If you want to show of your Windows Experience Rating in Windows Vista which displays a hardware rating of your computer but have a rather weak score you should consider tweaking the results to get a better score displayed at the end. The Experience Rating is derived from five subscores which are: Processor, Memory, Graphics, Gaming Graphics and Primary Hard Drive.

All five are benchmarked by Vista which assigns a score between 1.0 and 5.9 at the end. All five sub scores are then used to calculate the Windows Experience Rating. The weakest score is 1.0 while the highest score currently possible lies at 5.9.

Microsoft will add higher scores every 12-18 months to reflect changes in the hardware market. There won’t be a system that currently gets a score higher than 5.9 unless you tweak it with System Point.

continue reading "Change Vista’s Windows Experience Rating"

I have been using Norton products in the past and was always astonished how resource hungry those products were. They surely looked professional which was the main reason why I did install them but they slowed down the system and were really hard to remove from the system.

Norton Internet Security 2006 for instance slows down system start of the average pc by more than 40 seconds which is one of the reasons why I think that it is not worth it. A lot of great, resource friendly applications exist that can fully replace most Norton applications and I would recommend to make the switch.

The Norton Removal Tool is helpful because it can remove a failed installation or damaged Norton product from your system. I would even suggest to run this application after using the default uninstallation process just to make sure that all files and settings are gone as well.

continue reading "Norton Removal Tool"

Microsoft was never good at keeping data for themselves and it is no coincidence that yet another build of the upcoming service pack 1 for Windows Vista is now available through various means such as Usenet, P2P networks and ftp sites. The size of the 32-bit service pack 1 of Windows Vista is about 720 Megabyte while the 64-bit service pack 1 has one of about 640 Megabyte.

Both versions of service pack 1 for Windows Vista are shipped as executables and can be installed on any RTM version of Windows Vista, be it 32-bit or 64-bit. I would not suggest to go out and search for this release and install it on a computer that you work with because it is still a beta release and not a final one.

Unpacking the service pack reveals more than 1.7 Gigabyte of data and the installation seems to need three restarts before it finishes. In case you are wondering: I did not install the service pack 1 but found the information at blog.

continue reading "Another Vista Service Pack 1 build leaks out"

Reports have been flooding the web that the network transfer speed of Windows Vista drops to a low level when the user plays music at the same time. While there does not seem to be a obvious connection between network transfers and sounds being played and everyone would probably consider other possibilities first it seems that a service called MMCSS, the Multimedia Class Scheduler Service.

Mark Russinovich described the technical process in his blog explaining that ‘when a multimedia application begins playback, the multimedia APIs it uses call the MMCSS service to boost the priority of the playback thread into the realtime range’ which basically means that every other thread - including network transfers - see a performance drop because of this.

continue reading "Fix for slow Vista Network Transfer while playing Music"

I have written several times about the Autopatcher project which was basically providing users with the opportunity to download one executable file that contained all official patches for their Microsoft operating system. This method had a lot of advantages over downloading patches from Microsoft servers: You would save bandwidth if you had to apply the patches to more than one operating system and did not have to rely on the automatic updates website to select the patches.

It is also important to note that it is theoretically possible to attack an unpatched system when it visits the Microsoft website to download the patches which would not be the case if an autopatcher file would have been available. (for more than 1 computer, that is) Several users did not like the fact that they had to connect to a Microsoft server to download the patches because of privacy issues.

Microsoft requested an immediate takedown of the Autopatcher download pages with the reasoning that they want to make their downloads available only from their servers and from nowhere else. It is however kinda strange that it took them four years to request the takedown and many users fear that this has something to do with WGA enforcements.

continue reading "Microsoft killing Autopatcher Project"