March, 2009

Vista Grows Market Share: Too Little, Too Late?

On March 23, Sam Diaz blogged for ZDnet that Vista's market share has apparently climbed past 30% for the first time, according to an analysis by Web traffic monitoring company

Handy Tool: Halfdone Development’s Unknown Devices

If you're like me, you're nearly always in the process of building or rebuilding one or more Vista systems, or checking specific systems out for currency and correctness. Especially when dealing with new or revised builds, or with systems you haven't worked with before, you will occasionally come...

A New Operational Definition of “Windows Bloat”

OK, for the past couple of weeks, I've been digging more seriously into Windows 7, trying to get my mind around the new operating system, particularly from the standpoints of performance, usability, heft, and complexity. I've got to report that I'm favorably impressed on all fronts, especially in...

ITKE Contest Lets Experts Play on Their Knowledge

Between March 18 (yesterday) and April 30th (the end of next month) IT Knowledge Exchange (ITKE) members who rack up the most Knowledge Points and ask five IT related questions can win one of three different Microsoft Xbox 360 gaming rigs (an Elite model goes to the top ranked player, a regular...

Windows 7 Comes Off Pretty Darn Well

Now that I've gotten Windows 7 (the latest beta build: 7057) up and running on a couple of computers, I understand most of the recent hoopla it's garnered a whole lot better. It is indeed quick and easy to install: under half an hour in all cases, working from an ISO download I burned to DVD after...

Dual-boot Vista (or XP) and Windows 7–the Easy Way!!

While indeed you can shrink the system partition on your current boot/system drive and install Windows 7 on a new partition you create by trimming space from that partition, why bother? You can install Windows 7 to an external hard disk (eSATA only, USB won't work[updated 5/17/09 thanks to feedback...

Windows 7 Gains Added Luster

Long-time Windows expert Ed Bott posted an extremely interesting, if not downright intruiging blog yesterday on ZDNet. It's entitled "Is Windows 7 reliable enough to release now?," and proceeds to make a reasonably convincing case...

Patch Tuesday March 2009

Tuesday, March 10, was the second Tuesday of the month, the day colloquially known to MS system administrators and security mavens as "Patch Tuesday." Here's a smorgasbord of the items that showed up in the list of 3/10/2009 items with relevance for Windows Vista:

Paragon Partition Manager 9.0 Pro Edition

If the care and feeding of your Vista systems is anything like mine, from time to time there's just no getting away from messing with disk partitions. For me, that means one of several activities gets underway:

• Migrating a notebook or desktop user from a smaller drive to a larger one,...

Vista Wins 2009 Fiasco Award

Gosh, I love writing headlines because they can say so much and so little at the same time. Today's blog makes a terrific case in point. It refers to the recent Fiasco award for 2009, chosen by an anonymous Fiasco Awards Team, which was in turn sponsored by the Catalan Association of...