WindowsVista posts

Okay, not awards, per se, but at least some recognition of things that didn't suck -- stuff like improved performance and big price reductions (sometimes). Generational advancement in the CPU and video card arenas brought more power to our desktop systems than ever before. DDR3 stopped costing its weight in gold. The Phenom... got its ass handed to it all year long. (Seriously, AMD? You can't roll out a replacement soon enough.)

Also, one of the biggest legends in the realm of physical vaporware finally came to market, but BI doesn't see a lot of folks ponying up two grand for the Optimus Maximus keyboard. At least it made it to market after a rumor-and-tease gestation period that rivals that of Duke Nukem 3D.

There were a handful of big stories in the realm of gaming hardware in 2008, and, for a change, they were almost all good news for gamers.

New PC buyers have until the end of today to finish deliberating between Windows XP Home/Professional and Vista. As of tomorrow, the decision to use an iteration of the Windows Vista OS will be made for you. How very... Microsoft.

CNET reports that "As of June 30, large PC makers will no longer be able to sell Windows XP-based PCs, at least on mainstream notebooks and desktops. Retailers will also have only until their current supply is exhausted to sell boxed copies of the operating system."

Outside of "mainstream" PC providers, XP will continue to be available "from smaller computer makers known as 'system builders' until January 31, 2009," as well as "so-called ultra-low-cost-PCs until June 30, 2010."

Many gamers have opted out of upgrading to Microsoft's latest Windows operating system, Vista, due to a myriad of complaints. In spite of supporting DirectX 10 exclusively, gamers were dismayed by the strange drop in performance when switching over to Vista. Gaming performance dropped down about 10 percent when run on Vista environments, as opposed to XP. Now that SP1 is becoming readily available for download, benchmarking is finally possible.

The folks at Extreme Tech tried out Vista SP1 and XP SP3. There are improvements for both platforms, but Vista easily gains the most in this first patch. Whereas before, games on Vista produced lower framerates, they now perform identically to XP games. With driver issues finally being resolved on the maturing Vista product, gamers may finally make the leap to Vista ... provided they aren't waiting for the next Windows OS.

PC owners who have a Windows XP operating system installed have been able to download the final service pack release earlier this week. Now owners of the new OS, Windows Vista, should start being able to more freely update their own software with the first Vista service pack. According to the official Microsoft Vista blog site, people who have automatic updates set up on their Vista PC will now be able to download SP1.

While you may have automatic updates set up on your PC, that doesn't mean you will get SP1 today. Microsoft will slowly make the service pack available via the feature to its many, many customers over the next few months. However you shouldn't be able to avoid downloading SP1 for long. Remember, this is mainly a performance and bug fix release with no new features added.