windows vista 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.

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.