 | | | Vol. 2, # 4 - Jan 28, 2010 - Issue # 20 | |  | Game Time: Windows 7 is a Hit with the Gamer Crowd |
| - Editor's Corner
- Game Time: Windows 7 is a Hit with the Gamer Crowd
- Follow-up: Service Pack - Needed or Not?
- Quotes of the Week
- Cool Tools
- News, Hints, Tips and Tricks
- Non-security updates for Windows 7 released
- What features do you want to see in Windows 8?
- Apple Boot Camp now supports Windows 7
- Life without Windows?
- How to: Using the New Windows 7 Features
- How to disable "Reopen Last Browsing Session" feature in IE8
- How to tweak your libraries
- Windows 7 and Vista Security
- Protecting your systems from the "Aurora" exploit
- Question Corner
- Can I change the Shutdown button?
- Windows 7 Configuration and Troubleshooting
- Compatibility report when upgrading to Windows 7
- Network discovery in Windows 7
- Fav Links
- This Week's Links We Like. Tips, Hints And Fun Stuff
- Product of the Week
- WhiteSmoke Writer 2010: Advanced Writing Check Software for Super Charged Writing!
|
 | Kiss Your Antivirus Bloatware Goodbye
We asked users of antivirus products what they didn't like about their AV software. They told us they are resource hogs and slowed their computer down. They told us that scan times took way too long, and that the AV software nagged them. In short, old-style AV software takes too much Memory and CPU. Time to switch to VIPRE! It gives you malware protection that combines antivirus, antispyware, anti-rootkit and other technologies into a seamless, tightly-integrated product.
Even if you run "free" antivirus software, it hijacks 20% of your PC, so it's really not free at all! Get VIPRE now and see how fast your PC can really be:
http://www.win7news.net/O52HI2/100128-VIPRE
 | |
| Editor's Corner | |
Game Time: Windows 7 is a Hit with the Gamer Crowd
Full disclosure right up front: I don't play games. It's not that I'm opposed to fun; it's mostly a matter of time - I just don't have enough of it free to spend it on video games. And since I sit at the computer all day, writing, I tend to prefer leisure activities that get me away from my desk.
Back in the early days of video games, when I was younger and had fewer family and work obligations, I enjoyed a good game of Frogger or Donkey Kong and I made it all the way to end of Atari's Ms. Pac-Man. But by the time today's sophisticated gaming consoles came along, I had long ago lost interest. My son enjoys his Playstation 3 and my daughter has fun with her Wii, but my husband and I don't even have an Xbox (or any other gaming system) in our otherwise very well equipped media room.
The only PC games I ever spent any time with were Flight Simulator and Tetris. The former was an inexpensive substitute for real flying lessons, and the latter was a strangely addicting way to wind down and relax after a day or night on the streets back when I was a police officer.
My son, Kris, is the only real gamer in the family. He was hooked on Everquest for a while, then World of Warcraft. He also played a lot of online chess. Consequently, he usually had the most powerful computer in the family, systems he built primarily for gaming purposes. Today he makes his living from game- playing, or rather from game analysis, using his computer skills to review past games and help plot strategies for future games for Hikaru Nakamura, the U.S. chess champion. Right now, he's at the Corus Chess Tournament in the Netherlands, where Hikaru is fighting it out with some of the world's top players.
Even though gaming isn't my thing, I frequently get questions from readers who use their computers to play, and I try to keep up with what's going on in that segment of the industry. Since the release of Windows 7, I'm often asked if it's worth upgrading to the new OS for gamers, so I've talked to some folks who are into that scene and read the performance benchmark reports so I can try to give you the information you need if you're trying to make that decision.
Gaming is one of the most demanding applications that today's computers are asked to do. As video games become more and more realistic, it takes more powerful hardware and more sophisticated operating systems to run them. Many games must display fast-moving 3D graphics, which requires graphics processors that run much faster than regular processors. Today's high end video cards have highly efficient parallel-processing GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) for 3D rendering. It's not unusual, in a gaming system, for the video card(s) to cost more than the system's motherboard. The ATI Radeon HD 5870, for example, goes for more than $400 and the 5970 costs close to $700 on the average, although NewEgg sells one iteration, the PowerColor AX5970 2GBD5-WMD, for $829.
Of course, a top gaming system also requires a fast processor (such as a Nehalem model) and a motherboard that will support plenty of RAM. You'll want fast hard drives, too - which means, for best performance, expensive solid state drives. Here's a good article about how to select the best gaming motherboard:
http://www.win7news.net/O52HI2/100128-Best-Gaming-Motherboard
Once you've assembled all this top-of-the-line equipment (and wiped out your bank account in the process), it's time to think about software. What operating system is best for your heavy-duty gaming needs? Well, it appears that gamers are quickly jumping onto the Windows 7 bandwagon. According to a report last week from Steam, a popular online gaming community, 23 percent are already using Windows 7 just four months after its release - even though Windows 7 only makes up about 6 percent of the overall operating system market.
Not surprisingly, most of those (15.61% of the total gamers) are using the 64 bit edition of Windows 7. You need to run the 64 bit edition to take advantage of large amounts of RAM (over 4 GB), and it's getting much easier to find 64 bit drivers for most components.
Gamers incur many benefits by upgrading to Windows 7. Performance is everything in the gaming world, and Win7's performance is significantly better than that of Vista (although this may be more likely to show up more on low powered hardware than on the high end hardware favored by gamers). Windows 7 also comes with DirectX 11, which supports new features such as the ability to scale across multi-core CPUs (which are standard on high end gaming machine). Another new features is "tessellation," which lets games display more detailed images and more life-like characters. DirectX 11 can be installed on Vista but is not supported on XP. You can read more about the DirectX 11 features here:
http://www.win7news.net/O52HI2/100128-DirectX-11
Windows 7's multi-touch support also opens up a great new avenue for game developers. Gamers already use multi-touch devices. The Touch Pack for Windows 7 includes several games that leverage the capabilities of multi-touch monitors and laptops.
http://www.win7news.net/O52HI2/100128-Touch-Pack
And for those who might be worried about whether the games you've been playing on XP or Vista will run on Windows 7, the good news is that most of them will. Way back last January of last year, when Windows 7 was still in beta, ExtremeTech tested a number of popular games, going all the way back to Quake II and found that most worked, although a few needed some tweaking or had performance issues or had difficulties during installation that had to be overcome. There were only a couple, out of the 22 tested, that failed to run.
http://www.win7news.net/O52HI2/100128-Games-on-Win7
Microsoft has implemented a certification process, called Games for Windows, that will help you identify the games that have been tested and will work properly on Windows 7 (and Vista). That logo can give you some assurance. There is also a Games for Windows Live Marketplace where you can download games:
http://www.win7news.net/O52HI2/100128-Games-for-Windows
If you're interested in performance comparisons (XP vs. Vista vs. Windows 7) for popular games, FiringSquad.com has benchmarks for a number of games (including ARMA II, Resident Evil 5, Left 4 Dead and several more), and concluded that upgrading to Windows 7, especially for gamers using SLI or Crossfire, is the best gaming platform yet.
http://www.win7news.net/O52HI2/100128-Gaming-Performance
And like Vista, Windows 7 has the Games Explorer application, which provides access to all your games from one place and gives you useful information such as the effect that you can expect your computer's Windows Experience Index (WEI) score to have on your gaming experience. The Windows 7 version of Games Explorer also lets you manage the updates for your games and also gives you more information about each game (depending on what the publisher has included in the metadata for the game).
Let us know about your experiences with gaming on Windows 7, and how it compares to XP and/or Vista for your favorite games. Have you run into any issues where games that ran fine on your previous OS don't work, or don't perform as well on Windows 7? Or have you seen performance improvements? How about hardware compatibility? Did Windows 7 have any driver issues or other hardware problems when you installed it on your gaming system - or did you use the OS upgrade as a reason to buy or build a whole new system? Are you running your games on 64 bit Windows 7? If not, why did you stick with the 32 bit edition? We invite you to discuss this and other game-related topics in our forum at
http://www.win7news.net/O52HI2/100128-Forum-Discussion
Follow-up: Service Pack - Needed or Not?
In last week's editorial, we discussed the Windows tradition of waiting for the first service pack before upgrading the OS, and whether that rule of thumb should be thrown out the window when it comes to Windows 7.
Many of you note that you've been using Windows 7 since the beta or RTM and have found it to be the most stable operating system you've ever used, so only a few folks are waiting for a service pack. One network admin is planning to wait until XP support expires, while another is happily rolling out Windows 7 Enterprise edition without waiting for a service pack.
There are several who are looking forward to USB 3.0, though. I'm one of them. Quite a few motherboards with 3.0 support are out there now, and there are a few 3.0 hard drives already available at a reasonable price. The faster USB interface will be very welcome in our home/office, where we transfer many large files and can definitely use the extra drive performance.
Coffeeturtle (love that screen name) brought up a good point: that we might be seeing SP1 sooner than later, not because there are a lot of fixes needed, but simply to get some of the "wait and see" crowd past the well-ingrained psychological barrier to upgrading. And because there are fewer bugs to fix, maybe Microsoft will be able to focus on adding some new features, too.
It's great to read so many posts from people who are happy with their operating system - especially for someone who is used to receiving troubleshooting questions and complaints. Windows 7 certainly isn't perfect - I doubt we'll ever see a perfect OS - but it's obvious that customer satisfaction is high. I just hope the software doesn't get so good that my tips, tricks and troubleshooting articles are no longer needed.
As always, thanks to all of you who participated in the discussion.
'Til next week,
Deb Shinder, Editor
feedback@win7news.net
PS: Did you know this newsletter has a sister publication for XP users called WXPnews? You can subscribe here, and tell your friends:
http://www.win7news.net/O52HI2/100128-WXPNews
And for IT pros, there's our "big sister," WServer News, at
http://www.win7news.net/O52HI2/100128-WserverNews
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Quotes of the Week
"Wisdom too often never comes, and so one ought not to reject it merely because it comes late." - Felix Frankfurter (1882 - 1965)
"Attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference." - Sir Winston Churchill (1874 - 1965)
"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." - Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955) |
| | Kiss Your Antivirus Bloatware Goodbye
We asked users of antivirus products what they didn't like about their AV software. They told us they are resource hogs and slowed their computer down. They told us that scan times took way too long, and that the AV software nagged them. In short, old-style AV software takes too much Memory and CPU. Time to switch to VIPRE! It gives you malware protection that combines antivirus, antispyware, anti-rootkit and other technologies into a seamless, tightly-integrated product.
Even if you run "free" antivirus software, it hijacks 20% of your PC, so it's really not free at all! Get VIPRE now and see how fast your PC can really be:
http://www.win7news.net/O52HI2/100128-VIPRE
| |
| Cool Tools |
| News, Hints, Tips and Tricks | |
Non-security updates for Windows 7 released
We all know about Patch Tuesday - that's the day each month when Microsoft releases security updates for Windows, Office and other products. But last Monday, the company released a number of non-security patches that fix stability problems some folks have had with Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. There is also an update that addresses a very specific hardware configuration, a new version of the System Update Readiness Tool and an updated version of the Windows NT Backup Restore Utility for Windows 7. Find out more about the updates here:
http://www.win7news.net/O52HI2/100128-Windows7-Updates
What features do you want to see in Windows 8?
Whether or not Windows 7 was your idea, you probably have some ideas about what you would like to see in the next version of Windows. Student Lounge, a Microsoft newsletter for students, asks you to toss your ideas into the ring and share what you think should be included in Windows 8:
http://www.win7news.net/O52HI2/100128-Windows8-Features
Apple Boot Camp now supports Windows 7
Like the Apple hardware but don't want to give up Windows 7 for OS X? Now you can have your apple and eat it too - by installing Win7 on that super slim Macbook Air or your little Mac Mini or whatever Intel Apple product you might have. Last week, Apple released an update for its Boot Camp utility that adds support for Windows 7, so that you can install it in a dual boot configuration with the Mac OS. You can install Home Premium, Pro or Ultimate, in either 32 bit or 64 bit configuration. Find out more here:
http://www.win7news.net/O52HI2/100128-Boot-Camp-Update
Life without Windows?
Some folks would like nothing better than to see Microsoft fall, but what would life without Windows really be like? Randall C. Kennedy of InfoWorld paints a pretty grim picture, with many unintended (and unwanted) consequences. It makes a good read, and certainly gives you something to think about. Check it out at
http://www.win7news.net/O52HI2/100128-Life-wo-Windows
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| How to: Using the New Windows 7 Features | |
How to disable "Reopen Last Browsing Session" feature in IE8
Windows 7 comes with Internet Explorer 8, which offers many great new features. One of those is the ability to reopen your last browsing session - this can be a godsend if you accidentally close the browser with a number of pages open that you need to go back to. No more hunting through the History list - you can have them back with a single click. But there are situations wherein this can be a security issue. If you don't like the idea of having your previous browsing sessions so accessible, you can disable the feature and clear the browser cache so it won't be so easy for someone to see where you've been on the web. Here's how: - In the registry editor, navigate to
HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Software \ Policies \ Microsoft \ Internet Explorer \ Recovery - In the right pane, right click an empty space and select New | DWORD value (32 bit) Value.
- Rename the new Value NoReopenLastSession
- Double click the new value and set the value data field to 1
- Close the registry editor.
- Close and restart IE to make the change take effect.
Note: if you want to completely hide the tracks of your previous browsing, clear the browser cache as well: click Tools | Delete Browsing History.
How to tweak your libraries
The Libraries feature in Windows 7 makes it easier for you to organize and find your files, but if you've ever wished you could do a little more configuration of your libraries, here's a piece of software called Librarian. It lets you create a new library with any folder inside, change a library's icon, rename a library, change the content type of a new or existing library, change the default save location option, and more. Best of all, it's free. You can see screenshots and download it here:
http://www.win7news.net/O52HI2/100128-Library-Manager
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| Windows 7 and Vista Security | |
Protecting your systems from the "Aurora" exploit
There has been a deluge of discussion about the "Aurora" attack against Google and other companies in December, which exploited a security vulnerability in IE 6. Some organizations and government agencies have gone so far as to recommend that users dump IE for another browser. But Microsoft has released a fix for the vulnerability, and there are additional ways you can protect your systems from this type of attack. See these seven steps to get you started:
http://www.win7news.net/O52HI2/100128-7-Steps
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| Question Corner | |
Can I change the Shutdown button?
QUESTION:
I know this is a little thing but I thought I'd ask. I almost never shut down my computer completely. I do restart it. Is there any way to put "Restart" on the Start menu along with or instead of the "Shutdown" button? That would be great. Thanks. - Reese L.
ANSWER:
You can, in fact, change the Shutdown button's function to Restart, or even to Sleep if you more frequently put the computer to sleep. Any of the functions that appear when you click the arrow by the Shutdown button can be assigned to the button itself. Just right click the Start button and select Properties. Then click the Start Menu tab, and in the drop-down box labeled "Power button action," choose the action that you perform most often and you'll save yourself a click every time you perform that action. |
| Windows 7 Configuration and Troubleshooting | |
Compatibility report when upgrading to Windows 7
If you upgrade Vista to Windows 7, you may receive a compatibility report that lists programs and says "these programs might not work properly after the upgrade. We recommend uninstalling these programs before upgrading." If you're running Windows Live OneCare, it will be included in this report. That's because Windows Live OneCare is not compatible with Windows 7. Find out more in KB article 968420 at
http://www.win7news.net/O52HI2/100128-Compatibility-Report
Network discovery in Windows 7
You may have seen the option in the Network and Sharing Center to turn network discovery on or off, but do you wonder exactly what network discovery is and how it affects your computer on the network? Check out this Microsoft site that explains network discovery and tells you how to enable or disable it or customize its settings:
http://www.win7news.net/O52HI2/100128-Network-Discovery
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| Fav Links | |
This Week's Links We Like. Tips, Hints And Fun Stuff
Disclaimer: VistaNews does not assume and cannot be responsible for any liability related to you clicking any of these linked Web sites. |
| Product of the Week | |
WhiteSmoke Writer 2010: Advanced Writing Check Software for Super Charged Writing!
The world's leading language solution now allows you to perform advanced grammar checking, style checking, and spell checking, with a single click. The latest version of WhiteSmoke features Writing Review, a summary of your text which provides an overall readability score. WhiteSmoke Writer works with all text-based applications. WhiteSmoke Writer helps you to write with confidence, improve your communications and messaging with business partners, clients, family and friends around the world. Now, in an exclusive offer for Win7News subscribers get these added bonus tools: 2 Extra Pro Versions + the Multi-Lingual Dictionary for FREE! Get the full story here!
http://www.win7news.net/O52HI2/100128-WhiteSmoke
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| About Win7News | |
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