Just a quick message to let you all know that Service Pack 2 for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 has rolled out.
You can grab it free for both 32 bit Windows (348MB) and 64 bit Windows (577MB) at the respective links.
I’ve got my copy on download now, so I’ll post a review up for it in the coming days (hopefully by the end of the week).
Enjoy!
Ever since Microsoft released Windows Vista in 2007, I’ve absolutely hated the Disk Defragmenter in the operating system. It was fine in 98, 2000, and XP, but in Vista it is absolutely stupid.
For some reason, it automatically decides that you want to defragment all of your disk drives by default – and most of the time this is not the case for me. It spends absolutely ages “analysing” drives – to the point when I just give up and cancel it before it’s even started defragmenting.
It’s just such a failure – what happened Microsoft?
A lot of people say defragmentation is a total waste of time, but I think it does work now and then and it can improve hard disk performance (even if it’s just a little).
If you agree with me that defragmentation is a good idea, I’ve found a solution to the Vista defragmentation issues. It’s a little freeware program called Auslogics Disk Defrag. It works in all versions of Windows from 2000 up, so if you like it you can run it on some of your older systems too.
It’s much better than Vista’s defragmentation system because:
So yes, if you do think defragging is good but you hate Vista’s system, this is the answer.
It has been mentioned on a few sites that Microsoft is apparently going to be giving the prices for the upcoming Windows 7 release as early as next month.
However, there are rumours going round that Windows 7 might even be more expensive than its predecessors, which is a very worrying thought – especially in this economical climate. Not to mention the fact that Windows Vista (as much as I may love it) was overall rather a failure for Microsoft. Increasing the prices now may well put people off what is hopefully going to be a massive improvement on Vista. The last thing Microsoft want is to kill customers off now, surely.
There isn’t really enough information on the internet yet to make any predictions for what the pricing of Windows 7 is going to look like, but I’d say it would be a good idea to start saving up now just in case it is a little more than you expected.
If you’ve got a PVR (personal video recorder – a device that records TV programmes), you’ve probably get a few recordings lying on the hard disk that you really don’t want to delete. But now you’re reaching the stage where you’re running out of hard disk space and sacrifices are going to have to be made.
Well have no fear, because I’ve found a nifty little program that will convert the videos from your PVR into a DVD format ready for burning to DVD.
If you have a USB connection from your hard disk PVR to your computer, you’ll be able to copy the contents of it to your computer. Hook up your USB cable to it, put it into the necessary USB mode, and see what’s on it.
If you find various .ts files, you’re in luck. Because there’s a free program available called HDTV2DVD which will rewrite your .ts files into MPEG files for DVD burning. Even better – it will even organise the files into VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS so all you have to do is burn the two folders to DVD and it’s done.
The only thing you have to be aware of is that when you use HDTV2DVD on long programmes (eg. films which are more that 1.5 hours), you are going to struggle to fit it onto a 4.7GB DVD. You might need to get a dual layer disk.
There is an “autofit” feature which will effectively shrink the video into a size that will fit onto DVD, but it can really pixelise the image.
The one bug in HDTV2DVD that really annoys me is that the percentage done calculator is totally screwed up. By the time my 2 hour film had go to the end of conversion, the percentage done calculator was edging on 1,000,000%.
Other than that, it’s a really handy piece of freeware. I can’t seem to find any other program that will do the same job for free, so this one is a definite must have if you have a PVR.
Try it out and see what you think.
If you’re the kind of person who has tonnes of RSS feeds lurking around in your bookmarks, it can be a real pain trying to keep up to date with all the sites you know and love.
If you have this problem, Google Reader might be the answer to your problems. It’s a free service that you can dump all your RSS feeds in and it will look after them for you. To get the latest on all your feeds, you just go to the Google Reader site, log in, and all your feeds are together and ready for you to catch up on whenever you want to.
It remembers what feeds you’ve already read so you don’t waste time reading feeds you already know about. Also, another handy feature is being able to “star” posts that you particularly like so they’re easily accessible in the future.
It’s a really simple but handy idea. Best of all, it’s accessible anywhere in the world on any computer since it’s online.
I’ve known about it for ages, but I thought I’d talk about it since I find it so handy and use it daily. Check out Google Reader now – it’s free and so great to use.