Half Price Matinee

The Windows Vista team is looking for Xbox 360 owners to beta test Media Center Extender. Want in? Just answer these questions:

• Do you have an Xbox 360 console,
• Is it connected to the Internet?
• Is your PC capable of running Vista Ultimate or Home Premium?
• Are you over the age of 18?
• Do you live in the United States?

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Or at least it will seem that way.  ExtremeTech is running an article on how Microsoft’s next generation operating system will use three key technologies to add a little “get up and go” to the user experience.  The three technologies are:

• SuperFetch  -  An adaptive disk manager that puts frequently used programs in fast-loading parts of your hard drive (sort like what Diskeeper does for me now).
• ReadyBoost  -  Caches Page file information on a high-speed USB flash drive.
• ReadyDrive  -  Uses 128MB of embedded cache on new (large) hard drives.

Slick marketing names aside, they sound like possible ways to make the system faster.  Unless of course they take advantage of these technologies to push more graphics and other disk intensive programs at you, thus negating any gain when running future programs.

Read more about SuperFetch, ReadyBoost and ReadyDrive

Testers of Microsoft’s latest operating system say the next build, which they’re betting will hit this week, better be good.

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Or else what? They won’t make people buy it like all their other Windows versions?

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Microsoft has released the beta version of its Vista Upgrade Advisor software for download. It will let people know what hardware must be upgraded in order to get the best experence from Vista.

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Since I’ve been on a bit of a Vista kick lately (what can I say, it’s in the news), I thought some of us might want to check out the official Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor to see how much they’re going to have to shell out for the next great operating system

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  USAToday has an article on a new security “feature” of Windows Vista that looks to be so annoying as to make it a deal-breaker, at least for me.

I am looking forward to seeing what Vista can do in my setup, especially on the big screen. Vista is supposed to be graphically much cooler to interact with.

If my “interaction” is predominately closing stupid dialog boxes that POP up every time I want to do anything on my computer (like delete a shortcut), I’m going to have to seriously re-think my planned purchase.

I should note that the version of Vista the article refers to is a Beta (Beta 2 actually), so one can only hope that there is a big enough outcry about this that Microsoft tones this down some (or how about eliminates it altogether).

Take a look at the new security feature, then come back and tell me if it would impact your purchase of Windows Vista.