Early Vista SP1 64-bit installs causing new problems?

An iTWire journo by the name of Alex has found yet another Vista SP1 issue to bitch about, this time it's the x64 version and early reports are pointing to several problems.
Anything from the "Windows Performance Rating" vanishing, to the poor souls Treo not being recognized through "Windows Mobile Center" after SP1 installation. There could be many explanations for this happening, for example: The guys laptop is so sucky that Vista did him a favor by simply hiding crap results, and his phone may no longer sync to Mobile center because he has so few friends and contacts it just isn't worth it. Think of some yourself, it's fun!


Vista may have done the guy a favour.

Or Vista is indeed broke, and Microsoft need to sort it, but basing an entire 3 page article on one guys (unconfirmed) issues with his laptop seems so troll-like, it's almost beyond belief and seems more like a knee jerk reaction. Either way I am sick of all the ranting as of late, so much so that I will be installing Windows Vista x64 SP1 just to annoy websites like iTWire, InfoWorld and CNet (Staff bloggers) and all of their readers to show them that any normal user can install Vista x64 SP1 and have everything work afterwards. Meanwhile a whambulance has been dispatched to the above mentioned sites to pick up the whiney tossers.

source: neowin.net

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Vista SP1 vs. XP SP2 - Benchmarked

Some people are concerned that in order to get an accurate measurement of boot time the system needs to be booted many times. Let me assure you that the systems here under testing were rebooted more times than most normal PCs are over the course of several months.]


Over the past few days I posted two sets of benchmarks comparing Windows Vista RTM with Vista SP1 (first post here, second here). These posts generated a lot of feedback, and from reading this feedback it’s clear that what many people are really interested in is not the performance differences between Vista RTM and Vista SP1, but between Vista SP1 and XP SP2.

A few days ago I posted in reply to several TalkBack comments that I wouldn’t carry out these tests until XP SP3 is released. There didn’t seem any point. That didn’t satisfy the crowds who wanted to see Vista SP1 and XP SP2 go head to head. So, to cut a long story short, the pestering continued and I eventually gave in. So what follows are the fruits of nearly two whole days of work at the PC Doc HQ (the test was hampered by the death of a motherboard, something which rendered hours of work obsolete).

How does Windows Vista SP1 compare to Windows XP SP2?

Conclusions and Caveats

Note: I didn’t benchmark against XP SP3 because the EULA prevents the disclosure of benchmark results. Also, since it’s a beta, things can change between now and the final release.

So, onto conclusions. Looking at the data there’s only one conclusion that can be drawn - Windows XP SP2 is faster than Windows Vista SP1. End of story. Out of the fifteen tests carried out, XP SP2 beat Vista SP1 in eleven, Vista SP1 beat XP SP2 in two of the tests, and two of the tests resulted in a draw.

The best result for Vista SP1 was in the single file drive-to-drive copy, while the best result for XP SP2 was extracting multiple files from a compressed folder. Given these results and taking into account the improvments that SP1 bought to Vista, if I was to go back and compare XP SP2 with Vista RTM, XP would have hammered Vista even harder.

Reminder: These results apply to a single system and no optimizations were carried out to any of the systems. Your mileage can, and probably will, vary.

I’ll carry out some gaming benchmarks over the next few days. Watch this space!

source: blogs.zdnet.com

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The Best Antivirus in 2008

A new year... A new beginning... And the inevitable security solution smackdown. In this context, AV-Test has thrown together in the same arena no less than 24 antivirus products from the heavyweights of the security market.

The security solutions were tested against in excess of 1 million malware samples from the last six months. According to Av-Test's Andreas Marx, the test involved only the top of the line, "'best' available Security Suite edition" from each vendor, last updated on January 7, 2008, and running on Windows XP SP2. And yes Microsoft's Windows Live OneCare 2.0 was tested, but no, it's not the best antivirus of 2008. Well, of the beginning of 2008, anyway...

"First, we checked the signature-based on-demand detection of all products against more than 1 Mio. samples we've found spreading or which were distributed during the last six months (this means, we have not used any 'historic' samples.) We included all malware categories in the test: Trojan Horses, backdoors, bots, worm and viruses. Instead of just presenting the results, we have ranked the product this time, from 'very good' (++) if the scanner detected more than 98% of the samples to 'poor' (--) when less than 85% of the malware was detected," Marx revealed.

In terms of signature-based on-demand detection, Windows Live OneCare 2.0 held its own. Microsoft's security solution ended up detecting a total of 992,880 out of all the malware samples thrown against it, and accounting for a "Signature Detection" rate of 96.9%. This is nothing short of an excellent score for Windows Live OneCare, an antivirus that at the beginning of 2007 managed to occupy positions only towards the bottom of the security solution pack in early 2007. In the latest AV-Test "Signature Detection" test OneCare 2.0 came on top of F-Prot (986,961 – 96.3%), Panda (979,409 – 95.6%), McAfee (959,919 – 93.7%) and Nod32 (953,936 – 93.1%).

However, OneCare 2.0 was bested by the likes of AVK 2008 (1,022,418 – 99.8%); AntiVir (1,020,627 – 99.6%); Avast! (1,018,204 – 99.4%); Trend Micro (1,009,662 – 98.6%); Symantec (1,006,849 – 98.3%); AVG (1,005,006 – 98.1%); BitDefender (1,003,902 – 98.0%); Kaspersky (1,003,470 – 98.0%); Sophos (1,001,655 – 97.8%) and F-Secure (999,806 – 97.6%). The complete results of the "Signature Detection" test from AV-Test can be accessed here, courtesy of Sunbelt Software.

"Secondly, we checked the number of false positives of the products have generated during a scan of 65,000 known clean files. Only products with no false positives received a 'very good' (++) rating. In case of the proactive detection category, we have not only focussed on signature- and heuristic-based proactive detection only (based on a retrospective test approach with a one week old scanner). Instead of this, we also checked the quality of the included behavior based guard (e.g. Deepguard in case of F-Secure and TruPrevent in case of Panda). We used 3,500 samples for the retrospective test as well as 20 active samples for the test of the 'Dynamic Detection' (and blocking) of malware," Marx added.

Windows Live OneCare 2.0 is among the few security solutions that have scored a ++ in the test for False Positives. This means that OneCare 2.0 has generated no false positives, a task also completed by the security solutions from Symantec, Nod32, and Fortinet. However, OneCare 2.0 was ranked as having only a poor proactive detection, and a very poor response time to new malware being issued (more than 8 hours). But at the same time, out of all the malicious code it had to go through, OneCare 2,0 only missed two rootkits. The Anti-virus comparison test of current anti-malware products, Q1/2008 can be accessed here.

"Furthermore, we checked how long AV companies usually need to react in case of new, widespread malware (read: outbreaks), based on 55 different samples from the entire year 2007. 'Very good' (++) AV product developers should be able to react within less than two hours. Another interesting test was the detection of active rootkit samples. While it's trivial for a scanner to detect inactive rootkits using a signature, it can be really tricky to detect this nasty malware when they are active and hidden. We checked the scanner's detection against 12 active rootkits," Marx said.

source: news.softpedia.com



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DirectX 10 Gaming Performance Review - High End GPUs

DirectX 10 gaming has been promised to us for a LONG time: it was way back in November of last year that we saw our first bit of DX10-ready hardware in the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX graphics card. Since then, we have had Microsoft's Vista operating system released to consumers in January and AMD/ATI joining the DX10 graphics card market in May.

Games are another story, as they have been dripping out in demos, technology showcases and patches since the beginning of the summer. Both sides of the hardware dispute have been throwing punches at the other in regards to "cheating" or other allegations on the first run of DX10 benchmarks but we finally have the answer to all those disputes: retail games that YOU can buy. Neither AMD nor NVIDIA has excuses now as the games are on shelves and their hardware and software better be up to the task they have both claimed victory in since early this year.

Source : PC Perspective

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Programmer Personality Test?

Saya dapat info ini dari sini
Dibawah ini hasil test saya, ada benarnya juga, setelah diperhatikan emang sesuai ama karakter saya..Kalo kalian gimana?

Your programmer personality type is:

"DHSC"

You're a Doer.
You are very quick at getting tasks done. You believe the outcome is the most important part of a task and the faster you can reach that outcome the better. After all, time is money.
You like coding at a High level.
The world is made up of objects and components, you should create your programs in the same way.
You work best in a Solo situation.
The best way to program is by yourself. There's no communication problems, you know every part of the code allowing you to write the best programs possible.
You are a Conservative programmer.
The less code you write, the less chance there is of it containing a bug. You write short and to the point code that gets the job done efficiently. | Continue Reading..