Computer Active has compiled a list of 50 tips to improve performance of both XP and Vista.

For most people using a computer means using Windows and over the years Microsoft’s operating system has become easier to use.

However, there is always room for improvement, so in this feature we have compiled 50 of the finest tips for Windows XP and Vista. These can help to make Windows even better, easier to use and faster. Most don’t even require you to install any extra software, so if you want to make your copy of XP or Vista better, it’s possible to get started immediately.

Installing Windows XP Service Pack 3 sends some PCs into an endless series of reboots, according to posts to a Microsoft support forum.

Jesper Johansson, a former program manager for security policy at Microsoft and a prominent Windows blogger, has worked with users to tentatively identify the problem as involving only machines using processors from Advanced Micro Devices.

Messages from frustrated users began accumulating on the XP SP3 support newsgroup Wednesday, just a day after Microsoft released the update to the general public.

"I just installed Windows XP SP3 and after completing the processes and when the system reboots, the system cannot proceed to load the Windows," said a user labeled as "Olin" in a message that kicked off a long thread. "It just displays the flash screen of Windows then after it reboots again.

Most users who left messages on the forum said that they were unable to boot into Windows Safe mode.

View: ComputerWorld

Today we are going to take a look at GIGABYTE's high end motherboard, the X48T-DQ6. GIGABYTE makes two versions of this board utilizing Intel's X48 chipset. The X48 which is a DDR2 variant and the X48T which is the DDR3 version that we will be covering today. The X48 brings minimal changes to the chipset when compared to the X38 and the only tangible difference should be more overclocking headroom.

In recent years GIGABYTE has truly reinvented itself as a leader in innovation. In today's world the name of the game, or color to be more specific, is green. We have green cars, green homes and now you can add motherboards to the growing list of items going green. GIGABYTE has made a concerted effort to produce motherboards that use the least amount of energy possible without sacrificing performance. A task not easily accomplished. To this end they have dubbed this innovation DES or Dynamic Energy Saver. A system which can adjust voltage, power phases and clocks speeds of the board and CPU to ensure as little energy as possile is wasted while providing as much power as needed.

Is it possible to have a power efficient system without losing performance? Let's find out.

Link to: Full Review @ Bjorn3D

Fifteen years ago, the world wide web was the playground of boffins. Its design reflected the open ethos of those users: it had no central managers, no main menu and no investment in content – indeed, no business plan whatsoever.

Instead, its framers assumed that people would put their own material online, and users would then surf from one site to another, following links on the pages.

Then the first search engines sprang up, which sent digital robots crawling from one link to the next, copying everything they found. The idea was to index the entire web in one place by obsessively following every path from several starting points.

Dell has offered to replace the keyboards on a recent batch of Vostro laptops, which had the keys in the wrong places.

The problem was flagged by blogger Jake Gordon who pointed out that his Z key had been shifted too far to the right by an enlarged shift key, meaning that instead of appearing beneath A and S it sat beneath S and D instead, causing a fair old headache for the touch typists among us.

"There is no way to say it... we made a mistake and want to apologise to affected customers," Bill Bivin, Dell's laptop liaison admits on the Direct2Dell blog.

"Here's what we're going to do: we plan to contact all affected customers, beginning today. All affected customers will receive an updated keyboard. They will have two options: we can send the keyboard and required BIOS update directly to them, or they can choose to have a field technician replace the keyboard onsite."

The company is also planning to post a video walkthrough for those customers looking to adjust the keyboard themselves.

News Source: PC Pro

The suicide of a schoolgirl who had apparently become obsessed with ‘emo’ culture has, once again, drawn attention to the movement and its teen followers. Recording a verdict of suicide after Hannah Bond, 13, had hanged herself, the coroner noted that she had “become an aficionado of the emo fad.”

Emo has deep and spreading roots, which few who are close to it regard with much alarm. What began as narrowly defined musical genre more than two decades ago has since broadened into an attitude, a lifestyle and a fashion statement that has found a spiritual home on the internet.

The movement sprang from Washington DC’s energetic mid-Eighties punk scene, picking up its name when the music was described, perhaps dismissively, as ‘emotional’ or ‘emotive’. After falling in and out of favour over the next decade or so, the bands and their followers migrated onto the web, where lyrical veneration of pain, loneliness and depression combined with a largely teenage fan base to create an extensive online culture.

View: The Full Article @ Times Online

Microsoft plans to fix critical bugs in its Word, Publisher, and Jet database software next week.

The software vendor also plans to release a less-critical update for its antivirus products, fixing a flaw that attackers could use to launch a denial of service attack against products such as Windows Live OneCare and Microsoft Forefront Security.

The updates will be released Tuesday, the day set aside for Microsoft's monthly set of security patches. Microsoft provided some early details on the patches Thursday, in a note on its Web site. Microsoft considers flaws to be critical when they could be exploited by attackers in order to run unauthorized software on a victim's system.

Although Microsoft's note does not describe the bugs in detail, it looks like the company is planning to fix a known bug in the Jet database engine, which was disclosed in late March. Attackers had figured out a new way to launch a malicious Jet file using Microsoft Word, Microsoft warned in a blog posting.

View: Full Article @ InfoWorld

Microsoft chair Bill Gates today noted at a European news conference that sales of Windows Vista have reached 140 million copies worldwide. The update is the first since the company crossed the 100 million mark at the start of the new year, although Gates doesn't clarify when the company reached the newer threshold. This demonstrates that Vista continues to sell at a "very rapid" rate, according to the Microsoft co-founder.

If tracked between January and April, the number represents about 10 million copies of Vista sold per month in the first third of 2008 and signals a slight increase in the sales rate for the operating system, which averaged at just over 9 million copies sold per month in 2007. However, the sales rate is half that of the Windows update's initial results in the first two months of its launch, when it sold as many as 20 million copies per month to cater to early demand.

View: Full Article @ Electronista

Facebook will add more than 40 safeguards to protect young users from sexual predators and cyberbullies, attorneys general from several US states have announced. The news follows a similar announcement from MySpace after the social networking site was involved in a sexual predator scandal last year.

The changes include banning convicted sex offenders from the site, limiting older users' ability to search online for under 18s and a task force will be created to better verify users' ages and identities.

"Social networks that encourage kids to come to their sites have a responsibility to keep those kids safe," North Carolina attorney general Roy Cooper said. "We've now gotten the two largest social networking sites to agree to take significant steps to protect children from predators and pornography."

View: Full Article @ Pocket-Lint
Link: Join the Neowin Facebook Group

The Internet Storm Center, which tracks online threats, warned Wednesday that a worm is infecting vulnerable Web sites with a database attack. Though relatively small by Web attack standards with about 4,000 reported infected sites, the assault adds invisible code to a site that can force visitors to download malware onto their PC. Bad PR, to say the least.

IMPORTANT: DO NOT visit the domain named in the following test, or any sites that show up on a Web search as having this domain listed in their pages' code (including cached pages). Doing so could infect your PC with malware.

To see if your site has been hit, run the following Google search: "site:your company domain (ex. pcworld.com) winzipices.cn" -- or search for that domain within your Web site's HTML code. If you find anything, let your IT know immediately. When I ran a search just now I saw sites for everything from insurance companies to cemeteries to universities that all appear to have been infected.

The worm uses a SQL injection attack, according to the ISC, but it doesn't yet know just what vulnerability is targeted. The attack highlights the importance of keeping your site secure, something I wrote about last month. It's likewise critical to keep your own PC software up-to-date, as the ISC says visitors to infected sites can be hit via a known flaw in old Real Player software.

News Source: Computer World

According to a New York Times report that a future update of the software for Microsoft’s portable media player may well include a feature that will block unauthorized copies of copyrighted videos from being played on it. Soon after on Microsoft's ZUNE Blog, they set the record straight.

"We have seen some chatter in the blogosphere over the last 24 hours around a couple of posts speculating about what Zune may or may not do in terms of putting content filtering features directly into the Zune family of devices in future releases. We know you guys are following this discussion closely, and wanted to be absolutely clear on this issue:

We have no plans or commitments to implement any new type of content filtering in the Zune devices as part of our content distribution deal with NBC. We think some folks in the industry were expressing hopes for how the entire industry, not just Microsoft, would come to look at content distribution, and some speculation has ensued. Again, no plans are in place toward this end.

I hope this clears up any confusion on the topic, and that you can now go back to enjoying the spring update"

News Source: Zune Insider

A clear message to all torrent websites hosted on the US soil was sent all over the world today: A federal judge is hitting the shuttered TorrentSpy service with a $111 million penalty for facilitating the infringement of thousands of copyrighted works. U.S. District Judge Florence -Marie Cooper in Los Angeles, ruling in a case brought by the Motion Picture Association of America, said site operator Justin Bunnell and associates must pay the maximum $30,000 for "each of the 3,699 infringements shown." The case, producing what is among the largest fines in copyright history, was bolstered after the MPAA allegedly paid a hacker $15,000 for internal TorrentSpy e-mails and correspondence.

“This substantial money judgment sends a strong message about the illegality of these sites,” MPAA Chairman Dan Glickman said in a statement. TorrentSpy, a U.S.-based torrent tacking service, shuttered in March after it lost its case against the MPAA. TorrentSpy did not lose on the merits, but defaulted after it failed to produce internal records. No U.S. case has squarely addressed the legalities of BitTorrent tracking services, although one case is nearing a resolution. Judge Cooper ordered TorrentSpy permanently shuttered. TorrentSpy attorney Ira Rothken was not immediately available for comment. He has appealed the default order to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.

News Source: Release Log

Worried about your civil liberties and privacy? Then it may come as a shock to discover that you have unwittingly been allowing your phone to signal your every move.

Bluetooth, a wireless link built into many cellphones, makes our movements trackable by anyone equipped with a PC and an appropriate receiver. Vassilis Kostakos at the University of Bath in the UK placed four Bluetooth receivers in the city's centre. Over four months, his team tracked 10,000 Bluetooth phones and was able to "capture and analyse people's encounters" in pubs, streets and shops.

Bluetooth is now more of a privacy threat than the more frequently publicised RFID chips, Kostakos says. "If people are worried, they should turn off the Bluetooth function on their mobile phones."

News Source: NewScientistTech

Microsoft, Schiphol, The Netherlands: Yesterday the court passed judgment on the lawsuit we took out against the Dutch company Unicaresoft Corporation B.V. This lawsuit was instigated in response to Unicaresoft's unauthorized use of Microsoft's trade name MSN in its product name and various domain names. The court found in favor of Microsoft. This means that Unicaresoft may not use the name MSNLOCK and that the domain names must be transferred to Microsoft.

We regret that this case had to come to court. In the three months prior to the hearing we corresponded extensively with Unicaresoft to urge them to drop MSNLOCK as its product name and to stop using MSN in its domain names.

MSN is our trade name and we do not want it to be used in the name of another company's product or website (weblink). This would merely sow confusion among consumers as regards ownership and association. We therefore take action as soon as we discover unauthorized use of a Microsoft trade name, as demonstrated by the countless examples we submitted to the court.

We took legal proceedings against Unicaresoft because of the use of MSNLOCK as a product name and the use of MSN in domain names. Carola Eppink, who was portrayed as the defendant by the media, was never in the frame and was not a party in the court case.

View: Full Article @ Bink

BT is trying to introduce consumers to the delights of Blackberry-style mobile email and web access.

Dubbed BT Total Broadband Anywhere, the service provides the company's broadband customers with a "free" HTC Windows Mobile smartphone to take outside of the home.

The smartphone will hook up to any BT Wi-Fi hotspot - including 80,000 BT FON hotspots - to make calls, download emails or surf the web. When outside of a hotspot zone, the smartphone reverts to dawdling GPRS on the Vodafone network.

BT is attempting to play-up the simplicity of the device, claiming that it is simple for users to synchronise their BT email, VoIP telephone service and calendar. "This is not a niche play," Warren Buckley, BT's group director of mobile and convergence told PC Pro at this afternoon's launch event. "Having email and calendar access is not something consumers are used to. In testing, that was something consumers were very attracted to."

View: PC Pro