www.nickhodge.com

Sorta kinda pre­dicted this; now CNet finds it is true. “64-bit Vista finds a hom on con­sumer laptops”

Rather than down­load­ing the update on each of your Vista PCs, it might be bet­ter on your ISP band­width charge to down­load once:

• Win­dows Vista Ser­vice Pack 1 Five Lan­guage Stan­dalone (KB936330) 32-bit
• Win­dows Vista Ser­vice Pack 1 Five Lan­guage Stan­dalone for x64-based Sys­tems (KB936330)

Magazines love to do per­form­ance tests. If there is a spe­cial stream at AIS spe­cific­ally for time keep­ers, magazine journ­al­ists should apply for Gov­ern­ment grants to improve their skills!

APC Magazine has a run down of the per­form­ance changes in Vista RTM (late 2006 Vista) to Vista RTM Patched (what people are gen­er­ally run­ning today) and Vista SP1 (what will be run­ning in the very near future)

Whilst Gen­eral Melchett has been Vista x64 from birth, we Microsoft people were recently given early access to the final Vista Ser­vice Pack 1.

Last night, I down­loaded the updater. Backed up Gen­eral Melchett. Double clicked. And watched.

So, firstly a note to all. When the installer says 1. Sev­eral Reboots and 2. About an hour — both are highly cor­rect. Please be patient.

After an hour. A restart to the login screen. Ser­vice Pack 1 is installed.

Everything is work­ing. Net­work­ing, Remote Desktop. It is dif­fi­cult to quantify any gains quickly: how­ever the formal list of changes is worth a read.

In my research in the con­tinu­ing over­clock­ing research for Gen­er­al­Melchett, I’ve found that 55degC is a little warm for a processor.

The 8800GT is now installed and work­ing well. Just wait­ing for the two 22″ Dell LCD mon­it­ors, external speak­ers and new Geek­Desk for the home Geek­Space and we are go!

Admit­tedly, Gen­er­al­Melchett has been burnt in over the last 5 days (turned on con­stantly) to ensure sta­bil­ity. The Vista Reli­ab­il­ity and Per­form­ance Mon­itor is excel­lent at view­ing the sta­bil­ity of your setup over long peri­ods of time.

So, time for some extra CPU fan (Zall­man) and a con­trol­lable external 120mm fan.

It seems that the memory is the cur­rent weak­est link my the chain:

Yes, I know that the cor­rect eng­lish spelling of Cen­ter is Centre.

Thanks to the gen­er­os­ity of Jeffa, I scored an old Mini-ATX case with power sup­ply. Yeah, being the junior on the team — I get all the hand-me-downs.

Some hun­dreds of dol­lars later from AUS­P­CMar­ket, and I have my first ever:

1. AMD based PC (AMD Athlan64 x2 6000+)
2. Giga­byte Mother­board PC (GA-MA69GM-S2H)
3. Self-constructed PC (only a screw­driver required)
4. Media Cen­ter PC (Vista Ultimate)
5. Microsoft Wire­less Key­board 8000

Not being a hard­ware type, the mov­ing of cables, CPUs, fans, more cables and stuff made the phys­ical con­struc­tion a little longer than an expert. There are still some internal wir­ing bits to com­plete: hard disk light at the front and CD audio. Also missed that the our Acer LCD TV has VGA and PC Audio. The cables I pur­chased were not correct.

The toughest part was installing the power to the SATA DVD/CD drive, and ensur­ing the CD eject but­ton had enough clear­ance to work.

The first PATA (this was a sur­prise!) hard disk was stuffed, so off to plan B with a 500Gb PATA and we’re away. The mother­board would not boot up with this hard disk attached; so the old disk is a throw away.

Using the onboard graph­ics and USB based TV tuner is prob­ably sub-optimal. Need to fix these.

To add/change

1. Dual chan­nel PCI DVB-T card
2. DivX sup­port (com­plete at 9:40pm)
3. TV Guide so I can record TV successfully.

Oh, and the cats love the extra space. The case and CPU are quiet and rel­at­ively cool. The cave aspect of the case make it a per­fect hunt­ing spot:

Thanks Long for the point­ers. Have installed. Had USB hub issues yes­ter­day — I won­der if these updates will help?

I just love soft­ware: it just keeps get­ting bet­ter, in the field.

JohnG, the nicest man on the planet, will­ing let me into his house to film another epis­ode of The Geek Stor­ies. Mayling filmed a behind the scenes show… which will be inter­est­ing to see, too. Server racks and a com­pac­tus in the games room. Now that’s impressive!

So, do you have Australia’s geeki­est house?

Ed Bott, from ZDNet in the US recently tested Win­dows Vista Home Basic on a 2002-vintage PC with 512Mb of RAM — and found the oper­at­ing sys­tem respons­ive and usable.

Sur­pris­ingly, even the visu­als on this sys­tem were a treat. With a three-year-old video card, this sys­tem was cap­able of run­ning Vista’s Aero graph­ics. But because Aero doesn’t run on Home Basic, I was stuck with the Vista Stand­ard dis­play. It lacks the trans­par­ent win­dow bor­ders and whizzy live pre­views on taskbar but­tons, but oth­er­wise the look is indis­tin­guish­able from a sys­tem run­ning Win­dows Vista Ultimate.

(Link thanks to John Dowdell) Bridging my old world to my new world, this doc­u­ment details the sup­port for cur­rent Adobe applic­a­tions with Microsoft Win­dows Vista. It is well worth a read, espe­cially as Adobe products: Flash Player and the Adobe Reader are very com­mon installs.

Sum­mary: no Acrobat 7 sup­port for Vista, only Acrobat 8: with an update expec­ted first half 2007 for full sup­port. There are known issues with Acrobat 8 on Vista. Sim­il­arly with Office 2007; the update will have sup­port. You can make PDFs dir­ectly from Office 2007 using the Save as PDF and XPS plu­gin.

For Adobe Cre­at­ive Suite 2.3: (note that Cre­at­ive Suite Premium 2.0 with Acrobat Pro­fes­sional 7.0 is not a good com­bin­a­tion). For Mac­ro­media Stu­dio 8, the fol­low­ing seems to also apply.

we are not cur­rently aware of major issues that would adversely affect cus­tomer use of
Adobe Cre­at­ive Suite 2.3 on Win­dows Vista.

In the doc­u­ment, it is worth not­ing the para­graphs in regards to the forth­com­ing, pre-announce status Adobe Cre­at­ive Suite 3.0:

…Adobe Cre­at­ive Suite 3 is being designed for and thor­oughly tested on 32-bit ver­sions of four edi­tions of Win­dows Vista—Home Premium, Busi­ness, Enter­prise, and Ultimate.

Adobe Pro­duc­tion Stu­dio (video products) seem to install OK, but Vista is not recom­men­ded as an OS. EncoreDVD is repor­ted to not work on Vista. Shame, as I was just about to pur­chase a Pro­duc­tion Stu­dio for some Microsoft video pro­jects. 

Altsys/Aldus/Adobe/Altsys/Macromedia/Adobe Free­hand? Oooh. Maybe not so good:

Adobe does not plan to update Mac­ro­media Free­Hand to install or run on Win­dows Vista

Do go have a read, and look at the sup­port for­ums: Vista in Adobe Sup­port For­ums.

As a Microsoft Vista and an Intel-based Mac­Book Pro user, this year is a key year for Adobe products.