Anyone remember the American Express commercial where a guy talks about how he was at a big client dinner and his credit card got declined? “I was so embarrassed,” the voice actor moans, and then goes on to relate how his father told him to get an American Express. With no pre-set spending limit, he informs us, he’ll never have to worry about being declined again.
Microsoft is frequently dinged for having insecure products, with security holes and vulnerabilities. But Symantec no friend of Microsoft, said in its latest research report that when it comes to widely-used operating systems, Microsoft is doing better overall than its leading commercial competitors.
The information was a part of Symantec’s 11th Internet Security Threat Report. The report, released this week, covered a huge range of security and vulnerability issues over the last six months of 2006, including operating systems.
Microsoft’s PR usually drops me in a barbed-wire protected conference room for demos. So when the Mobile guys offered to do the meeting over breakfast, I stupidly jumped at the change of venue. ‘Stupid’ because I’m a self-employed freelance writer. To make an 8am breakfast meeting in NYC, I need to roll out of bed in north Jersey around 5:30am. I haven’t been up that early since my last hangover emergency.
Fortunately, the W Hotel serves excellent coffee which eradicated my bleary fog such that I could actually understand what the Microsoft guys were talking about. Before that they sounded like one of those Charlie Brown saxophone-as-teacher numbers.
It used to be that the simplest way to boost system performance was to pop open your PC’s case and fit more RAM. Windows Vista contains a new feature that allows you to give your system a performance boost by doing nothing more that plugging a flash USB drive (known sometimes as a USB key) into an available post.
This new technology is called ReadyBoost and this allows users to plug a USB flash memory device into a USB 2.0 port on the PC and use it as a cache or virtual memory. The advantage of ReadyBoost is that it is much faster to cache to the USB drive than caching to your hard disk, speeding up your system and enhancing overall performance. ReadyBoost uses the USB flash memory device as a fast store for frequently accessed data, the average random 4K read from a flash device is about ten times faster than accessing the same information from the hard drive.
To make use of ReadyBoost you’ll need:
Whenever you start your computer, you are faced with a few moments of thumb twiddling while Windows XP boots and prompts you to log on. Although you should expect to wait for a few moments, sometimes Windows XP seems to boot rather slowly. In fact, you may notice that over a period of time the PC that used to roar to life seems a bit sluggish instead.
Thanks : www.pctipsbox.com
