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Don’t know whether Vista’s Disk Defragmenter is really working in the background…If it does, reaaaally slow. The interface for this new defrag tool is very simple, but you’re unable to determine the progress and estimated time while it’s running defrag. Kind of miss defragger in XP…

Does the above look familiar to you – Windows Blue Screen of Death… Now it’s Vista’s turn. The Green ribbon (see below) actually is a progress bar of Windows Explorer in Vista. Happened to me once when I tried to copy a couple of my old movies from one USB drive to another USB drive. The entire system hanged and neither keypad nor mouse was working. I finally had to manually shut down the computer and reboot. Check here to see how to prevent this disastrous screen…

Everyone knows that Vista is a CPU hog because of its Aero feature… plus some software bundles that come with purchased computer, these significantly slow down the performance. In order to speed up your system, you can uninstall unused/trial version of software, or modify Services Startup via Services.msc or System Configuration via msconfig.

Accidentally change Theme Service from Automatic to Manual can totally change the look of Start button…

Classic button after set Themes to Manual

Original Vista Start button

Updating my previous post regarding the approximate release date for SP1… Mike Nash from Windows product management group confirmed Vista SP1 arrival saying SP1 will be available to release via Windows Updates and the microsoft.com download center in mid-March. Hopefully this can speed up Vista’s core system and improve its hardware compatibility…

While many PC users are still not sure whether they would like to upgrade to the latest Windows Vista, Windows 7 ( previously codenamed Blackcomb and Vienna) is scheduled to be released by 2012. MinWin, the Windows Kernel, will be used for Windows 7.

Eric Traut talks Windows 7 and MinWin from Long Zheng on Vimeo.

Here are some screen shots for the future Windows OS and FAQ…

Microsoft release Vista SP1 RC2 today to it’s Vista testers including corporate users, customers, software and hardware engineers. It seems that it’s final version of Service Pack 1 is right at the corner… There is a rumor from overseas’ software engineers that February 15 is the final release date.

Also Windows XP SP3 will be released during the first quarter of 2008. Due to lack of software and hardware support for Vista, most of Windows users are still using XP, which its lifecycle is extended to year 2014.

Vista’s biggest enemy is not OS X, Ubuntu and RedHat but its own cousin – XP.