Social Networking Sites

It is believed that early man used sign language to communicate with each other. Later on he learnt to talk. Then, he began to use smoke signals to communicate over long distances. Then came the advent of letter writing. The 19th century has witnessed the invention of the telegraph and telephone and as a result human interaction has become easier. But the most phenomenal method of communication and interaction evolved in the 20th century—the Internet. The Web started from bulletin board services and forums and has evolved to a more complex method of social interaction—social networking sites. The sites offer a safe, secure and fun-filled way for people to connect, interact and socialise on the Internet.

Vista Security Cente

The Security Center is the one-stop to check up on all the security settings on the OS. It displays the status of the most important security elements which are required to protect Vista. Clicking on the Security Center you will find information on:

• The Firewall status
• Status of Windows Updates—specifically if Automatic updating is on
• Malware protection—here you can find out if you have an antivirus software installed, and if so, are the virus definition files up to date; you can also find out the status on Windows Defender or any third-party anti-spyware product
• The “Other security settings” keeps a track of the Internet security settings and whether the UAC feature is turned on

While the right-hand side of the Security Center display status information, the left-hand pane will give you one-point access to each of the programs that the Center is tracking. You can thus access:

• Windows Update
• Windows Firewall
• Windows Defender
• Internet Options

from the left-hand pane; this helps you make immediate changes to these security systems if the Security Center finds something amiss.

Windows Media Center

Windows Media Center was earlier shipped as its own operating system—the Windows XP Media Center Edition. It is now also bundled along with Windows Vista Ultimate Edition. The program is primarily meant as a home entertainment hub, wherein the interface is either a large monitor or an LCD/plasma television. The interface is meant to be used from a distance of about 10 feet, and thus features large and colourful icons instead of a traditional menu layout. Windows Media Center is capable of organising and cataloguing several media pieces on your computer—from TV shows to movies to photographs; it can also record TV shows at specified time intervals and acts as a PVR if supported with the right hardware. To record TV, it requires a TV-Tuner card, either analogue or digital. Flash memory (NVRAM) and part regular hard disk. Such H-HDDs, as they are called, should soon become regular features of our computer systems. Typically, H-HDDs include between 50 MB and 512 MB of Flash memory. Much like ReadyBoost, Windows Vista will make use of this Flash capacity to store frequently used data as cache. Vista can, for example store boot data to the cache when the system shuts down or hibernates. This should allow faster restarting or resuming, respectively. The cache can also be used as a scratchpad for data reads and writes even when the hard drive has spun down—this should reduce the power consumed by the disk under normal usage; once again a plus point for laptop owners. Recorded shows can either be burnt onto disc or transferred to a portable media player. There are several geographical restrictions on this software— particularly—Windows Media Center can play HD video in all countries, but does not support HDTV in any country except the United States. Additionally, there is no support for HD-DVD or Bluray movies in any country. While HDTV sets are not supported, media managed through Media Center can be relayed to any standard TV set via Media Extenders or via the Xbox 360 game console. (A Media Extender such as the Xbox 360 game console allows you to stream your music, movies, and photographs to a television set.) Media cannot be transferred to another computer, however (for this you can always use Windows Media Player 11, assuming all computers have Vista installed).

ReadyBoot - Vista

When a Windows system boots, a large number of files need to be read intomemory and processed. Typically, the files which need to be called upon boot depend on which services and startup programs the user requires to start the system up. This process can be quite inefficient since multiple portions of the same file may be accessed at different times during bootup. To reduce this inefficiency, the system can cache data that is frequently called upon during the boot process. Practically, code and data accessed during boot are traced by the system (ReadyBoost in this case) and the information is recorded as a cache file. ReadyBoot is, incidentally, implemented by the ReadyBoost service described earlier. ReadyBoost will continue monitoring the system for 90 seconds after start of the boot, or until 30 seconds after the shell has started, or until 60 seconds after all services have been initialised, whichever elapses first. ReadyBoost uses idle CPU time to calculate a caching plan for the next boot based on historical data it has collected as trace information from the previous boot (typically information pertaining to which files were accessed and where they are located on disk). The size of the cache depends on the total RAM available, but is large enough to create a reasonable cache and yet allow the system the memory it needs to boot smoothly.

ReadyDrive - Vista

Recently announced were hybrid disk drives which were part non-volatile Flash memory (NVRAM) and part regular hard disk. Such H-HDDs, as they are called, should soon become regular features of our computer systems. Typically, H-HDDs include between 50 MB and 512 MB of Flash memory. Much like ReadyBoost, Windows Vista will make use of this Flash capacity to store frequently used data as cache. Vista can, for example store boot data to the cache when the system shuts down or hibernates. This should allow faster restarting or resuming, respectively. The cache can also be used as a scratchpad for data reads and writes even when the hard drive has spun down—this should reduce the power consumed by the disk under normal usage; once again a plus point for laptop owners.

ASUS EN8800GT 1GB

An 8800GT With The Ultimate Top-up Plan!

The ASUS 8800GT is like any other 8800GT, except this one has been filled to the brim with a whopping 1 GB of memory. This isn’t the only 1GB card to come to our labs—the Palit 8500GT was another one, but didn’t quite outperform the other 8500GT-based cards. Could it be a similar fate for this card? First things first—the 1GB card doesn’t come with the standard NVIDIA cooler: it’s been replaced by a much more robust and chunky cooler and an equally good fan. There’s no cooling for the memory, though. Overall, it’s very quiet and runs just fine with temperatures hovering around the 50º C mark. Even with FSAA turned up to 4x and Antistrophic filtering to 8x, we were able to very respectable frame rates in Company of Heroes, F.E.A.R. and Doom 3, but the frame rate was only fractionally more than the standard 512 MB 8800GTs. The ASUS 8800GT 1GB comes with no bundled games. It’s evident that there are no clear benefits from using the much large frame buffer. If you have set a higher budget for a card, then this 8800GT 1GB could be worth it—if you can get it cheap in the market. Anything over that and you’re better off saving for a 512 MB 8800GTS.




Specifications

GeForce 8800GT, 1GB DDR3, PCI-E 1 and 2 supported, DirectX 10 complaint, Shader Model 4.0 supported