Ok, admittedly Microsoft Vista is a failure. Noone “wants” Vista, everyone just gets it or upgrades it because they have to through Microsoft’s monopoly of offering it on every new computer built. I don’t even want to know what tactics they’ve used to get corporations to adopt it but considering they’ve been target of antitrust lawsuits in most of the G8 nations, it’s probably not very nice.

Windows 7 is the next version of Windows, and it’s coming next year. In the latest demo of their beta build, it shows that they’ve been paying attention to what matters most: the user interface. While Vista brought technical enhancements to customers without any visible benefits, Windows 7 trys to use the original enhancements as well as some new ones, in a way that people can see and visualize right away. Gee, it’s like they’re actually thinking about people using their software.

On Lifehacker, Get Window’s 7 Best Features Now, shows people how to enhance Vista to get many of these features right away, without waiting for the late and very expensive Windows 7. Many of the addons are really good and have a nice benefit.

In Vista, bootup is configured to only use one core. If you have a dual core (or more) machine, you can change it to take advantage of multiple cores:

• Go to the start menu find msconfig,
• click on boot tab
• click on advanced options
• number of processors select the number of cores
• when you exit msconfig it will prompt you to use selective startup if you haven’t used it before, confirm this.

I’ve tried it and it doesn’t seem to make that much of a difference. Comment back if you find a different experience.

When Vista was released from Microsoft, it was up to digital imaging providers like Nikon and Canon to write their own codecs so that their image files could be viewed by their users. Unfortunately, relying on Camera manufacturers, usually foreign, and without good ties to Microsoft Developers has led to some complications.

Most noteably, anyone using the 64-bit version of Windows has not been able to view their raw files (.NEF) since Vista was released. Nikon provides a codec for XP and 32-bit Vista only.

Enter Ardfry Imaging. They created a beta version of the NEF codec for Vista x64. I’ve installed it and it works!