Category — PC

I love these things!

I reported a while back that it was coming, and now it’s here. Microsoft released today Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) for public download. Current users of Vista should use Windows Update to retrieve and install the download.

I’m just reporting here. I don’t have Vista installed on anything to test it out. Enjoy.

Oh…I can’t help it. If you’re thinking about getting Vista, you might just want to click here instead.

I recently had a friend complain that my blog posts were too “Mac biased” and, therefore, useless to PC users. While I won’t apologize for being an adamant Mac fan, I’ll try to throw them a bone here with this little gem:

PicLens is a browser plugin that is, in my humble opinion, one of the coolest innovations for viewing images from the web. You really have to see it to fully understand what I’m talking about, but basically it allows the user to view a “feed” of images in a full-screen, interactive environment.

I know that it works with Flickr, Google Images, Picassa, Yahoo, and Facebook at this point, but, if there are not already others, I’m sure there will be soon!

It is available for Safari, Firefox, and Internet Explorer. The newest feature, the 3D “Wall” of images, only works in Firefox and IE. I’ll take this opportunity to throw out my Firefox plug. My advice: quit using Internet Explorer. If you are a PC users and don’t have it, download Firefox here.

Head over to piclens.com to download the plugin that’s right for your browser. Once the plugin is installed, anytime you mouse over an image on a site that works with PicLens (Media RSS enabled), a small play button will fade in. Click that button to begin the experience. If you need more help, you can click the Tutorial link on the piclens.com site.

Questions? Leave a comment here, I’ll respond. Enjoy.

Microsoft has sent Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) to manufacturing today. SP1 is intended to address some of the concerns that users of Microsoft’s newest operating system have encountered including, but not limited to: slow file copy times, slow return from sleep, and device driver conflicts.

SP1 will be pre-installed on new OEM computers in the next several month, according to a blog post by Mike Nash from Microsoft’s Windows product management group.

The Service Pack should release to current users of Vista in mid-March via Windows Update. Apparently the new Service Pack can cause some driver conflicts with devices that may currently be functioning with Vista. In theory, Windows Update will identify these problem devices and not prompt users to install the service pack if they have incompatible devices installed.

I’ll post more about this as news develops and the release date gets closer. Thanks to this post for alerting me to the upcoming release.