Windows 7 Goes Gold

We’re fast approaching one of the final milestones in the run up to the consumer launch of Windows 7 this autumn. But in advance of that, on July 10th, the so-called ‘Gold’ RTM or Release To Manufacture version of the operating system will be confirmed, swiftly followed by distribution to manufacturers and developers on July 13th. This head start should help avoid some of the problems following the launch of Vista when far too many hardware devices didn’t have the necessary drivers in place. Barring any unforeseen last minute glitches or bugs this is the version of the software that will go on sale on October 22nd. Good news too on pricing, it looks like it will be a fair bit cheaper than Vista.

Scrub System of Useless Data

There is no secret that working on the computer, no matter its outstanding initial performance, will eventually bring it to a slower functioning. Also, web browsing and installing applications will generate tons of files needed for some process, but never wiped after they are no longer needed. They’ll hang in there until you decide to take some action against them the moment you find yourself in need of free space or simply settle to clean the system of data that serves no useful purpose.

The need of more space, especially on the system drive, often requires going into the temporary files (Windows and web browser) manually and eliminating files you no longer need. An automatic approach to this task has already been created and there are plenty of apps perfectly fit for the job. Read more

NVIDIA GeForce 185.81 Beta Drivers

Santa Clara, California-based NVIDIA has recently introduced a new series of GeForce graphics drivers with a new Beta release of their 185 series. The new release offers support for all of the company’s latest graphics accelerators, including the most recent GeForce GTX 275, as well as other previously-released GeForce cards, part of NVIDIA’s GeForce 6, 7, 8 and 9-series of desktop GPUs. In addition, according to the release notes of the new GeForce drivers, users of NVIDIA graphics accelerators will be able to take advantage of a series of performance increases.

The company’s new GeForce Driver release 185.81 Beta includes support for its latest GeForce GTX 275 graphics processing unit, as well as a number of new features. According to the release notes, users upgrading their drivers to the latest beta release will be provided with support for Ambient Occlusion, a new setting in the NVIDIA Control Panel, CUDA 2.2, for better performance in GPU-enabled applications, and expanded support in the NVIDIA Video Encoding library for GPUs that use less than 32 cores. Read more