Intel Nehalem's Market Named Leaked to be Core i7

Posted on Aug 13,2008

Making its way around the Internet late last week was speculation of the official name for Intel’s future processor microarchitecture, currently codenamed Nehalem.

If the rumors are to be correct, the Intel Core i7 and Intel Core i7 Extreme Edition processors will officially be announced August 11 with an expected launch date of Q4 2008.

Nahalem is expected to be initially manufactured with a 45nm process and be available with two, four, or eight cores, for up to 731 million transistors in the quad core variant. A very exciting aspect of the new architecture is the new integrated memory controller, called the Intel QuickPath Interconnect, with DDR3 SDRAM support, which will eliminate the bottleneck that was the front side bus and which had been haunting Intel for years. This should result in a substantial performance increase despite Intel’s competition, AMD, having been using an integrated memory controller in their processors for years.

Another feature of Nahalem will be the re-introduction of Hyper-Threading technology, which was used previously in the Pentium 4 series of processors. Hyper-Threading allows a single core to run an adjacent virtual core, allowing for two threads per actual core, making for potential performance gains. With all the added performance of the upcoming Nahalem processors, power usage is not expected to rise much, providing for greater performance-per-watt efficiency.

Nehalem will come in variants for desktops, servers, and notebooks. The upcoming home desktop variant is codenamed Bloomfield and will use the new LGA1366 socket, making it incompatible with all previous generation motherboards.

Source

SOS- Anti-virus Rescue Disks to the rescue

Posted on Aug 12,2008

I'm generally called up by friends and family to fix their computers when things go wrong. Fixing often means getting rid of malware stuck deep into their systems. And have you noticed the ugly trend now? No longer do you find viruses that destroy data, but rather Trojans that very happily collect data and phone home to their server secretly. Well if I've to choose between data destroying virus and secretly collecting information virus, I'd rather prefer the latter.

In any case, this often means I've to download updated virus definitions, carry anti-virus software installers, process explorer when Windows Task Manager fails to open, spyware programs and assorted cleaning utilities to pry the nasty buggers loose. Though this kit does most of my job, I do lack one essential utility - a Rescue Disk.

Rescue disks aren't backed up files; these are special anti-virus disks that can be used to scan the computer without starting the operating system. What's the use of this, plenty!

Why use Rescue Disks

1. Rescue Disks can scan when the operating system in not ON, meaning if a virus is preventing it's deletion under Windows or any other operating system, the anti-virus on the rescue disk will instantly be able to remove the infection as the operating system is not active, rendering the virus inoperative.

2. Rescue Disks can help when Windows refuses to start due to virus attack. Just pop in the disk and let the scan begin, hopefully it can fix the problem by removing the virus.

3. Rescue disks aren't prone to virus attacks themselves as these are CD's normally (which are read only), or even if one uses USB devices, the virus cannot operate as it needs the operating system to work. Note in case of USB device, your BIOS has to have the ability to boot from USB device.

4. You'll definitely need a Rescue Disk if the over-smart virus doesn't let an already installed anti-virus do its job.

5. You'll definitely need a Rescue Disk if the virus prevents any attempts to install a fresh anti-virus.

Though one does not need something as severe as a Rescue Disk nowadays, I still prefer this method to booting into the OS and then scanning, as it's a lot more thorough.

Free VS Paid

This debate can go on for eternity - What is better paid or free? Let's not get into that, though I can say that free Anti-viruses generally do not allow one to create a "Rescue Disk", this option often is left to paid counterparts. However, there are always nice blokes that allow one to download/make Rescue disks for free, mind you these aren't worse or cut down versions of paid counterparts. Though I would still recommend you to check documentation before using an Anti-virus that claims to be free, as some scan and recognize for free but do not remove viruses.……..Continue reading

tweak Domain Logon Cache Entries in Vista

Posted on Aug 11,2008

If you are using Windows Vista(except Home Editions), when you try to connect to a domain, it caches the domain credentials locally so that you can use them to login in case the domain might not be available.

This is done by a setting known as CachedLogonsCount in Registry Editor. It shows the number of domain logon entries vista is currently saving in the logon cache on the local machine.

Here' is how you can do this>>>

1. Click on Start button, type regedit in the search box and hit Enter.

2. Now navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\winlogon

3. In the right pane of the window, look for cachedlogonscount.

4. Right-click on it and select Modify.

5. In the Value data field you can choose a value between 0 to 50 coz 50 is the maximum.

6. Click OK and exit Regedit.

7. Now Reboot your computer.

Microsoft says goodbye to Windows era

Posted on Aug 10,2008

American software giant Microsoft has made its first major move away from the Windows operating system brand by starting its research project to create the software that will replace the household computer staple, it has been revealed.
The BBC today reported on the company's Midori system, which the news provider labels as "radically different" to Microsoft's preceding offerings.
It added that the Midori system is so different due to the projected pace of change that future computers will bring, with the new program being more internet-centric and mobile, not necessarily tying the system to a computer.
Speaking to the BBC, research vice-president of Gartner Michael Silver said there is more need for mobile computing.
He said: "The value of Microsoft Windows, of what that product is today, will diminish as more applications move to the web and Microsoft needs to edge out in front of that."
In a blog on ZDNet, Mary Jo Foley noted that Midori could be a return to Cairo, a previous but unreleased similar project undertaken by Microsoft in the early 1990s.

Source

Disable regedit under windows vista ultimate

Posted on Aug 09,2008

Users running MS Windows Vista Ultimate on their machines can prevent any kind of fiddling with the Registry Editor by disabling it and for that I’m going to tell you a simple tutorial.

Here’s how you can do this>>>>

1. Click on Start button, type gpedit.msc in the search box and hit Enter.

2. Click Continue to elevate the UAC prompt. This will allow you to open Group Policy Object Editor.

3.In the left pane of the window navigate to User Configuration>> Administrative Templates>>System.

4.Now in the right pane, double click on Prevent access to registry editing tools and you’ll get the following window.

5.Here click on Enabled and select Yes in the drop down menu given below.

6.Click on Apply ,then OK and close the Group Policy Object Editor.

7.That’s it you are Done.

Now you can not access Regedit by any means. But if you do wanna fiddle with it you can select Not Configured option in step 5.