Nearly 30% of logged Vista crashes were due to NVIDIA driver problems, according to a Microsoft data included in the bundle. That’s some 479,326 hung systems, if you’re keeping score at home, and it’s in first place by a large margin — Microsoft clocks in at number two at 17.9 percent, and ATI is fourth with 9.3 percent. The data points in the table cover an unspecified period in 2007, and Microsoft makes no attempt to break the aggregate data down into which device drivers, specifically, returned the highest number of crashes. If the number of failures were split by month and then graphed, we’d presumably see the number of NVIDIA driver failures per month decreasing as the company slowly brought its driver issues under control.The data clearly indicates that NVIDIA had a driver problem, but it’s impossible to quantify the scope of that problem given the numbers above. NVIDIA holds a greater percentage of the market than ATI, which means that there will inevitably be a higher percentage of NVIDIA driver crashes than ATI driver crashes; however, the degree to which such market share considerations have affected the results above is hard to determine in the absence of more data. There’s also the matter of data collection; Microsoft’s charts do not clarify if multiple crashes from a single system each counted as separate events. In theory, NVIDIA’s proportion of total driver crashes could be inflated by a relatively small handful of systems with severe driver issues.
Here’s one nice new release with a terribly long name (including a typo in “enterprise”) from grooup ZWT. This release is targeted mostly at companies and profesionals - Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 with SP1 isn’t something you would normally use at home. This DVD9 release is only for 64bit systems and contains both Enterpise and Standard editions of Exchange Server 2007 (the difference is only the serial you use for activation).
AMD on Thursday released seven new Phenom processors, aiming to hit the mainstream PC market with low-cost, performance-minded processors that include the first shipments of AMD’s triple-core Phenoms. Four of the chips are the new 50-series CPUs (also known as the “B3 stepping”) that fix the TLB (Translation Lookaside Buffer) erratum thatplagued the first batch of Phenom processors out of the gate. The TLB erratum necessitated a fix on the affected system’s motherboard BIOS (turning the TLB “off”) resulting in some reduced performance. The new 50-series processors have similar model numbers and have the same speed clock-for-clock: i.e. the Phenom 9500 and 9550 are both 2.2-GHz quad-core processors.
It took many years from IE6 to IE7, but this browser is still quite new and Microsoft is already releasing a first beta version of IE8. MS unveiled the beta version of Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) for developers at the annual MIX08 conference in Las Vegas. The beta version of IE8 includes better predictability when designing sites, full support for cascading style sheet (CSS) 2.1 at release to manufacturing, and integrated developer tools to quickly debug HTML, CSS and scripts in a visual environment, Microsoft said. “A lot of the end user or consumer features are not featured on this build because it really is targeted at the developers and the designers,” Matthew Lepsen from the Microsoft IE development team, said on a video produced by Microsoft’s Channel 9 site. While the consumer version of IE8 will differ somewhat from this first beta, it will not be a dramatic change, Lepsen said. The software giant again stressed the browser’s interoperability. Microsoft on Tuesday announced that it will make IE8 standards compliant.