pc-india

2006-10-20T07:47:00.000-07:00

Your IQ Is 140

Your Logical Intelligence is Below Average

Your Verbal Intelligence is Genius

Your Mathematical Intelligence is Genius

Your General Knowledge is Genius

A Quick and Dirty IQ Test

2006-10-08T07:15:00.000-07:00

2006-09-27T11:11:00.000-07:00

TOP PICKS
(after extensive reviewing, personally)

BEST TORRENT CLIENTS:
1.Azureus
2.Bitcomet
3.Utorrent

BEST TORRENTS SITES:
1.Torrentz
2.Torrentspy
3.Piratebay.org(best for apps.)
4.Isohunt(best for movies)

BEST P2P CLIENTS:
1. Limewire Pro
2. Morpheus Ultra
3. Ares

BEST ANTIVIRUS(HOME USE):
1.Nod32
2.AVG
3.Antivir PE
4.Bitdefender
5,Panda Platinum

BEST FIREWALL(HOME USE):
1.Outpost Pro
2.Kerio
3.Zone Alarm.
4.Sygate
5.Bitdefender

BEST ANT-SPYWARE:
1.Spysweeper
2.Ad-Aware
3.Outpost firewall's inbuilt scanner
4.Spybot

2006-09-25T06:51:00.000-07:00

PHILIPS SBS-HP250 HEADPHOONES REVIEW

I have used many headphones in the past, most of them have been the low budget ones from tech-com,etc. i had also used a set from plantronics, the biggest problem with them seems to be their durability, within 2 weeks of use most of them had broken chords, ear cushions coming off, or they stopped working on being dropped, so i set out to look for real audiophile set of headphones, after much searching and reading comments i put aside models from altec lansing and son y to zero in on the Phillips HP-250, i purchased them from fabmall.com, and finally 15 days later they arrived, i i immediately notices that the package had been mishandled and was not protected at all, but i was glad to see the headphones were scratch less.
the first thing you notice is the length of the chord, must be around 5 meters long, great for watching movies, almost as good as wireless headphones, the headset looks sleek with silver and black design, the earphones are really large, although they don't feature noise cancellation, they do a fair job of it as they completely cover the entire ear, the earphones alo swivel 180 degrees, though i don't know what use will that be, the insides have a finish and the headphones are very comfortable to wear, u will only notice slight discomfort when wearing theses for very long hours.
the sound quality seems to be great, although the volume isn't the loudest, its loud enough, so that you don't hear anything else, i tried diff. genres- rock,jazz,pop,etc. and everything sounded great!
and now for the best part, the price is only Rs. 945.
my suggestion: GO get it!

2006-09-11T02:38:00.001-07:00

2006-09-11T02:38:00.000-07:00

2006-09-10T00:16:00.000-07:00

COOLER MASTER THERMAL COMPOUND KIT
fter searching long and hard for a pro cooling compound in nehru place i finally came across this, i was actually looking for arctic silver thermal compund which is a highly acclaimed cooling solution, but it seems it is very rarely available in delhi, in fact most vendors don't even seem to understand "thermal compound kit", and those who did thought it to be your generic white paste(rs 20 for a med sized bottle)
anyway after i finally found a shop specializing in pro cooling, i bought the kit for rs 250, it was small injection type pack.
now for the performance- 1st of all IT STINKS!!!!, i applied it directly onto the CPU and GPU and ran benchmarks , and the temp. instead of falling rose about 10 degrees, i waited and waited but no change, i found the manual said to apply a plastic sticker on the CPU and then apply the paste, common sense told me it wouldn't do any good, but i still tried, the result 30 degree rise in temp!
so finally i had to put the the paste back on, it was at this point i realized that the content is far less than what you think it is , once you rip off the cover from the injection body, u find it's only 1/4th filled, and this thing costs 250 bucks ie abt 50 times costly from the generic ones.
so conclusion stay away from it, i say stick to bigger heatsinks with copper heatpipes from coolermaster or vantec.
as for me i'm trying my hand on liquid nitrogen or aqua cooling

2006-09-09T09:54:00.000-07:00

CALL OF DUTY 2 REVIEW

Another world war 2 based shooter, same stuff of killin' every jerry that moves, so should u play this game, hell u should cuz its call of duty 2! The original call of duty was one of the best games of 2002, it got worldwide recognition for its immersiveness and game play, it didn't do anything new, but whatever it did, it made a brilliant job out of it, it was the best WWW2 shooter ever, about a year later, an expansion pack call of duty- united offensive came out, it had new missions, but nothing else. Call of duty 2 promised to make the gaming experience even more better, frankly there wasn't much to improve upon, but the developers have definitely succeeded in doin' what they said.

You start of as a Russian soldier in the aftermath of the battle at Stalingrad, for those of you who haven't played the original call of duty, don't worry; You have a basic tutorial in the beginning of the game to explain u all the basics. you will notice that the health bar has been done away with, when you are at critical health the screen turns red and you will have to take cover to regain your health this saves a lot of frustration of going back to collect those health packs and adds to the realism. I played the game on rig with a 6600 GT 128 MB and 1 gig ram initially the auto detect set the res. to 640x4480 with no AA and AF but I found that you play the game just as well at 1280x768 with 4XAA (anti aliasing) and 4XAF (antistrophic filtering), I suggest you keep cranking up the settings until you stop getting playable frame rates. the graphics look awesome u can see the snow falling real time and the water looks brilliant too, but the best part is the smoke and the explosions, the smoke effects are probably the best seen on a PC game and explosions look real enough to make u feel right in the middle of the war, the sound effects are awesome too.
now to the game play, anyone who has played call of duty before knows that nothing beats this game when it come to game play
when you play this game you don't feel like you are playing a game you fell like a real soldier right in the middle, although the is quite linear and monotonous, you never feel that, hats what makes this game so great, its the realism you feel, you feel the grief the anger when you see one of your comrades dying trying to cover you. The AI of the game is brilliant too, your team-mates will always lead the way and you never feel stranded with a bunch of morons, they cover you, throw in grenades at the right time and do as they would in real life, and the enemy is real smart too, if you think you could just go to the front and shoot everybody to hell you are in for a lot of reloads, the Germans take cover intelligently and have a knack of always landing their grenades in the right spot, luckily you have a grenade danger indicator which shows you the direction of the incoming grenade so that you take some cover, the game also has extensive use of smoke grenades, as I said before the smoke looks very realistic and you are gonna need it when charging at an MG-42 machine gun.
the campaigns are divided into 3 parts starting with the Russian campaign which has you fighting in the cold and snowing Russian towns, crawling through pipes and sniping enemy snipers, and then you have the British campaign where you sight in the much hotter environment of the Sahara deserts, the game looks gorgeous in the missions in these missions, a fair part of the campaign is blowing up panzers as a tank commander, its great fun, and finally the American mission show cases the d-day landings on the beaches of Normandy and the fighting through the towns in France, it probably the toughest part in the game.
the only con in the game is probably the lack of different missions like air missions, but that is a minor glitch the game is sure to keep u glued to ur PC for hours, my suggestions stop reading and buy the game.

Pros= brilliant game play, cool graphics, and the pleasure of killin' lots of jerried
cons= a bit linear maybe but honestly, any decent gamer wouldn't give a damn about it. Must play game.

Rating 9.5/10.

-Amit Patnaik

2006-09-09T09:52:00.000-07:00

more cool tips

Mac trick.

Many of the guides for installing OSX Tiger are complicated and use linux. You can install OSX using public-domain free windows only tools.

If you wish to install OSX tiger to your intel machine or usb drive, you can follow these few steps. Be careful because you can kill your hard drive if you are not careful.

You will need either a seperate hard drive (seperate partition will not do) or an external hard drive. Whatever extra hard drive you use will be completely replaced by osx and you will lose all information on that drive.

1. Authorized users should obtain the OSX files from Apple. It is illegal to obtain them from torrent sites by searching under the following keywords: "VMWare files for patched Mac OS X Tiger Intel"
2. Unrar these files to the root of your C: drive
3. Download Forensic Acquisition Utilities
4. Unzip these files and copy dd.exe to the root of c: drive as well

Note: the dd.exe program is used to write the image to your spare hard drive or external hard drive. The command is the following:

dd if=c:\tiger-x86-flat.img of=\\.\PhysicalDriveSomething

PhysicalDriveSomething should be replaced with your real physicaldrive (PhysicalDrive1, PhysicalDrive2, etc.). What your hard drives or usb drives are labelled is not always obvious. So I use WMI to figure this out. If you don't need it, don't get it. It's free... and it may prevent you from killing your wrong hard drive.

5. Download WMI Tools from Microsoft
6. Open WMI Browser Object
7. Allow block content and click the OKs until it loads
8. Select Win32_SystemPartitions.PartComponent in the left column
9. In the right column right-click on the drive device id (Disk #0, Partition #0, etc) and select Go to Object
10. The device window will open and click the associations tab
11. Exploring with this tool you should be able to match drive letters (Win32_LogicalDisk.DeviceID="C

:") to each physicaldisk reference (Win32_DiskDrive.DeviceID="\\\\.\\PHYSICALDRIVE0")

Click for larger version:

12. Now that you know the physicaldrive label for your extra internal or external drive, you can drop to the root of your c: drive and run the command. Be sure to replace the physicaldrive text with the physical drive you determined above. If you use the wrong one, you will erase your primary hard drive.

dd if=c:\tiger-x86-flat.img of=\\.\PhysicalDrive

13. The command will appear to hang but you will notice your extra harddrive cranking away. It's going to do this for 15min to hours. Just let it run.
14. Once it is done, reboot and set the osx drive to your boot drive through your bios.
15. If your hardware is compatable, you should boot to OSX.

If you need to debug, I recommend these forums.

This wiki is also excellent:
http://wiki.osx86project.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

UNEASYsilence was one of the first to report on the OSX on intel hack... and is still a good source for updated news on the topic.

easy way to get music.

MySpace allows you to listen to a lot of songs; however, only a few of them can be downloaded. This little work-around will allow you to download most music files.

MySpace allows you to listen to a lot of music, but they only allow you to download a select few of the songs. Here is the work around.

1. Goto the MySpace site that you want to download the music from
2. That page must have at least one song available for download
3. Open notepad
4. Right-click the download link and select copy Link
5. Paste this link into your notepad

You see something like this:

http://mp3download.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=

OldSongNumberHere

Title of the Old Song Here

bandid

6. Right-click the add link and select copy link
7. Paste this into your notepad

You will see something like this:

NewSongNumber

Title of the New Song Here

8. Now in the original URL just replace the old song number and old title with the new number and title. Paste this URL into your browser and click OK.

9. After several seconds, you will be prompted to download the song.

Here's an example:
Site: http://www.myspace.com/monstersarewaiting

The one downloadable song Christine...

http://mp3download.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction= bandprofile.downloadSong&bsid=535475&song_name=Christine&fid=7570106

The add link to Don't Go...

asfunction:addSong,2373353^Don%27t%20Go^Monsters %20Are%20Waiting%2E%2E%2E%2E%2E%2E

The new hacked URL...

http://mp3download.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction= bandprofile.downloadSong&bsid=2373353&song_name= Don%27t%20Go^Monsters%20Are%20Waiting%2E%2E%2E%2E%2E%2E&fid=7570106

people leave music files in unprotected directories all of the time. Here's how to get to them.

We all need music. If you properly query google, you can find open indexes of music files easily. Here are some hints to get you started.

Google: -inurl:htm -inurl:html intitle:"index of" "Last modified" mp3

mp3

open directories

wma

ogg

You can add additional search criteria to focus your search more.

Google: -inurl:htm -inurl:html intitle:"index of" mp3 "pearl jam"

This command will find open directories with mp3 files with Pearl Jam. Obviously you can change the band name or file type to better define your search.

cool tips

Microsoft has an unsupported virtual CD-ROM program. Why buy alcohol or Daemon Tools?

Alcohol and Daemon Tools are excellent software packages that allow users to mount ISO files as virtual CD-ROMs. Yes, there is a way to use that ISO without burning it to a disk.

Although I love these tools, Microsoft has a free, 60kb program that does the same thing! Of course, it is not supported... and it's not as friendly as the software listed above; however, it works and it's free.

Here's the download link:
winxpvirtualcdcontrolpanel

Here's the readme:

Quote:

Readme for Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel v2.0.1.1

THIS TOOL IS UNSUPPORT BY MICROSOFT PRODUCT SUPPORT SERVICES

System Requirements
===================
- Windows XP Home or Windows XP Professional

Installation instructions
=========================
1. Copy VCdRom.sys to your %systemroot%\system32\drivers folder.
2. Execute VCdControlTool.exe
3. Click "Driver control"
4. If the "Install Driver" button is available, click it. Navigate to the %systemroot%\system32\drivers folder, select VCdRom.sys, and click Open.
5. Click "Start"
6. Click OK
7. Click "Add Drive" to add a drive to the drive list. Ensure that the drive added is not a local drive. If it is, continue to click "Add Drive" until an unused drive letter is available.
8. Select an unused drive letter from the drive list and click "Mount".
9. Navigate to the image file, select it, and click "OK". UNC naming conventions should not be used, however mapped network drives should be OK.

You may now use the drive letter as if it were a local CD-ROM device. When you are finished you may unmount, stop, and remove the driver from memory using the driver control.

2006-09-09T09:51:00.000-07:00

hardware,prices,cracks & FPS

http://www.techtree.com/techtree/jsp/home.jsp?cat=586
http://www.techenclave.com/forums/hardware-prices.html
www.npithub.com.
for serials-
www.serials.ws -no smut, no donload the crack, just the serial key
personal tip-
if u wanna run newer games on older pc's, don't look at the min. requirements, if the game installs on ur pc, then it shall run, just to the options,->advanced graphic settings and turn off effects like antialiasing and antistropic fiiltering, HDS, shadows, etc and reduce the resolutions, this way u might not get the lloks but atleast the game will run.
cool tool-
FRAPS- record ur game footage, take screenshots and see the frames per seconds the game gives on ur pc.and free.
http://www.fraps.com/

2006-09-09T09:50:00.000-07:00

LORD OF THE RINGS BATTLE FOR MIDDLE EARTH 2 REVIEW
jrr tolkien's saga goes on, the second installment in the "battle for middle earth" series is out.while the first game followed the plot of the movies and only showed those places that were shown in the movies, the game is closely realted to the book and most of the stuff in the game isn't from the movies at all, the game follows the allegiance between the men, the dwarves and the elves in an attempt to stop the advancing forces of sauron.there are 3 modes in the single player-the campaign mode-including the good and the evil mode;the war of the ring mode which is like risk and rome total war, its a turn based mode where all you have to do is to take decisions and move your armies over a map of middle earth, and finally the skirmish mode which is spread over all parts of middle earth.you also have the option of creating you own hero with unique abilities, you can use your hero in skirmish mode.

the good campaign has maps from the grey havens,rivendell,the dwarven kingdoms to mirkwood and celduin, and you get to play as men with all the characters of men featured in the book and movies with newer characters like the dunedain, as elves with new characters like haldir and glorfindel, u'll also find elrond and arwen here, and finally as the 3 foot tall dwarves with new charcters like the dwarven king dain and gloin, all of these are featured exclusively in the books.
the evil campaign has civilisation like mordor,isengard and goblins, u'll see completely new heroes like sauron himself,dragons,giant worms,orc kings...., one of the best misiions in the game is the last one for the evil campaign, where the last alliance in formed at rivendell and sauron himself come out to batlle, its very cinematic. each civilisation has its own buildings and units,upgrades and abilities, one thing to notice here is the resource bulidings-you can't build them close to each other, you have to build them far apart fot maximum output.
one of the best things i like about this game is the way units are made, in most of the strategy games units are made one by one, but in this game you can create batallions of untis, which saves a lot of effort and time.
one thing you will notice in the skirmish mode is that as you keep winning your level keeps going up, and you become musch stronger, this makes the skirmish mode very intersting especially with the numerous maps middle earth, you can play in.
the AI is good and balanced, the enemies are hard to beat at medium settings, especially in the skirmish mode as they continously attack you, disrupting yor resource gathering,one prob. is when you postion your archers on top of a garrison or wall to attak on the enemies below, they have a habit of leaving their positions and running after the enmeies even though the enemies are withinn their firing range, apart from this there are no other probs.
the graphics engine is also updated and the game looks stunning the special effects like the effect when you can unleash a crushing wave of water on your enemies(much like arwen did in the 1st movie), and calling upon a barrage of flames look simply mind blowing, you see the bodies of men flying round as troll swing at them...., it sounds awsome too, the actors from the movies have provided the voices, so the orcs's grunts and the gondor soldiers rally calls all sound brilliant, also noteworthy are the cinematic animation sequences they are a brilliant mixture of art and cut scenes,narrated by elrond(of matrix's agents smitth fame).
i have played many RTS titles from the age of empires series, rise of nations to the command and conquer series,empire earth, and i can tell you this is one of the best ones, once you start this game its really hard to get up before finishing up all the missions, even after you have completed the campaign you will find your self engrossed in the skirmish mode, this game is really very addictive and immersive, i mean it!, so the final verdict whether you have seen/read lord of the rings before or not,play this game its a very immersive,cinematic and amazing piece of coding(read as a game).

pros-stunning graphics and sound, heroes and places not seen before in the movies, immersive
cons-hogs 6 gb hard disk place, maybe the gameplay is a bit short,but maybe i am saying this cuz the games so bloody addictive!
rating-9/10.

2006-09-09T09:49:00.000-07:00

NVIDIA 6600 GT REVIEW
he nvidia 6600 gt in currently the most popular graphic card among gamers because of its price-to-performanec ratio, it offers great performance at a very reasonable price.
i am reviewing is a MSI 128 MB version, there is hardly any difference in the performance of the 128 and the 256 mb versions, so buying thre latter is not recommended.
first the package, MSI has inc;uded lots of stuff here, there are about 13 software and games cd including fulll versions of pop=sands of time,XIII and myst 4, and full version software from adobe,farstone and windvd are also included, there's also a hdtv/s-video cable to hook up ur pc to ur tv which is a great experience compared to gaming on a 15/17"monitor.
now the specs, the 6600 gt is based on the NV40 having 90nm fabrication, it has a default clock speed of 500 mhz,it has GDDR3 128 bit memory of 128 MB, which is clocked at 1 GHz, there's also a tv out port.
now to the benchmarkig, i ran the tests on a pc with intel pentium 4 3ghz cpu(530J) with HT,intel 915GAV motherboard with 800MHz FSB, seagate ultraATA 7.2K HDD,1 GB RAM at 333MHz.
at default settings the card gave a respectable score of 3306 in 3DMarks'05 and 1500 in 3DMarks06.
now to the real world tests, in DOOM3 at 4XAA AND 4XAF and 1204x769 the card gave a very playable 60 FPS,in half life 2 the card delivered 70 FPS at 6xAF with a res. of 1204x768, in quake 4 at 1204x768 with 2xAF and 4XAA the card delivered about 35-40 FPS, similar results in age of empires 3 and call of duty 2 with the highest settings, and now for the "system killer" FEAR the card spewed out only about 15-20 FPS at high settings.
so as you can see, the card allows you to nearly all games without a hitch, even at high settings.
the card is very overclockable too, provided you have sufficient cooling, herein lies the problem, the gpu of the 6600gt heats up very quickly it runs at 75-80 C under load, but once you take care opf the cooling using fan cards or thermal paste, this card overclocks like a dream, MSI also bundles its own overclocking too-DOT dynamic overclocking technology which can safely give you a performance boost, i recommend the optimal settings to be 750/1300 MHZ for the core and memory respectively.
to conclude the 6600 gt is an excellemt card for its price, its totally paisa-vasool maal, even with the coming of 7600 gt which is priced at 13000 rs., this is still the best mid range when it comes for value for money.
glossary-
AA-anti aliasing
AF-Antistropic filtering
FPS-frames per second
(the higher the better)

2006-09-09T09:47:00.000-07:00

after searching long and hard for a pro cooling compound in nehru place i finally came across this, i was actually looking for arctic silver thermal compund which is a highly acclaimed cooling solution, but it seems it is very rarely available in delhi, in fact most vendors don't even seem to understand "thermal compound kit", and those who did thought it to be your generic white paste(rs 20 for a med sized bottle)
anyway after i finally found a shop specializing in pro cooling, i bought the kit for rs 250, it was small injection type pack.
now for the performance- 1st of all IT STINKS!!!!, i applied it directly onto the CPU and GPU and ran benchmarks , and the temp. instead of falling rose about 10 degrees, i waited and waited but no change, i found the manual said to apply a plastic sticker on the CPU and then apply the paste, common sense told me it wouldn't do any good, but i still tried, the result 30 degree rise in temp!
so finally i had to put the the paste back on, it was at this point i realized that the content is far less than what you think it is , once you rip off the cover from the injection body, u find it's only 1/4th filled, and this thing costs 250 bucks ie abt 50 times costly from the generic ones.
so conclusion stay away from it, i say stick to bigger heatsinks with copper heatpipes from coolermaster or vantec.
as for me i'm trying my hand on liquid nitrogen or aqua cooling.

2006-09-08T10:36:00.000-07:00

FASTEST BROWSER:
ok, i did the tests, i recorded time for loading gmail,gamespot,download .com
and here are the results:
1. firefox
2. netscape
3. opera

2006-09-08T10:35:00.000-07:00

pirated windows update

ok simple,
just visit this link , u shuld use firefox/opera
http://windowsupdate.62nds.com/

2006-09-08T10:29:00.000-07:00

WINDOWS VISTA REVIEW by Amit Patnaik

aah, i have been away for a while but now i am back and big time too, i haven't been doing nuffin' all this while i have completed my windows vista, in which i have dissected the the new version of windows.
please note that this review is completely orignal, nothing is copid and pasted neither is anything taken from any magazine, i would also like to thank one dhruv shukla who gave me the vista dvd.
i tested vista on rig witha p4 3 ghz processor(530j),1 gb of ddr 333mhz ram,80 gb pata hdd, a nvida 66oogt 128 mb and intel 915gav mobo.
1st the sys rq. well it is suggested that u have atleat a 2 ghz intel pro. 512 mb ram, and 10 gb of free hard disk space and most importantly a directx 9 compatible display card. u can downloaded the windows vista upgrade advisor from microsoft website to check for the req.
it is alo reqd. that the drive u are installing vista in is ntfs formatted, i suggest using no more than 15 gb drive.

now the installation.
vista come on a single layered dvd only, so instead of downloading th 4.5 gb iso file, i suggest u borrow it from sum1, the version i tested was the windows vista beta 2 ver, build 5384(ultimate edition), i popped in the dvd and it took a min for the setup and then another 3 min. before i could get a place to click next.
u have to obtain a serial for installing vista as of now this is easily available upon registration with microsoft, vist presents u the option to upgrade or to separately install if u wanna keep xp too, choose separate install,and then start the installation, now the installation doesn't require any user intervention for most of the time, and it took about 1.5 hrs on my pc, so i suggest u get a quick nap, when u get if everything went fine the installation should be over and then u jsut have to configure the regional settings etc.
BOOTING INTO VISTA
vista uses its own boot loader and presents u with option of booting into vista(microsoft windows) or xp(earlier version of windows), 1st good thing u notice is the time it taks to go from the login screen to the desktop, very fast and it seems to fade away, and u can start opening folders even before the os is fully started and all the services load so very good startup time, now u are pesented with the welcome center where u have the options and info. abt. vista.
EYE CANDY.
the icons are larger nbow and are of higher resoluyions, the wallapers seem more spectacular, thw windows are transparent, the sceen savrs look stunning especially the desktop aquarium, u will laso notice how the windows seem to fade in slow mo when u minimize them and when u move ur cursor over a tab in the task bar it give u a picture preview of what's rnning and on pressing the win=key + tab, u get a brilliant 3d flip of all the minimized windows including the desktop, the start menu has changed as well now there are no horizontally cascaing menus for programs, instead the go vertical, u also ahve a search box in the task bar.
the explorer has changed as well there is the vista trademark green progress bar that fills in the address bar as the explorer loads , u also have a menu in the address bar besides a better side bar containing favorites and specific locations, the re is alo a side bar for the desktoop which u can customize and add gadgets like sudoku, calc. etc.
BUNDLED PROGRAMS
vista bundles along loads of programs like a new windows movie maker a brilliant media center software, dvd burner, windows defender, parental security,ie 7,wmp 11 and lots more, yet a proper firewall and antirus, iso files handler, download manager are missing.

ANNOYANCES
the is no "run" menu in taskbar so u have to press winkey+r, type in msconfig or regedit or try to acess some settings from control panel or even press alt ctrl delete, u will see that an annoying window always pops up skaing confiramtion or permition even for the most absic tasks, this is really frustating, microsoft calls in user acess protection which means preventing the user from changing any systme setting(like pressing alt ctrl del), if u are a power user like me u can disable it in the security settings in control panel.
also u must registe vista or else the os will lock down in 14 days, luckily it free.
i recommend visiting tweakingvista.com and follwoing their tweaks and downloading tweakvista.
also bear in mind the the os is quite unstable, after installing ez antivirus and spyware doctor, the system got sluggish and the net stopped working, i couldn't correct it whatever i tried.
the cold hard fact is after u are familiar with the cool eye candy and the new bundled software vista seems like old wine in a new bottle, it is still a lot like xp, and maybe more irritataing, microsoft seriosly needs to look into it before realeasing the final version.
my suggestion= if u are considering an upgrade just to run vista, forget it its not worth it, buy a mac instead, which looks and performs better.