Friday, December 12, 2008

Windows 7 Benchmark Results "Very Promising" [Windows 7]

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes at ZDNet tested pre-beta Windows 7 release 6956 against Vista RTM and Vista SP1. Win 7's snappy boot time and dominance in other tests suggest that a good OS is on the way. Early on, we showed you completely non-scientific evidence of Win 7's pleasingly fast boot time. (Shutting down is another matter—my build (6801) sometimes takes forever.) I was glad that Kingsley-Hughes—using a Phenom 9700 quad-core system with ATI Radeon 3850, 2GB of Corsair Dominator RAM and WD's 10K RPM Raptor as primary drive—managed to demonstrate that the fast boot isn't a fluke. By the way, Vista SP1 had the slowest boot. In two other tests, PassMark Performance and PCMark Vantage, Win 7 pre-beta beat the Vista builds, though it failed to trounce them in the CineBench R10 test. Remember, this is a pre-beta, so nothing is guaranteed, but what makes this newsworthy is that Kingsley-Hughes—who incidentally is in no way a Bond villain—ran similar tests with Vista a few years back, and early Win 7 makes a mockery of that noise. Check the ZDNet article for the full system specs and benchmark scores—I'm sure at least some of you will want the nitty gritty.

[Via: Gizmodo, The Gadget Blog ] [Tag: ]

Sunday, December 7, 2008

Netflix fixes streaming issues with Roku device, Xbox 360

If you've been using Netflix streaming through a standalone solution like the the self-branded Roku device or the Xbox 360 client, you may have been troubled recently by a lack of picture quality. Compared to a PC streaming on the same connection, users were often unable to get full quality videos, despite of having plenty of bandwidth available.

Though Netflix never mentioned how widespread the problem was, they at least admitted it was a problem on their end and said they were working on a fix. All necessary changes and fixes have now been made, according to the company. Netflix won't elaborate on what caused the issue, but they certainly didn't try to shirk away from it and have already dealt with it, so kudos to them.
[Via: Justin Mann ] [Tag: ]