As I was predicting here, Vista's first service pack, although not yet available, may help it rise or fall, but latest reports made me see the reality is slightly different. No matter what I or other people may think, it seems Vista is going to replace XP for good, and the only questions remaining is "how fast?"...


A lot of bad things have been said about Vista so far, and most of them are not lies, but Bill Gates seems to consider it the best Windows OS so far, and the industry should take this into account. After all, the Windows peripherals and software market is huge, and as soon as official support for XP is going to stop, software producers will start releasing Vista-only products.

According to information from Dell's Outlet Center, it seems that while 70% of the small businesses go for Windows XP, only 7% of the consumers still choose it over Vista, but there's one thing that I don't think most people considered... As a corporate user, you can order a batch of 100 laptops and ask your system integrator to deliver them with Windows XP preinstalled, while for consumers, it gets harder and harder to find computers that come with anything else preinstalled then Vista.

Expectations are that Vista will become what XP is now, the operating system that users wow to use until their computers blow up, but is there enough time for this to happen until Microsoft releases Windows 7? Just think about this - while DirectX 10 has been on the market for more than a year, being one of the reasons that made a lot of gamers upgrade to Vista, serious DirectX 10 games that run decently on mid-end systems are nowhere to be seen yet...

At last, we shouldn't forget that, in some areas, businesses and home-users started to switch from Windows to Linux, and despite the fact this is only a drop in an ocean, the future will show us if this was a drop of acid, or simply dilluted water...

As time passes and Vista gets closer to its first service pack, the applications built for tweaking it are getting new versions too. One of them comes from Yamicsoft, and it's called Vista Manager. The reason I am writing this is the fact that Vista Manager got version 1.4.1 released less than a day ago, and if you haven't heard of it already, this is a good moment for that...

There are 7 tasks that Vista Manager takes care of - providing information, tweaking your system, cleaning the junk from your computer, customizing all aspects of your Vista OS, improving security, network settings and it also comes with a bunch of built in utilities for helping you to perform timed system shutdowns or retrieve your Windows/Office keys.

Available for both Vista 32 and 64 bit, Vista Manager is priced at $39.95, but free trial versions are also available. The 32 bit trial can be downloaded from here, and the one for the 64 bit version of Vista can be retrieved here.

iolo technologies is a company well known for its all-in-one system suite System Mechanic, but they also release various system tools as standalone products, and today I have to tell you a few things about their firewall solution, called simply Personal Firewall, which recently got a new update, bringing the current version number up to 1.5.1.3.


The proprietary IntelliDefense technology takes the prompts usually encountered when using firewalls to a minimum, because most programs that try to create connections to a network are automatically classified. Even more, the stealth mode makes your PC invisible to hackers, and the Personal Firewall doesn't interfere with full-screen applications such as games or media players.

To run this program, you need a computer having Microsoft Windows 98, Me, 2000, XP, or Vista, at least 256MB of memory (that should go up to at least 1GB for Vista, obviously), 10MB of disk space, Internet Explorer 6.0 with Service Pack 2 or later and an Internet connection, of course.

Priced at $39.95, iolo Personal Firewall comes with free updates, unlimited tech support through email, phone or Web, and a license can be used to protect up to 3 computers. If you want to try this first, feel free to grab your trial version from here. Stay safe!

Google Earth is an amazing product, but I consider NASA's World Wind to be even better. Leaving them aside, there are quite a bunch of stripped-down applications that allow you to view our planet from space, and nothing else, apart from minor view adjustments, or the ability to display cities/borders, and so on. If you simply want to have a simple program to help you use a view of our planet as a screensaver or as a dynamic wallpaper, I got some news for you...



EarthView, a program coming from DeskSoft, reached version 3.8.1 not so long ago, and since it appeared after Christmas, nothing stops you from grabbing it now. After all, there's a free trial version available for download, too, and there's nothing easier than getting it from here.

The feature list of this program includes the ability to switch on and off atmospheric effects, urban areas and city lights, clouds, location and local time for over 3000 cities worldwide, but that's not all! You also get multiple monitor support, additional maps to download (only available in the commercial version), and many more.

Priced at $25.00, EarthView also allows you to purchase subscriptions for real-time cloud data, starting at $5 per month, down to $3/month for yearly payments.

According to the official page, there are no special system requirements, so any computer capable of running Windows 95, 98, ME, NT 4.0, 2000, XP, 2003 or Vista and having 100MB of free disk space should be enough, but I can't help but wonder... what if I have an old 200MHz computer with 16MB of memory, and an ancient video card that runs Windows 95? Well, that's why you should always try before you buy, as long as this is possible...

No matter how big your hard drive is, it's never enough. For some people, this may not be the truth, but for me, unfortunately, it is. After learning how to disable hibernation and recover some disk space, now the time has come to take things one step further and remove old backups...

- Press the Start Orb, type "disk cleanup" in the search box, and then press Enter.


- In the window that opens, press the OK button or simply tap Enter.


- Open the More Options tab, as you can see below.


- In the System Restore and Shadow Copies section, press the Clean Up button.


- Choose to Delete old restore points.


Now, you have more free disk space. It was pretty easy, don't you think?