News Bits: NVidia DX10 Card for Notebooks, NVidia Vista Driver Problems, The Reason for Junk Software

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Nvidia 8-series graphics cards confirmed for laptops

Nvidia stated that they will be shipping their 8-series GPUs in laptops in time for the launch of Intel's next-generation Santa Rosa Centrino Pro platform, which is scheduled to come out in Q2.

The Nvidia 8-series is likely to be the first DirectX 10-compatible notebook graphics hardware unless ATI has a hidden surprise. There is no word on the pricing.

Read More (Engadget)

Lenovo ThinkPad is strongest notebook PC brand according to TBR

Lenovo announced that it has received top rankings in notebook brand awareness and customer satisfaction for Q4 2006 according to TBR (Technology Business Research). Lenovo's rankings increased in that quarter and overshadowed some of its largest competitors in reliability and product design.

Lenovo has now dominated the area of hardware reliability for the eighth year in a row. The company was noted for making significant progress in the areas of notebook value, ease of doing business, repair time, and overall satisfaction. They were also noted for being the only PC company in TBR's report that maintained their position for hardware reliability for an extended period of time.

Read More (Business Wire)

Nvidia Vista drivers not ready for gaming

According to a group of gamers, Nvidia's Windows Vista drivers for GeForce video cards are not ready for prime time. They have set up a web site dedicated to the cause, and there is discussion about a possible class-action lawsuit against the company.

The main issue is the performance of the Nvidia drivers under gaming scenarios in Vista. One poster on Nvidia's forums made the following comment:

<blockquote>

I have Vista Ultimate 32-bit edition and an 8800GTX. I installed 4 games (UT2004, Dreamfall, Oblivion and NFS Most Wanted) and not a single one of them works. Even with Forceware 100.30, 100.54 and 100.59.

If I am lucky I can play for a couple of seconds, but then the game crashes to the desktop with the error message &quot;Your display driver crashed and has been recovered&quot; ...or something.

</blockquote>

Many Nvidia owners are reporting problems with the latest official drivers. Complaints range from games not running to seeing significant performance decreases compared to XP. Director of PR at Nvidia, Derek Perez, told Ars Technica the following in a statement:

&quot;We are working diligently to make sure we achieve and maintain the level of driver quality and reliability that NVIDIA is known for. Over the coming weeks NVIDIA and our partners, along with the industry will continue to update Windows Vista drivers to ensure maximum performance on 3D applications and add feature support.&quot;

Note that all of the reported problems users are experiencing with Nvidia drivers under Vista are gaming-related; standard users should have no issues.

Forum Discussion

Read More (Ars Technica)

Why vendors load junk software onto PCs

&quot;Tuning up&quot; a system used to mean defragmenting the hard drive, optimizing files, cleaning the registry, deleting old programs and useless data, as well as installing little utilities that supposedly would help performance. However, &quot;tuning up&quot; has taken on a different meaning in today's world - the removal of spyware and preloaded junk software. Many vendors, such as Dell and HP, preload junk software onto PCs before they are shipped to the customer.

Why do vendors load that software? Simple - they are paid to do so buy the software makers because consumers are more likely to buy the full version of the software if it is already preinstalled.

Usually, it is a tedious process to uninstall the preloaded junk and then optimize a system. However, a utility loaded onto Lenovo laptops makes the entire process far easier. The ThinkVantage Base Software Administrator is designed for people who want to customize their preloads. The tool allows the user to see the preload recovery area on Lenovo PCs (both laptops and desktops) and select which programs, patches, and utilities to have installed and which ones to not install. It is an automated tool and will recover a system according to what you told it to do. Lenovo is proud to be the only vendor that offers this option.

However, support has only been added to recent systems from Lenovo, starting this past summer. If you have a newer Lenovo system, this software utility is well worth a try.

Read More (Lenovo Blogs)

 

good to see that they have at least announced a time point....

 

Or they could be proud to be a company that has no bloatware whatsoever on their notebooks

 

Mobile DX10's are finally announced. That's great news. I was starting to think the release date was going to slip back further again.

I like what I hear about Lenovo's ThinkVantage in general. This Base Software Administrator sounds interesting. But how about just not loading the junkware in the first place ;p?

 

I wonder what models of the 8 series are going to be out first? I can't imagine seeing one of the 8800GTX yet, those things draw some serious power,unless Nvidia has been working non stop for power optimization.

 

The mobile editions of NVIDIA cards will draw far much less power, and have much less performance then the normal PCIe cards for desktops. I think the desktop cards take up two slots these days, and have heatsinks and fans.

I remember the days when getting heatsinks and fans on video cards was "cool" and luxury...restricted only to the high-end, $400 cards.

 

But if there wasn't bloatware, wouldn't we end up paying more for the same system? It's a possibility, especially with budget systems. Of course, price and cost are not connected directly, so maybe not...

In general, do more expensive systems come with less bloatware than the cheaper ones? I believe the only things I had were Quicken and Norton, but Norton was a 90-day trial, so it can be justified. I don't remember if Quicken was a decent trial or not, but most people have no need for Quicken, so it's bloatware regardless. So, how much junk did everyone else who paid good money get?

Malia

 

The one thing I have liked about my previous Dells is that they give a single disk OS and then a driver disk. Makes it very easy for a clean install. HP on the other hand has the four disk set that puts things exactly as they were when the system was purchased.

Although many of the manufacturers have gone to including no disks. That is the ultimate example of how cheap they are.

 

Oh 8 series

I guess our battery life for laptop will cut in half. Eeeeee~

 

Hopefully Nvidia irons out the Vista drivers before the DX10 notebooks arrive. Don't plan on breaking my piggy bank for a $2000 brick.

 

I hope Lenovo keeps up the quality products and services.

 

WOW I cant wait till Centrino pro and Dx10...hopefully its gonna be a great combination.

 

Good point and it's true too. It is the same idea as selling ad space on web pages. We are paying to be splattered with junk mail before we even connect the thing to the web.

And yes, business class systems seem to come with far less crapware. I know Dell's do as did the HP I just bought. And in reality the prices for the business system were not that much more then a comparable consumer line systems. Of course they do cost more just not really that much.

All I know is I am more then happy to pay $100 more for a system that comes to me clean vs. splattered with the crapware like AOL. I mean when was the last time anyone acutally signed up for AOL because it was on a computer you bought?

If the crapware companies had their way we would not even be able to buy a HDD w/o it pre-installed somehow...

 

My Asus was pretty clean. I only had to uninstall Norton Internet Security. I was pleased. There were other utilities installed, but I use them (control for the extra buttons, things like that). I don't know if I would rather pay the $100, I can probably clean all that crap up within 2-3 hours, ands I'm not worth $20/hour, so I would just do it myself.

Didn't someone write a script to remove all of that stuff from a Dell?

 

The stuff like the Yahoo-branded toolbar on Acers are the ones that really get to me.

I got myself a whitebook and installed my own OS--so no bloatware at all . But even if I had bought my system with an OS, there would not have been bloatware either.