Microsoft Fever

What is the last thing you heard about Microsoft? Whatever it was, there is a good chance it wasn't praising the company. Well, I have a change for you. Microsoft's recent updates (Service Pack 2) have brought to light the wonder that Microsoft is. When Vista first came out I may have been the only person that had no problems. I loved Vista from the start. Then Service Pack 1 came out, and it made the operating system even better. Finally, a couple weeks ago, the second service pack came out and was not aimed at my needs. It offered upgrades to the RSS feeds sidebar gadget, which I don't use. It also allows you to burn information onto blue ray discs, which I'm not currently interested in. It gives you better performance from your wireless internet when exiting sleep mode, which I didn't have a problem with before. It gives you the latest bluetooth technology, which I don't need. One thing about this major upgrade that I enjoyed was the incredible performance boost. Everything is so much faster, include boot-up time. Another major improvement is the enhanced power management. I have never been impressed with any Windows-running machine in terms of battery life, however, your computer can now run for a little bit longer.

I am going to go ahead and say something that many kids will disagree with. Summer sucks. I absolutely love the first month of it, then the second month, everything slows down. To cope with the slow-moving summer, I decided to make a list of preffered applications. I started with internet browsers. I tested every browser on a scale that ascended to 100. I tested them on ten different factors: Speed, Performance, Add-ons, Visual Effects, Video, Audio, Simplicity, convenience, layout, and security. I spent about ten minutes with each browser testing these factors. The browsers I tested were Firefox 3.5, Internet Explorer 8, Google Chrome, Flock, Opera, and Safari. Each factor was worth ten points. The highest scored was surprisingly Opera. Opera's score was 83 out of 100. I soon discovered that the ten minutes that I devoted to this browser wasn't nearly enough time to recognize it's flaws, especially in Facebook. The second on the list was Internet Explorer 8 which came in at an 81. I spent some time getting better aquainted with this browser, and have come to love it. The visual effects (I'm a sucker for eye candy) are amazing. The speed is incredible, but most of all the simplicity and convenience are the best. I love the accelerators which allow you to instantly blog, email, translate, and share anything on a page with Facebook. I also tested out media players. I tested Windows Media Player, Zune, iTunes, and Songbird. I tested each for speed, performance, quality, simplicity, and visual effects. Zune came in first with a 95. This was the best score of any application type that I tested. Another good thing about this media player is that in the Marketplace, every song is twenty cents less expensive than in iTunes, and unlike the information that many misinformed people preach, you don't just rent the music. You purchase it, unless you have a Zune Pass, in which case, you actually do rent it, which is kind of retarded. I especially love the display it will give you if you click on the album picture beside the song status. This brings up a screen giving you an amazing slideshow and a biography of the artist. It also give you interesting facts about the song and album, such as the number of times the song has been played, or the number of albums sold. While I'm not too big on the Zune MP3 Player, I love the Zune Software.

Other than IE 8 and Zune, Microsoft has also done other great things. Windows Live has branched into a wonderful system, offering excellent email service and up to 25gb of information to back up your computer online free. If you have multiply email addresses, like myself, you can manage them all from Hotmail (or Live). I currently manage two Gmail accounts and one Hotmail account all from my inbox.

With the release of Windows 7 just a few months away, Microsoft will probably grow into an even better organization simplifying everyday tasks, and bringing what was thought to only exist in imagination to the real world.