- Dell UltraSharp 2709W Review & Driver
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Posted by oVan on Friday, May 16, 2008 | PermaLink | 2 commentsUpdate: a little bird pointed me to the first review of Dell 2709W.
Update 2: here's a link to the Dell 2709W User Manual
Dell has released drivers for the upcoming Ultrasharp 2709w LCD monitor. Download here: DELL_2709W_A00-00_R186104. This also means that an 2708w or 2708wfp will not be released.
- How reliable is your Vista?
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Posted by oVan on Wednesday, May 30, 2007 | PermaLink | 0 commentsOne of the best features in Windows Vista is still unknown to a lot of people: the Reliability and Performance Monitor is a very handy program based on the Microsoft Management Console interface that shows you a lot of information on the current performance and the historical stability of your computer. To start this tool, type "reliability" in the Start Menu and you'll see the shortcut to the "Reliability and Performance Monitor".
Upon launch, it shows you the actual performance status in 4 horizontal bars: CPU, Disk, Network and Memory. When you click on Resource Overview, you get those nifty graphs that show you the latest trends.
When you select the Reliability Monitor from the left column, you'll get a historical chart showing you how reliable your computer was until yesterday. This is based on a lot of factors: software installs and uninstalls, application failures, hardware failures, Windows failures and miscellaneous failures.
When you installed Vista (or bought a new computer with Vista pre-installed), your computer started with reliability index 10. Every day that ended with some problem will lower the index. Similarly, every day without any problem will raise the index a bit. Selecting a day in the chart will immediately give you a list of all problems that occured. This feature comes in very handy when you need to troubleshoot a computer of someone else. Without having to rely on their story, you just open the reliability chart and immediately see what causes the problem.
ps: As you can see in the screenshot above, the reliability index for my Dell notebook is at a very low index of 3.80. This is caused by the HP Sleep Service (HPSLPSVC) that crashes every time returning from sleep (what's in a name?), despite numerous chats with the friendly HP Live Support and disabling DEP for all HP software.Labels: monitor, reliability, reliable, tip, trick, Windows, Windows Vista
