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Windows 7 Service Pack 1 RTM

Dragon — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 05:30:43 +0000

Microsoft announced on Wednesday that Windows 7 Service Pack 1 was “released to manufacturing” which means it has been tested and it is ready for the general public to use and will soon be available to download. So what does this mean for you as a gamer? Well at this point absolutely nothing unless you are doing a reinstall of Windows 7 on your system then it should make it go a little quicker on the updating side of things.

With previous versions of Windows like Windows Vista or Windows XP we kind of got used to a Service Pack coming out with new features or vast performance improvements – however with Windows 7 it is actually a very feature rich and solid performing operating system and therefore for the Windows 7 side of things for Service Pack 1 it is really only a few minor feature fixes and otherwise just what a Service Pack should be – one big all inclusive update of all previous security fixes and updates since the operating system released. There could possibly be some performance improvements but for those test results we will have to wait for the final build to come out and for the PC enthusiast websites to do their benchmarks comparing the new Windows 7 SP1.

For more information on what exactly is all included in the Windows 7 SP1 / Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 update (both the client operating system and server operating system come from the same mold so to speak so they get the same update) I will direct you to a guy that knows a lot about Windows and a lot about Microsoft in general; Mr. Paul Thurrot at the Supersite for Windows where he did a writeup of the Service Pack back in January.

Service Pack 1 will become available publicly on February 22, via Windows Update, through manual downloads, and pre-installed on new PCs and servers.

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New NVIDIA Drivers Released

Dragon — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 03:05:43 +0000

New NVIDIA drivers (195.62 WHQL) were released yesterday and this is a notable release because of two reasons:

One, it corrects the “buffer overflow” issue for COD:UO that I posted about back in October that occurred with the then latest release of 191.07 WHQL drivers. (From the release notes)

GeForce GTX 260: Call of Duty 1–the application crashes with a buffer overrun
error. [606182]

And two, SLI and multi-GPU support is added for COD:MW2. (From the release highlights)

Adds SLI and multi-GPU support for many top new gaming titles including Borderlands, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, FIFA Soccer 10, and more.

If you are upgrading your drivers as always I recommend using Add/Remove Programs (or Programs and Features or Programs for Windows Vista and Windows 7) to do the actual uninstall of the current drivers, a reboot of the system, then a cleaning using Driver Sweeper, then another reboot of the system and then finally the installation of the current drivers. This ensures you get a clean installation of the new drivers and there aren’t any parts left behind to muck things up.

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Graphics Upgrade

Dragon — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 14:09:19 +0000

Over the last few months I have been struggling with a rather high amount of crashes in WAW in both Windows XP Professional and Windows 7 Ultimate RC with anything from WAW just stops responding to the game just closing without any error dialogue box at all to outright solid freezes of Windows and even a few blue screens every now and then. What would make me the most fumed would be the crashes would almost always seem to happen while playing Zombies (hosting) and would almost always happen when we are in the higher levels. So in general it wasn’t just affecting me because when I crash everyone else is getting the boot.

I have been trying different settings changes and drivers and flip flopping back and fourth between Windows XP and Windows 7 but from what I can gather after narrowing it down the issues seemed to be mostly related to driver problems with my current graphics card; an EVGA 8800GTS 320MB (first gen). Although the crashes have been a little better using older drivers I am still crashing at times and although I haven’t had any problems with ANY other games except WAW I got sick of it and I finally just ordered a new graphics card.

Enter the EVGA NVIDIA GTX260 SSC Edition; PCIe 2.0, 896MB of RAM, 448bit, 675MHz core, 2304MHz memory clock, 216 stream processors and best of all I haven’t had a crash in over 3 weeks now in the same Windows 7 RC install I was running previously.

The downside is the card is big – even bigger than my old 8800GTS and to get this guy in my case I had to shift all my hard drives down to the bottom as far as they would go and shift them towards the front of the case as far as they would go to where they are touching the grill of the intake fan and I am left with about a sixteenth of an inch between the back of the graphics card and the front of my top hard drive. The other downside is I really don’t see any graphical improvements because my 8800GTS already handled WAW on max settings and it was a DirectX 10 card so I was really already seeing everything there was to see but wow does the GTX260 process everything better. Of course I do get better frame rates but the overall smoothness of WAW on max settings now is much better; along with other games but I really don’t play too many other newer games so once again my 8800GTS handled all of those fine without issue. I guess this is an upgrade for MW2 but I don’t know how that game is going to turn out yet so we will have to see how it performs in the future for whatever I buy.

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