During one of the final session of TechEd New Zealand 2010Nigel Parker from Microsoft compared the performance difference of the latest build of IE9 to Chrome. This demonstration shows that the hardware acceleration in IE9 is still much faster than Chrome even when hardware acceleration was enabled in the latest Chrome Canary build.
For some time Mozilla and Google would tout that performance of their browsers JavaScript engines as compared to IE but now that the performance difference is almost negligible Microsoft has taken a huge lead in what the next big performance benchmark for browsers, HTML performance.
Microsoft have just released to the public beta of a new version of Microsoft Security Essentials. This new versions looks relatively unchanged from the previous version with only a few added features.
Windows Firewall Integration – While the product itself does not include a firewall it now prompts you to turn on the firewall on during install.
Enhance protection from web-based threat – This feature does real time scanning of your web traffic into your computer to ensure that there are no malicious scripts being downloaded.
New and improved protections engine – The scanned engine has now enhanced detection and cleaner and better performance. Microsoft Security Essentials is already a really fast performing AV product only make it better.
See the new “Enable network protection against exploits of known vulnerabilities” real-time scanning option.
Microsoft have now released Windows 7 Service Pack 1 Beta to the public. This comes about 11 months after the release of Windows 7 RTM and is a good indication that we will see FTM of SP1 before the end of the year.
In my experience the installation takes about 4 times longer if you are only running 512mb of ram. While not many physical computers will have this much ram some virtual computers may be configured to this so I recommend that you reboot and temporarily bump you ram up to at least 1gb ram.
Microsoft have just released the latest version of the ACT Toolkit which allows corporations to scan their production computers for application that may have compatibility issues when running Windows 7. The new version now allows users to rate the compatibility of application for 32bit and 64bit application separately. With the x64 version of Windows 7 now the dominant (see here and here) operating system version this tools is going to be really useful for enterprise looking to make the 64 bit jump.
You may also notice that this update has also dropped the “RC” tag from Windows 7 reports section that was previously in version 5.5 which you could previously only do via a SQL command.
This version also resolves an issue with the DLL file called “logger.dll” that is used for the User Account Control (UAC) evaluator. The problem was that other programs like Sophos Anti-Virus also use the same name for their DLL’s and thus caused an error “The procedure entry point LoggerStart could not be located in the dynamic link library logger.dll” error message (see below). They have renamed this DLL on the Agent to “ACTEventLogger.dll” instead so the conflict has now been resolved.
This version also comes with the demo Stock Viewer application (see below) that has so often been used by Microsoft demonstrate how to use SHIM’s to remediate problem apps. This is a nice addition as you can practice you SHIM creating skills on this program first before attempting to fix more challenging production application.
If you don’t already have a SQL server to use for ACT you may also want to download and install SQL Server 2008 R2 as well from http://www.microsoft.com/express/Database/
