According to Neowin.net the following will be released next patch Tuesday. About bloody time!

938979 Vista Performance and Reliability Pack

This update resolves a number of individual issues which may be affecting some computers running Windows Vista. These issues have been reported by customers using the Error Reporting service, product support, or other means. Installing this update will improve the performance and responsiveness for some scenarios and improves reliability of Windows Vista in a variety of scenarios. Some examples of the improvements contained in this update are:

Improves performance in resuming back to the desktop from the Photo and Windows Energy screensaver.

Resolves an issue where some secured web pages using advanced security technologies may not get displayed in Internet Explorer on Windows Vista.

Resolves an issue where a shared printer may not get installed if the printer is connected to a Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 system and User Access Control is disabled on the Vista client.

Resolves an issue where creating AVI files on Vista may get corrupted.

Improves the performance in calculating the ‘estimated time remaining’ when copying/moving large files.

Improves performance in bringing up Login Screen after resuming from Hibernate.

Resolves an issue where synchronization of offline files to a server can get corrupted.

Resolves a compatibility issue with RAW images created by Canon EOS 1D/1DS Digital SLR Camera which can lead to data loss. This only affects RAW images created by these two specific camera models.

Resolves an issue where a computer can lose its default Gateway address when resuming from sleep mode.

Improves the performance when copying or moving entire directories containing large amounts of data or files.

Improves the performance of Vista’s Memory Manager in specific customer scenarios and prevents some issues which may lead to memory corruption.

938194 Vista Compatibility and Reliability Pack

This update resolves a number of individual issues which may be affecting some computers running Windows Vista. These issues have been reported by customers using the Error Reporting service, product support, or other means. Installing this update will improve the reliability and hardware compatibility of Windows Vista in a variety of scenarios. Some examples of the improvements contained in this update are:

Improved reliability and compatibility of Vista when used with newer graphics cards in several specific scenarios and configurations.

Improved reliability when working with external displays on a laptop.

Increased compatibility with many video drivers.

Improved visual appearance of games with high intensity graphics.

Improved quality of playback for HD-DVD and Blue-Ray disks on large monitors.

Improved reliability for Internet Explorer when some third party toolbars are installed on Vista.

Improved Vista reliability in networking configuration scenarios.

Improved the reliability of Windows Calendar in Vista.

Improved reliability of systems that were upgraded from XP to Vista.

Increased compatibility with many printer drivers.

Increased reliability and performance of Vista when entering sleep and resuming from sleep.

My facebook RSS feeds suddenly stopped working, so I had to go in and resubscribe to them (facebook uses unique URLs for each viewer) – it seems to be working again now.

I’ve added in some caching to my miniblog & status boxes up on the site here on the off chance that they were getting pissed off with it getting constantly hit. I know their T&Cs bar scraping:

… you agree not to use the Service or the Site to… use automated scripts to collect information from or otherwise interact with the Service or the Site

But… RSS is all about the automated collection of information from a website by script. What’s the difference between my own hand rolled Perl picking up the XML and Google reader for example? Bah.

Ignoring all dire warnings about not using the firmware from www.speedtouch.co.uk with my Be* provided router, I’ve just bumped it up to 6.2.17.5.

As they don’t provide any change log all I can tell is:

– It fixes the Vista SMB / CIFS / WLAN problem I had previously
– Update: it also fixes the NTLM authentication problem with IE7, so now you can login to the Speedtouch’s web interface using IE.
– It has a new colour scheme:

Ah-ha! TAKE THAT Facebook! You should now have a rather fine "miniblog" on the left hand side complete with little pictures, snide comments and an XML RSS feed all of its own.

This is to make up for the fact that I’m not posting as many big, long posts these days but still have the occasional bit of time to post something I’ve found on the meganet.

Woo!

I was going to add a little "mini feed" for my facebook activities, but Facebook trample all over the RSS spec so it’s impossible to directly extract the links out of the feed and embed them here – you’d have to get redirected via Facebook first. Bah.

In other news, I’m dreadfully sorry for the lack of posts of late. Working for a bank has its downsides ;)

Well, it’s been a long running saga but things are actually getting better. I’ve recently found a new power management option, that governs how Vista behaves when "sharing media". I’m taking this to mean any share on the PC, not just Windows Media style automagic sharing.

Setting it to "allow the computer to sleep" (see below) has dramatically helped in that Vista now goes back to sleep when it’s supposed to. So, my media centre PC now wakes up to record a show and then immediately goes back to sleep once it’s finished. BRILLIANT!

I still have the little problem of it waking up at 4am every day, but we’ll see if this new change helps at all. If not, then I have a little trick up my sleeve…

I have a Speedtouch 716WL and use its inbuilt 802.11g wireless with a few laptops around the house. Recently I got a new Vista tablet and whilst it works great on the wirless for general email & web browsing, I’ve found that I can’t use any SMB shares or remote desktop to any PC on my LAN from my Vista notebook. XP notebooks are fine.

If I remote desktop, it will connect to the destination machine, briefly showing the logon screen before kicking me off saying that the remote computer ended the connection. Trying to browse to SMB shares invariably causes explorer to hang.

I contacted Alcatel about it and they’re aware of the problem. The resolution is to switch to using WEP instead of WPA-PSK on the speedtouch. Not a great workaround…

Update: Alcatel have got back to me and said that they’re due to release new firmware "shortly" that fixes this. Appendages crossed then…