ATI 7.2 for Vista

as you might not know, I'm running a PC with a P4 2,8 GHz from 2003, and only 512 MB of RAM. So running Windows Vista in those conditions is not always easy, as the new OS is very demanding in resource when running Aero for instance. My graphic card, an "old" ATI 9800 pro 256 MB supports all the features from Aero...but everytime I've installed Vista, the whole system became like crippled after the installation of ATI drivers 7.1. These drivers might have been good, in compare with the ones provided by NVidia for their cards, but not good enough anyway. And yesterday at last, new drivers were released. Catalyst Suite 7.2 for Vista ( think they work on XP too, same file with a different name, but just the same file). These new drivers are awesome! They made my PC run suddenly twice faster as before under Windows Vista. So if you're running a PC with an ATI card under Windows Vista, I can only recommend to install those drivers as soon as you can, the difference is amazing.

Spyware Doctor

I just want here to confirm what Justin said in his message below. I've also used Spyware Doctor, more than a year ago. Just before that, I was using several anti-spyware programs at the same time,until I realised that Spyware Doctor could replace them all, and even do a better job. Unfortunately, the program became very resource demanding, and occasionally conflicted severely with other applications on my system. That was the end of my relationship with Spyware Doctor. Despite an obvious change of behavior in a windows environment, Spyware Doctor remains in most reviews one of the 2 best anti-spyware, together with SpySweeper, that I never tested. I promise that I will, and report my experience in this blog.
One thing though, don't be abused by the button "START SPYWARE SCAN NOW", it does not mean that you will get an online scan of your drives; in PC Tools language, it's the download button for Spyware Doctor. I do not not appreciate such marketing methods.

PC Tools Software

Hello everyone,

Some of you may know already that PC Tools has just recently released new security software free of charge.

PC Tools Antivirus Free Edition and PC Tools Firewall Plus. I have used PC Tools Spyware Doctor in the past and liked it very much but recently it has gotten very resource demanding for an antispyware program so I uninstalled it. However these 2 programs caught my interest, especially the antivirus, which use to cost money, but they limited a few features and made a free version. The Firewall I thought they would make sooner or later, but never thought that they would make it free as well. It seems PC Tools is trying to get its name more popular in the security market. The Antivirus program will run on Vista, XP, and 2000. However the Firewall will currently only run on XP, 2000, and 2003 Server, I suspect they will add Vista support in the near future.

If you are looking to test new products you may wish to checkout these 2 free tools, they are new and have not yet been proven as good software, so as of now I do not currently recommend them, however depending on PC Tools, that may change in the future.

Justin