Vista SP1 Stable
Vista Service Pack 1 was released a while ago but at the time there were a lot of reported install problems, these appear to have been resolved.
I have just installed SP1 which took about 30 minutes to complete. Amongst other fixes that I have yet to notice network transfers now begin much more quickly, or atleast the status bar begins working more quickly. Network drives also appear to mount more quickly, but that could just be my imagination.
You can download the 32bit version here: 32bit Vista SP1
Video Transcoding With Quad Core
More programs are making use of multi cores now that they are being programed or reprogrammed to do so. Only a few games currently make use of multiple cores but Nero Vision and Windows Movie Maker (vista version) both make use of multiple cores reducing video transcoding time dramatically.
Converting a 90 minute movie from .avi to dvd format used to take about 45 minutes on a 3ghz single core processor, but on this 2.4ghz quad core machine it now only takes about 16 minutes to convert the video.
Web Spider On The Crawl
I've created a web spider and sent it on a crawl for specific pieces of information. I will update this blog with the findings in a month or so once it has analyzed enough data. The current crawl rate is quite slow, but should improve as I make tweaks to the code.