Early voting is underway in many parts of the country and now at PC Pitstop. Who do you plan to vote for?

October 2008 Newsletter

It’s been a full 6 months since the release of Windows XP SP3. The unsuspecting public downloaded it faster than Tom Cruise jumps a couch, and it wasn’t long before 25% of us found we had grabbed a ticking time bomb. Endless reboots, blue screens, data loss and reinstalls were the wails coming from every help forum on the World Wide Web. In some cases John Q Public didn’t even know the grenade was coming. It was tossed in the middle of the night by Microsoft’s Automatic Update service. You don’t need to imagine the problems this created because you lived it.

Dave reports in from the Microsoft Professional Developer Conference.

When Steve Sinofsky took the stage on Tuesday at the Microsoft Professional Developer Conference, the senior vice president was willing to confess some past sins with Vista. His presentation was the first public demonstration of the new Windows 7 user interface, and showed how Microsoft intends to change Windows 7 to fix the problems that exist in Vista, and indeed in earlier versions of Windows.

Broadband Genie, a new PC Pitstop partner in the UK, takes a closer look at the current state of broadband technology. Broadband used to be the cutting edge, final frontier of home and business internet access, but over the past five years or so broadband has gone from being accessible only to the wealthiest homes and clients to something which is cheap or sometimes free when bundled with other telecommunications packages. With increasing speeds and new technology constantly improving the application of broadband around the home, it can be a confusing and jargon-filled world, but hopefully this guide will help you to understand some of the more widely used terms and where broadband is headed in the future.

Everyday we’re bombarded with segments on the worlds sinking economy. Satellite and cable delivers spin on everything from Housing to the cost of corn. But what I don’t see is how the candidates view computing and the internet. It may not seem as important as other issues but since my livelihood depends on it, I worry. Will someone try to limit my access? Will congress tax it out of reach for the average citizen? Will the next president support censoring it into impotency?

What does the next nicely wrapped, political present, have in store for us? That's what I’m worrying about, and if your job is linked to computing, you might be too.

By now most of us have heard about the websites of McCain and Obama. We’ve read the reviews, and watched newscasters make reference to their technical savvy or lack thereof. We've seen blogs discussing site designers and I've even seen articles chronicling change to the sites over their entire existance.

URGENT Install Immediately: PC Pitstop recommends installing this latest (958644) Microsoft security patch now.

On October 22, Microsoft released security patches for all versions of Windows listed below. This “out-of-cycle” patch was released in Microsoft Security Bulletin MS08-067 . Its sudden release only serves to emphasize its importance. You can check your add/remove programs sections to see if the patch was automatically installed (be sure to check the "show updates" box).

What graphics cards were surfacing as the top 3D video perforrmers based on the test results captured during the first month since its roll out?