Up to only a few days ago, the combination of a NVIDIA chipset, SATA hard drive, Apple Quicktime Player and Windows Vista resulted in intolerable Quicktime videos playback from disk. Clearly something was wrong in one or the other, but neither company was going to accept the responsibility. After both NVIDIA and Apple had played their “not our fault” card for four painful months, finally NVIDIA has come out on top with new SATA drivers that appears to fix the issue for myself and other users too.

A few weeks ago I documented the horrible playback performance for Quicktime videos on Windows Vista with my NVIDIA/SATA system configuration. Not only did I have a hard time discovering the cause of the issue, there was also no apparent remedy. In each respective knowledge base, both companies stare at each other hoping the other could do something about. After several Quicktime updates later, clearly nothing was happening on Apple’s side.

Out of the blue on the August 1, NVIDIA released a driver update for its SATA controller through Windows Update. It is however a recommended update so you’ll have to enforce it manually. It updates the SATA driver to version 5.10.2600.995 (v9.95) dating 2/07/2007. This driver supercedes NVIDIA’s own SATA driver available on the website of v9.92 at the time of writing. After a flawless install and reboot, it clearly fixed the issue for me and at least two others readers on this blog.

In the end, all it takes is a fix. Even now we still don’t know who’s fault it actually was, but from the perspective of a user we don’t really care either. The software business is not shy of workarounds, for example it’s even officially documented to write HTML hacks around stupid Internet Explorer 6 bugs. Arguably at the four month mark both companies deserve to be slapped, but NVIDIA has fixed the problem and that’s all that matters.

Update: NVIDIA PR has kindly commented on the issue. “The SATA issue was a known bug and fixed in our drivers. The Apple iTunes and Vista issue was not related to us.” Sounds like there’s another iTunes issue besides Quicktime, bummer.

Update 2: For those of you who can’t acquire the driver through Windows Update, a downloadable file is provided on the NVIDIA forums. Update 3: Or thanks to Rafael, from Windows Update directly itself.

I’m not a Palm customer nor a Windows Mobile user, in fact, I don’t even own a smartphone, but I can’t help notice the excitement over the Palm Treo 750 and its imminent Windows Mobile 6 upgrade as anticipated by many smartphone users I’m sure. Announced all the way back in March of this year, Palm had promised each and every Treo 750 customer with an upgrade to Windows Mobile 6 “later this year”. If smartphone users are anything like Windows users, and if the ROM leak today is any indication, then they shall suffer no longer from next week.

In an official email release for Microsoft Australia’s TechEd conference, it writes

Launch of the Palm Treo 750 Smartphone
Palm® and Microsoft will be announcing the availability of Windows Mobile® 6.0 on the Palm Treo™ 750 Smartphone at Tech.Ed. Check out the Palm booth, BP9 for a sneak preview!

Whilst I’m not exactly sure why Palm has chosen TechEd or even the land-of-technological-deficiency, Australia, in particular to host such a major announcement, but I guess it doesn’t really matter where they announce it as long as the customers can get their hands on it, and good publicity for both companies too. Palm was boothed at last year’s TechEd Australia so I suspect they were happy with the investment.

Coincidentally and obviously timed for the same reasons, the AT&T-branded Windows Mobile 6 ROM image for the Treo 750 was actually leaked in the past 24 hours on a Pocket PC and smartphone enthusiast forum – XDA-Developers. You can get a sense of just how desperate the users were after 260 replies and 44,856 topic views in such a short time. Of course Palm has since launched its lawyers at the website forcing them to remove the download, but users won’t have to grieve much longer.

If you were one of the many betting on performance and reliability improvements in anticipation for Windows Vista Service Pack 1, then your winnings has arrived early, in fact some can already claim the jackpot. Winning lotto balls KB938194 and KB938979 for Windows Vista were distributed today to a group of Windows Server 2008 testers which is said to fix many of the mass-reported performance issues in Vista and even some unexpected improvements.

First reported in the forums of AeroXP and NVNews, two Vista hotfixes were made available to beta testers yesterday with a changelog promising to improve performance and reliability right across the board. Of course, this was an unexpected find in the Server 2008 beta as everyone anticipated such changes to by in the Vista SP1 beta than anything else. Nevertheless, the fix is what matters no matter what beta it’s under.

The changes that caught everyone’s eyes were

• 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.
• 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.
• Improved reliability and compatibility of Vista when used with newer graphics cards in several specific scenarios and configurations.
• Increased compatibility with many video drivers.
• Improved visual appearance of games with high intensity graphics.
• Increased reliability and performance of Vista when entering sleep and resuming from sleep.

and so they should because those are, or at least imitate, the holy grail to most of the rants and raves of Vista horror stories we’ve been hearing.

AeroXP’s Bryant and Rafael has also done an early non-benchmark test on these patches and reports extremely promising results with up to 80% decreases in file operation times such as move or copy with large files and folders. Whilst I’m sure a more scientific test would lead to lesser but more accurate results, but it’s a good indication there was a real problem and this is a real solution.

It’s also no surprise to see these leaked unbelievably fast without much doubt over legality and the like. Whilst I’m sure Microsoft released these under private beta for good reasons, I can’t imagine them thinking not every Vista enthusiast awake or asleep will want this the very first second they read Neowin or any other Windows enthusiast website, so they can’t really blame anyone for a leak if they do decide to investigate.

A patch in beta would otherwise seem like a risky idea, but I guess the potential benefits far outweighs the risks of stuffing up your entire installation. Quick, before Microsoft notices, you can the download the X86 version patches here, and X64 version patches here. Word of warning for those gutsy X64 owners out there (update: downloads obviously removed upon Microsoft’s request), disabling driver-signing with BCDEdit will no longer work after this patch is applied so you will not be able to boot with any unsigned drivers.

Some say these patches will be distributed via Windows Update in the coming weeks, but I speculate this patch will become the cornerstone for Vista SP1’s long list of fixes, and we should expect more fixes like these in other areas of the operating system when it is released. I can’t see Microsoft miss out on the opportunity to promote the benefits of SP1.

Update: Microsoft has, at the time of writing, removed the downloads from Mediafire’s file hosting service.

Inside the Insiders is a series of interviews with some of the most recognized and outspoken Microsoft influentials, journalists and enthusiasts I know. I plan to go around interviewing as many of these peers as possible to find out more about their background, life outside of Microsoft and their darkest Unix fetishes. At least that’s what I tell them. Little did they know their answers will help me annihilate them and my other competitors.

Scared of a backlash, Kip now only shows affection for the butterfly indoors.How Microsoft will beat Google is a question on everybody’s minds, and as soon Microsoft has the answer we’ll hear it on LiveSide. LiveSide is not only the resource for many technology pundits who have a hard time digesting the Microsoft online strategy some call Windows Live, but even Microsoft employees themselves. Kip Kniskern is one of the three “sneaky geniuses” who collectively knows more Live products and services than probably exists. Started on the 3rd day in January 2006, LiveSide has grown to one of the most popular Microsoft blogs with more an impressive track record for scoops and early beta insights.

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Even for someone like myself who’s never played the Halo story or own an Xbox to do so, I can’t help but not get excited by Halo 3. Halo has changed gaming like how Lord of the Rings changed film-making – continuously setting new standards for graphics, gameplay and storytelling with each release. No doubt Halo 3 will set even higher standards with a bang.

As we approach the not-too-distant release date in September, it’s no surprise to see the merchandise trickling out to juice this sucker one last time, and rightly so they deserve to. So far we have everything from the special edition Xbox 360 with an interesting color palette, X360 faceplates, controllers, headsets, books, comics and even the Zune. Bungie of course also have some merchandise of their own, clothing included, but none of them beats what came out of Microsoft Australia today.

As announced on the TechNet Australia blog, they will be giving away 50 limited-release Halo 3 hooded jumpers to some very lucky TechEd Australia attendees. To be eligible to win, you will have to put your hand up to become a walking billboard, but that’s nothing compared to the eBay value of this treat. I have been told this are exclusively made for TechEd by the Xbox team in Australia, so you won’t be seeing this ever again.

Compared to the other Halo 3 hoodie they have at the official Bungie store, the Australian one kicks ass like Master Chief. I’m going to put my hand up to plaster myself all over with TechEd stickers, I need a new hoodie. 😀

For a Windows Vista Service Pack 1 Beta vaguely coming “sometime this year“, everything seems to be rolling along right now. Private beta in-progress, TechEd sessions, products roadmap, kernel documentations and even advisories to hardware manufacturers for new WHQL tests. And there’s no sign of slowing down as two more SP1 cameo appearances has been recently spotted in Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 and DirectX SDK August 2007.

Thanks to a tipoff by Mustapha Adjiri as well as hawks-eye Channel9 member stun, inside the Visual Studio 2008 “Orcas” Beta 2 distributed last week was a readme file with specific mentions of a Vista SP1 beta. Unfortunately to those special few running SP1, they’ll have problems installing Orcas.

“When Orcas is installed on a Windows Vista SP1 Beta platform, the .Net Framework has mismatched versions. This causes random failures in the product.” I’m assuming the culprit is a rollup release of .NET Framework 3.0 included in SP1 which Orcas has issues detecting. With no apparent workaround, sucks to be beta testing both at once.

Thanks to another tipoff by Brian (update: and brownie points to AeroXP too), Vista SP1 is doing more good than bad for another part of the development platform. It appears everyone is taking DirectX 10 nice and slow except Microsoft who’s now readying to roll out the first revision before anyone has even took advantage of the first release yet, Direct3D 10.1. In the August 2007 release of the DirectX SDK it writes,

Direct3D 10.1 Tech Preview
Direct3D 10.1 is an incremental, side-by-side update to Direct3D 10.0 that provides a series of new rendering features that will be available in an upcoming generation of graphics hardware.

• TextureCube Arrays which are dynamically indexable in shader code.
• An updated shader model (shader model 4.1).
• The ability to select the MSAA sample pattern for a resource from a palette of patterns, and retrieve the corresponding sample positions.
• The ability to render to block-compressed textures.
• More flexibility with respect to copying of resources.
• Support for blending on all unorm and snorm formats.

This tech preview provides an early look at these features and the handful of new APIs that support them. The August 2007 Direct3D 10.1 Tech Preview requires the Windows Vista SP1 Beta which will be available to MSDN subscribers once it is publicly released.

What’s interesting is the reference to a Windows Vista SP1 MSDN release that hasn’t been mentioned before. However, I’m not sure if they mean MSDN subscribers will get it first, or simultaneously during the public beta test. Since there’s only 154 days left in “sometime this year”, it could ship any day now. 😉