P5B Deluxe and Windows Vista

I have been told by Asus to send the board in question back to the Distributor, have them checked and then sent to Asus RMA but I am not going to do that. It’s Pakistan not USA. It will take months before I get a new board and besides I don’t think it’s a hardware problem, it’s the stupid drivers released by Asus.

The proof is simple, install Windows Vista and it loads up all drivers, you will not feel any performance lags or any thing like what you face in Windows XP after installing drivers provided by Asus. Windows Vista Ultimate’s installation time with me is 15-20 minutes only, the boot time with default drivers and installation is just 20 seconds with 1 GB of RAM and double of that with 512 MB of RAM.

I then downloaded version 6.10.01.5110 of Audio driver present on Asus P5B Deluxe drivers page, which were the latest at that time and still. New version has appeared on Asus FTP, I have yet to try that. After installing the Audio drivers provided by Asus and Soundmax, guess what… The boot time which was 20 seconds with default drivers reached 40 seconds!!!

I am not able to figure out the problem with Frontpanel Audio though, it does not work under Windows Vista’s default drivers. I have not tested if it works or not with drivers provided by Asus and Soundmax but I really don’t care about the front panel if there is no change in performance.

Here it comes – Internet Explorer 7

True, it’s final version has been officially released by Microsoft. You can read a review about it at Paul Thurrott’s SuperSite for Windows

It looks very good indeed. I have not downloaded it yet, will take me 2-3 hours perhaps to get the download done with my dear stupid dial-up. I plan a few additions on my website very soon insha’Allah, but I have to complete other things before making final those additions. Pray I am able to spend equal time with everything that requires my attention. To all those friends and users who are using Internet Explorer 6 as their default browser. Please upgrade to Internet Explorer 7 as soon as possible.

It has many new features and functions esp. Security wise, it’s far better than the old Internet Explorer, the version 6. To those users (like me) who moved to Firefox, or Opera. I don’t think they’ll make themselves come back permanently to IE7 because both Firefox & Opera offer complete customization of the browser to user’s requirements. Firefox being more customizable than Opera here. Well, it will be the G33KS who like to see everything customized to their brain who won’t come back to IE7. As for other usual users, IE7 is good enough to use and esp. for the one’s who are still stuck with using IE6. IE7′s user interface might be a little confusing for the usual IE6 users, but just upgrade to it n play around with it, get used to the new UI.

Users with pirated versions of Windows will not be able to install IE7 without bypassing WGA check. Well, good luck with that! If you are able to by pass it that is. Here are the links…

Official Internet Explorer 7 Website
Direct Download Link to IE7 for Windows XP SP2- 14 MB

For other Windows, use the official website and guide yourself to the download page.