The Wireless Gaming Receiver is pretty simple to hook up and install. You plug the receiver in via USB just as you would a receiver for a wireless keyboard or mouse. Windows Vista will automatically detect and install the Wireless Gaming Receiver which is pretty cool.

However, you’re going to want to install the Xbox 360 Accessories Status application on the Wireless Gaming Receiver CD as this will enable you to check to see how your battery life is doing on the wireless Xbox 360 Controller. The Xbox 360 Accessories Status also lets you configure notifications for device connections.

Thanks to a pointer by Michael Wolf, who you can catch over on the Gamerscore Blog, I discovered that you can use the Xbox 360 Controllers (Wireless or Wired) to play the in-box-games that ship with Windows Vista. Sweet! I shot video to demo using the Wireless Xbox 360 Controller to play Minesweeper, Chess Titans, and Solitaire:

I was particularly impressed with the fact they incorporated the ability to have your Xbox 360 Controller “rumble” in certain instances within these games – such as in Minesweeper when I hit a mine.

The Xbox 360 Wireless Gaming Receiver is priced at $19.99. That is not a bad deal if you already have an Xbox 360 and wireless controller. I’ve also seen the Wireless Gaming Receiver and Controller bundled together as well for about $50.00.

The new monitors with the large screen sizes have, been designed to optimize a user’s Windows Vista experience and have thus been certified as Windows Vista Premium ready. Asus also looking to extend the multimedia experience of these monitors, has equipped both these monitors with built-in stereo speakers and earphone jacks.

A report at CNET says that some of Microsoft’s notebook partners are unhappy that the Aero interface is reportedly shortening the battery life of laptop/notebook portable computers.

As a Vista user myself, running Aero and using two batteries – the main battery and one in the docking bay, I get approximately 5 hours of battery life from both batteries, with, from memory, nearly six hours of life when previously using Windows XP, although I am now thoroughly used to getting 5 hours of life from Vista, and then using a third docking-bay battery for an addition two and a half hours of battery life if needed because I’m on the road or otherwise away from a power point.

This being the case, it would seem anecdotally true that Vista delivers less battery life than XP despite advancements in Vista to more intelligently use less power and use a combined sleep and hibernation mode to conserve power.

The consensus is that if you switch off the Aero graphics settings on your Vista equipped notebook, you will get the same kind of battery life you got under Windows XP – but you naturally miss out on the Aero graphical goodies.

Some manufacturers have resorted to implementing their own power saving schemes, automatically switching off Aero when ‘maximum power’ savings are selected, while Microsoft is promising to do more to enhance battery life through future Vista updates and patches.

Of course, future enhancements to battery technologies will remove this problem, but until then, users will have to decide between slightly less battery life if they wish to preserve Aero graphical niceties, the no-Aero graphics solution, or simply resort to carrying a second or third spare battery with them if they truly need non-stop power for hours.

“We’re making some updates to Halo 2 for Windows Vista that should improve the install experience and address other technical issues, ensuring that the final retail version provides a fantastic experience for gamers,” the statement writes. “Given these changes, we will be adjusting the on-shelf date of the product.”

Although the message does not specifically state how long this delay will be, retailers and other video game-related websites have already taken the liberty of extending the U.S. release to May 22nd, 2007. GamePro will update you if we receive further word from either Bungie or Microsoft.

Rutkowska recently announced she will be running a training session called ‘Understanding Stealth Malware’ during the Black Hat Briefings and Training event in Las Vegas, which runs from 28 July to 2 August.

The training session, which will be co-presented by researcher Alex Tereshkin, promises to demonstrate new rootkits developed for Vista, ways of defeating hardware-based forensics systems and other techniques Microsoft would probably prefer the world didn’t know.

Rutkowska said she, too, is aware of the need for discretion. “For ethical reasons we want to limit the availability of this course to only ‘legitimate’ companies,” she said in a post on her blog, Invisible Things.

Rutkowska isn’t against Windows as such, but has a track record of ferreting out its weaknesses. She recently uncovered a number of flaws in Vista’s much-hyped User Account Control (UAC) feature, which led Microsoft to declare that the feature wasn’t really intended for security after all.

Until recently she was a researcher for Coseinc, but is now in the process of founding a security start-up based in Poland, she said.

Earlier this spring she demonstrated several methods that sophisticated rootkits can use to hide from even the most reliable detection method currently available – hardware-based products that read a system’s RAM.

The demonstration in July will cover such methods, but will be more comprehensive, including unpublished techniques, implementation details, new code and sample rootkits.

The target will be Windows and specifically 64bit Vista, including new kernel attacks against the latest 64bit Vista builds.

“These attacks, of course, work on the fly and do not require system reboot and are not afraid of the TPM/BitLocker protection,” she wrote.

TPM (Trusted Platform Module) refers to security systems with a hardware component built into the processor, designed to improve security and specifically to make copy-protection systems more difficult to circumvent. Rutkowska said the demonstrated techniques would work against copy-protection systems, but that this side of things wouldn’t be specifically discussed at the demonstration.

The training is aimed at security and OS developers, forensic investigators and penetration testers, Rutkowska said.

That’s why it surprised many that Vista — like its Win32 and Win64 predecessors — was listed as susceptible to the Windows Animated Cursor Handling vulnerability that Microsoft patched last month.

That vulnerability stemmed from a basic flaw (a stack-based buffer overrun) in Microsoft’s Windows GDI implementation — the kind of thing you’d expect Microsoft to have eliminated, especially in light of Vista’s top-to-bottom Desktop Window Manager (DWM) overhaul, anyway.

Microsoft officials were surprised, too. As it turned out, the errant code happened to be very, very old errant code.

“First of all, this code is pretty old; [it's] in Windows 2000 and predates the SDL,” wrote Michael Howard on Microsoft’s new Security Development Lifecycle blog.

Microsoft’s SDL practice is part of its much-ballyhooed Trustworthy Computing push. As Howard pointed out, no SDL is perfect, and — in the case of last month’s Windows Animated Cursor exploit — some vulnerabilities will still slip through.

“In the Windows Vista process, we banned certain APIs, like strcpy and strncpy, and changed well over 140,000 calls to use safer calls. Memcpy [the affected call] wasn’t on that list,” Howard said.

So how did Microsoft miss the Windows Animated Cursor Handling flaw during its Vista DWM coding (and legacy GDI recoding) processes? For one thing, Howard said, the errant call in this place didn’t trigger a -GS cookie, which makes it difficult to identify in the first place.

“Because there are no candidate buffers on the function’s stack, there is no -GS cookie added to the stack, even though the code is compiled with -GS,” Howard wrote. “This is not the first time we’ve seen code with no cookie, and this has made us rethink the heuristics used by the compiler when it determines whether to place a cookie on the stack or not. But changing the compiler is a long-term task. In the short-term, we have a new compiler pragma that forces the compiler to be much more aggressive, and we will start using this pragma on new code.”

And in an ironic twist, Howard said, one of Vista’s new security improvements — namely, address space layout randomization (ASLR) — actually helped mask the vulnerability.

“The next issue is that the code is wrapped in an exception handler that catches code failures,” he said.

Enter ASLR: “[T]he goal of ASLR is to reduce the likelihood that an attacker can determine the address of critical functions,” Howard said. “This makes it harder to make exploits run correctly. But if the vulnerable code is wrapped in an exception handler that catches many errors, a failed attempt will not crash the component and the attacker can try again with a different set of addresses.”

Elsewhere, Howard explained, Microsoft missed the vulnerability because of an utterly pragmatic reason.

“Code that uses calls such as memcpy is hard to flag as vulnerable without generating a great many false positives. This is a research problem that no one has solved, here or elsewhere,” he wrote. “Another angle is to replace calls to memcpy with memcpy_s, which forces the developer to think about the destination buffer size. We may ban memcpy for new code, but we still need to analyze this further. Stay tuned.”

I’m just about to install vista to dual boot with win xp, I have 2 HDDs, 1 160GB Primary Master and 1 80gb Primary Slave.

Currently I’m using the 80GB for Downloads and such, and the 160gb has 1 15gb partition with XP and 1 135gb Partition for games and such.

I’m just wondering, if I split up the 135gb partition into say, a 20gb partition and a 115gb partition, will that work and let me install Vista onto the 20gb partition? or do I need to use my 2nd HDD to do it?

Secondly is there anything I should know before going ahead with this? I got Vista just after release so I know how to install it but I’m not sure if I need to do anything special to make it dual bootable so it will recognise Vista and XP and give me the choice of what to do when I turn the pc on.

Just one last question, and I’m thinking the answer is probably pretty logical, but I’ll ask anyway.

If I install a program in Winxp, will it install it for Vista too, so just say I install Oblivion on XP would it show up in Vista as an installed program?

I dont really want to use Vista for gaming anyway, but just for chatting and stuff as I really loved the interface of it, just disliked the different performance in games and the incompatability of programs.

Hoping for some fast answers so I can get it done ASAP.

Answer for this problem is here!