Valve released its much advertised User Interface reboot for Steam on Monday. The interface is a lot cleaner and has a very modern feel. You can have access to your library and related information in one easy to read screen. The layout is a lot better and is much easier to access than the previous design.
They went with a light gray theme that somehow seems to suit the interface perfectly. You always wonder just how any different iterations these designs go through before a company like Valve picks one!
On the Steam application homepage you can see your friends as well as how many people are on Steam at any one point in time. I’ve yet to see that number drop below 1 million. On the home screen you can now see almost all the information that you had to visit other menus for in the past. From online Friends, to what you have Downloading and your Achievements, Valve has made all the basic information available at your fingertips.
With even more good news, the application now uses a WebKIT browser instead of Internet Explorer. This means higher compatibility and quicker rendering of pages, plus it will be Cross Platform which is important for Valve’s future plans:
The new steam is due soon for Mac OSX and Linux operating systems.
The popular electronic distribution service, Steam is coming finally to Mac OSX and also supposedly to Linux. This may make these two Operating Systems finally viable for consumers interested in entertainment titles.
Hopefully more developers will take this approach so that gaming on other platforms will become a reality. More choice for the consumer is always a good thing.
Microsoft has launched a new initiative called Fix-It Center.
The company is seeking to address customer’s Technical Support issues by offering a downloadable tool that runs troubleshooters, perform system maintenance, and seeks relevant answers from the Internet for problems.
If the tool encounters a problem that it cannot solve, Microsoft Support can look at the Fix-It Center logs and determine the customer’s exact hardware and software load out, everything that has been done to-date to fix the problem and take things from there.
Several of these troubleshooting tools are now available on Windows 7, however Fix-It Center brings these facilities to Windows XP,Server 2003,Server 2008 and Windows Vista installations as well.
Micron announced the current fastest SSD drive on the market. The RealSSD C300 boasts a SATA 6GB/s interface and read/write speeds of 375/225MB/s . To give you some idea of the comparions, the leading SSD Competitor only managed 260/105 MB/s .
You may ask whether you can really appreciate that speed difference in practical usage, and the answer is yes. Yes you certainly will notice that difference.
In fact, purchasing an SSD drive for your otherwise average PC is the single most effective update you can possibly make on your PC. The SSD drive will totally change the way you work and play, making everyday tasks on your computer much quicker and improving your overall experience tremendously.
In what could be a shot across the bows of Steam and Impulse, Microsoft has announced that its Games for Windows Live platform will soon allow games to be downloaded.
That means that Microsoft is getting into the Digital game distribution business on the PC, a space which has been dominated by Valve’s Steam platform by a wide margin in the past.
Should Valve be worried? Given that the consumer response to Games for Windows has been lukewarm in the past, we don’t think so. If, however, Microsoft offers Digital Distribution to developers and publishers that would be using it’s Games for Windows platform anyway, these developers and publishers may decide to forgo Steam or Impulse distribution plans. We’ll keep you informed on how this all turns out!
Earlier this week we heard reports that windows pcs were exhibiting a black screen that prevented the user from accessing the Desktop. Security firm PrevX initially stated, much to Microsoft’s displeasure, that the error was caused by a Microsoft Security Update.
It seems that new information has determined that the error exists, and it is not caused by Microsoft’s Security updates but instead by various types of Malware.
“Having narrowed down a specific trigger for this condition we’ve done quite a bit of testing and re-testing on the recent Windows patches including KB976098 and KB915597 as referred to in our previous blog. Since more specifically narrowing down the cause we have been able to exonerate these patches from being a contributory factor.
We have not analyzed further whether a change occurred in the OS interpretation of this or other registry values. In any case, we believe there are significant benefits in the OS using the length of the value as recommended by the SysInternals article.
We have always strongly recommended keeping Windows and all other software up-to-date to reduce the window for exploitation by new threats. We’ll keep you updated with further progress if we find anything new.
We apologize to Microsoft for any inconvenience our blog may have caused. This has been a challenging issue to identify. Users who have the black screen issue referred to can still safely use our free fix tool to restore their desktop icons and task bar.”
“We’ve conducted a comprehensive review of the November Security Updates, the Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool, and the non-security updates we released through Windows Update in November. That investigation has shown that none of these updates make any changes to the permissions in the registry. Thus, we don’t believe the updates are related to the “black screen†behavior described in these reports.”
The problem seems to be caused by users who’s machines are infected with Malware such as Daonol
So it seems that a thorough cleaning of our systems is in order again. We recommend doing a pass with one of the top tier antivirus packages as well as Malware Bytes free scanner.
Let us know in the comments if you fell victim to this problem, and if so what you did to solve it.
