Bluetooth Blueprints

There was one day when I visited my friend’s house when he showing off his newly arrived Bluetooth Stereo Headset. He asked me to try it on but I was indifferent towards it saying “A headphone is a headphone, how different can it be from all the others that I’ve tried on?” and declined his offer.

It was later, much later that I realised, when another friend of mine forced me to try it on, that THIS is indeed something different. It wasn’t just different. The difference was mind-blowing. The reception was crystal-clear over Bluetooth and the best part was that with Windows 7, it just works out of the box. It was this way right from Windows 7’s beta days. My friend and I fancy things that do not require drivers to be installed manually. We would readily confess to the fact that we have an obsession for collecting products that either has drivers on Windows built-in or gets it from Windows update. Our collection of product right from the AMD Motherboard & Processor to the Hauppauge Win TV PVR 150 – MCE TV Tuner card, the Xbox 360 controller for PC, to our Microsoft Keyboards and mice and HP fingerprint reader would all stand to prove this.

Both of us recommend to our friends & family and to anyone to buy products that would work out of the box. There might be other products out there, better products than the ones we recommend but  without integrated drivers, not only on Windows, but essentially any OS, the products loses its value and many of the features that it may be capable of which just get lost on installing the drivers that came with it manually.Also, the ones that have these drivers on the OS by default, have a better integration with the OS and with the software that comes with the OS which gives a seamless, intuitive, no non-sense experience with the device.

The other irritating part that we both hate while installing drivers manually is the whole load of bull crap software that get installed which I don’t need. For example, when I install my webcam, all I need is for it to work with my IM client software that I’ve already got installed. I don’t want a whole lot of crap to get installed enabling me to view myself and record video. These software are usually crippled with very basic options. If you are from a company that makes these drivers+software packages – listen carefully: We don’t need it! Just give the “.inf” files with the relevant “dlls” and be done with it. Perhaps for the non-geeky audience an installer to install the drivers. If you still want to give your software (which mostly is anyways third-party) give a choice to install it or not while installing the drivers.

Now back to my initial topic of the Bluetooth stereo headset.

After upgrading to Windows 7 RTM, for some reason, my Bluetooth headset has stopped getting the drivers from Windows update. I thought may be, my ultra-low-cost Bluetooth dongle (that I got for Rs.120, hehehe) had some problem with it. So, i tried with the other dongle (Yeah, I have two dongles, don’t get J already), it still didn’t work. So, finally I decided to take it to my friend’s house to test it with his setup. It still didn’t work. It didn’t work with my two cheap dongles and neither did it with his X-Micro ultra-costly (Rs.1800, no, you read it right that is eighteen hundred) dongle. He asked me to leave it with him for a while for him to try again and also try his headset (exact same model The Dell BH200) with my dongles and I did.

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Yesterday, I went back to collect it and asked him for the result of his experiments and guess what, all combinations of setups worked just fine and neither he nor I have any idea what the problem is. Now, I’ve brought back my hardware to carry out the same testing experiments at my house once again before I re-install the OS (Yes, I screwed it up while installing Office 2010 yesterday and it now needs a re-install damn it). Let’s see how it goes.

Now off to become the mad scientist and on with my experiments. See you all later with the results.

P.S. Wow, I just realised that this is one of my longest posts.

Hardware graphics boost for Windows 7 by MS

Although the thought of an "OS" using the GPU made users wary, the concept needed time for general acceptance and that time has come. It is here and now. Windows Vista introduced this concept, but its insanely large hardware requirements that were ahead of its time made it an utter flop.

Today, the hardware world has caught up with the technological evolution with M$ playing Big brother for all that has happening around us. Microsoft needs to be given credit for necessitating the standards and minimum requirements to go up. It has done this to such an extent that even the linux world has started to accept these requirements.

Most mainstream Linux distros also require almost the same level of hardware requirements as Windows in order for the user to utilise all the features that the OS offers.

Now, Microsoft is trying to improve the visuals in Windows 7 by working with hardware makers on a software interface that maximizes the use of graphics cards. With the release of Windows 7 comes the latest iteration of its API for multimedia - The DirectX 11. This allows the OS to take advantage of the latest hardware with utmost efficiency.

The eye-candy that comes as part of Windows 7 now is a given to the end-user. One doesn't have to get special hardware to get this feature. Pretty-much all mainstream hardware support this. And for the über cool enthusiasts, it is not just about the eye-candy. It is about the overall multimedia experience. With the clarity of videos/TV on Media Centre, the realism in games, the ultra-fast response times enabled by the level of detail, the right shade of colour for designers etc. Windows 7 tries to improve all these dramatically.

With the increasing number of cores on consumer processors, DX11 drivers enable the OS to break up the tasks and provide for division of labour effectively. It not only is going to use the CPU but also the massive parallel processing capabilities of today's GPUs for performing many of its tasks that were until now only done using the CPU. This will improve the gaming and High definition experience on PCs by leaps & bounds.

The DirectX 11 enhancements could also encourage more developers to build games for Windows 7 and help the company keep pace with competition. Competition to M$ isn't keeping quiet either. Apple's upcoming OS codenamed Snow leopard has radically changed the base to take advantage of graphics and CPU cores. It comes with built-in support for Open CL too. Open CL is a set of tools enabling the management of parallel execution of tasks. (Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCL)

"There are plans to make native DirectX 11 hardware from AMD in its ATI Radeon GPUs available when Windows 7 is released" said AMD's Robin Maffeo, a Microsoft alliance manager on a blog post.

As users demand heavier graphics from PCs, it is in Microsoft's best interests to offer an operating system that breaks up tasks across multiple graphics cores and CPUs

Nvidia and AMD have said they would support DirectX 11 and OpenCL. Intel, which offers integrated graphics on chipsets, in June released updated graphics drivers for Windows 7, but it carried support for only DirectX 10.

Windows 7 - Worth the wait

I am one of those who shifts to the latest OS just for the heck of trying it out. I must confess that although the wait for the latest iteration of Microsoft's Windows 7 has been the least, it seems like I've been using the OS for eons now.



I shifted to the beta Build 7000 when it had released and later upgraded to RC (build 7100) when that had come out.  I must say that right from the beta days, it felt like a very complete OS. Not for a moment that I felt I was using a pre-release or a beta OS. This first-hand experience led me to immediately to think that this is going to be a huge success and that Vista was supposed to be like this which it never did.

Now that the versions, the packaging, the pricing and the release date is announced, it has created a whole lot of buzz around it and has got me and many others excited to find out what's in store in the final RTM. How is it going to handle the DX11 graphics and how it is going to run on old or low-powered netbook hardware.

The pricing is lower than its Vista equivalent and anything about it has managed to garner a lot of attention. So, even hardware companies like AMD are associating themselves with it to piggy-back on its news for publicity. GPU makers ATI and nVidia have announced drivers for their cards for the new OS. Every Technology Forum, every technology blog worth its salt is talking about something or the other.

So definitely, 7 is worth the wait. Steven Sinofsky's decision to keep the name simple and straight forward, to keep everything under wraps until it was completely ready unlike Vista and the Engineering that has gone behind its design to make it draw the least juice out of the hardware has made it the darling of the masses. I have no doubts that this will make a great purchase for anyone looking for a new refreshing computing experience.