Our friends from the Windows Club have launched a new competition called 'Best Windows Website Contest 2009'. The contest just started and it is open to submissions. If you run a website, including a blog or a forum, which primarily focuses on Microsoft Windows, you are invited to participate in this contest. The first 50 sites which are submitted will receive a 1-year license for a-squared Anti-Malware. If you are interested to participate, submit your entries here.

Windows Vista's launch was a very troubled one with plenty of issues which quickly created a very negative image for this operating system. Six months after its launch, we ran a survey to identify the top problems users were confronted with. The results were very clear. Our readers said that the top issues were the lack of proper drivers (36% of votes) and application compatibility issues (36% of votes). These two, combined with a very weak offering of security solutions seriously impacted their user experience.

In this article I will go through each of these areas and share with you the current status on Windows Vista plus the outlook for the upcoming Windows 7 launch. Will Windows 7 share the same issues at launch?

DPC Latency Checker is a free tool that shows in real-time how quickly your system reacts to the tasks it has to complete. DPC stands for Deferred Procedure Call, which is a Windows mechanism that allows high-priority tasks to defer lower-priority tasks for later execution. For example, device drivers are high-priority tasks that need to be processed right away before any other task. If a device has an improper driver this operation is going to take more time than usual and it's going to slow down the system which will lead to interruptions in real-time audio and video streams. In this article I will show you how you can use DPC Latency Checker to find out if you have a device driver problem and, if any, how to fix it.

One of the things that I liked about Ubuntu (or any other Linux distribution) is the centralized software manager that you can use to search, download, install and update applications. The same software manager notifies you when there are updates available for any of the software installed on your system. I always wanted such a feature for Windows Vista. After a bit of research I found Update Notifier, a freeware application which does exactly what it says, it notifies you when there are updates available for the software that you have installed. In this article I will show you where you can find this tool and how to use it.

One of the problems with Windows Vista's Backup and Restore Center is the fact that it provides different functionality based on the Windows Vista version you have. For example, Windows Vista Home (Basic and Premium) users cannot make a complete backup of their PC. They need to purchase Windows Vista Business or Ultimate or go for a third-party solution which offers all the backup and restore features they need. The good news is that these users no longer need to spend money on a complete solution. A company called GFI has launched GFI Backup 2009 Home Edition, a software tool which offers all the backup and restore features you need, free of charge. In this article I will review this tool and summarize its main features and how well they work.

Many of our readers asked us via e-mail if we know any free tools which work on Windows Vista that can be used to convert movies to the format(s) supported by iPhone. Therefore, we decided to test some free video converting applications and then make a tutorial on how to use the best tool we could find. In this article I will give you a step by step guide for a tool called Handbrake. At the end, I will also give you a list of other possible alternatives.

If you are one of the many readers who are very happy with the content we provide, you might want to know that there are many ways you can say "Thank You!". In this short blog post, I will give you a few suggestions on how you can help the editorial team. As you will see, there are many ways in which you can chip in. Some of them will require only a few seconds of your time.

Since Internet Explorer 8 has been launched we have written a lot about its features and how to use them. Recently we have also created a search accelerator which allows you to search for tutorials on our site directly from Internet Explorer 8. The accelerator is called Search on Windows Vista 4 Beginners and can be found in the Internet Explorer Add-ons Gallery. In this article I will show you how to install it and use it.

Our next guest in the 'Getting to know the Microsoft enthusiasts' series is James M. Fisher, Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professional) and the man behind Windows Talk. If you want to know more about him as a person and learn more about Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals and what they do when they are not helping people with their IT problems, don't hesitate to read this interview. You will surely enjoy it.