If you want a bit of benchmarking action under Windows Vista, here is some news for you from the UK.

London, UK, January 30th 2007 - We are pleased to announce that the latest version of SiSoftware Sandra XI Service Pack 1 (SP1) for download and to be included in all current versions of the Sandra family of product. This free service pack now offers full support for Microsoft™ Vista™ and includes an additional free theme.

"With a new operating system coming out technicians have more and more questions and we wanted to give them a familiar interface to simplify there jobs and increase productivity. We also value their investment and wanted to extend this investment in Sandra and by being able to offer Vista support in this version it helps protect there investment, this way even customers of the older 2007 version get free Vista support for free." said SiSoftware's Chief Technical Officer Adrian Silasi.

The folks at Sharkoon in Germany have just come out with a new product which allows you to connect up most recent IDE or SATA hard drives directly to your system via USB and nifty adapter.

I've personally had use such devices many times before when needing to move data from a desktop hard drive to my notebook.

Are you willing to take the plunge and buy Microsoft's new operating system, Windows Vista, but don't know which edition to buy? There is a quick guide over at ViperLair which provides plenty of good information on the subject.

With Windows Vista out there already, some folks will be running Microsoft's latest edition to the Windows family, however the majority of you will be waiting for the end of January 2007 release date. Over the past few months and even years, there has been a lot of information and changes to the OS and it has become quite a confusing mess in regards to the different versions and licenses. Should I get Home Basic? What's so special about Vista Ultimate? Only 2 reactivations before I need to buy a new copy? Should I go 64bit?

Looking at building a new system that works well with the new Windows Vista operating system? Scott from The Tech Report comes to the rescue with a new article that discusses the exact issue.

WINDOWS VISTA IS FINALLY SHIPPING to consumers, and we've decided to refresh our system guide for the occasion. Not much has changed in the world of PC components since our December update, but we've nevertheless tweaked our recommendations with both Vista and recent price fluctuations in mind. Windows Vista requires new drivers, especially if you're looking to run the 64-bit version of the operating system, so we've scrutinized our hardware selections for proper driver support. And, of course, we've updated our operating system recommendations with info on the features available in each version of Vista and advice on which one might be right for your needs.

Once again, our sponsor for the system guide is the excellent online retailer Newegg.com. Newegg's support allows us to make more frequent updates to the guide, and considering its excellent track record and competitive pricing, it's also a fine source of components for prospective buyers. Of course, the component picks in the guide are still very much our own. They have evolved from our previous system guides, with obvious input from our more recent hardware reviews and new developments in the market.

Users of Windows Vista and nVidia's GeForce 8800 graphics cards can almost rejoice!

nVidia plan on releasing a Vista beta driver to their website for public download on Tuesday, January 30th which includes SLI support. D3D performance is set to be improved over the Release 95 Vista drivers, and is on par with Windows XP games and applications in some cases (except OpenGL).

Driver Description: This driver is intended for testing on GeForce 8800 GTX/GTS series GPUs. This driver is intended for DirectX 9 and DirectX 10 application testing in single GPU only. It is not recommended for NVIDIA SLI testing. 3D performance of this driver is improved over Release 95 Vista drivers, and is on par with Windows XP for the top applications, with the exception of OpenGL applications. This driver can also be used with GeForce 7 and GeForce 6 series GPUs, though performance can be slower on some applications because we still have work to do on our drivers. Our goal is to get Vista performance equivalent to XP performance wherever possible, and we will do this through continuous driver updates.