During CES a group of overclockers with access to liquid nitrogen and liquid helium for the extra boost of coldness cools an AMD Phenom II X4 chip to -232 degrees Celsius. Once they got the chip cooled to this frigid temperature, they pushed the clock speed all the way up to 6.5GHz, which is a world record for a quad core CPU and they dished out and astonishing 45,474 3DMark05 score!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wB0JodKgZ0A

My day job is a Messaging Administrator (LCS 2005, OCS 2007, Exchange 2003/2007) most of our production e-mail environment is Exchange 2003. We have been seeing resource and performance issues across the board including some system instability problems.  The root has been tracked to exhausting the pool of Page Table Entries. During the attempt to find the optimal configuration I wanted to track Free PTE usage, I figured someone else may benefit from this spreadsheet.. Note: Moving to a 64 platform with Exchange 2007 resolves this performance issue as well but I am about 12 months away from having the 120,000 production mailboxes moved over.

So far Win 7 has been rock solid on the few VM’s I’m testing with and very snappy compared to Vista, later this week I will be installing in on my old fijustu p1510d (stay tuned to hear how it works.) I consider the p1510d to be fairly close to a net book but with a convertible and touch screen. Here are some of what I think are the “coolest” features

Windows 7 provides a new tool for creating docs for support to reproduce issues it’s the PSR.exe and it is the black box recorder of GUI’s.  Once you hit “record”, it tracks your mouse and keyboard and captures screenshots with any comments you choose to associate alongside them. Once you stop recording, it saves the whole thing to a ZIP file, containing an HTML-based “slide show” of the steps. This is my new way to create quick howto docs.

You can also install Windows 7 from a USB Memory Stick. All you need to do is format it as FAT32 and copy everything over xcopy e:\ f:\ /e /f (where e: was the DVD drive and f: was the removable drive location).

WordPad can now read and write both the Word 2007-compatible Office Open XML file format but also the OpenDocument specification that IBM and Sun have been advocating http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument

If you need to run multiple instances of an app you can simply hold down the Shift key while clicking on the taskbar icon, and it will open a new instance of the application rather than switching to the existing application. For a keyboard-free shortcut, you can middle-click with the third mouse button to do the same thing.

Lastly Windows 7 support burning an ISO file natively from the operating system! Simply double click on a DVD or CD .ISO and it will open a nice little applet to walk you thru burning it. Now where is my mounting utility, I primarily work on my X200 tablet which does not have a CD/DVD drive.  I don’t miss it as I keep my ISO’s on my hard drive and mount them when I need them, but why can’t Microsoft put this into the operating system.