If you went away for the holidays and just got back, wow, do you have some downloading to do! Tens of megabytes of patches and updates to Windows, Office, third party tools, and device drivers all seem to have popped up during egg nog season. Here is a quick list of sites Windows users should visit to grab some patches.
Office Update: http://office.microsoft.com/productupdates/
This is the twin site to Windows Update, and offers updates and patches specifically for Office 2000 and Office XP. New for the holidays: Office XP Service Pack 2 and Office 2000 Service Pack 3. I do admit, after applying these service packs, Outlook is crashing less often.
Windows Update: http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com/
This is the automated download site for getting patches and updates to Windows releases since Windows 98. Generally, major security fixes to Internet Explorer and Windows show up here, as do popular device driver updates.
New over the holidays is the arrival of Windows Media Player 9 and a large cumulative update to Internet Explorer 6. However, if you haven't run Windows Update in a while, you may literally see over 30 different patches that need downloading. For example, this weekend I booted up an old Windows 98 machine that was last updated in March 2002. During those 10 months, over 30 patches totaling over 50 megabytes showed up.
TIP: Now here's a little trick reader Steven Noonan emailed me about. The default behavior of the Windows Update page is to automatically try to determine what updates your PC needs. This is fine generally. But let's say you want to apply the patches manually because you have multiple PCs to upgrade at once, or you simply want to have the patches as individual files in case any need to be re-applied and you wish to save the download time.
What Steven pointed me at is the Windows Update Catalog page, which can be enabled by clicking on the Personalize Windows Update link. Once you are on the catalog page, you can search for specific downloads and patches by Windows release, or by hardware manufacturer. Windows XP for example has over 120 patches alone, not counting device driver updates! Once you select all your updates into your download basket, they are downloaded to your hard disk and you can install them manually.
Microsoft Downloads: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/
This is where you find ALL the Windows related downloads from Microsoft. Generally the downloads here propagate a few weeks later to the Windows Update site, but it doesn't hurt to look. For example, the latest DirectX 9 is available for download here, but has not made its was to the Windows Update page yet.
DirectX: http://www.microsoft.com/directx/
You can always find the latest information and downloads of DirectX at its own dedicated page.
nVidia Graphics Drivers: http://www.nvidia.com/
With the demise of so many good video graphics card companies over the years, Number Nine and 3dfx to name a couple, the graphics world has come down to two companies: ATI and nVidia. I still to this day do not endorse ATI video cards, as my 10 years of experience with dozens of their cards has been nothing but a frustrating and painful exercise. And even when one visits the ATI web site, it is a daunting task to figure out exactly which make and model and revision of ATI card you have in your PC in order to download the correct driver. If you buy a PC with a pre-installed ATI video card of unknown model, good luck!
Naturally, ATI's one monopolistic command of the graphic market has been eroded away significantly by competitor nVidia, which has a simple and beautiful solution to the whole problem of driver updates: one single driver for practically ever card they make. This is known as a monolithic driver, or Unified Driver Architecture as they call it, and is the exact opposite of ATI's confusing scheme.
I love nVidia's method, because between by Ti4600, GeForce 3, MX440, and half dozen other nVidia based cards, I simply download the one single driver one time.
The monolithic driver for GeForce cards was updated in December and does include a significant speedup. I'm not sure if this partly due to the fact that I downloaded DirectX 9 at the same time, or simply a better drivers, but on many of my PC systems I've noticed significantly faster graphics (especially basic 2-D operations) as a result of downloading both DirectX 9 and the latest nVidia driver.
Real Player: http://www.real.com/
Just as I thought I was all done downloading, my Real Player 8 tray icon started blinking the weekend after Christmas. Which can mean only one thing: a new Real Player update, not Real Player 9 as I'd expected, but this time known as the Real One. I've not put the Real One Player and Windows Media Player 9 together in a cage to see which one reigns supreme over the other at playing MPEG4 content.
Quick Time: http://www.apple.com/quicktime/products/qt/
Wait! Not to be left out, all you Quick Time 4 and Quick Time 5 users better start upgrading as well, because Quick Time 6 is out to jump into the MPEG4 arena as well. Quick Time is great for watching those older movie trailers that never seem to appear in other formats.
Adobe Acrobat Reader: http://www.adobe.com/
Although Acrobat was last updated last summer, many of us perhaps have forgotten to upgrade that old Acrobat Reader version 3 or 4 release that came pre-installed on the PC. So now is as good a time as any to continue the downloads by making sure you have the latest Adobe Acrobat Reader.
SoftMac Xpress 8.2: http://www.emulators.com/download.htm
If you our very own update announcement over the holidays, SoftMac Xpress 8.2 is now available as a free download. SoftMac Xpress 8.2 is fastest release of SoftMac so far, running up to twice as fast as SoftMac 2000 version 8 on the same machine. And being the small efficient piece of code it is, we're happy to say that the SoftMac Xpress download is barely over a megabyte in size. Enjoy!
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