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Windows Vista Tools - How Good Are They?

Posted 11/01/07 at 12:10:47 AM |  by Mark Soper

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Complete PC Backup and Restore - Bigger Backup File, But Speedy Restore Times

Complete PC Backup and Restore (found in Ultimate and Business editions) performs both tasks creditably, according to Tom's Hardware, which tested it against Symantec's Norton Ghost 12.0 and Acronis True Image 11.0 in a comparison of "Bare Metal" disaster-recovery backup and restore solutions. Although Ghost created the smallest backup file size and True Image performed the fastest backup, Complete PC Backup and Restore provided the fastest restore time, beating Ghost by two minutes and True Image by nine minutes (20 GB data set).

Mark's Take: I've found Complete PC Backup and Restore to be useful both for disaster recovery and for moving a Vista install to another hard disk.

Windows Live Photo Gallery Speeds Past Google Picasa

A veteran user of Google Picasa and Windows Live Photo Gallery (the update to Vista's Windows Photo Gallery) likes the speed of Photo Gallery and its improved transfer features, but prefer's Google's support for dual-display screen savers and ability to select multiple images from different file folders.

Mark's Take: I prefer Windows Live Photo Gallery's editing and tagging features, and like its speed as well.

Windows Movie Maker HD Not So PG About Playing Nicely with Others

Windows Movie Maker HD (aka Movie Maker 6) adds support for HD video input, HD video output, and lots more editing features, but is often crippled by problems with various third-party codecs. Unfortunately, these problems often don't show up until you have your movie ready to output to DVD. If you're running Windows Movie Maker, be careful what you have installed, and check the WindowsMovieMakers.net website for help.

Mark's Take: I haven't had any problems with Windows Movie Maker HD or DVD Maker, but I don't have a lot of third-party codecs running on my Vista system. With the strides Microsoft has made in adding third-party codec support for digital camera RAW files, it would be good to see the same care given to the video side.

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TAGS: 
windows, Software, news, picasa, Windows Vista, Windows Live Photo Gallery, Windows Photo Gallery, Complete PC Backup and Restore
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COMMENTS
avatarcodecs

Submitted by dentaku on Thu, 2007-11-01 09:52

Live Photo Gallery is a huge improvement over the original Photo Gallery especially with the new features of the photo import wizard which should have been part of Vista when it launched.

Codecs are still one of the biggest problems with Windows because it's not visible to the user. Any software can mes with your codecs and unless you're a power user who knows how to use GSPot or some other codec analysis tool you might not ever figure out what the problem is.
DVD Maker and Media Center would crash any time I would try to use a DivX or XviD file. It turns out that DivX still has problems with Vista (what are the DivX people waiting for?) so I un-installed it and installed FFDShow and now it doesn't crash. Movie Maker is still a little unstable with certain files though.

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avatarKeep those codec fixes coming, folks

Submitted by Marcus_Soperus on Thu, 2007-11-01 16:52

Dentaku,

Thanks very much for suggesting tools and fixes for codec problems with DVD Maker and Media Center.

GSpot is available from http://www.headbands.com/gspot/ for 32-bit Vista versions as well as 9x/Me/NT/2000/XP.
FFDShow, which supports playback of a wide range of video and audio formats, is available from http://ffdshow-tryout.sourceforge.net/

Microsoft should certainly make it easier to view installed codecs. With Windows Vista (and XP, with Media Player 11), you must open Windows Media Player, click Help, About WMP, and click the Technical Support Information link to view audio and video codecs, file filters and related information.
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