Universe’s Tech Blog

Trying to get Nero working under Vista is no longer a frustrating hit-and-miss affair. An update just posted to nero.com enhances the current (and rather ridiculously-named) Nero 7 Premium Reloaded edition with a 150MB dollop of Vista-friendly goodness.

It’s been a long time coming. Throughout much of this year, apcmag.com has tracked the status of Nero under Vista beta and RC builds. In many cases, getting them to play nicely together came down to specific build editions of both the application and the OS.

We eventually discovered a way to install Nero on Vista using the cut-down Nero Lite version rather than the full-bottle package.
Then came claims by Alcohol Soft, the maker of the Alcohol 52% and 120% programs, that Microsoft was deliberately blocking third-party burning apps by denying the installation of device drivers which created ‘virtual drives’.

Now the beta testing smoke has cleared and with Vista’s codebase hermetically sealed (well, until the first patch or update), Nero has finally pulled up a chair at the Vista table. And just as well, because despite Vista’s enhancements in this area — including direct DVD burning and support for UDF and ISO images, there are still plenty of reasons not to dump Nero.

Finally, note that throughout this article we resisted the temptation to invoke clichés such as ‘burning ambition’ or puns like ‘Nero fiddles while Vista burns’.

As if to dangle a gold medal of some sort in Intel’s face, AMD is flaunting — no, gloating over — sorry, congratulating Nintendo on its release of the Wii console.

It would seem AMD is squeezing its acquisition of ATI for all the juice it’s worth, as it is an ATI graphics chip that pumps-out Wii’s adequate graphics. Although, no longer ATI, as AMD has imaginatively decided to name the Wii’s GPU the ‘AMD Hollywood’ graphics processor.

One of the unique aspects about the Wii is its focus on fun and gameplay as opposed to the technology within the unit.

Not interested in emphasizing the highly-usable nature of its technology for the Wii, AMD is only too keen to pick up the bulk of the credit for the greater focus on game innovation. It confidently declared the sufficient Hollywood chip “… resulted in Nintendo delivering a brand new level of immersive gameplay and interaction …”

Fans should be praising AMD for implementing such a reasonably-capable graphics chip into their Wii. Such a fine pedigree of gameplay, we hear, wouldn’t have been possible with any other brand.

“Nintendo’s vision is to do something radically new and different with Wii,” AMD says el presidente of Nintendo America said, continuing “… the technology hidden in the system allows us to deliver an intuitive and fun gaming experience in a silent and beautiful form factor,” wrestling back some credit for the Wii’s gameplay.

Thanks to its unique controller, which we hear AMD had no part in, AMD says Nintendo’s bigshot said the Wii “… not only changes how people play games, but redefines how they interact with both the system and their televisions.” This goes against the norm of redefining how you don’t play games.

Cementing its position as making superbly-existent graphics chips for Nintendo, AMD’s Dave ‘ATI-of-yore’ Orton says “Having powered the graphics in the Nintendo GameCube, AMD is delighted to …”

No, seriously, the rest of that quote will put you in a coma.