For more than a decade, some variation of this screen has been part of the Windows Disk Defragmenter utility:

Well, no more.  The colorful progress window has been banished in Windows Vista. The Disk Defragmenter runs in the background, and the only interface available is the one to change the time it runs or to manually start or stop a defrag.

I remember people who actually used to sit and watch the Windows 95 Defrag progress window, in which little boxes of different colors were shifted around. We’ve come a long way.

What does it mean to a website’s traffic when a story makes it to the front page of Digg? Here’s what happened to this site last week:

That’s quite the decay curve, isn’t it? 

This comparison is beautifully done.

(And no, this one’s not a joke. This is a two-minute compilation that compares the Windows Vista sounds with their XP predecessors. QuickTime or Flash, take your pick.)

… Oh, and be sure to turn your speakers up. The Vista sounds are much softer and less jangly than their XP counterparts. That’s not an artifact of Long’s presentation; that’s how they sound.

Mary Jo Foley leaves Microsoft Watch and Jim Rapoza takes over. Big redesign. Content? Oh, we’re supposed to actually write interesting things?

This review of Windows Media Player 11 is going to give last week’s contender a serious run for Worst. Review. Ever.

Unsubscribed.

My newest post on ZDNet is up.

Last month, I published 10 tweaks for Windows Vista RC1. It got a good response, but it also drew some complaints. “Too basic,” said some critics. “And hey, those aren’t all tweaks.”

OK, fair enough. To satisfy the critics (you know who you are), I present 10 expert tweaks for Windows Vista RC2. No beginner-level stuff here, and I’ve clearly labeled which are tips and which are tweaks.

To see the entire collection of tips and tweaks in order, start here. Or, if you’d prefer to jump directly to whatever interests you, see all 10 on a single quick list and jump directly to the ones that interest you.

I’ve been noticing a lot more spam getting through my server-side filters and also passing through my client-side filters lately. It’s apparently not my imagination:

A significant rise in the global volume of spam in the past two months has security analysts worried that bot nets are increasingly being used by spammers to stymie network defenses erected to curtail bulk e-mail.

[…]

While bulk e-mailers have, in the past, sent unwanted messages from a single server, increasingly the spam emanates from networks of compromised PCs, known as bot nets. The level of junk e-mail has increased almost in lock step with the number of compromised systems used for spam, said David Hart, the administrator for Total Quality Management.

“What is most alarming is that new clients–Internet addresses that we have never seen before and which could be new infections–have tripled since June,” said Hart, who posted a chart tracking the growth on his Web site this week.

The chart is fascinating:

It looks like the surge started on June 11.

Hmmm. Couldn’t have anything to do with this, could it?

Adrian just cut down the list of RSS feeds he reads by about 5%. Of course, he was starting at a crazy high total of 950 feeds. Yow!

Anyway, his example inspired me to cut down my puny list of 225 feeds by a similar amount. In this case that means 10 feeds to unsubscribe from. It turned out to be pretty easy, actually. The first ones I dropped include a bunch that just crank out too many posts, and not enough catch my eye to make it worth sifting through all those posts. Too much noise, not enough signal.

The good news is that each of those sites was cranking out an average of 20 or more posts per day. In at least half of the feeds I deleted, the folder in FeedDemon was filled to capacity, with 200 unread posts.

Now, if I wanted to cut my list from 225 down to 10, I might have kept some of those sites. But my personal preference is to read only places where the quality level is very high. If there’s something on one of those bigger sites that’s relevant to me, I’m confident that a John Walkenbach or a Dwight Silverman or a Scott Hanselman or Raymond Chen or Dori Smith will comment on it. The people on that list are amazingly good at finding stuff I’m interested in, and I’m happy they’re around as filters.

Meanwhile, I feel liberated, having just deleted more than 2000 posts I was never going to read.

One of these days I’ll publish my feed list if anyone’s interested.

… I just noticed that the J-Walk Blog is still in beta:

So visit at your own risk.

Get tinfoil hat. Add frosting. Bake on the Internets for 24 hours.

Anyone who takes this seriously for more than about 10 seconds needs to go take a two-week timeout in some place where they don’t have electricity.

(See also here.)

Over at ZDNet, I’ve just posted Part 1 in a three-part series comparing the leading digital media solutions for the living room. If you’re curious what you get with different DVRs, PC-based software like Beyond TV and Sage TV, and Windows Media Center, check out the feature table and the accompanying post.

Long Zheng surveys the effects of Hurricane Steve on Redmond:

“I think I see Windows Vista… Actually no, just a cloud.”