Warming to Action Center

One of the paint point of running any Beta OS (including windows 7) is that one or two drivers can be a bit … flakey. With Vista I blamed a lot of trouble on Nvidia’s drivers during the beta and they only seemed to come right just after release. By comparison their drivers for Windows 7 are an order of magnitude better; though I’ve had issues with my screen going black even though the machine was still responsive on the network.

I recorded a video recently about Windows 7 and I mentioned in it that I like the new option to hide items in the “system tray” as we used to call it or the “notification area” to use its proper name. I said in passing that I had hidden the new “Action Center” and one of the people reviewing the video said “oooh , you shouldn’t really hide that, it’s a really useful tool” . It is, because it gives an easy route to a whole slew of security and maintenance is  including newly discovered fixes. Fine, yes, but unless it has something I want to know it gets banished. I’m starting to change my mind about whether I want Action Center hidden after I missed something which said “update your nvida driver”. Granted the text here isn’t perfect, because it seems to be generic for all 3rd party drivers but I did what it told me to do and I went to Windows Update and well, well there is a new driver which only a few days old. I installed it via Windows update (see second picture) and so far, so good.

But for Action Center I wouldn’t have looked in optional updates – I just leave windows update do its thing, so maybe I’ll let it have the jealously guarded space on the notification area. 

All we need to do now is get Redmond to understand that some non-US English locales spell it Centre. That might be a lost cause though.