Monday Tech Reading - tech
(hx) 10:47 PM CEST - Sep,01 2003
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- Mobile Games Selection Grows -
The Nokia 6600 phone supports Bluetooth, which Kirsi (Nokia's senior
manager for games applications) believes will pull more people into
multiplayer gaming. While players can currently play one another over their
normal mobile connection, Bluetooth brings other factors to mobile gaming.
The technology is cheaper and more likely to get a group of people in the same
room playing together, he said. He expects players will help and work more
closely with someone in the same room than someone out of sight. That will
then get people used to the concept and more willing to use their regular
mobile connections for gaming, he said. Nokia will also launch in
October its N-Gage gaming phone, announced in February, and has set up a
publishing unit to develop games for it. The N-Gage looks more like a games
device than a phone, and will be marketed as such, Kirsi said.
- Summer's Greatest Gadgets - Summer comes to a close with the Labor
Day holiday in the United States, but
some of the season's coolest wares will become available in the months ahead.
Japanese technology companies introduced a variety of hot gadgets over the
summer months and expect to ship many of them this fall. Digital cameras with
ever more options for their price are among the new entries. Also watch for
ever smaller digital music players, enhanced by continuing shrinkage in
storage technology.
- Panasonic intros credit card camcorder - Panasonic announced
three products based on SD Card technology, at the Consumer Electronics
Show IFA in Berlin last week. All three devices are small enough to fit
in a trouser pocket: the world's first MPEG2 SD camcorder, the world's
thinnest digital camera, and an all-rounder product with functions for taking
films, taking photos, recording memos and listening to music. The D-snap
camcorder SV-AV100 weighs a mere 156g and is a small as a credit card. It
attains the standards of the current large camcorders with 10x optical zoom
and records in MPEG 2 format (which is also used in DVD videos), and in MPEG 4
format. A 512MB SD memory card can store up to 20 minutes of DVD-quality
video, or 3.5 hours of standard MPEG 4 video. Photo snapshots are made by the
camera in VGA quality (640 x 480 pixels).
- Origami helps cellphone cameras to focus - Picture-messaging
phones may be about to get a whole lot more intrusive. Thanks to a novel and
ultra-cheap micromotor technology,
cellphone cameras should soon be able to zoom and focus with the same
precision as the autofocusing lenses used in expensive stills cameras. 1
Limited of Cambridge, UK, has found a novel way to make a thin sheet of a
piezoelectric ceramic material work like a motor. It can move whatever is
placed on top of it, or it can be rolled into a cylinder to grasp and move a
miniature camera lens.
- Biostar iDEQ 200s SFF Review -
The iDEQ 200S is really clean looking. It's constructed of brushed
aluminum. The front bezel is made of clear plastic with a silver finish
beneath it. The 200S certainly has a style of its own, having more of a sleek,
professional looking exterior rather than flashy and "eye boggling" like some
other (windowed) SFF PCs out there..
- Seasonic Super Tornado 300watt PSU Review - One of the
major features of the Super Tornado is Seasonic s S2FC, or Smart and
Silent Fan Control. S2FC is a temperature controlled fan control that does not
increase the speed of the fan linearly with the temperature of the power
supply, but rather uses a combination of delayed increase in RPM and
exponential increase in RPM to produce the desired result. As you can see in
this Seasonic diagram, the fan speed increases at a faster rate as the power
load on the PSU increases, resulting in a higher heat output and more required
cooling. The fan speed is therefore not directly linked to the load upon the
power supply, but is still indirectly linked.
- Gigabyte Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB with DDR-II - The layout of
the card is to the letter of the ATI specs so you know it's going to work and
work properly at that. After all, if ATI can't get it right themselves, who
else would? The overclocking of the card for a full pressed card was
fantastic. Its software bundle, while small, is enough to keep you occupied
enough till you get yourself some high-end games and take full advantage of
the hardcore VPU you have brought yourself. In all, the
Gigabyte Radeon 9800 Pro 256 has taken it all when it comes to
performance, style, overclocking and a good price tag.
- nForce2 Ultra 400 Mainboard Roundup - Digit-life has published
Nvidia nForce2 Ultra 400 Mainboard Roundup.
- AOpen AK77-400 MAX KT400a review -
The AK77-400 MAX is a feature rich board that includes many of the
computing luxuries in use today. This motherboard comes with integrated LAN,
Serial ATA, Firewire, ATA/133, and AGP 8X.
- EPoX 8KRA2+ Review -
The 8KRA2+ comes with many of the expected features and offers both SATA
and PATA RAID. It has 400MHz FSB and DDR-400 (single channel) support, AGP 8X,
USB 2.0, IEEE 1394, 100Mb LAN, two SATA connectors (VIA controller supporting
RAIDs 0, 1, and JBOD), and four ATA-133 connectors (two off the Highpoint
controller that support RAIDs 0, 1, 0+1, and JBOD and two off the VIA
Southbridge).
- Microscope Pen Review - "Technically, this item is a gadget to me,
since it has absolutely nothing to do with PC's. I will be using this
Microscope Pen to assist me in some examinations in the future, and I can very
easily see where this product can, and should be used.
Continue on as I look at this 100x magnification portable microscope"
- ALi/ULi M1687 K8 chipset Overview (1) -The Athlon 64 (Socket 754)
will be officially announced on 23rd September 2003. ALi which has been quiet
for the past 1 year is back in the market. ALi/ULi offers a long ready
solution for the K8 and it is the M1687 + M1563. M1687 is ALi's new generation
North bridge that offers a high-performance and cost-effective solution for PC
systems. It supports the AMDR K8 Processors. With AGP 1x/2x/4x/8x support,
M1687 provides system designers with enough headroom to interface with
different graphics solutions to fulfill various market requirements. The M1687
introduces HyperTransportt bus, a next generation link bus that can reach up
to 6.4GB/sec to K8 CPU side and up to 1.6GB/sec to our south bridge side in
bandwidth.
- Athlon 3100 SiSoft Memory Benchmark -
Athlon 3100 SiSoft Memory Benchmark using AXP 3100 running 1 x 512M
Corsair CAS 2, 5-2-2 on *** chipset single channel DDR400.
- NV35 supports pixel shader 3.0 - According to TheInquirer, the
NV35,
Geforce FX 5900 Ultra already has support for pixel shader 3.0 but there
is no any driver publicly available that will support it. u The same source
implied that when Nvidia tested pixel shader 3.0 internally, there was a
hardware problem.
- How to Reinstall Windows w/o Losing Your Data - Over time, Windows
loses stability. If you keep a computer for more than two years, at some point
you're going to have to bite the bullet and reinstall Windows from scratch.
But contrary to popular belief, you won't have to reformat your hard drive
(with one exception, discussed below). The bad stuff you need to get rid of is
all in your Windows folder. PCworld have
posted a new guide called "How to reinstall Windows without Loosing your
data".
- The interactive XP, T-Bred and Barton painting guides updated -
The
interactive AMD Athlon XP, T-Bred and Barton painting guides of the
OverClocked inside workshop area are now updated with a new feature to lower
the Vcore down to 1.10 Volt (in 0.025 Volt steps).
- GIMP 1.3.19 -
The GIMP
(GNU/Image Manipulation Program) is a very nice graphics manipulation
application that works on many operating systems, in many languages, on many
file formats and is used for a variety of computer imagery purposes.
- BlindWrite Suite 4.5.6 -
BlindWrite
Suite is the best set of tools to reproduce or clone any CD, even
protected ones. It's the most powerfull tool to create a perfect copy from
your original CD for personal backup use. BlindWrite Suite can also create
CD-audio from MP3, Ogg Vorbis, WAV, WMA, Monkey's Audio and be used with an
CD-ROM emulator like Daemon Tools.
- Magic Utilities 2003 v2.20 -
Magic Utilities (download)
is a cute program designed to make your computer clean and more stable. These
utilities include Uninstller Plus,StartUp Organizer,Process Killer.Magic
Utilities enables you to easily and safely uninstall programs;inspect and
manage the programs that automatically start when your turn on or logon to
your computer;lists and controls all currently running processes(system and
hidden processes are also shown).With a cool and user-friendly interface makes
it easy for anyone to use Magic Utilities.
- Nero 6.0.0.15 and InCD v4.0.5.03, MediaPlayer 1.4.0.6 - A new
Nero v6.0.0.15,
InCD 4.0.5.03 and
MediaPlayer 1.4.0.6 have been
released, no changelog yet :]
- A-Tuner 1.5.44.4523 -
A-Tuner is a
small tool for changing Anti-Aliasing (including all unofficial
modes),Anisotropic Filtering,Vsync MipMap LOD (Level Of Detail) and Bias
settings on your Nvidia card and should work with Nvidia Detonators 23.11 -
45.23 and Win98/ME/2000/XP.
- OpenGL Extension Viewer 2.04 -
This
program displays the vendor name, the version implemented, the renderer
name and the extensions of the current OpenGL 3D accelerator.
- Logitech WingMan Software 4.30 Beta -
Logitech WingMan Software is software for Logitech's Game Controller
series. This is the latest automated self-installer of Logitech WingMan
Software.
- Firmware Fix For Deskstar 75GXP and 60GXP - Anyone who
has one of those drives should download
the firmware update immediately to reduce the risk of hard drive failure
and data loss. (thanks
StorageReview)
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Updated:10:31 PM CEST Jun,20
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