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 Gameguru Mania News - Sep,16 2005 - tech 
R520 benchmarked - tech
(hx) 07:36 PM CEST - Sep,16 2005 - Post a comment / read (5)
The chaps over at Hardware Analysis have posted pretty interesting benchmarks of ATI's R520-powered Radeon X1800 XT and Pro graphics cards. The cards are tested in Half-Life 2, DOOM 3, Far Cry, and Splinter Cell against a number of GeForce 7800s and 6800s, and ATI's own Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition:
Our conclusion is a mixed bag really. The benchmarks were run on release candidate drivers for the Radeon X1800 Pro and XT, hence performance is not likely to change much before launch. On the other hand ATI has been able to wring extra performance from their drivers in the past, so we'd expect them to be able to pull that off here as well. Overall it looks like the Radeon X1800 XT is good match for the GeForce 7800GTX, although in most games the GTX clearly takes the lead. The Radeon X1800 Pro is slightly slower than the GeForce 7800 GT, although not by much. Considering the fact that we've used a top-of-the-line AMD Athlon FX57 processor, with 1GB of OCZ DDR400 memory on the popular Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe motherboard your mileage may vary, we honestly don't know how these cards will do in a lower spec-ed system. With more pipelines, 24 vs. 16, the GeForce 7800 GT and GTX should have the advantage here.

Overall ATI has managed to finally bring the R520 architecture to market, although over 6-months late. If they had launched it earlier they'd have taken the market by storm, much like the GeForce 7800GTX did at launch. However it will now be a tough sell, the MSRP is around $599 for the Radeon X1800 XT, which is up to $150 more expensive than the GeForce 7800GTX which is faster overall. Same applies to the Radeon X1800 Pro, which will retail at $449, you can buy a GeForce 7800GTX for that amount of money, which honestly hands the Radeon X1800 Pro its own behind. For now it is clear that ATI has managed to launch a new line of graphics cards that keeps pace with NVIDIA's, kudos to them for staying competitive.
Western Digital's Caviar RE2 hard drive - tech
(hx) 12:10 AM CEST - Sep,16 2005 - Post a comment
TechReport take a look at Western Digital's Caviar RE2 hard drive that offers more than five times the capacity of the 74GB Raptor. Weighing in at 400GB, the RE2 spins at 7,200RPM, boasts 16MB of cache, supports Native Command Queuing, and is covered by Western Digital's five-year enterprise warranty. Best of all, the drive's cost per gigabyte is actually lower than 400GB desktop drives from other manufacturers. Here's a taster:
In the world of enterprise-ready 7,200-RPM Serial ATA drives, the Caviar RE2 has few competitors and no equals. Our IOMeter results paint a clear picture of the drive's performance under multi-user loads, and while it's not quite as fast as the Raptor, it dominates everything else. Combine that with a high storage density and an affordable price tag that's very un-enterprise-like, and the Caviar RE2 comes out as a definite winner for the workstation, server, and network attached storage applications that it was designed to tackle.

The Caviar RE2 a winner for a whole lot of other systems, too, in part thanks to that affordable price tag. Selling for only $220 online, the drive is less expensive than its closest competitors, Hitachi's Deskstar 7K400 and Seagate's 400GB Barracuda 7200.8. Not only is it cheaper, but the Caviar RE2 also has double the cache of the Hitachi and Seagate 400GB drives. Hitachi's drive lacks a five-year warranty and NCQ support, too.
 Gameguru Mania News - Sep,14 2005 - tech
Evening Tech Reading - Bill Gates takes on Google - tech
(hx) 11:45 PM CEST - Sep,14 2005 - Post a comment / read (1)

SECURITY...

CRIME

  • Fake DVDs worth £1m seized in raid at west London home - They took away £400,000 worth of counterfeit stock and equipment as well as more than 50,000 CDs and DVDs which included Bollywood hits Salaam Namaste and My Wife's Murder. Also seized were 24 multi DVD burners, three photocopiers, three computers, a labelling machine and thousands of blank CDs and DVDs, said police.
  • Mass. teen pleads guilty in ISP, telecom hacking case - A Massachusetts teenager has pleaded guilty in federal court to hacking into the networks of Internet and telephone service providers, stealing someone's personal information and posting it online, according to a statement from Michael Sullivan, U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts.

TECHNOLOGY...

  • Bill Gates takes on Google - Gates said: "So Google is not offering development capabilities yet. Of course, I expect they will. But they're not in that game at all today. In fact, they have this slogan that they are going to organize the world's information. Our slogan is that we are going to give people tools to let them organize the world's information. It's a slightly different approach, based on the platform-ization of all of our capabilities and not thinking of ourselves as the organizer.
  • Microsoft gets into the gadget business - Microsoft announced at PDC today that it is getting into the "gadget" business putting it in direct competition from a feature stand point with Apple's Dashboard and Yahoo's Widgets (Konfabulator). Gadgets, like widgets, are mini-applications that typically provide useful information or perform very simple desktop functionality. However, unlike widgets, they do not require a widget enabling program (i.e. such as Konfabulator, DesktopX Standard, Kapsules, etc.). They are stand-alone programs requiring on additional downloads.
  • Microsoft Demos with 'Expression' Design Tool Suite - Developers get a look at the Expression Studio Suite, which includes 'Acrylic' for graphic design, 'Sparkle' for animation and 'Quartz' for Web design.
  • New Yahoo Mail beta to be unveiled - Yahoo was set to unveil on Wednesday a limited public beta of its new Yahoo Mail service, featuring a new interface more like that of a desktop e-mail application and faster response time.
  • Google Launches New Blog Search Tool - The new search service, called Blog Search, went live on Wednesday in test (beta) form. Users can access it through various Web addresses, including one through Google and one through Blogger.com.
  • AMD64 Longevity Program - AMD has announced the addition of two new processors to its AMD64 Longevity program for embedded systems. The AMD64 Longevity program guarantees processor availability for five years, and currently covers several single- and dual-core Opteron processors.
  • TiVo 7.2 OS adds content protection, blocks transfers, and auto-deletes some shows - PVRblog has a story about TiVo's addition of content protectionin to its latest OS update.
  • AnandTech's R520, RV530 and RV515 Pre-NDA Extravaganza - Despite rumors that R520 may have as many as 32 pixel pipelines, AnandTech maintains that cards will launch with 16 pipes. These R520 cards will carry a Radeon X1800 moniker, and high-end XT and XL variants will be equipped with 512MB of memory. For the mid-range market, cards based on the RV530 will be known as the Radeon X1600 series. Equipped with 12 pixel pipelines, a 128-bit memory bus, and between 128MB and 512MB of memory, these cards are purported to have very low power consumption.
  • Intel gets licenses for both SLI and CrossFire - Intel's forthcoming high-end 975X chipset, which is expected to be launched in the first quarter of next year, will support both Nvidia's SLI and ATI Technologies' "CrossFire" dual-graphics technology, according to sources at Taiwan motherboard makers.

HARDWARE... 

GUIDES...

  • 64-Bit Windows' Performance on Dual-Core - For this first installation of a two-part series investigating the performance of 64-bit Windows, ExtremeTech loaded up a test system with 2GB of RAM, an Athlon 64 X2 4800+, and a bunch of applications and benchmarks in both 64- and 32-bit flavors
  • Microsoft Knowledge Base article to help search the Knowledge Base! - Using keywords and query words in Knowledge Base articles may help you find the content that you are looking for more quickly. This article lists some of the most frequently used keywords and query words in the Microsoft Knowledge Base.
  • MR Tech's Recommended Mozilla/Firefox Blocking Ads Methods - check it out!

SOFTWARE...

  • Microsoft Codename Max - Microsoft Max (Requires WinFX Runtime Components 3.0 Beta 2) lets you make lists of your photos and turn them into beautiful slide shows to share with your family and friends. Max is the codename for Microsoft's flagship application based on WinFX and Microsoft's new user experience.
  • phpMyAdmin 2.6.4 - phpMyAdmin can manage a whole MySQL-server (needs a super-user) but also a single database. To accomplish the latter you`ll need a properly set up MySQL-user who can read/write only the desired database.
  • Firefox 1.6 Alpha 1 - Please note this is a nightly/test version ~ download
  • FileZilla 2.2.16 - FileZilla is a fast FTP and SFTP client for Windows with a lot of features. Fixed bugs: - Fix parsing of URLs of the form ftp://user@host in the quickconnect bar; - Create empty directories if dropping files from Windows Explorer into FileZilla.
  • Macromedia Flash Player 8.0.22.0 - Macromedia Flash Player is the standard for delivering high-impact, rich Web content. Designs, animation, and application user interfaces are deployed immediately across all browsers and platforms, attracting and engaging users with a rich Web experience.
  • Macromedia Dreamweaver 8, Fireworks 8, Flash 8 Trials - download trial versions
  • FastStone Image Viewer 2.25 Beta - FastStone Image Viewer 2.25 (download) is an image browser, viewer, converter and editor with an easy to use interface and a nice array of features that include resizing, renaming, cropping, color adjustments and more.
  • PSP Video 9 1.71 - PSP Video 9 is a free PSP video conversion and management application. It can convert regular PC video files (avi, mpeg, etc) into PSP video files, as well as manage/copy these PSP video files between your PC and PSP.
  • SpeedFan 4.26 - SpeedFan is a freeware program that monitors fan speeds, temperatures and voltages in computers with hardware monitoring chips.
  • Rage3D Tweak CCC v1.1 - Rage3D Tweak CCC is a brand new tweak application that integrates directly into ATI's Catalyst Control Center (CCC) driver application and adds key tweak functions to the existing interface.
  • Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS and Audigy 4 Pro series driver 2.08.0002 WHQL - download - Changelog? We can only guess :(
  • Omega Catalyst 5.8 Drivers - After a long wait, the newest Omega Drivers for ATI have been released. For those of you who aren't familiar with these drivers, they are basically modified versions of the official ATI drivers to include more options and performance optimizations.
 Gameguru Mania News - Sep,13 2005 - tech
ATI's Crossfire technology benchmarks - tech
(hx) 09:11 PM CEST - Sep,13 2005 - Post a comment / read (1)
After months of hype ATI's answer to SLI is nearing release. APC Labs has the scoop on how it perform.

For this first look they have run a limited set of benchmarks focused upon 1280x1024 screen resolution, so chosen because it is the standard resolution for the vast majority of LCD screens on the market. Alongside the dual X850XT cards our test setup used the ECS PA1 MVP Extreme motherboard, Pentium 4 3.73GHz Extreme Edition and 1GB of DDR2-667.
 Gameguru Mania News - Sep,11 2005 - tech
Saturday Tech Reading - tech
(hx) 12:07 AM CEST - Sep,11 2005 - Post a comment

SECURITY...

  • Mozilla offers temporary fix for Firefox flaw - The downloadable fix protects (download) against attacks that take advantage of a new, unpatched flaw that could let attackers secretly run malicious software on users' PCs. The flaw was disclosed late Thursday by security researcher Tom Ferris, sending Mozilla staff into damage-control mode.
  • Securing Mac OS X Tiger - Corsaire has released a guide to Securing Mac OS X Tiger (PDF) which addresses the new security features introduced through Tiger and presents some security good practice guidelines
  • Microsoft Windows CSRSS Local Privileges Escalation exploit - CSRSS is the user-mode part of the Win32 subsystem. Win32.sys is the kernel-mode portion of the Win32 subsystem. An attacker may gain a local elevated privileges by exploiting a vulnerability in CSRSS.

OFF-TOPIC...

TECHNOLOGY...

HARDWARE... 

GUIDES...

  • BIOS Optimization Guide Rev. 8.3 - This guide serves as a repository of knowledge on various BIOS options. It also serves as a guide on how best to optimize your BIOS.
  • ATI Shimmering - The shimmering issue rages on and ATI's new Catalyst 5.8 drivers are no exception.
  • How to avoid of detection of server application on Windows XP SP2 firewall - This trick use only modification of registry keys.Windows Xp SP2 firewall have list of allowed program in register which are not blocked.If you add new key to it,your server (malware or trojane) can run freely.

SOFTWARE...

  • Kernel 2.6.13.1 Final - Linux Kernel (changelog) has been updated again
  • Firefox 1.5 Beta 1 - download  ~ also known as the 1.8 Beta 4 milestone, this is the first beta release of the next major Firefox update and is aimed at testers, extension/theme authors and Web developers.
  • Mozilla Thunderbird 1.5 Beta 1 - Mozilla Thunderbird is a redesign of the Mozilla mail component. In related news, Phoronix has just posted a new article on the beta.
  • QuickTime Alternative 1.61 - QuickTime Alternative 1.61 is released today. This new version is based on QuickTime 7.0.2.120, which adds support for H.264 and more, but it does not support Windows 95, 98, 98 SE and ME any longer.

  • FFDShow MPEG-4 Video Decoder 20050909 - ffdshow is a DirectShow decoding filter for decompressing DIVX movies.

  • Azureus for Windows 2.3.0.5 Beta 23 - Azureus (homepage) is a Java based BitTorrent client that offers multiple torrent downloads, queuing/priority systems (on torrents and files), start/stop seeding options and instant access to numerous pieces of information about your torrents.
  • Shareaza 2.2.0.0 - Shareaza is a Gnutella file sharing program, allowing you to find and share audio, video, images, books, software and more on the net's coolest peer-to-peer network.
  • RivaTuner 2.0 RC 15.7 - Rivatuner is one of the (if not the) best Tweak Utilities available for NVIDIA GeForce and ATI Radeon based videocards.
  • zer0point Catalyst 0.5.8 - Based on The ATI Catalyst 5.8 Drivers ~ download.
  • NGO ATI Optimized Driver v2.5.8 - The NGO ATI Optimized Driver is a tweaked version of the ATI Catalyst driver. The main purpose is to satisfy the users with a better performance and better image quality. The Driver has support for all Radeon cards. This new version adds PCI Latency Tool by Audiotrak.
 Gameguru Mania News - Sep,08 2005 - tech
Thursday Tech Reading - tech
(hx) 04:17 PM CEST - Sep,08 2005 - Post a comment / read (2)

SECURITY...

  • Symantec Patches Security Flaw - Symantec has issued a patch for a vulnerability in its corporate antivirus software that could allow an unauthorized person to access a company's servers. The flaw, in version 9 of its AntiVirus Corporate Edition product, exposes the server login name and password used by the administrator who authorizes updates to the software, Symantec says.
  • Microsoft Windows keybd_event validation vulnerability - As is Known, with the current Microsoft Security Model, applications that share the destkop are able to send messages between them. Every Desktop application is able to obtain the handle of every process executed in the same desktop. This feature and the possibility of any application to emulate a virtual keyboard by sending key strokes, allows every process to send messages and keys as if there were an interactive user.
  • Cisco IOS Firewall Authentication Proxy for FTP and Telnet Sessions Buffer Overflow - The Cisco IOS Firewall Authentication Proxy for FTP and/or Telnet Sessions feature in specific versions of Cisco IOS software is vulnerable to a remotely-exploitable buffer overflow condition. Devices that do not support, or are not configured for Firewall  Authentication Proxy for FTP and/or Telnet Services are not affected. Devices configured with only Authentication Proxy for HTTP and/or HTTPS are not affected. Only devices running certain versions of Cisco IOS are affected. Affected devices are those running IOS versions 12.2ZH and 12.2ZL, 12.3, 12.3T, 12.4 and 12.4T. Users can log-on to their Cisco device and enter the 'show version' command to determine which version of IOS it is running.
  • Internet satellite imagery under fire over security concerns  - Asian governments have expressed security concerns about easy access to detailed satellite images on the Internet, such as those used by rescuers in New Orleans, saying the technology could endanger sensitive sites.

OFF-TOPIC...

  • News Corporation buys game sites for $650 million - IGN Entertainment, the owners of super-popular gaming website IGN.com, has signed a definitive agreement to be bought out by Murdoch's News Corporation. News Corp will pay $650 million for a set of sites. For those not in the know, sites under the IGN network include IGN.com, GameSpy, GameSpy Arena, FilePlanet, TeamXbox, 3D Gamers, Direct2Drive, GameStats.com and a handful of sites under the Vault and Planet networks.
  • Scientists develop 'clever' artificial hand - Scientists have developed a new ultra-light limb that can mimic the movement in a real hand better than any currently available. The new hand, called the 'Southampton Remedi-Hand', can be connected to muscles in the arm via a small processing unit and is controlled by small contractions of the muscles which move the wrist.
  • $1bn pirates - The music industry will push for more than $1 billion in damages after its landmark court victory over internet music pirates Kazaa. The Sydney-based internet file-sharing company has had $30 million of its assets frozen as record companies try to recoup some of the estimated $3 billion lost in pirated music.
  • The BBC releases early videos for public use - The BBC has finally made good on its long standing promise to release its video archives on the internet - for free. Almost 100 clips, mostly from documentaries and science shows, were made available to the UK public for free - with an encouragement to viewers to mix and match the old footage for new creative endeavours.

TECHNOLOGY...

  • ATI Radeon X1800 "R520" - Interestingly, there are 16, 24 and 32 pipes versions but there are only 10 pieces of the 32 pipes versions exist currently. The core clock of the card is 650Mhz+ and memory at 1400Mhz. The R520 card uses 1.26ns GDDR3 memories. The 32 pipes R520 performance will exceed the GeForce 7800GTX. Another quick look at a REV02 sample of ATI's upcoming R520 graphics chip can be found on HKEPC
  • S3 Graphics Announces Chrome20 Series - The Chrome20 series of products use 90nm process technology. S3G have gone for low voltage and cool operating temperatures with Chrome20. They're also claiming the 'highest core clock of any GPU to date'...heh.
  • Logitech Unveils Smart Mouse - The new fangled mouse is capable of two-way communication with the PC, it can inform users when their mouse battery is low, and notify them when they receive an email or instant message. Other features include laser tracking, 10 buttons, volume control and probably too many other things.
  • Hefty hardware requirements for Windows Vista - Hardware vendors are going to love the news that Windows Vista is going to need very beefy hardware to run well. Nigel Page is a strategist with Microsoft Australia. He told APC that Vista would work best on a video card with more than 256MB RAM, 2GB of DDR3 memory and a S-ATA 2 hard drive.
  • Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer webcasts from Microsoft Business Summit - Bill Gates Shares Microsoft's Vision for Helping Midsize Businesses (56 Kbps / 100 Kbps / 300 Kbps)  / Steve Ballmer on Delivering Business Value to Midsize Companies (56 Kbps / 100 Kbps / 300 Kbps)
  • iTunes 5 announced - iTunes 5: Available today the player that has 85% market share globally will come with a new refined look. Users will be able to organise folders of playlists, Sync with Microsoft Outlook for contacts/calendar, parental tags and album reviews amongst the many new features.
  • iTunes Phone announced -  iTunes phone: Available in the US today with Cingular and due to hit globally by the end of September the iTunes Phone (Motorola ROKR) features an iTunes client inside. The phone has quad band GSM, camera, 100 song capacity and instant access to iTunes.
  • Harry Potter iPod announced - Available today the latest addition to the iPod family is the "potter pod". The iPod has the crest engraved on the back and Apple are exclusively distributing Harry Potter audio books via the iTunes Music Store.
  • iPod nano announced - Available today Jobs has announced a new flash based iPod Mini. The iPod nanois equiped with a color display and can support photos, uses a grey click wheel, and is 80 percent smaller in volume than the original iPod. The new device is flash based and will plug-in to existing iPod accessories. The device will include a 14hr battery and will be released in a 4GB version ($249) and a 2GB version ($199).
  • D-Link unveils wireless 'G' DVD player with Flash reader - The D-Link DSM-320RD supports component video, optical digital audio and coaxial digital audio connections. The MediaLounge DVD Player also sports a Multi-format Flash Card Reader. The device can play DVD, DVD±R/RW, Video CD, Kodak Picture CD, Music CD, MP3 and WMA audio files on CD-R/RW.
  • Father of Athlon 64 leaves AMD - Fred Weber, the chief technology officer at AMD and one of the executives often cited as being behind the company's turnaround, is leaving to invest in start-ups.
  • DVD reaches speed barrier - Panasonic and Hitachi-LG Data Storage have introduced 16x DVD-Ram drives for PCs, while Panasonic and Hitachi Maxell have introduced 16x DVD-Ram media. However, this looks to be the upper limit of DVD recording speeds for the time being.

HARDWARE... 

GUIDES...

  • Everything You Need to Know About Chipsets - Everything you need to know about chipsets is covered in this tutorial.
  • PCI Express Bus Tutorial - Everything you need to know about PCI Express bus.
  • Putting together a system for Media Center - Bit-Tech has published a 7-page guide to putting together a self-build system to run Windows Media Center.
  • Benefits of Upgrading Notebook Memory  - With memory being quite cheap at the moment compared to times of the past, now is a good time to consider adding extra memory to your notebook or desktop system.
  • The Different Levels Of RAID & What They Do - Techzone list all the RAID levels available and explain what they do.
  • Audio Restoration 101 - If you have dusty vinyl, crusty cassettes, disco-era 8-tracks, reel-to-reel tapes, or any other music media that need a digital face-lift, fear not; breathing new life into old formats is easier than ever.
  • VoIP 101 - At this point most people have probably heard of VoIP, and many may have used it, but they may not fully understand the basics of this rapidly expanding technology. This Tech Tip will take a look at some of the basic features, modes of operation, and other background information on one of the latest ways technology can be used to connect people.
  • Battlefield 2 Optimization Guide - The range of cards used in the guide is completely different this time around. Battlefield 2 is a very graphically intensive game requiring a fairly powerful CPU, a good amount of memory, and a strong graphics subsystem.

SOFTWARE...

  • PHP 5.0.5 Final - PHP 5.0.5 is now available for download. This version is a maintenance release, that contains numerous bug fixes, including security fixes to vulnerabilities found in the XMLRPC package.
  • Fiddler 1.0.1 - Fiddler is a HTTP Debugging Proxy which logs all HTTP traffic between your computer and the Internet. Fiddler allows you to inspect all HTTP Traffic, set breakpoints, and "fiddle" with incoming or outgoing data. Fiddler is designed to be much simpler than using NetMon or Achilles, and includes a simple but powerful JScript.NET event-based scripting subsystem.
  • Paint.NET 2.2 Alpha 2 - Paint.NET is a photo and image editing tool designed for computers running Microsoft Windows XP or Windows 2000.
  • Remote Printer Manager ($50) - Remote Printer Manager (demo) is a sophisticated network management tool that allows network administrators to add, modify and remove printers on any Windows-based computer on their network.
  • ACDSee 8.0 (shw) - ACDSee (download) digital photo software makes it easy to import, view, organize, print, enhance, share and archive your digital photos.
  • XnView for Windows 1.80.3 - XnView is an efficient multimedia viewer, browser, and converter. It supports more than 400 graphic file formats (PNG, JPEG, TARGA, TIFF, GIF, BMP, and more). This utility also supports animated GIF, multipage TIFF, multiimage icon and MPEG, AVI, WAV, AIFF, and QuickTime files.
  • FastStone Image Viewer 2.24 Beta Build 2005-09-06 - FastStone Image Viewer (download) is an image browser, viewer, converter and editor with an easy to use interface and a nice array of features that include resizing, renaming, cropping, color adjustments and more.
  • QuickTime 7.02 - QuickTime 7 (download) is Apple's cutting-edge digital media software for both Mac and Windows-based computers delivers unparalleled quality for creating, playing and streaming audio and video content over the Internet. Besides playing MPEG-4 and MP3 content, it supports timecode tracks as well as MIDI standards such as the Roland Sound Canvas and GS format extensions
  • Apple iTunes 5.0 - iTunes 5 (download) lets you enjoy all sorts of sounds, from podcasts of your favorite radio shows to new music to bestselling audiobooks.
  • Jet-Audio 6.22 - Jet-Audio (release notes / download) features an impressive home audio system interface, including independent A/V components for Digital Signal Processor, Audio CD Player, Digital Audio (MP3, RA, etc.), MIDI (MID, MOD etc.), and Digital Video (AVI, MPG, MOV, etc.), along with a Mixer and a Remote Controller.
  • DVD Region+CSS Free 5.9.4.0 - DVD Region+CSS Free enables you to watch and copy any region code CSS-encrypted DVD movies on any DVD drive! It fully supports region-protected (RPC2) DVD drives, and does not require any firmware modifications. It will work, even if you can not change the DVD drive's region anymore.
  • ratDVD v0.76 - ratDVD is rapidly becoming popular on the internet. The software takes a full featured DVD movie and puts it into a highly compressed .ratDVD container format file - while preserving all the features of the original DVD. This release adds an ISO Image Plug-In, new playback components and of course some bug fixes.
  • Winamp 5.1 Surround Edition - In this release they have added 5.1 surround sound, aswell as new encoders (ACCPlus & WMA). Also they have added a new playlist generator
  • ZoneAlarm Free 6.0.667.000 - ZoneAlarm includes five interlocking security services that deliver easy-to-use, comprehensive protection. Unlike any other security utility, it incorporates a firewall, Application Control, an Internet Lock, dynamically assigned Security Levels and Zones. Combined, these elements yield the strongest security possible
 Gameguru Mania News - Sep,06 2005 - tech
Microsoft Unveils Laser Gaming Mouse - tech
(hx) 09:11 PM CEST - Sep,06 2005 - Post a comment
Microsoft today unveiled its first wired laser mouse, outfitted with enhanced gaming performance features as part of its new Game Precision Series. Word is: "delivering superior performance and control, Microsoft Laser Mouse 6000 is sure to give every gamer an edge when battling on the PC."
Microsoft's first wired laser mouse delivers maximum precision and superior control for work and play on the PC. Its ergonomic design provides outstanding comfort, and the advanced laser technology delivers superior accuracy and performance, making this mouse ideal for everyday use on a desktop.

Microsoft Laser Mouse 6000 has advanced software features that include a Precision Booster, enabling users to shift between ultrafast speed and precision control for targeting, and a Gaming Toggle that lets users easily switch between favorite weapons or program frequently used action sequences -- all with the touch of a button.

The thin, flexible cord is great for agility and movement -- the closest feeling to wireless while still having a wire. The scroll wheel with detents is great for desktop navigation and gaming, for amazingly accurate in-game weapons changing and scrolling. In addition, productivity-boosting features including a new Magnifier tool, for real-time enlargement and editing, deliver maximum efficiency on the PC.

Consistent Game Control
Joining the Game Precision Series later this year will be the new Xbox 360 Controller for Windows, a wired gaming controller that works with Windows XP-based PCs and the new Xbox 360 system to deliver a consistent gaming entertainment experience across Microsoft's gaming platforms.
The new Laser Mouse 6000 will be widely available by October 2005, and the Xbox 360 Controller for Windows will be widely available in November 2005 for the following estimated retail prices: Laser Mouse 6000: $54.95 (U.S.), Xbox 360 Controller for Windows: $44.95 (U.S.).
 Gameguru Mania News - Sep,05 2005 - tech
Monday Tech Madness - tech
(hx) 11:38 PM CEST - Sep,05 2005 - Post a comment / read (3)

SECURITY...

  • Arabic Trojan butts into porn surfing  - Security experts today issued a warning after detecting a malicious Trojan horse which tries to interrupt the surfing of adult websites by displaying messages from the Koran. The Yusufali-A Trojan monitors users' surfing habits by examining the title bar of the active window. If the Trojan finds a key word such as 'teen', 'xx', 'sex' or 'penis', it minimises the window so that the user cannot see its content and displays a message from the Koran instead.
  • New technology may increase ID theft, scientist says - Identity cards and chip and pin technology for credit cards will force fraudsters to be more creative and are unlikely to alleviate the problem.
  • OpenSSH Two Security Issues - Two security issues have been reported in OpenSSH, which can be exploited malicious users to gain escalated privileges or bypass certain security restrictions.
  • mod_ssl "SSLVerifyClient" Security Bypass Security Issue - A security issue has been reported in mod_ssl, which potentially can be exploited by malicious people to bypass certain security restrictions
  • OpenSSH 4.2 - OpenSSH 4.2 has been released. OpenSSH is a 100% complete SSH protocol version 1.3, 1.5 and 2.0 implementation and includes sftp client and server support.

TECHNOLOGY...

  • ECS Editors' Day Coverage - @ Bjorn3D / @ Legit Reviews
  • Via Announces the P4M800 Pro - Via announced the launch of the Via P4M800 Pro chipset, providing affordable and scalable IGP (Integrated Graphics Processor) solutions, with multimedia and connectivity features for the mainstream and fast-growing entry-level PC markets
  • Intel's 65nm Pentium Extreme Edition to get 1066MHz FSB - Intel's dual-core Pentium Extreme Edition will gain support for the chip maker's 1066MHz frontside bus when it enters the 65nm era, if a company roadmap slide leaked onto the Web is to be believed.
  • Europe is not ready for HD TV - So why has HDTV been so long in taking off in Europe? Thomas Wrede, VP of product management for SES Astra, speaking at the HDTV DisplayForum in Berlin argues that consumers need confidence that new HDTV devices can really display high defiition pictures and are fully interoperable. This was far from clear two years ago, when existing HDTV in Europe via satellite had a vast difference in quality on some of the displays, with apparently HD ready devices only having around 576p resolution or below.
  • Kazaa hit by file-sharing ruling - An Australian court has ruled that the popular file-swapping program Kazaa urged its users to breach copyright. The Federal Court ordered Kazaa's owners, Sharman Networks, to modify the software to prevent further piracy.
  • Macrovision Attacks P2P Networks - The recording, movie and game industries are hoping to disrupt activities on P2P networks by flooding them with fake files and corrupted search results: Welcome to the world of Hawkeye - Macrovision's latest weapon in the War on File-Sharing.
  • Microsoft and Google: Anything you can do...- UK newspaper The Times has reported that Microsoft has bought Teleo, a provider of Internet telephony software and services. Microsoft plans to 'incorporate and expand' on Teleo products, linking them into the software behind its MSN portal. Microsoft could now add 'click-to-call' features to Outlook or Internet Explorer, its Internet browser, so users can call online contacts.
  • Skype gets first mobile users - Skype has signed its first ever deal with a mobile phone company in a move that integrates VoIP calls with a traditional cellular mobile phone service.
  • Mini-projector Prototype Developed - Epson has announced that it has succeeded in developing a prototype postcard-sized mini-projector using an LED light source. With a footprint of 13.8 by 10.3 centimeters, the 500-gram prototype can fit into the palm of a hand.

HARDWARE... 

GUIDES...

SOFTWARE...

  • OpenSSH 4.2 - OpenSSH 4.2 has been released. OpenSSH is a 100% complete SSH protocol version 1.3, 1.5 and 2.0 implementation and includes sftp client and server support.
  • FreePortScanner v2.0 - Free Port Scanner (download) is a small, fast, easy-to-use and robust port scanner for the Win32 platform. You can scan ports on fast machines in a few seconds and can perform scan on predefined port ranges.The tool is designed with a user-friendly interface and is easy to use. FileZillla Server 0.9.10 - FileZilla Server is a reliable FTP server.
  • KeePass Password Safe 1.02 - KeePass Password Safe (download) is a free/open-source password safe or manager which helps you to manage your passwords in a secure way. You can put all your passwords in one database, which is locked with one master key or a key-disk.
  • BSPlayer 1.36 Build 825 - BSplayer is a Windows player that plays back all kinds of media files ( avi / mpg / asf / wmv / wav / mp3...) and specialises in video and divx playback
  • DHzer0point 0.7803 (based on the Nvidia 7803 Beta Drivers) - The DHzer0point philosophy is Quality First, Last and Always. Image quality, Driver quality and Performance quality. You're games should run as fast and look as good as possible, with as few problems as you've ever seen.
 Gameguru Mania News - Sep,03 2005 - tech
NVIDIA ForceWare Drivers v78.01 - tech
(hx) 10:13 PM CEST - Sep,03 2005 - Post a comment
A new WHQL Forceware graphics drivers v78.01 (Win2k/XP ~ 20.6MB) are available for download from the official NVIDIA download page. These new drivers add support for the GeForce 6200 with TurboCache, NVIDIA PureVideo, and NVIDIA SLI Microsoft DirectX 9.0c and OpenGL 1.5 and resolves problem with overclocking not working when running GPUs in SLI mode. These new drivers add support for GeForce 6500 only. There are no additional driver updates in 78.01 since 77.77.
Radeon X800 GT Roundup - tech
(hx) 02:13 AM CEST - Sep,03 2005 - Post a comment
Bit-Tech has tested four Radeon X800 GT solutions (PowerColor, Saphire, HIS, BFGTech) that are available to buy today - with the exception of the final card, the All-In-Wonder X800 GT, which is an engineering sample from ATI.
First off, PowerColor's GameFX X800 GT 256MB is based on the R480 core, and as such it overclocks pretty well - we found that it was 20MHz faster than the fastest we could get either R423-based card to. However, the 2.0ns memory overclocked poorly in comparison to the other cards. The card is a solid Radeon X800 GT implementation with a nice cooling solution that should allow you to attain some reasonably good clock speed increases. You get a free game along with most of the required adapters - we'd hope that PowerColor will consider adding a second DVI to VGA adapter in to the bundle, as it's a missing link in an otherwise solid product.

Sapphire's Hybrid Radeon X800 GT 256MB is let down by a poor cooling solution - it overclocked reasonably well considering the poor cooler, but at anything above 485MHz core, you will be greeted with the fan spinning at full speed. Admittedly, it is not all that loud, but it is louder than any of the other cards on test here. If we disregard the cooler, Sapphire have implemented a very solid card that performs as expected at its default clock speeds - the bundle is good, there's a free game and the PCB is a funky blue/green colour.

HIS' Radeon X800 GT IceQ II iTurbo 256MB is another great Radeon-series implementation by the company from Hong Kong. There are questions as to whether the cooling solution will appeal to everyone and you can't help but think it is slightly excessive on this card. Having said that, it's quiet and if you've got the room for a two slot cooler you shouldn't look much further than this card.
 Gameguru Mania News - Sep,02 2005 - tech
Friday Tech Reading - tech
(hx) 04:09 PM CEST - Sep,02 2005 - Post a comment

SECURITY...

  • Virus Top Twenty for August 2005 - NetSky.q and Mytob.c have been fighting for first place in our ratings for several months now. These worms are very different: they exploit different vulnerabilities and were created a year apart. NetSky.q was fighting for supremacy against Mydoom and Bagle versions: judging by the results, NetSky seems to have won this war.
  • Phone virus spreads through Scandinavian company - A mobile phone virus recently hit a small company in Scandinavia and spread from one handset to another, according to security vendor F-Secure Corp. It was the first time F-Secure has seen a mobile virus make serious headway into an enterprise after showing up on an employee's phone, said Ero Carrera, an antivirus researcher at Helsinki, Finland-based F-Secure. The outbreak lasted about a day as dozens of employees received the virus and about 20 of them opened it on their phones, causing it to spread, according to a Web log entry on F-Secure's site.
  • IIS Information Disclosure - It is possible to remotely spoof the "SERVER_NAME" Microsoft Internet Information Server 5.0, 5.1 and 6.0 server variable by doing a modified HTTP request. Thus potentially revealing sensitive ASP code through the IIS 500-100.asp error page, the spoof also opens up a potential range of exploits in third party web applications and web services.
  • [!] Update for Windows XP (KB897663) - Install this update (direct link) to ensure that a firewall exception created via the registry (yesteday story) is listed in the Windows Firewall interface the same as if the exception was created in the interface itself. After you install this update, you may have to restart your computer.
  • A Wormy Zen - Creative has shipped approximately 3,700 Zen Neeons that are infected with a worm in their file system. According to the company's site, the problem has affected the 5GB Creative Zen Neeon with serial numbers between 1230528000001 and 1230533001680.
  • Symantec Anti-Virus Tool Puts Server Passwords in Danger - Symantec is investigating a report of a security hole in a version of its corporate anti-virus product that could expose sensitive username and password information, the company acknowledged. The reported security hole affects Symantec Anti Virus Corporate Edition Version 9 and could allow an attacker or nonprivileged user to obtain sensitive server log-in information. Details of the vulnerability were posted on the Bugtraq mailing list Wednesday.
  • Fake Yahoo site phishes for identities -  A web site designed to look like an official Yahoo service offering free games, but is most likely designed to facilitate ID theft, has been discovered by Internet security firm Trend Micro.
  • DVD Jon hacks Media Player file encryption - Norway's best known IT expert, DVD Jon, has hacked encryption coding in Microsoft's Windows Media Player, opening up content broadcast for the multimedia player to alternative devices on multiple platforms.Jon Lech Johansen has reverse engineered a proprietary algorithm, which is used to wrap Media Player NSC files and ostensibly protect them from hackers sniffing for the media's source IP address, port or stream format. He has also made a decoder available.

TECHNOLOGY...

  • Billion-Dollar Baby Dot-Coms? Uh-Oh, Not Again - Jim Breyer, a top Silicon Valley venture capitalist, knows that the $12.2 million his firm paid for a modest stake in Facebook, an online service immensely popular with the college set, is a lot of money.  So he's not surprised that some are pointing to that deal as proof that inflation is back in the venture world - a development that can't help but stir memories of the late 1990's.
  • Virgin launches new digital music service - Sir Richard Branson today appeared in London via a hologram recording beamed to his flagship store as he launched Virgin's new digital music download service in the UK.
  • Gateway Ships Easy-Care PCs - The new systems are available in several configurations on Gateway's Web site. For example, the S-5000S desktop costs $449 with Intel's Celeron D 331 processor, 256MB of DDR2 SDRAM, a 40GB hard drive, and a CD-RW drive.
  • Toshiba May Delay HD-DVD Launch - Toshiba is reviewing the launch schedule for HD-DVD, a next-generation optical disc format for high-definition video, and could delay its U.S. launch until sometime next year, it says.
  • T-Mobile EDGE Network Nearly Complete - T-Mobile today said they have already launched EDGE data on 90% of their GPRS network. Yesterday changes on the carrier's website revealed they expected to complete their EDGE network by the end of September.
  • Cordless videophone for broadband - Philips is to launch a cordless home videophone designed for making live video and Voice over IP calls via broadband Internet. The VP5500 looks like a type of DECT phone, but works by sending and receiving wifi-signals to and from an ADSL or cable modem. The phone, which cannot be used for regular GSM calls, has an integrated VGA video camera capable of rotating through 240-degrees so that users can see what they are filming. The Privacy Cam Key ensures privacy, and users can easily select between just voice or video calling.
  • Microsoft to Stop Releasing Services for Unix -  Microsoft will stop releasing any new versions of Services for Unix - from what the article hints at, Microsoft wants Unix interoperability integrated into the OS. Microsoft says that this integration couldn't be done with past architectures.
  • Firefox 1.5 beta due next week - Firefox 1.5 Beta 1 will be available next Thursday, according to a posting in the section of the foundation's Web site devoted to developer news.
  • World's First Built-In Wi-Fi -Enabled Digital Cameras - Nikon is redefining the digital camera shooting experience with the announcement of two new revolutionary Wi-Fi enabled models. The Coolpix P1 and P2 are the world's first built-in Wi-Fi-enabled (IEEE802.11b/g) digital cameras to hit the marketplace
  • Philips to unveil "rollable display" at IFA 2005 - Readius is the world's first prototype of a functional electronic-document reader that can unroll its display to a scale larger than the device itself. With four gray levels, the monochrome, 5-inch QVGA (320×240 pixels) display provides paper-like viewing with a high contrast ratio for reading-intensive applications, including text, graphics, and electronic maps. Using a bi-stable electrophoretic display effect from E-Ink, the display consumes little power and is easy to read, even in bright daylight. Once the user has finished reading, the display can be rolled back into the pocket-size (100×60×20 mm) device.
  • BFG to make PhysX cards - AGEIA has announced that BFG Technologies will build physics cards based on the PhysX PPU.

HARDWARE... 

GUIDES...

SOFTWARE...

  • DTCPing.exe 3.0 - This tool is designed to assist with troubleshooting MS DTC Firewall Issues.
  • MS Products Key Finder v1.0 - This little utility will let you find the CD-Keys (download) of some of Microsoft products installed on your computer. This tool comes handy when you lose your CD cover and there is no way to know CD-Key.
  • WinAmp 5.1 Final - Nullsoft Winamp (download full / lite) is a fast, flexible, high-fidelity media player for Windows. Winamp supports playback of many audio (MP3, OGG, AAC, WAV, MOD, XM, S3M, IT, MIDI, etc) and video types (AVI,ASF,MPEG,NSV), etc. This new version includes CodingTechnologies AACPlus encoder.
  • JetAudio Basic v6.2.2 - JetAudio (download free basic version) is integrated, multimedia software made of a single compact rack. Not only does it play various music and video files, it also has features such as CD burning, recording, and conversion to other file formats. You can create your own Internet broadcast by using JetCast, provided with JetAudio, and you can play all major file formats, including WAV, MP3, MP3Pro, OGG, WMA, MPEG, AVI, WMV, MIDI, RM, and video and audio CD tracks.
  • Fresh UI v7.42 - Fresh UI is the fresh solution for configuring and optimizing Windows.
  • DVDFab Decrypter 2.9.3.8 - DVDFab Decrypter - previously named DVDFab Express (Free Edition) - is a simple version of DVDFab Express.
  • CleanCache 3.1 - CleanCache is a free, very powerful Internet Explorer 6.0, Mozilla, Netscape, Firefox and Windows 2000/XP cleaner.
  • Win32Pad 1.5.9 - Win32Pad (download) is a feature filled text editor that is written with a programmer in mind.
  • WinZip 10.0 Beta - The first WinZip 10.0 beta adds Explorer style view Navigate your Zip files in the familiar Explorer-style view, making it much easier to work with large, multi-folder archives and  improves compression.
  • Skype 1.4.0.47 Beta - A new beta is out.
  • XTreme-G Drivers - TweaksRUs released two XTreme-G drivers sets: XG 77.56-HD based on nVidia Forceware 77.56 WHQL and XG 78.11-HD based on Forceware 78.11.
 Gameguru Mania News - Aug,31 2005 - tech
Wednesday Tech Madness - Opera for free! - tech
(hx) 06:38 PM CEST - Aug,31 2005 - Post a comment

SECURITY...

TECHNOLOGY...

  • MSN Toolbar Roaming Favorites First Look - Released to beta testers earlier today, the MSN Toolbar Roaming Favorites Add-In Beta 1 is Microsoft's first attempt at allowing users to access their internet bookmarks (a.k.a. Favorites) remotely without having to be signed up to the MSN Internet service. Because the MSN Toolbar is free, anyone will be able to install this addition once it's released.
  • Hollywood, Microsoft align on new Windows - Although ordinary MP3 files and DVDs will play without any difference, the deep changes in the way the operating system handles some entertainment content will come with costs. The most obvious of these may be the risk of compatibility problems between some older monitors or TVs and Vista computers, particularly when trying to play high-quality video. Vista may also make it harder to do some casual copying, such as recording Internet audio.
  • Valve Names Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Express Edition the Preferred Development Environment for "Half-Life 2" Modifications - Microsoft announced that Valve has named the upcoming Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Express Edition as the preferred development environment for hobbyist Windows developers creating modifications for Source, the engine on which "Half-Life 2" is built.
  • Nokia Releases New N-Gage Arena Launcher for Global Gaming - Nokia today announced that it has released a new version of the N-Gage Arena launcher for the over 400,000 valued N-Gage Arena members. The new version 2.5 includes new features and functionality, as well as updates to the existing services. N-Gage Arena members can now download a free copy of the new launcher at http://arena.n-gage.com/launcher
  • T-Mobile MDA Pro now shipping - Brimming with features, the MDA Pro measures in at a considerable 128 x 81 x 25 mm and 285 g with a clamshell form factor which opens to allow access to its thumbboard and 65K colour display with a resolution of 640 x 480 pixels. The device can be used in either palmtop or tablet configurations, as the screen half swivels 180 degrees and closes to cover the thumbboard.
  • Creative awarded MP3 player interface patent  - Creative has been awarded a patent for an MP3 player interface similar to that of Apple's iPod.
  • Cisco adds 'self-healing' tech to Cat 6500 - Cisco has unveiled plans to rejig the software on its flagship enterprise switch, the Catalyst 6500, to support patching and updating of sub-sections of the switch's operating system without having to schedule downtime.
  • ATI R580 taped out - The R520 chip is delayed for a whole quarter now and this has given ATI enough time to prepare for its next step, the R580 chip. The R580 is done by a separate team from the one making R520, with both teams working independently. The R580 won't be just a clock speed upgrade. It will be a slightly different chip with some marchitectural differences but we don’t know all the details yet.

HARDWARE... 

GUIDES...

SOFTWARE...

  • Free Opera Registration Key until 12 a.m. August 31 - Opera celebrates 10 years, giveaways free registrations just for one day!
  • Kernel 2.6.13 Final - Linux Kernel 2.6.13 has been released, the usual bunch of minor fixes and updates included.
  • OpenOffice 2.0 Beta 2 - OpenOffice.org 2.0 sports a redesigned interface and better interoperability with other file formats, including Microsoft Office.
  • Yahoo! Toolbar for Firefox 1.0.1 - download
  • Google Talk 1.0.0.66 Beta - Google Talk is a lightweight Jabber-based instant messaging client with voice capabilities. Google Talk is easy and intuitive to use. All you need to make free calls is an Internet connection, a microphone, and a speaker.
  • CCleaner 1.23.160 - CCleaner (download) is a freeware system optimization and privacy tool. It removes unused files from your system - allowing Windows to run faster and freeing up valuable hard disk space. It also cleans traces of your online activities such as your Internet history.
  • FastStone Image Viewer 2.23 Beta Build 2005-08-31 - FastStone Image Viewer (download) is an image browser, viewer, converter and editor with an easy to use interface and a nice array of features that include resizing, renaming, cropping, color adjustments and more.
  • Paint.NET v2.2 Alpha 1 - Paint.NET (download) has many of the powerful features that expensive commercial applications have, including the ability to use layers.
  • PhotoFiltre 6.1.3 - PhotoFiltre (download) is a complete image retouching program. It allows you to do simple or advanced adjustments to an image and apply a vast range of filters on it.
  • DVD Rebuilder 0.94 Free - This tool helps you to do a full dvd backup(movie, extras, menus) of your DVD9s to one DVDR using one of the best video encoder available, CinemaCraft Encoder.
  • 3d Traceroute 2.1.8:18 - 3d Traceroute is a replacement for your ping plotters and traceroute programs. It is a full blown three dimensional traceroute program.
  • TightVNC for Windows 1.3dev7 - TightVNC is a client/server software package allowing remote network access to graphical desktops. You may allow yourself to access your machine from everywhere provided that your machine is connected to the Internet. It is optimized to work over slow network connections such as low-speed modem links. Can work remotely almost in real time in most environments.
  • DNA-Force 2.0.7777 - These are modified NVIDIA ForceWare drivers for Windows 2000 & XP. Modified drivers simply means that the author takes official or beta drivers from the manufacturer and starts to tweak them for either better image quality and or performance.
 Gameguru Mania News - Aug,28 2005 - tech
Sunday Tech Madness - tech
(hx) 07:48 PM CEST - Aug,28 2005 - Post a comment

SECURITY...

  • Suspected computer worm authors arrested, FBI says - Authorities in Morocco and Turkey have arrested two men for unleashing computer worms that disrupted networks across the United States last week, the FBI said on Friday. Farid Essebar, 18, of Morocco, and Atilla Ekici, 21, of Turkey, are believed to have been responsible for the Zotob worm that hit the Internet less than two weeks ago, along with predecessors called Rbot and Mytob released earlier, the FBI said.
  • Simple PHP Blog File Upload and User Credentials Exposure - Simple PHP Blog suffers from insecure default permissions and lack of validation on uploaded images. Proof of concept code included.
  • Web of crime: Internet gangs go global - Many intelligent, tech-savvy criminals now "work as mercenaries for the highest bidder," says Tom Kellerman, until recently a specialist in data risk management for the World Bank. He calls organized Web crime "the cocaine of the new millennium," likening its mystique of lawlessness and easy money to that surrounding drug trafficking in the United States during the 1980s.

TECHNOLOGY...

HARDWARE... 

GUIDES...

  • $2000 Q3-05 system guide - HardOCP took a $2000 budget and applied it to four different build scenarios.
  • Recording and Producing Your Podcast - THG explains how to record and produce your own podcasts. Podcasting allows you to convey your message to a wide audience in a personal way.
  • The Definitive BIOS Optimization Guide Revision 8.2.2 - Adrian Rojak has updated his premier BIOS optimization guide.
  • Trialling Microsoft Windows XP x64 - What is the difference between Microsoft Windows XP and Microsoft Windows XP x64? What are the benefits? How compatible is it with hardware and software? These questions and more, in this article.
  • Windows 64bit Compatibility Guide - Check it out!

SOFTWARE...

  • First Debian/kFreeBSD Live-CD Appears - The first Live-CD based on Debian GNU/kFreeBSD has appeared. Its name is Ging (for Ging Is Not Ging) and it includes a GNOME 2.10 desktop, Abiword, and a complete toolchain with gcc 4.0.
  • MySQL 4.1.14 - MySQL (download / changelog) is the world`s most popular open source database, recognized for its speed and reliability.
  • Longhorn Visual Styles Pack 3.0 - TCMagazine have posted working download link
  • FastStone Image Viewer 2.22 - FastStone Image Viewer 2.22 (download) is an image browser, viewer, converter and editor with an easy to use interface and a nice array of features that include resizing, renaming, cropping, color adjustments and more.
  • Anti Trojan Elite 3.1.9 - Anti Trojan Elite is a trojan/keylogger remover.
  • AutoHotkey 1.0.37.07 - Customize your keyboard, joystick and mouse with an open source automation and hotkey utility that is backward compatible with AutoIt.
  • nLite 1.0 beta 6 - Works for every version of Windows XP installation, tested with SP2 build 2180. To avoid confusion, this is for pre-installation, not like XPlite which is post installation customizer.
  • Free Download Manager 1.9 Build 334 - Free Download Manager (download) is a full-featured download accelerator and manager. It is absolutely free! Using this software product you can easily download a list of files and whole web sites from any remote server via HTTP, HTTPS and FTP.
  • FlashGot 0.5.9.9 - FlashGot (download) is a free Mozilla/Firefox extension, meant exploit the popular FlashGet download manager.
  • Skype 1.3.0.66 - Skype (download / release_notes) is the next phenomenon from the people who brought you KaZaA. Just like KaZaA, Skype uses P2P (peer-to-peer) technology to connect you to other users – not to share files this time, but to talk for free with your friends.
  • Yahoo! Messenger 7.0.0.437 - download
  • K-Lite Codec Pack 2.53 - The K-Lite Codec Pack is a free collection of codecs and related tools. Codec is short for Compressor-decompressor. Codecs are needed for encoding and decoding (playing) audio and video. The very user-friendly installation is fully customizable, which means that you can install only those components that you want.
  • Hmonitor 4.2.2.1 - Hmonitor has much more functions than MotherBoard Monitor, for example, including thermocontrol features and COM/PerfMon API support.
  • ATITool 0.25 Beta 4 - ATITool is an overclocking utility designed for ATI video cards.
  • Intel Chipset Installation Utility 7.2.1.1006 - The Intel Chipset Software Installation Utility (mirror1 / mirror2) installs to the target system the Windows* INF files that outline to the operating system how the chipset components will be configured. This release adds Intel® Lakeport Chipset & Intel Glenwood Chipset & Intel Mukilteo Chipset support.
  • Creative Labs X-Fi drivers - For those who may have misplaced the Sound Blaster X-Fi Installation CD. This package includes updates and fixes for Sound Blaster X-Fi
  • NVIDIA SVX StarStorm (77.77) - These are modified NVIDIA ForceWare drivers for Windows 2000 & XP. Modified drivers simply means that the author takes official or beta drivers from the manufacturer and starts to tweak them for either better image quality and or performance. Please bare in mind that the driver manufacturer, in this case NVIDIA, does not support drivers like these. You use them at your own risk.
  • Forceware 78.01 Win2000/XP WHQL (BETA) - The driver is compatible with GeForce Series 6 and 7 graphics cards. The drivers have been recompressed to save on file-size as they where 27 MB big. They are now 18 MB. Of course these drivers are WHQL certified yet to be considered beta.
  • 56x BIOS and 10x Firmware updates - Lot's of new motherboard BIOS updates from last week.
 Gameguru Mania News - Aug,27 2005 - tech
G70 in texture shimmer hell? - tech
(hx) 01:49 AM CEST - Aug,27 2005 - Post a comment / read (2)
There have been a couple of articles that have cropped up on the web (thanks Bit-Tech) that are discussing issues with poor filtering quality on NVIDIA's GeForce 7 series video cards. An article on ComputerBase (translation: here) notes some irregularities in the texture filtering algorithm used in the current drivers on GeForce 7800 GTX. These texture issues do appear to vary from game to game and system to system, with some games appearing fine and some clearly having issues  There's also a second article over on 3DCenter, which shows some comparison videos of the shimmering - they're pretty large, but worth checking out if you want to understand what is going on:
ATI, with its Radeon X800, shows: Even with activated "optimizations" (meaning quality reduction), there are no shimmering textures. While there is no full trilinear filtering used, this can not be noticed so quickly. Even though ATI's texture filtering hardware does not compute as exactly as a GeForces', the overall image quality is better, for there are not as many questionable "optimizations." Angle dependency when using AF, however, should not be considered as a feature of modern graphic cards any more, ATI's advertising speaking of "High Definition" gaming can thus be seen as an unfulfilled promise straight from the marketing department. At least, ATI shows that the scene in the video does not have to include texture shimmering.

Nvidia, with its current 7800 series, offers graphic cards that can not be recommended to lovers of texture quality–even though texel performance was increased by a factor of 2.5 compared to the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra! Added to the angle dependency (inspired by ATI's R300), there is now the tendency to texture shimmering in addition. The GeForce 6800 (or GeForce 6600) has to be configured to use "High Quality" to circumvent texture shimmering as much as possible. With the 7800, this seems to be useless; even when using "High Quality", the new chip tends to texture shimmering. The old Nvidia GeForce FX shows nearly perfect textures, though.
What's going on? NVIDIA need to get the 80s out the door and fix this problem, quick!
 Gameguru Mania News - Aug,26 2005 - tech
Intel Branding Media Center PCs as "Viiv" - tech
(hx) 02:35 AM CEST - Aug,26 2005 - Post a comment / read (1)
At the second day of the IDF 2005, Intel introduced Intel Viiv (pronounce vive) technology designed to enrich consumers' enjoyment of digital entertainment. These systems will be small form factor devices designed to boot nearly instantly after initial startup, thanks to Intel's Quick Resume technology. All VIIV PC's come with a remote control, require Windows XP MCE along with a specific Intel chipset, and will feature dual core processors for fast encoding of captured media.

The chaps over at AnandTech sat down with Intel and got more information on their new VIIV digital home platform:
For a laptop to be called a Centrino it must feature three basic components: a Pentium M processor, the appropriate Intel chipset and the appropriate wireless solution. For a desktop to be called a VIIV, it must meet a number of hardware requirements:

1) It must use either a Pentium D, Pentium Extreme Edition or Pentium M (Yonah) processor. All of which are dual core, but in the future dual core may not necessarily be a requirement.

2) It must use either a 945G, 945P or 955X chipset or Intel's Calistoga chipset for Yonah.

3) It must use either an Intel PRO/1000 PM NIC or a PRO/100 VE/VM NIC. Wireless is not a requirement.

4) Intel HD Audio is a requirement, as well as the appropriate jacks (either 6 RCA connectors or a single SPDIF, no word on whether the latter supports 5.1 channel audio).

5) All VIIV PCs must come with a remote control that works with Windows XP Media Center Edition and can work with the media shell used on the system by default (e.g. MCE's 10 ft UI).

Along with those hardware requirements, the following software requirements are in place:

1) All VIIV PCs must use Intel's driver stack, including HD Audio, RAID, Graphics (if applicable) and LAN drivers. They must also use Intel's Instant on/off drivers (more on this in a moment).

2) The system must run Windows XP Media Center Edition (and obviously meet its requirements).

3) The system must feature Intel's network software, which when used with VIIV certified network products you are able to setup a home network or configure any VIIV certified network device entirely from the remote control.

4) All VIIV PCs must use Intel's Integrated Media Server software. The media server software features a transcoding engine that will automatically transcode audio and video from a number of "popular" formats to a DLNA compliant format for transmission to digital media adapters, portable devices, etc... without worrying about maintaing compatible codecs. The media server software will also find all content on your network and give you access to it from the VIIV PC, even if you are remotely accessing the VIIV PC.
 Gameguru Mania News - Aug,25 2005 - tech
Evening Tech Reading - tech
(hx) 02:38 AM CEST - Aug,25 2005 - Post a comment / read (2)

SECURITY...

TECHNOLOGY...

HARDWARE... 

GUIDES...

  • CE-ATA Standard - Learn about the new CE-ATA standard, a new hard disk drive standard targeted to consumer electronics products.
  • Setting Up a Dual Display Desktop - Displaying your desktop on multiple monitors is natively supported by Windows XP, 2000, ME, and 98, as well as in the popular distributions of Linux. Although this Tech Tip will focus on configuring a dual display setup in Windows, it is possible to go much higher than two monitors if your needs and budget should allow
  • Rojak Pot's BIOS optimization guide rev. 8.21 - This guide serves as a repository of knowledge on various BIOS options. It also serves as a guide on how best to optimize your BIOS.
  • Configuring Internet Authentication Service for Network Access Protection (NAP) in Windows Server "Longhorn" Beta 1 - You configure NAP health requirements and enforcement behaviors with Internet Authentication Service in Windows Server 'Longhorn.'
  • How to quickly improve your computer's performance - BonaFideReviews has posted a guide about How to quickly improve your computer's performance.

SOFTWARE...

  • ERUNT & NTREGOPT 1.1i - ERUNT (includes NTREGOPT!): The Emergency Recovery Utility NT: Registry Backup and Restore for Windows NT/2000/2003/XP.
  • AVG Free Edition 7.344 - A free, reliable tool for computer protection against viruses.
  • Vcleaner 0.995 - Vcleaner removal utility will detect and remove following viruses: BackDoor.Agent.A-Z, AA-BG, ownloader.Agent.AS, I-Worm/Atak.A-I, I-Worm/Bagle.A-Z, AA-BA, I-Worm/Bugbear.D, I-Worm/Netsky.A-Z, AA-AD, I-Worm/Sasser.A-F, I-Worm/Zafi.A-D, PSW.Bispy.A-.
  • Microsoft Outlook 2003 Junk E-mail Filter (August 2005) - This optional update (download) provides the Junk E-mail Filter in Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 with a more current definition of which e-mail messages should be considered junk e-mail. This update was released in August 2005.
  • Google Talk 1.0.0.64 Beta - Call or send instant messages (download) to your friends for free–anytime. Google Talk is in beta and requires a Gmail username and password.
  • Morpheus 5.0.0.737 Beta - Morpheus (download beta) ushers in a new era in file-sharing technology. A completely redesigned Smart User Interface makes it quick and easy to search, discover, download and play all types of media files including MP3 audio, music, movies, videos, games, photos, documents and more
  • MSN Messenger 7.5 Build 0299 Final - Microsoft has released for download an updated version of MSN Messenger - this is the final version 7.5 (build 0299). Among the new features are Dymanic Backgrounds and Voice Clips. Dynamic Backgrounds fill your MSN Messenger conversations and subtly animate during the conversation. Voice Clips allow you to send short audio clips (15 secs max) to your friends on MSN Messenger.
  • PSPad UNICODE 4.5.0 (2125) Beta - PSPad (download package + installator) is a text and code editor.
    Futuris Imager 5.3.1 -     Futuris Imager (download / plugins) is a compact and simple image viewer. It is capable of opening more then 30 graphical formats, including all popular ones (GIF, JPEG, PNG, TIFF, JPEG2000 and so on).
  • K-Lite Mega Codec Pack 1.37 - This new version adds three BSplayer skins and includes ffdshow build 2005-08-22, MP4 splitter build 2005-08-18, Matroska splitter (Haali) build 2005-08-18, CoreAAC version 1.2.0.573, CoreVorbis version 1.1.0.79, DC-DSP Filter version 1.03.
  • RatDVD 0.75 - The new version gives you more control about the encoded video. DVDs can be analyzed and the new "Constant Average Bitrate" mode allows users to specify the bitrate of the encoded ratDVDs and thus the size of the encoded ratDVD.
  • PlexTools Professional v2.25 - With PlexTools you can perform various tasks, using your Plextor optical drive, ranging from digital audio extraction, burning CD/DVD compilations and advanced quality measurements. Users who have an original PlexTools installation CD can install the upgrade for free, if you haven't got this CD you can purchase the software online :]
  • Microsoft IntelliPoint 5.2
  • Firmware R 4.3.2 for THOMSON Speedtouch 500v4 Series (510 & 530) - This latest official version adds support for advanced firewall configuration, gaming & application NAPT assignment, dynamic DNS, user mgnt, local network mgnt, advanced remote mgnt, advanced diagnostic tools, easy task selection GUI. (thanks Siegfried)
 Gameguru Mania News - Aug,24 2005 - tech
IDF 2005: Intel reveals details of new CPU design - tech
(hx) 04:57 PM CEST - Aug,24 2005 - Post a comment
As expected, Intel announced at its developer forum a new processor architecture. Basically, the hardware designers took the best elements of the Pentium M "Banias" architecture - such as power saving features - as well as some functionalities of the current Netburst model of the Pentium 4 - such as the quad-pumped bus - to create the new architecture that will appear in desktop, mobile and server processors in the second half of 2006.
This dual-core CPU design will support an array of Intel technologies, including 64-bit EM64T compatibility, virtualization, enhanced security, and active management capabilities. Intel says the new chips will deliver big improvements in performance per watt, especially compared to its Netburst-based offerings.

At 14 stages, the main pipeline will be a little bit longer than current Pentium M processors. The cores will be a wider, more parallel design capable of issuing, executing, and retiring four instructions at once. (Current x86 processors are generally three-issue.) The CPU will, of course, feature out-of-order instruction execution and will also have deeper buffers than current Intel processors. These design changes should give the new architecture significantly more performance per clock, and somewhat consequently, higher performance per watt.

Unlike Intel's current dual-core CPU designs, which don't really share resources or communicate with one another except over the front-side bus, this new design looks to be a much more intentionally multicore design. The on-die L2 cache will be shared between the two cores, and Intel says the relative bandwidth per core will be higher than its current chips. L2 cache size is widely scalable to different sizes for different products. The L1 caches will remain separate and tied to a specific core, but the CPU will be able to transfer data directly from one core's L1 cache to another. Naturally, these CPUs will thus have two cores on a single die.

The first implementation of the architecture will not include Hyper-Threading, but Intel (somewhat cryptically) says to expect additional threads over time. I don't believe that means HT capability will be built into silicon but not initially made active, because Intel expressly cited transistor budget as a reason for excluding HT.

On the memory front, the new architecture is slated to have the ever-present "improved pre-fetch" of data into cache, and it will also include what Intel calls "memory disambiguation." That sounds an awful lot like a NUMA arrangement similar to what's found on AMD's Opteron, but I don't believe it is. This feature seems to be related to a speculative load capability instead..

related links: Pentium cores present and future pictured @ TechReport, Intel's New Architecture Details Revealed @ AnandTech
 Gameguru Mania News - Aug,23 2005 - tech
Monday Tech Madness - tech
(hx) 03:29 AM CEST - Aug,23 2005 - Post a comment

SECURITY...

  • IE Workarounds For Zero-Day Exploit - Microsoft has offered a number of workaround in its advisory to further mitigate risk. In related news, Liston, however, warned that once the "killbit" is set to prevent the use of Msdds.dll as an ActiveX, all applications that use the COM object utility will break.
  • Microsoft UPnP MS05-039 Vulnerability Detection Utility - MS05-039 Scan 1.0 is a Windows based detection and analysis utility that can quickly and accurately identify Microsoft operating systems that are vulnerable to the multiple buffer overflow vulnerabilities released in the
    MS05-039 bulletin.
  • Hacker Hits Air Force Officer Database - An online intruder has disappeared into the wild blue yonder with personal data on approximately half of the US Air Force's 70,000 officers.
  • Web of Crime Series - In this five-part series, PCWorld show you the global scope of the problem and how innocent PCs are turned into zombie armies to threaten and extort money from businesses.
  • Hotel hacking could pump smut into every room - During a stay in a hotel belonging to an unnamed worldwide chain, a SecureTest staffer paid for internet connectivity. He found TCP port 5001 open on the in-room IP enabled TV providing the service. Connecting to this port a full TV maintenance menu was displayed over which it was possible to carry out test procedures, change channels or turn the TV on and off.
  • WindowsXP SP3 Fixes and Features Preview *Updated* - Here's the unofficial fix list for Windows XP SP3. The SP3 isn't even close to beta yet, so this by no means is the final list and new fixes are added almost daily.

TECHNOLOGY...

  • Google Prepares to Take On Microsoft on the Desktop  - Google on Monday launched a beta version of the forthcoming upgrade of its desktop search tool, and on Wednesday the company is expected to unveil a "communications tool" that is said to be a step beyond the company's current search-related business focus.
  • Apple Demands French Web Site Remove OS X on Intel Videos - It has confirmed by eWEEK that Apple sent a letter to the French Web site MacBidouille asking the site's owners to remove posted videos and torrent files for the videos. These videos showed a version of Mac OS X for Intel running on generic PCs, rather than on the Intel-based developer kits Apple made available to developers for a fee.
  • MSDN users to get early access to Visual Studio 2005 tools - Subscribers to MSDN (Microsoft Developer Network) will get early access to the general availability releases of the Visual Studio 2005 developer toolset and SQL Server 2005 database.
  • IDF August 2005: ATi - Multi Graphics - Hexus.net has posted their IDF coverage with word from San Francisco on ATI's multi graphics solution.
  • AMD adds faster 25W Turions - AMD has added Turion 64 MT-37 and MT-40 processors to its mobile lineup. The MT-37 clocks in at 2.0GHz and will sell for $268 in 1,000-unit quantities, while the MT-40 runs at 2.2GHz and has a $359 price tag.
  • Intel Takes Cool to the Core - This week Intel will reveal details about a new chip architecture that will allow the company to put a lid on the runaway power consumption of its Pentium 4 and Xeon chips and to create chips with more than one processing core.
  • Albatron debuts PC6600 LE SLI graphics card - Albatron Technology today unveiled its Nvidia NV43 based graphics cards (PC6600LE and PC6600LEQ) for the entry-level market. The products will first be released in Taiwan and then be shipped globally in a few months time
  • Laptops Ready for American 3G - Sierra Wireless today announced they have a PCI Express Mini HSDPA modem, in addition to a CDMA EV-DO. model announced previously. These modems are designed to be factory installed in laptops to provide high speed cellular data without additional PC cards

HARDWARE... 

GUIDES...

  • Windows Keyboard Shortcuts - This Tech Tip is going to follow a different format than the norm and will list a few dozen of these hot keys that can be used to make working in Microsoft Windows even easier.

SOFTWARE...

  • AutoPatcher XP August 2005 - AutoPatcher is a comprehensive collection of patches, addons and registry tweaks that give you peace of mind in the knowledge that your Windows system is up to date, even before you connect it to the Internet. It's designed to quickly patch a system with the most current updates and tweaks available, and requires no user interaction once you have selected what to install.
  • Google Desktop Search 2.0 Beta (With Sidebar) - Google Desktop Search provides full text search over your email, computer files, chats, and the web pages you've viewed. By making your computer searchable, it puts your information easily within your reach and frees you from having to manually organize your files, emails, and bookmarks.
  • Port Monster - With Port Monster, you can not only be protected from Internet offenses and attacks, but also, you can know for sure if anyone is trying to connect to your computer.
  • 3d Traceroute 2.1.5:11 - 3d Traceroute is a replacement for your ping plotters and traceroute programs. It is a full blown three dimensional traceroute program.
  • BitTorrent 4.0.4 - Another original BiTorrent (download) release...
  • FileZilla 2.2.15 - FileZilla (download) is a fast FTP and SFTP client for Windows with a lot of features. FileZilla Server is a reliable FTP server.
  • VisualCron 2.5.0 - VisualCron (download) is windowsbased program that works like the integrated task scheduler but have more features and flexibility. VisualCron is based on the Unix/Linux version of cron.
  • EVEREST Home Edition v2.20 - It offers accurate hardware information and diagnostics capabilities, including online features, memory benchmarks, hardware monitoring, and low-level hardware information.
  • Delete Locked Files - Unlocker 1.71 - Helps delete locked files with error messages like: Cannot delete file: Access is denied, There has been a sharing violation, etc.
  • New Audio Software for Audigy 1 - 2 ZS - Creative Labs have released a new Audio Software for Audigy 1 and Audigy 2 ZS
HighDef Content to Require New Monitors - tech
(hx) 03:02 AM CEST - Aug,23 2005 - Post a comment
Ars Technica has posted an interesting article on Windows Vista, DRM, and new monitors:
First of all, High Definition content is not what you get on a DVD today. Most DVDs are 480i (upsampled to 480p by many quality players), the same as broadcast TV (but without the distorted colors). HD content is essentially everything above the 480 lines: 720p, 1080i, and 1080p (the last one is currently rare).

The upshot of all of this is that display devices need HDCP support. If a monitor or television supports HDCP, HD content will be playable on that device (provided that it hasn't been cracked). If a monitor doesn't support HDCP, one of two things will happen at the discretion of the content providers. It's a possibility that a given studio may simply refuse to allow the content to be displayed at all. More likely, the studios will allow for playback on unauthenticated devices with purposely degraded quality. The thinking is that Joe Consumer will be more likely to pay for HD content than seek out pirated content that's not in HD. Talk around the industry suggests that many studios will degrade content to a 480p level by passing it through a constrictor, although we won't really know until products start shipping.
 Gameguru Mania News - Aug,19 2005 - tech
Nightly Tech Reading - tech
(hx) 02:10 AM CEST - Aug,19 2005 - Post a comment

SECURITY...

  • Microsoft IE Remote Code Execution Exploit (0day) - Critical - FrSIRT have identified a critical vulnerability with Internet Explorer 6 for Windows XP SP1 and SP2.
  • Microsoft offers Zotob removal tool - Microsoft on Wednesday made available a free software tool to help victims of the worms that hit Windows computers in the past days clean their systems.
  • Hackers fight to create world's largest Botnet - Experts are warning that the sharp rise in malware activity this week is being caused by hacking groups competing with each other to create large botnets of remote controlled PCs.
  • How To Create An Uncrackable Password - The TechZone shows you how to create a password that can't be crack

TECHNOLOGY...

HARDWARE... 

GUIDES...

  • NVIDIA SLI GeForce 6600GT performance - Elitebastards take a look at  the kind of performance that can be garnered from a GeForce 6600GT-based SLI setup over using a single 6600GT board.
  • Asus's PEG Link Mode investigated - Adrijan Rojak's Pot tested the PEG Link Mode using the NVIDIA GeForce 6800GT PCIe graphics card: The effect on the 6800 Ultra was minimal, with a variance of only about 2%. That's probably because PEG Link Mode only overclocked its memory bus. Evidently, the 6800 Ultra has plenty of memory bandwidth. The difference would be more evident in cards with limited memory bandwidth. When it comes to the ATI X300, PEG Link Mode definitely improved its performance by 8-9% in the benchmarks we ran! That's a significant boost in performance.
  • Power Supply Tutorial - Everything you need to know about power supplies, including types, how to calculate its true power, efficiency, power factor correction (PFC) and more.
  • Windows Genuine Advantage, Two Weeks Later - Here's a consolidated list of what works and doesn't work
  • XP Myths - Myths Regarding Windows XP v1.2.4 - There are numerous Myths floating around the Internet regarding Windows XP, especially relating to Optimizations and Security. Hopefully this site will debunk some of these.

SOFTWARE...

  • Adobe (Acrobat) Reader 7.0.3 Update - The update fixes a security flaw - download
  • ChrisTV Lite 4.60 - ChrisTV Lite - The best way to control your TV Card - TV on your PC with High quality image and sound- developed by Chris P.C. srl for TV Tuners with WDM Drivers installed
  • FireTune 1.06 - FireTune for Mozilla Firefox v1.x was developed for an easy and fast optimization of your browsing experience with Firefox.
  • McAfee AVERT Stinger 2.5.6 - Stinger (download) is a stand-alone utility used to detect and remove specific viruses. It is not a substitute for full anti-virus protection, but rather a tool to assist administrators and users when dealing with an infected system.
  • EliteToolbar Remover 2.0.1 - The new EliteToolbar Remover (download) deletes any traces of many persistent malwares.
  • Sysinternal's Process Explorer 9.21 - Process Explorer (download) shows you information about which handles and DLLs processes have opened or loaded.
  • Google Toolbar 3.0.125.1 - The Google Toolbar (Win2k/XP / Win9x/ME) increases your ability to find information from anywhere on the web and takes only seconds to install
  • WinAce 2.6 Final (shw) - WinAce (download) is not just another archiving shell. With it's own powerful compression format ACE and built-in support for other popular compression types like ZIP, RAR and MS-CAB (to name a few), WinAce could actually become the only archiver you need.
  • BSPlayer 1.35.823 -  BSplayer is windows player for playing back avi/asf/mpeg video files. It can also display subtitles.
  • NVIDIA BIOS Editor (NiBiTor) v2.4 - MVKTech has just released a new version of NVIDIA BIOS Editor (NiBiTor) software. NiBiTor is the original and defenitive BIOS tweaker that supports the latest NVIDIA graphics cards.
  • ATI Tray Tools v1.0.3.730 - ATI Tray Tools is a small utility that can be found in the windows tray which then allows instant access to options and settings
  • Audio Console for Creative Sound Blaster Audigy audio cards 1.20.22 - This web release installs the Audio Console application for the following Creative Sound Blaster series audio devices only: Creative Sound Blaster Audigy, Sound Blaster Audigy Platinum and Sound Blaster Audigy Platinum eX series; Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 including Platinum, Platinum eX and Value series; Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS including Platinum and Platinum Pro series; Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 4 Pro.
  • Forceware 77.79 Windows x64 - A new beta ForceWare driver has been leaked by OSNN. You have to install it manually through the Device Manager because of the lack of an installer.
  • ForceWare 78.11 Win2000/XP 32-bit - Dell released a new ForceWare driver today intended for their mobile quadro platform. In it's official form the driver did not support many GeForce graphics cards. This version includes a modified .inf file.
  • ATi Linux Drivers 8.16.20 - ATi has released an updated suite of drivers for Linux.
 Gameguru Mania News - Aug,18 2005 - tech
ATI Catalyst 5.8 Performance Analysis - tech
(hx) 02:42 PM CEST - Aug,18 2005 - Post a comment
ATI has just released the latest Catalyst drivers (v5.8) for their Radeon series of graphics cards. The newest version includes a massive amount of fixes for games like Battlefield 2, GTA: Vice City, Quake 3 and Warcraft III but what about performance changes? Tweaktown has posted their performance analysis of Catalyst 5.8 against the previous version on low, mid and high-end Radeon cards. Here's an excerpt:
There we have it - a new set of Catalyst drivers from ATI that haven't done much in the way of performance but the HUGE list of fixes make them one of the better releases we have seen for a while. There is no doubt as we see Crossfire hit the streets that ATI will be putting a lot of effort into its performance as nVidia have had a huge jump on them and ATI want to make sure that Crossfire puts a dent in nVidias multi cards sales as quickly as possible. We have already started seeing cards around Australia with Crossfire Enabled stickers on them so we don't think it will be far away.

There should be a fix in the latest drivers for everyone and it would be worth the upgrade to the Catalyst 5.8's this time around especially if it's been a few months since you have taken the plunge and are still running older drivers.
 Gameguru Mania News - Aug,17 2005 - tech
ATI CATALYST Drivers v5.8 - tech
(hx) 11:19 PM CEST - Aug,17 2005 - Post a comment / read (1)
ATI has released a new ATI Catalyst drivers (release notes / download ~ 25.2MB) bringing them up to version 5.8. The package contains: RADEON display driver 8.162, Multimedia Center 9.08, Catalyst Control Center 5.8 (requires .NET Version 1.1 Framework), HydraVision Basic Edition 3.25.9006, Remote Wonder 3.02, WDM version 8.15 (6317) and Southbridge/IXP Driver.
The following section provides a summary of the issues that have been resolved in the latest version of Catalyst. These include:

  • Battlefield 2: Geometry corruption or missing textures are no longer noticed when playing the game for an extended period of time under Windows XP with an ATI Radeon® X800 XT installed
  • 3D Mark03: Enabling Powerplay mode and running the 3DMark03 or 05 in a loop no longer results in an error message being displayed
  • Area51_2.3dc: Playing the game under Windows XP no longer results in the NPC and guns appearing distorted, flashing or missing. Further the polygons no longer pop in and out of the display
  • GTA: Vice City: Setting the desktop and the game display option to 1024x768 32bpp and attempting to play the game under Windows XP MCE, no longer results in an Invalid Pixel Format message being displayed after approximately 5 minutes of game play
  • Lineage 2: Playing the game under Windows XP no longer results in display corruption being noticed
  • Movie Maker 2: Connecting an external video source using the S-video composite connectors, no longer results in the Movie Maker 2 application intermittently failing to capture video, when selecting the Capture from Video Source
  • MU Online: Opening a chat window and playing the on-line game no longer results in hesitation being noticed when pressing the Enter key
  • Quake 3: Enabling SmartShader followed by attempting to do a mode change while playing the game, no longer results in the game failing to respond
  • Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic: Running the Dantoonie level of the game no longer result in hesitation being noticed
  • Terathon: Starting the Terathon 3D engine and selecting a single player demo, no longer results in the 3D engine failing to respond under Windows XP
  • Trackmania Sunrise: Playing the game under Windows XP no longer results in the operating system failing to respond, when attempting to exit the game after leaving the PC idle for an extended period of time
  • Warcraft III: Playing the game under Windows XP with the display rotated by 90 degrees CCW, no longer results in display corruption being noticed
  • Performing an overwrite of the video driver install, no longer results in the Hydravision Multidesk feature being unable to load
 Gameguru Mania News - Aug,16 2005 - tech
Monday Tech Reading - tech
(hx) 02:57 AM CEST - Aug,16 2005 - Post a comment

SECURITY...

  • Microsoft Security Advisory (899588) updated for exploit - Microsoft is actively analyzing and providing guidance on a malicious worm identified as "Worm:Win32/Zotob.A", which is currently circulating on the Internet. The worm is a malicious attack which exploits the Windows Plug and Play vulnerability addressed in Microsoft Security Bulletin MS05-039 on August 9, 2005. The worm creates 16 threads to scan for infectable systems. The worm targets random class B IP addresses, sending SYN packets to TCP Port 445. When a vulnerable system is found, buffer overflow and shellcode is sent to the remote system, creating an FTP script and launching FTP.EXE to download and execute the worm from the source system.
  • Windows 2000 Plug and Play Universal Exploit - A remote code execution vulnerability exists in Plug and Play (PnP) that allows an attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability to take complete control of the affected system, the following exploit code can be used to test your system for the mentioned vulnerability.

TECHNOLOGY...

  • Xbox 360 may not always have a hard drive, confirms Allard - Speaking in the September issue of US magazine Game Informer, Allard said that the company isn't yet ready to announce details of possible multiple models of the Xbox 360, with the presence of a hard drive being touted as one potential difference between models.
  • Windows Mobile Smartphones Get Wi-Fi - Qtek has announced two new Windows Mobile Smartphones with built-in Wi-Fi, the Qtek 8300 and 8310. The phones run Windows Mobile 5, which is the first Smartphone version to support Wi-Fi in addition to cellular protocols. In addition to Wi-Fi and quad-band GSM / GPRS with EDGE, both handsets have a 2.2" QVGA display, 1.3 Megapixel camera and MiniSD slot. The 8300 features dedicated media playback buttons, while the 8310 has 2 application keys.
  • Boost Mobile Announces Two GPS Games - In Swordfish, players must use the GPS to move to schools of fish and cast the phone towards them. Once a swordfish is hooked, the game becomes a standard arcade fishing game. Torpedo Bay is more actively location based. Players move the streets hunting for enemy subs (other players) as well as other targets and bonus items. Each game costs $5.99 for the first month and 2.99 for following months.
  • Google Halts Scanning of Copyrighted Books - Google has halted its efforts to scan copyrighted books from some of the nation's largest university libraries so the material can be indexed in its leading Internet search engine.
  • Scientists invent pee-powered battery - Researchers in Singapore have developed a paper battery that is powered by urine. The battery is composed of paper, soaked in copper chloride, sandwiched between layers of magnesium and copper. The whole thing, once laminated in plastic, is just a millimetre thick, and 6cm by 3cm in size. The researchers report that with just 0.2 millilitres of urine the battery will provide around 1.5 volts, with a maximum power output of 1.5 milli-Watts
  • Intel slashes Pentium 4 6xx prices - All five 6xx-class processors had their prices cut. The 3.8GHz 670 fell from $851 to $605, a fall of 28.9 per cent. The 3.6GHz 660 was cut to $401, 33.7 per cent off its previous price, $605. The 3.4GHz 650 now costs $273, down from $401, a cut of 31.9 per cent. The 3.2GHz 640 dropped 20.2 per cent, from $273 to $218. And the 3GHz 630 now costs $178, down 20.5 per cent from $224.
  • Design issues delay R520 launch - In a recent investors Q&A session ATI’s Senior Vice President of the PC Business Unit, Rick Bergman, on the subject of R520 said "We had hoped to have that product in the June timeframe, but unfortunately due to a variety of design issues it has moved out to the September / October timeframe for launch". This is more or less in-line with the late summer launch previously mentioned by Dave Orton.

HARDWARE... 

GUIDES...

  • WiFi - Wireless networking explained - The underlying principle of WiFi is that computers communicate with one another over a radio frequency in much the same way that handheld transceiver are used by friends to chat with one another on the road. One key difference, though, is the bandwidths each uses.
  • CoDecs Guide - CoDecs compress and decompress data. The word CoDec is a shortening of the term Compressor/Decompressor. Compressing a data stream or a file reduces its data rate.
  • How To Reinstall Windows XP - This purpose of this guide is to give you a checklist to follow so that a reloading of Windows goes smoothly the first time.
  • Catalyst 5.7 drivers: memory limited performance improvements - Another not-so-great thing about the new drivers is that some of the performance increase claims in the driver release notes are slightly misleading. While we did see a lot of the gains that they mentioned in most of the games, we found many of these increases to be with cards so limited (performance-wise) that they didn't matter.
  • NVIDIA BIOS Editor (NiBiTor) Guide - NiBiTor, offers the latest in uber tweaking, gaining full control over the latest releases of supported GPU's. The latest release allows full manipulation over the Geometric Delta clocks of the latest video card technology found on supporting cards

SOFTWARE...

  • Aircrack - 802.11 Sniffer and WEP/WPA Key Cracker - download
  • Fraps 2.6.4 - Fraps (download) is designed as a generic tool for DirectX and OpenGL games. In its current form Fraps performs many tasks and can best be described as: Benchmarking Software, Screen Capture Software and Realtime Video Capture Software.
  • DeepBurner Portable - DeepBurner Portable works straight from your removable media, whether it's a USB flash drive, compact flash card, or even a good old floppy.
  • BenQ DW1640 firmware - BenQ QSuite 2.0 improves writing quality for DVD+R & DVD-R media., add SolidBurn Technology and Overspeed ability.  The download link for the firmware is here.
  • Wireless Vista BETA drivers - Intel  PRO/Wireless 2100 (Release Notes / Drivers) / Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG / 2915ABG (Release Notes / Drivers)
  • ForceWare 78.10 Win 2000/XP - Pieter over at laptopvideo2go found these drivers at Fujitsu Siemens, for their Amilo laptop series. Try only at your own risk.
 Gameguru Mania News - Aug,13 2005 - tech
Friday Tech Reading - tech
(hx) 02:58 AM CEST - Aug,13 2005 - Post a comment

SECURITY...

TECHNOLOGY...

  • Pirated Version of Mac OS for PCs Available - Instructions on how to install Apple Computer's Mac OS X operating system on any PC with a chip from Intel or Advanced Micro Devices were posted to the Internet this week, and they could be found on several Web sites today. The process requires a copy of Mac OS X version 4 (Tiger), VMware's virtualization software, the PearPC emulator that can run operating systems written for PowerPC on any architecture, Apple's Darwin 8.0.1 software, an x86 processor that supports SSE2 (Streaming SIMD Extensions 2), and two files created by an independent developer that can be downloaded using the BitTorrent file-sharing system.
  • Game players say Blizzard invades privacy - A number of "World of Warcraft" players are up in arms over software being used by the game's publisher to scan users' computers for hacks prohibited under its terms of service.
  • Blu-Ray has Updatable DRM (CMS) - The upcoming Blu-Ray disc format allows for updatable copy protection through it's lifecycle. This way, as the copy protection gets cracked (and you know it will), studios can release a new form of the protection on a disc and it would update players.
  • Intel to detail next-gen chip design - Due to ship in H2 2006, the architecture will result in "processors that are high-performance, energy-efficient and multi-core", the company said. "New form-factors" for PCs will be enabled, it promised. The beans will officially be spilled on 23 August, when CEO Paul Otellini kicks of Intel's bi-annual Developers' Forum.
  • Intel 'preps' Pentium 4 6xx price cuts - The cuts will see each model drop a price grade: the 670 will fall from $851 to $605 (down 28.9 per cent), the 660 from $605 to $401 (33.7 per cent) and the 650 from $401 to $273 (31.9 per cent). The 640 and 630 will fall further, from $273 and $224, respectively, to $218 and $178, the sources allege.

HARDWARE... 

GUIDES...

SOFTWARE...

  • FastStone Image Viewer 2.20 - FastStone Image Viewer (download) is an image browser, viewer, converter and editor with an easy to use interface and a nice array of features that include resizing, renaming, cropping, color adjustments and more
  • Gaim 1.5.0 -  Gaim (download) is a multi-protocol instant messaging client for Linux, BSD, MacOS X, and Windows. It is compatible with AIM (Oscar and TOC protocols), ICQ, MSN Messenger, Yahoo, IRC, Jabber, Gadu-Gadu, and Zephyr networks.
  • AOL Instant Messenger 5.9.3861 - This new version adds Tabbed Browsing, Thumbnail Previews, Spyware Quick Scan and "Who Is" Lookup features.
  • AIM Fix - AIM Fix was created to remove all known AIM viruses in one consolidated removal tool.
  • Realtek AC'97 Drivers 3.75 WHQL - This driver supports all ALC series audio chipsets from ALC101 up to ALC861.
 Gameguru Mania News - Aug,12 2005 - tech
NVIDIA ForceWare 77.77 drivers - tech
(hx) 12:16 AM CEST - Aug,12 2005 - Post a comment
Along with the GeForce 7800 GT release NVIDIA released a new ForceWare drivers today. It's version 77.77 (release notes PDF) and it is a WHQL driver (Microsoft submitted tested and approved). You can grab the drivers here.
Release Highlights:
- Support for GeForce 7800 GT
- SLI support for GeForce 6600 and GeForce 6600 LE
- New SLI rendering mode (SLI Antialiasing) for increased antialiasing performance
- Broader SLI optimizations and validation for the latest games
- Resolved SLI Antialiasing issues with some applications and generating screen shots. For a full list of other issues resolved, please view the driver release notes.
- Microsoft DirectX 9.0c and OpenGL 2.0 support
 Gameguru Mania News - Aug,11 2005 - tech
NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GT reviews - tech
(hx) 05:16 PM CEST - Aug,11 2005 - Post a comment / read (3)
NVIDIA today introduced and announced immediate availability of the Company's new NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GT graphics processing unit (GPU). The 7800 GT offers near-GTX performance for at least a hundred bucks less than NVIDIA's top-end card, and it pretty much creams anything else in its price range.
TheTechLounge: NVIDIA's reference 7800 GT features 20 rendering pipelines, a core clock of 400 MHz, and a memory clock of 500 MHz (1 GHz DDR) while the reference 7800 GTX features 24 rendering pipelines, a core clock of 430 MHz, and a memory clock of 600 MHz (1.2 GHz DDR). However, XFX (like many other vendors) overclocks even the standard versions of these cards, with their 7800 GT core clocked to 450 MHz and the memory pushed up to 525 MHz (1.05 GHz DDR).

Guru3D: Just like the 7800 GTX the GT will need a pretty spiffy CPU. 3.4 GHz Pentium 4 or a rather sizable AMD64 Athlon 3400+ to get the most out of it's capacity, such a processor at minumum I really must recommend. Even with our Athlon 4000+ testing rig we ran into CPU limitation here and there. That's does not mean games run like rubbish though, oh of course not. They are way up there in the highest ranking scores and performance. Yet the graphics card can go faster then it's allowed by the CPU. The CPU simply isn't presenting data fast enough to the graphics card driver. Even a game like Half-Life 2 will run into that limitation if you turn off stuff like AA and AF and then measure in 1024x768. Of course you'll have incredible framerates and let me emphasize this again, at blazing speeds.

TechReport: So, like I said at the outset, the card is fast, and it's less expensive than the GeForce 7800 GTX. The performance differences between the two were narrowed a little bit in our testing because we used an "overclocked in the box" GeForce 7800 GT and a stock-clocked GTX. Even so, I'd have a hard time finding the justification for spending an extra hundred-plus dollars on a 7800 GTX now that the 7800 GT has arrived. None of these cards are cheap, but the 7800 GT is easily a better value than its pricier sibling. Either card will get you the full feature set of NVIDIA's G70 GPU, and the performance delta between them isn't huge.

HotHardware: With its 20 pixel pipelines, 7 vertex units, and 256MB of 1GHz RAM, the GeForce 7800 GT performed very well throughout our entire battery of benchmarks. And with its support for Shader Model 3.0, and excellent anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering quality / performance, the GeForce 7800 GT also has superior in-game image quality. Its relatively quiet single-slot cooler is another plus, as it the 7800 GT's full support for NVIDIA's SLI multi-GPU technology.

HardOCP: Battlefield 2 performance was also very strong on the BFGTech GeForce 7800 GT OC. We found we could play with the maximum in-game quality settings at 1600x1200 with 2X TR MSAA. The GeForce 7800 GTX was faster in this game allowing 4X TR MSAA with a single card. Battlefield 2 is a very bright game, taking place outdoors, and there is a lot of vegetation, which can look pretty nasty if not Anti-Aliased. The BFGTech GeForce 7800 GT OC allows you to have Transparency Multisampling Anti-Aliasing enabled at every resolution to help eliminate the aliasing. With two cards in SLI, the performance is there to allow the absolutely best image quality of Transparency Supersampling at 4X at high resolutions.

PC Perspective: In most cases in our benchmarks we found the 7800 GT card at reference speeds beating out the best ATI card on the market, the X850XT Platinum Edition. This is bad news for the Canadian chip designer as NVIDIA already has one model above the GT with the GTX and could come out with another faster unit any time it wants to.

VR-Zone: This card could not really be unlocked, using the latest version of Rivatuner (RC15.6), available. The issues we faced is this: right after we ticked to enable the disabled pipes, a restart is required for changes to take effect. However, upon rebooting of windows, we saw the progame's main page listing the card, still at 20x1pp / 7vpp. This means it had not been unlocked at all.
 Gameguru Mania News - Aug,10 2005 - tech
Evening Tech Reading - tech
(hx) 03:36 AM CEST - Aug,10 2005 - Post a comment

SECURITY...

TECHNOLOGY...

  • Group Launches New DVD Security Features - The Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA), a partnership of electronics manufacturers and Hollywood studios including Hewlett-Packard Co. and 20th Century Fox, said it plans to fight piracy by embedding an identification mark on movies, music and video games that can only be read by equipment that carry its technology.
  • Current Windows Vista Aero will Degrade OpenGL Performance - Microsoft's current plan for OpenGL on Windows Vista is to layer OpenGL over Direct3D in order to use OpenGL with a composited desktop to obtain the Aeroglass experience. If an OpenGL ICD is run - the desktop compositor will switch off - significantly degrading the user experience.
  • Macromedia drops FreeHand from bundle - FreeHand, Macromedia's popular illustration tool, has been omitted from the company's upcoming developer suite, dubbed Studio 8. Macromedia executives cited "extensive research with our customers" as the reason behind the decision, and not its impending acquisition by Adobe Systems--which current sells a competing product called Illustrator.

HARDWARE... 

  • A Look at NVIDIA's nForce 4 SLI X16 - The SLI chipsets feature two x16 PCI-Express slots capable of handling full sized graphics cards. The downfall to this setup is the splitting of bandwidth between the two cards. While two cards were in use, each x16 slot was effectively split into an x8 in order to provide bandwidth to each. Following the announcement of NVIDIA's new nForce 4 SLI X16 chipset this is no longer an issue. The new chipset will provide extra PCI-E bandwidth as well as advanced I/O options
  • Acer Ferrari 4000 Notebook - As far as weight and dimensions go, the Ferrari 4000 is pretty much identical to the TravelMate 8104WLMi. You're looking at 363 x 265 x 34mm (WxDxH), with a weight of just over 2.8kg. So, it's not the smallest or lightest notebook around, but it's still ok for carrying around with you all day - something that I've done with it on many occasions. FYI, Amazon sells Acer FERRARI 4005WLMI AMD TUR 64 1GB for only $2,128.95.
  • Rockdirect XTI 3.8 Performance - Users looking for ultimate notebook performance should seriously consider Rockdirect's XTI series. Taking into account overall performance, the XTI 3.8 is the fastest notebook we've tested thus far.
  • OCZ EL DDR PC3500 Gold GX - These OCZ DDR433 memory modules are 100% hand-tested to ensure their stability at this frequency with such extreme timings
  • GeForce 7800GTX: EVGA's KO Edition - The EVGA e-GeForce GTX KO comes out of the box with a core clock setting of 490MHz and memory clock of 1.3GHz. It also sports a modified heat sink and a new look, a first for our 7800 series. We're excited to see how this card performs and overclocks compared to the other 7800s. It's safe to say that it should outperform the 7800s that we've reviewed so far, but we'll be seeing by how much in the performance section later on.
  • Gainward's overclocked 7800GTX - The improved core and memory clocks meant that we could attain a higher level of playable image quality in Far Cry - it was possible to attain a smooth gaming experience at 1600x1200 with HDR lighting turned on.
  • MSI NX7800 GTX SLI - Half-Life 2 is really showing its CPU limited colors when you have two MSI NX7800 GTX video cards in SLI. The CPU literally cannot keep up with the power of these video cards. What you can do, on the other hand, is simply enable very high image quality settings.
  • PowerColor X800 GT - Even though X800 GT carries memory chips that are almost maxed out on frequency, we get a whopping core overclock which makes a quite an impact in todays games. Let's just hope every retail X800 GT will overclock like our PowerColor sample.
  • Sapphire X700 Pro Graphics Card - NVIDIA's 6600GT, which is its main competition, outperforms the X700 Pro in almost all games and settings except under heavy load in Doom III and Half-Life 2. Surprisingly enough, the X700 Pro, which should be a top performer in Half-Life 2, takes the backseat to NVIDIA's 6600GT except under 1600x1200 with AA and AF turned on where it's competitive, although it doesn't lead in this setting either.
  • Samsung SpinPoint MP0804H Hard Drive - The Samsung MP0804H has certainly gone through a lot and it shined in its tests. When used as an external unit, its faster than NAS units and has a lot more capacity than typical flash drives. As an internal drive, I felt an immediate rejuvenation in performance.
  • Lite-ON SOHR-5238S CD-RW drive - The Lite-On SOHR-5238S is a very capable drive when it comes to CD-R media, the burn quality is very good indeed. The SOHR-5238S is also a very fast and reliable reader and can also read protected media well. Digital Audio Extraction quality is also a plus point with this drive and consistently impressed us with the DAE speed and quality. The SOHR-5238S is let down by poor CD-RW write quality, and this is really the only bad point about the drive.
  • HDA Digital X Mystique 7.1 Gold sound card - EliteBastards take a look at HDA's Digital X Mystique 7.1 Gold discrete sound card, the first of its kind to support real time Dolby Digital encoding via its Dolby Digital Live support.
  • Saitek PC Gaming Mouse - The Saitek's big selling point is that it offers increased resolution over standard mice - 1,600dpi rather than the conventional 800dpi. This is in keeping with the resolution on offer from the likes of Razor Diamondback and Logitech's gaming mice.
  • Casio EX-P505 digital camera - The EX-P505 isn't a cheap camera, in fact at around £315 it is in the upper end of the market for 5MP models, but it does have a lot to offer for the money not least its extraordinary movie modes.
  • Nokia 8800 - There is no real technical reason why you should want to own an 8800. Its old technology in a new shell and even that loses its appeal very quickly.

GUIDES...

SOFTWARE...

  • FastStone Image Viewer 2.20 08-08-2005 Build - FastStone Image Viewer 2.15 (download) is an image browser, viewer, converter and editor with an easy to use interface and a nice array of features that include resizing, renaming, cropping, color adjustments and more.
  • VirtualDub v1.6.10 - VirtualDub (download) is a video capture/processing utility for 32-bit Windows platforms (95/98/ME/NT4/2000/XP), licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). It lacks the editing power of a general-purpose editor such as Adobe Premiere, but is streamlined for fast linear operations over video.
  • Real Alternative 1.43 - Real Alternative will allow you to play RealMedia files without having to install RealPlayer or RealOne Player from Real Networks. Supported are: RealAudio (.ra .rpm), RealMedia (.rm .ram .rmvb .rpx .smi .smil), RealText (.rt) and ReadPix (.rp).
  • K-Lite Codec Pack 2.51 - The K-Lite Codec Pack is a free collection of codecs and related tools. Codec is short for Compressor-decompressor. Codecs are needed for encoding and decoding (playing) audio and video. The very user-friendly installation is fully customizable, which means that you can install only those components that you want.
  • AIM Ad Hack 4.12- With this small file (download) you can effectively remove all the ads from AIM (Updated for AIM version  5.9.3861)
  • Yahoo! Messenger 7.00.00.426 - download
  • Netscape Browser 8.0.3.3 - This new version fixes all security and bug fixes through Firefox 1.0.6 and also a bug disabling downloads for many users,
  • WinRAR 3.50 - WinRAR (download) is a powerful archive manager. It can backup your data and reduce size of email attachments, decompress RAR, ZIP and other files downloaded from Internet and create new archives in RAR and ZIP file format.
  • NGO NVIDIA Optimized Driver v1.7776 - The NGO nVidia Optimized Driver is a tweaked version of the nVidia Forceware driver. The main purpose is to satisfy the users with a better performance and better image quality.
 Gameguru Mania News - Aug,07 2005 - tech
Sunday Tech Reading - tech
(hx) 01:57 PM CEST - Aug,07 2005 - Post a comment / read (1)

SECURITY...

  • Trojan poses as war death notice - The emails were first detected last night and claim to contain a report from The Guardian on the death of 140 US Marines. The email contains a link to the 'full story' but leads users to a bogus web page with two Trojans built in. The Cgab-A and Borodr-Fam Trojans can be downloaded through an improperly patched version of Internet Explorer. Once on the PC the Trojans will allow full control, harvesting personal information and using the computer to spam more copies of the Trojan.
  • Antispyware firm warns of massive ID theft ring - Officials at Sunbelt Software, a Clearwater, Fla.-based vendor of antispyware tools, said the company stumbled upon a massive ID theft ring that is using a well-known spyware program to break into and systematically steal confidential information from an unknown number of computers worldwide.
  • How to bypass Citibank Virtual Keyboard Protection - The Virtual Keyboard concept can be easily defeated by using Win32 APIs to access HTML documents.
  • Another way past Windows antipiracy found - According to the Thursday posting, all a PC user apparently has to do to have GenuineCheck.exe generate a valid code on a machine with pirated Windows XP is to run it in Windows 2000 compatibility mode. This is done by downloading the tool, right-clicking on the file and selecting "properties." Then select the "compatibility" tab in the menu and change the compatibility mode.

OFF-TOPIC

TECHNOLOGY...

HARDWARE... 

  • 2000dpi Razer Copperhead mouse - The Copperhead offers tracking precision at up to 2000 dpi and the first mouse to utilize Full Speed (12MBps) USB [1.1]. The 2000 dpi laser sensor uses a 16-bit data path and samples at 1000Hz, compared to other mice that poll at 125Hz.
  • HP - Compaq TC4200 Tablet PC - Directly from HP, the TC4200 comes in two base models priced at $1,599 and $1,849. The major difference is that the first is loaded with a 1.73GHz Pentium-M 740 Dothan processor and a 40GB hard drive, while the latter uses a 1.86GHz Pentium-M 750 Dothan with Bluetooth and a 60GB hard drive.
  • AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ - Going at a price of US$902, it is cheaper than Intel's top-end Extreme Edition 840 which is at US$999. Comparing the performance of these two high-end dual-core processors, it's without a doubt that AMD's Athlon 64 X2 4800+ is the better choice.
  • Crucial Ballistix PC4000 (DDR500) 1GB Memory Kit - With the emergence of DDR2 and other high-end components, this RAM is better suited for people not wanting to make the jump yet to PCI Express, DDR2, and other high-end components.
  • OCZ Platinum PC4800 Elite Edition 1GB Dual Channel Memory Kit  - The TCC5 PC5000 DFI Special reached 313MHz while the TCCD PC4800 Elite Edition reached 320MHz. The difference between the two is 7MHz, and to overclockers, that is a big difference. For the extreme hardcore enthusiasts who absolutely need neck breaking performance, the Elite Edition would definitely be the top choice.
  • AOpen i915GMm-HFS Motherboard - AOpen's i915GMm-HFS is a very feature rich i915GM based motherboard. The memory selection flexibility, plethora of video output options, and SATA RAID features make it quite attractive for power and quiet computing users. However, the lack of Dolby Digital Live encoding with a high definition audio codec makes the board less attractive to HTPC enthusiasts.
  • Asus P5WD2 Premium Intel 955X Motherboard  - The Asus P5WD2 Premium BIOS is top notch offering a lot of overclocking options and tweaking features for the enthusiast community. The Intel processor line up is known for very high FSB overclocks and Asus has catered to them with FSB increases up to 450 MHz and voltage increases for memory that should help you get to a very high speed indeed.
  • Epox EP-9NPA+ Ultra Socket 939 Motherboard - The Epox EP-9NPA+ Ultra offers users a very flexible nForce 4/PCI Express platform, and has some useful integrated peripherals like a 8-channel audio, 10 USB2.0 ports, IEEE 1394a, and Gigabit LAN.
  • ABIT Fatal1ty X800 XL 512MB - The goodness of a 512MB framebuffer simply does not show too well in the benchmarks, even when conducted at 1600x1200 with 6x Antialiasing and 16x Anisotropic Filtering. What we see is an X850 XT 256MB, and generally a GeForce 6800 Ultra 256MB, ahead in practically all the tests. Right now, then, L275 can be better spent on faster hardware.
  • Albatron GeForce 7800GTX - The unit PCSTATS tested was a decent overclocker, reaching a modest 479 MHz core and 1347 MHz memory. Considering the mounting holes on the Albatron GeForce 7800 GTX are in the same location as the previous generation, enthusiast upgraders can port over their existing cooling hardware easily!
  • EVGA e-GeForce 7800 GTX - As for the subject matter of this review, the EVGA e-GeForce 7800 GTX graphics card really has higher default frequencies than the reference GeForce 7800 GTX: 450/490/1200MHz against 430/470/1200MHz.
  • Gigabyte GV-NX78X256V-B GeForce 7800GTX - The Gigabyte GV-NX78X256V-B is based on the reference nvidia design, and is very quiet in operation as a result. While it's a single slot solution, the GV-NX78X256V-B videocard does generate a lot of heat - you'd best have good airflow in your case if you plan on getting a GeForce 7800 GTX videocard.
  • Compro VideoMate TV Gold Plus2 Video Card - Compro Videomate TV Gold Plus II is good choice for casual users who want to turn there PC into a multimedia moster. The Noise Reduction and the Video Smoothing technologies allow the increase in audio quality and better looking video and we also like like the Timeshifting and Power up functionality. While snapshot works good with most movies and TV programs, it cannot handle fast speed motion well which ends ghosting the picture.
  • Samsung Spinpoint SP2004C SATA II 200 Gigabyte NCQ Hard Drive - The Samsung SP2004C 200 Gigabyte SATA hard drive was a very welcome suprise. Though it couldn't beat the Maxtor with its massive 16 megabyte cache, it more than made up for this by being extremely quiet and boasting faster seek times and a higher average read speed. This drive would be an excellent choice for a quiet pc project or that home theatre PC due to the very noticeably quiet operating noise.
  • Western Digital Passport 80GB External USB2.0 HDD -
  • Antec TX1050B Black SOHO Tower Case - The included Smart Power 500W modular PSU is a nice addition to an already great case. The combination of a modular design along with all cables having black mesh sleeving should help to keep everything neat and tidy
  • Microsoft Optical Desktop with Fingerprint Reader - Setting up the fingerprint for each website is fairly simple; just navigate to the webpage and scan your fingerprint, which will bring up a form for you to input your login info. Once your login data is saved for the webpage, navigating to it and authenticating is extremely simple and works well.
  • Cambridge SurroundWorks 200 Speakers - Sound quality is terrific for a system of this type. Aside from the remote control, setup and use is a breeze, but the remote isn't a deal breaker. This little system rocks.
  • Logitech MM22 Portable iPod Speakers - They won't blow away your regular stereo sound system, but they will do a good job of what they are designed for - letting you un-tether from your headphones while listening (and perhaps sharing) your music, anywhere you want.
  • Samsung 193P+ LCD Monitor - When you are out looking for this display, make sure you do not purchase a 193P by accident. The two have the same MSRP and look identical so check out the packaging and the specifications. There are a good deal of 193Ps left over so the Plus models are still tough to find.
  • Nikon Coolpix 7900 Digital Camera - The onboard flash on this camera is fairly limited in its maximum range, but it does a great job at making sure it doesn't completely wash out colours. For situations where the flash is disabled, the camera automatically uses its Best Shot Selector (BSS). This makes the camera take three separate photos with the hopes that one of the three will have a minimal amount of motion blur to it.
  • Nokia 3230 Mobile Phone - The handset is a standard 2.5G phone with Tri-band coverage at 900, 1800 and 1900 frequencies. It supports GPRS, but there's no 3G shenanigans going on here. As such it makes sense that there's only a single camera on the back. This has a resolution of 1.2Megapixel count rather than the now more common 1.3Megapixel.
  • Samsung SGH-Z500 GSM Triband-WCMDA Camera Phone - The built in camera takes pretty good pictures with various resolutions up to 1152x864 (mega). The video recording can be done in sub QCIF (128x96), QCIF (176x144) modes. Size limit can be set to MMS limit or unlimited ~ 60mins. There is no built in flash led on the phone.

GUIDES...

  • Basic System Buyer's Guide - August 2005 - HardOCP has posted their August recommendations for a $400 budget system, including a GeForce 6600.
  • Update of the interactive AMD SocketA Rating and product ID (OPN) guide - With this interactive guide it's possible on the basis of numbers and characters on the Socket A CPU to get the Vcore, CPU temperature, size of the L2 Cache, the officially given FSB and the multiplier of the CPU within a few seconds.
  • Anatomy of a Hard Disk Drive - Ever wondered what is inside a hard disk drive?
  • How to Unclog Epson Print Heads - It's unbelievable how Epson printheads get clogged. No matter how good they are, they get clogged for no reason and don't unclog by themselves. Either you change the head or manage to unclog it by using a liquid made by Epson, which costs a small fortune – when you get to find it. So the poor technician has almost no chance to repair such printer.
  • Voice Over IP for $60, or $200, or $0 - All you need for VoIP communication is software, and the best software is free
  • F.E.A.R Demo Tweak Guide - Koroush Ghazi has published this brief guide as a holding point for known tweaks and tips for the FEAR Demo.

SOFTWARE...

  • SyncToy for Windows XP - SyncToy (download), a free PowerToy for Microsoft Windows XP, provides easy and flexible copying, moving, and synchronization of files in different directories.
  • CPU-Z 1.30 - CPU-Z (download) is a freeware detection program base on the Panopsys hardware detection engine. It allows to get some information on your system.
  • 7-Zip 4.26 beta - 7-Zip (download) is a file archiver with high compression ratio
  • eXeem 0.27 Public Beta - eXeem (download) is a brand new Peer-To-Peer program, which is based on the BitTorrent idea. eXeem eliminates the need for trackers as nodes in the program will be taking their role
  • AIM Ad Hack 4.11- With this small file (download) you can effectively remove all the ads from AIM (Updated for AIM version 5.9.3857)
  • VisualRoute 9.3g (shw) - VisualRoute (download) delivers the functionality of key Internet "ping," "whois," and "traceroute" tools, in a high-speed visually integrated package.
  • Gmail Notifier 1.0.25.0 - The Gmail Notifier (download) is a downloadable Windows application that alerts you when you have new Gmail messages. It displays an icon in your system tray to let you know if you have unread Gmail messages, and shows you their subjects, senders and snippets, all without having to open a web browser.
 Gameguru Mania News - Aug,05 2005 - tech
Nightly Tech Madness - tech
(hx) 03:58 AM CEST - Aug,05 2005 - Post a comment

SECURITY...

  • Microsoft to release six patches, some 'critical,' next week -  Microsoft Corp. will release six software patches next Tuesday covering flaws in its Windows operating system, along with an updated version of its Microsoft Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool and a nonsecurity update for Windows, Microsoft announced today.
  • First Windows Vista viruses unleashed - An Austrian hacker earned the dubious distinction of writing what are thought to be the first known viruses for Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Vista operating system. Written in July, the viruses take advantage of a new command shell, code-named Monad, that's included in the Windows Vista beta code.
  • IP flaw leaves Windows 2000 wide open - Vulnerability research firm eEye is warning of a critical flaw in Windows 2000 which it claims cannot be patched. Microsoft is currently investigating the problem and eEye is giving out few details in an effort to avoid helping hackers. The flaw is thought to allow access to PCs by subverting the IP address. This would be ideal for a worm attack that requires no user interaction, such as Sasser.
  • Genuine Windows Validation fixed - Microsoft has updated the Windows Genuine Validation tool to circumvent the hack exposed last week that allowed the system to be bypassed with a snippet of JavaScript code. The Validation is now a two-step process that first generates a code and then has you copy and paste that code to complete the process.

TECHNOLOGY...

  • Will Your PC Run Windows Vista? - Microsoft has said it won't issue the minimum hardware requirements for Windows Vista until next summer. However, the company has already dropped hints that analysts say suggest Windows Vista's Aero UI requires relatively high-end graphics. The operating system itself will determine which level a PC fits into by sensing its graphics capabilities, and PCs will either be deemed capable of running Aero or not. Those that are not will present a classic Windows interface, the software giant has said.
  • Windows Vista hands-on preview - Bit-Tech cover some of the technology behind the Beta, as well as more mundane things like the new Installer and the new security features included. There's a look at the new interface, using Aero, as well as our opinions on the new IE7.
  • Intel Temporarily Cuts Chip Set Production - Intel spokesperson Bill Kircos has denied reports that Intel is planning to exit the low-end chip set business altogether, but said Intel is "prioritizing manufacturing schedules" to focus on certain types of chip sets amid capacity constraints. He declined to specify which products would be affected by the adjustments, but a source familiar with Intel's plans said the move would affect various chip sets for low-end PCs.
  • Liquid metal is so cool it may be on ice - You will probably remember the excitement that greeted Sapphire's announcement, in May, of the first ever graphics card cooled by a fascinating new technology, liquid metal cooling, the Radeon Blizzard X850XTPE. Recently, however, Sapphire has been very quiet about the new card. They released a product with a similar name, the X850XTP - but it's a standard air-cooled model. According to TheInquirer, the part of the problem is this: "although liquid metal might be better than anything else at sucking heat away from a hot chip, that heat doesn't magically disappear. The heat is still inside the cooling system, and must be somehow removed from the liquid metal before the coolant carries the heat back to the chip."

HARDWARE... 

  • Sempron 3400+ Processor - The Sempron 3400+ more than met our performance expectations, and now that we finally have a 2.0 GHz Sempron with a full 256K of L2 cache, the Sempron is starting to move around the fringes of the mainstream market. It easily outpaced the Celeron D 340, and made short work of a 3.0 GHz Pentium 4 Prescott.
  • G.Skill DDR Memory Roundup: 7 Extreme Kits Tested - MadShrimps take a closer look at 7 Dual Channel kits from the Extreme Series and test their overclockability."
  • Corsair ValueSelect 1GB DDR333 SODIMM Memory - The majority of notebooks are capable of supporting 2GB of memory, which is the maximum amount of memory WindowsXP can manage without requiring any tweaking. This review is based on a 1GB DDR SDRAM SO-DIMM module from Corsair. This module will be tested using a notebook featuring the Intel 855PM chipset, which of course only supports DDR333.
  • GeForce 7800 GTX shootout - What's abundantly clear in our look at three retail GeForce 7800 GTX graphics cards is that there is no such thing as a bad one. All three cards from BFG, Leadtek, and XFX, respectively, can be recommended to a certain type of buyer, so determine if you want a) the cheapest GeForce 7800 GTX (Leadtek PX7800 GTX TDH MyVIVO, b) the one that does well in every department (BFG Technologies 7800 GTX OC), or c), the absolute fastest XFX GeForce 7800 GTX Extreme Edition.
  • AOpen Aeolus 7800 GTX - However, as it turned out, with our review sample AOpen has matched XFX with the core and memory hitting 450 and 1,250MHz respectively - up from 430/1200 on the reference nVidia boards
  • HIS X800XL vs Sapphire X800XL 512 MB - Bjorn3D has tested two cards with different features.
  • GeCube X800XL 512MB Graphics Card – 256MB vs. 512MB - TweakTown take a close look at GeCube's new ATI Radeon X800XL graphics card with 512MB of GDDR-3 memory onboard. After looking at the package and the card, they are comparing the 512MB model against a 256MB model to see what type of differences we have in our usual array of gaming benchmarks.
  • Gigabyte Aurora chassis and watercooling kit - Sporting three 120mm fans and a fantastic layout, this aluminium case is not only great value for money, but it's got the looks and performance too.
  • Plextor 740A review - While I was also impressed with its fast, high quality writing on both CDR's and DVD+R's, it did disappoint on DVD+RW, and DVD+R DL media.
  • Canary Wireless Digital Hotspotter - To use the Digital Hotspotter you simply press the white button. The unit will then scan for WiFi signals and will report whether or not it found one on the LED Display. IF you press the button again after the unit finds a network, it will search for another.
  • Lexmark Z735 printer - The Z735 has a very conventional design and a boxy appearance, though with rounded edges. Paper feeds from a near-vertical rear tray to an extendable one at the front. There are two control buttons, one to switch the printer on and off and the other to feed paper. A single USB 2.0
    socket at the rear connects the printer to a PC.

GUIDES...

  • Multitasking with Native Command Queuing  - Native Command Queuing can definitely improve the performance of desktop systems. Across our nine tests, NCQ performance gains average to around 9% for both the Maxtor and Seagate drives. That's pretty good, especially considering that we saw a handful of much more impressive gains in some of our tests.
  • Editorial - Of Gaming And Laptops - Let's take a look at the laptops with the top-tier chips: the nVidia 6800 non/Ultra go and the ATI X800 non/XT MOBILITY. There are only a few laptops: the Sager 9880, the Dell XPS Gen 2/Inspiron 9300, and the Dell Precision M70. Keep in mind that the high performance Alienware/Falcon/Voodoo laptops are just Sagers with a nice paint job. Let's take a look at each one.
  • How to Install Hard Drives over 8 GB in Older PCs - if you install a HD over 8 GB in an older PC it will format it as 8 GB. Learn how to correct this problem.
  • What is VoIP and how does it work? - If you have never heard of VoIP before, then the following article will change the way you think about how long distance phone calls are being made now, and about how all phone calls will be made in the future. Voice Over IP (VoIP) is a method for turning analog audio signals into digital data that can be transferred over the internet.
  • Secure XP - A Windows XP Security Guide v1.2.2 - Improve Windows XP's Security on computers not connected to a Domain. Windows XP Home does not include all the security features Windows XP Professional does, so some security options may be unavailable to the Home user.

SOFTWARE...

  • Microsoft Windows XP Pro SP 2 "ICMP" Patch - If you configure your computer that is running Microsoft Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2 (SP2) as the endpoint of a Tunnel mode Internet Protocol security (IPSec) connection, packets are dropped. This symptom occurs if you turn on the Windows Firewall feature. Additionally, packets are dropped even though you have configured the Windows firewall feature to allow ICMP packets. This patch updates the icmp and tcpip drivers (download) so make sure you get the "TCP/IP Event ID 4226 Patcher" to remove the connection limits in XP SP2, enjoy.
  • TCP/IP Event ID 4226 Patcher 2.23d  (WinXP SP2) - This is not a Microsoft product and will modify your internet connection driver (download) to allow for more connections, since Microsoft decided to limit the connection to 10 as a "security" measure, which I think is crap, I have mine at 256 now!
  • Skype 1.3.0.60 - This new version improves call qualit for users with restrictive firewalls and routers.
  • zlib 1.2.3 - Version 1.2.3 eliminates potential security vulnerabilities in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2, so all users of those versions should upgrade immediately.
  • DVD Region+CSS Free 5.9.3.2 - DVD Region+CSS Free enables you to watch and copy any region code CSS-encrypted DVD movies on any DVD drive.
  • AnyDVD 5.4.1.1 - AnyDVD allows you to decrypt CSS encrypted DVDs on the fly. Insert your CSS- (Content Scrambling System) and RPC (Region Code Protected) - protected DVD into your DVD drive
  • Nero CD-DVD Speed 4.04 - Nero CD-DVD Speed is a benchmark which can test the most important features of an optical drive. These tests include: Transfer rate, Seek times, CPU (Central Processing Unit) usage, Burst rate, DAE (Digital Audio Extraction) quality & Spinup/spindown time. It can also check the CD (Compact Disk) and DVD (Digital Versatile Disk) media quality.
  • Nero Burning Rom 6.6.0.16 - The Packages have been updated to v6.6.0.16 (mirror1 / mirror 2 / changelog) for the main Nero Burning ROM package, v3.1.0.16 for the NeroVision video/photo suite package and v4.3.20.1 for the InCD package.
  • HWiNFO32 v1.55  - A new version of professional hardware information tool has just been released.
  • Forceware 77.56 WHQL 64-bit - They are compatible with all current GeForce and Quadro graphics cards from NVIDIA starting at GeForce 3 making this a very interesting release. Make no mistake though, hardly any GeForce garphics card is not supported. GeForce 2 GTS is missing though.
  • Forceware 77.56 WHQL 32-Bit - They are compatible with all current GeForce and Quadro graphics cards from NVIDIA starting at GeForce 3 making this a very interesting release.
 Gameguru Mania News - Aug,03 2005 - tech
Evening Tech Reading - tech
(hx) 02:51 AM CEST - Aug,03 2005 - Post a comment / read (1)

SECURITY...

  • Microsoft to Host Hacker Meetings - Microsoft is working on plans to make a recent hacker meeting held on its Redmond, Washington, campus a twice-yearly event, according to a spokesperson for the vendor's security group. The company plans to host another Blue Hat security event in the fall, though no specific date for it has been set, Stephen Toulouse, a program manager in Microsoft's security unit, said on Monday.
  • Apple adopts controversial security chip - The computer that ships in the kit features a security chip called the Trusted Platform Module (TPM). The chips inclusion with the new Apple hardware doesn't come as a complete surprise. It has been previously suggested that Apple could use the TPM to prevent that computer users install the OS X operating system on a non-Mac PC such as a models made by Dell or HP.
  • Cisco IOS Exploitation Techniques - Mike Lynn, former researcher for Internet Security Systems (ISS), spoke at the Black Hat security conference (PDF) in Las Vegas about a serious vulnerability that he found while reverse-engineering the operating system in Cisco routers.
  • Virus Top Twenty for July 2005 -  NetSky.q is once again in first place, in its own strange way marking the sentence given to its author Sven Jaschan.

OFFTOPIC...

TECHNOLOGY...

  • Flash Memory to Speed Up Hard Drives - No more long waits for your PC to wake up. Longer laptop battery life. Data that survives a drop. These are the promises of solid-state-memory disks (SSDs), which use flash memory to supplement or replace today's hard drives. Samsung is working on two types of products: pure SSDs and hybrid drives that combine traditional hard disks and flash memory.
  • Apple doubles up on mouse buttons - Apple announced a multi-button mouse, known as the Mighty Mouse. The new model also features a scroll ball that allows users to quickly scroll through large web pages, graphics or spreadsheets. The item's functionality is similar to that of the scroll wheel that is common with PC mice.
  • Microsoft attacked over Vista name - WorldVista and The VistA Software Alliance are upset with Microsoft's choice, believing there's going to be a fair bit of confusion between the veteran admin software and Microsoft's Next Big Thing.
  • Yahoo to launch blog ad network - Yahoo's new service will differ from Google in that it will add human editorial to the selection of ads for content pages. In comparison, Google's service relies on technology.
  • Yahoo gathering ABC, CNN news clips - Video clips from CNN.com and ABC News will become part of Internet media company Yahoo Inc.'s free on-demand content, following agreements announced Monday.
  • Windows Guru Calls For IE7 Boycott - Paul Thurrott made a call in a recent article to boycott Internet Explorer, due to Microsoft's approach (continued in IE7) of not supporting web standards.
  • UK Record Companies Suing File Sharers - Record companies in Britain are filing their first ever lawsuits against five people accused of illicitly sharing music online, after settling out of court with dozens of others. More than 60 BPI lawsuits have already been settled, with users paying up to 6,500 pounds each in compensation
  • How to play H.264 content on your PC - According to TheInquirer, both Apple's Quicktime H.264 movie or Microsoft WMV-HD content looked very good and that you will experience some amazing quality when you play any of those standards. I can assure you it's much better than Mpeg 2 that you find on your DVDs.
  • Windows Vista Beta 1 screenshots and video  - Flexbeta snapped a few screenshots and recorded a video. The reason for the video is just to show off Windows Vista new graphics engine.
  • Assembly 2005 coverage - Assembly 05 / Jussi Laakkonen, Assembly 05 Event Director interview /  Pics and video

HARDWARE... 

  • Opteron 100 makes the leap to Socket 939 - The Opteron 100 series will now drop into AMD's Socket 939 infrastructure and no longer require registered DIMMs. The new AMD Opteron 100 Series processors with ECC unbuffered memory support offer a compelling price/performance ratio, beginning with Model 144, priced at $125 in 1,000-unit quantities, and scaling to Model 152, priced at $799 in 1,000-unit quantities.
  • Athlon 64 X2 3800+ Processor - In single-threaded performance, the Athlon 64 X2 3800+ simply can't match up to the higher-clocked Athlon 64 models, but does lay out the entire Pentium D line and manages to win a few against the 3.6-3.8 GHz Pentium 4 processors.
  • 2048 MB DDR Memory Shootout - At 272 MHz, Corsair's TWINX2048-3200C2 is screaming fast for one gigabyte modules. With a 36% overclock, Corsair simply leaves all the other modules in the dust..
  • OCZ EL PC3500 Gold GX 2-2-2-5 - It is a dual channel kit consisting of two 512Mb OCZ PC3500 (433Mhz) EL DDR Gold Edition GX modules with low timings of 2-2-2-5 that run on 2.8V, with gold layered copper heatspreaders, EVP (Extended Voltage Protection) and ULN (Ultra Low Noise) Technology.
  • OCZ PC2-6400 Gold Series Memory -
  • ASrock 939Dual-SATA2 ULi M1695 motherboard - ASrock 939Dual-SATA2 is a full fledge ATX board based on the ULi M1695/M1567. It supports the Socket 939 AMD Athlon 64x2, 64, FX, Sempron processors with a FSB of 1GHz of HTT. It supports cool n quiet, 4 GB of Dual channel DDR 400.
  • ATI Radeon X700 Pro and NVIDIA GeForce 6600GT Video Card Comparison - You might be surprise by the outcome: while NVIDIA does have the faster hardware, Tech-Hounds still recommend Radeon X700 Pro over the GeForce 6600GT.
  • ATI Radeon X300 SE HyperMemory 128MiB - They're no gaming powerhouses, but neither are they totally useless.
  • BFG Tech GeForce 7800 GTX 'Overclocked' - The BFG 7800 GTX is for people who not only want the best but the best of the best and is not for people who think the 9250SE they have is offering the ultimate gaming experience.
  • XFX GeForce 7800 GTX Overclocked - This is the current fastest stock 7800 GTX card on the market, beating out the 460 MHz of the BFG Tech unit and the 480 MHz of the Gainward card recently announced.
  • Zalman VF700-Cu VGA Cooler - Is your video card o­ne of those that is getting very hot and eventually raises the temperature of your entire system? Or perhaps the stock cooler that came with it is very noisy? Many people have o­ne or even both of these problems and the CNPS7700-Cu for their video card might be the perfect solution for either situation.
  • Plextor PX-740A review - With the exception of the Platinum brand DVD+/-R media, the PX-740A proved to be a competitor with drives such as NEC"s ND-3540A and Pioneer"s DVR-109D, and being at the same level as BenQ"s DW1640.
  • SimpleTech SimpleShare NAS - Unlike many external storage solutions, both packaged with and without a hard drive, the SimpleShare NAS is exactly what the name is; a very simple to use NAS unit that's designed for homes and small businesses. We'll be focusing in on the features of this unit and we'll evaluate its performance through the ease of use and the results obtained by third party networking benchmarks.
  • Ultra USB Hubs - ViperLair take a look at a couple USB hubs that add more ports to your existing setup.
  • Sony Cyber-Shot DSC-W7 -  Now, Sony has a compact 7.2MP digicam with a 3x optical zoom for $399. It's an excellent camera for those who want superior point-and-shoot quality without breaking out the owner's manual every five minutes or paying for a call to the local Geek Squad. Along with superior resolution, the DSC-W7 mirrors the trend in cameras with huge, 2.5-inch LCD screens to frame and review your shots.

GUIDES...

  • System Builders Guide (SBG) - They are covering budget (The Avenger – under $800), mid-range (The Executioner - $800 - $1500) and high-end (The Slayer – No Budget)
  • Secure XP - A Windows XP Security Guide v1.2.2 - Improve Windows XP's Security on computers not connected to a Domain. Windows XP Home does not include all the security features Windows XP Professional does, so some security options may be unavailable to the Home user. Security on Windows XP starts with having the latest updates. Installing SP2 is essential in making sure your system is secure. SP2 requires a Spyware and Virus free system to install without problems. Please read the advisory and run through Steps 1 and 2 completely before installing SP2.

SOFTWARE...

  • 29 Vector Drawing Programs - check it out
  • Unofficial Windows 98 SE Service Pack 2.0.2 - It contains all Windows98 SE updates (download) from Windows Update site and more.
  • SyncBack Freeware 3.2.8.500 - SyncBack (download) is our freeware program that helps you easily backup and synchronise your files to: the same drive; a different drive or medium (CDRW, CompactFlash, etc); an FTP server; a Network; or a Zip archive.
  • Morpheus 5.0.0.666 Beta - Morpheus searches the major file-sharing networks and simultaneously connects with millions of users of Gnutella, eDonkey, LimeWire, Grokster, G2, NEOnet and BitTorrent.
  • Guifications 2.11 - Guifications is a Gaim plugin that displays msn style "toaster" popups in a user defined corner of the screen. It's highly configurable, easy to use, and has theme support. It really is, the end all, be all, toaster popup plugin for Gaim!
  • Mp3tag 2.32b - Mp3tag can rename files based on the tag information, replace characters or words from tags and filenames, import/export tag information, create playlists, and more. It supports online freedb database lookups for selected files, allowing you to automatically gather proper tag information for select files or CDs.
  • Mozilla Suite 1.7.11 - download.
  • Firefox 1.0.6 Optimized builds  - From the same folks who bring you the "optimized" Firefox 106 builds, this is a new build (download) specifically for those folks who's processors support SSE2.
  • BWMeter 2.3.4 - BWMeter (download) is a powerful bandwidth meter and monitor, which measures and displays all traffic on your network.
  • Maxthon v1.3.3 - Maxthon (MyIE2) (download standard / combo) is a powerful web browser with a highly customizable interface. It is based on the Internet Explorer engine (your most likely current web browser) which means that what works in IE, works the same in Maxthon but with many additional efficient features.
  • Copernic Desktop Search 1.6.0.737 - The Search Engine for Your PC Find Your Files, Videos, Pictures, Bookmarks, Browser History, Contacts and Emails with the Power of a Search Engine Right on Your Desktop.
  • CCleaner (Crap Cleaner) 1.22.142 - CCleaner (download) is a freeware system optimization and privacy tool. It removes unused files from your system - allowing Windows to run faster and freeing up valuable hard disk space.
  • 7-Zip 4.25 Beta - 7-Zip (download) is a file archiver with high compression ratio.
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