Content and news by Rob Williams

Thanks to its ease-of-use and ability to store my RSS feeds in the “cloud”, I’ve been a long-time user of Google’s Reader aggregator, and have had little to complain about. But this past weekend, I encountered something a little unusual with the service – something that could be considered humorous for some, but a major problem…

Long before millions of people were subjected to having their personal data stolen via a certain online network, I often wondered if there were better ways to pay for digital goods online, such as those found on Xbox Live or PlayStation Network, than to simply hand over credit card details. Of course, game cards are one option…

When Intel unveiled its ‘Thunderbolt’ connector this past February, it seemed there were reasons to be both excited and a little disappointed. The latter was due to the fact that Thunderbolt wasn’t quite the ‘Light Peak’ we had come to know. While offering similar functionality, it totally lacks a fiber-optic connection, which was the reason…

At CES this past January, Kingston showed us an upcoming product that we knew had the potential to become a boon for iPad and iPhone users – a mobile hard drive with wireless capabilities. At the time, the idea and implementation impressed us enough to warrant Kingston’s earning of one of our “Best of CES 2011” awards…

With the publishing of Ryan’s Z68 SSD caching article this past Monday, we hit a significant milestone – one that took me until just last night to realise. That article marked our 1,000th piece of content, and with our first-ever having been published on March 1, 2005, it sure took us a while to get here! Despite that, it’d be impossible for…

We’re in the process of running two small contests, and both end tomorrow night. For those who haven’t entered yet due to A) Laziness, B) Lack of time or C) Lack of knowledge about them – none of those excuses are good enough! If you at all want a chance to win a copy of either PowerDVD 11 Ultra or Futuremark PCMark 7, get on…

Polish game developer CD Projekt RED this week released the long-awaited follow-up to The Witcher, called The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings. There are a couple of interesting things about the game, but most of all, it happens to be a PC-only offering, and an RPG at that. While on game consoles, single-player RPGs are not uncommon…

To help fill a model gap that no one told us about, NVIDIA has released its GeForce GTX 560, a slight step down from the Ti variant. Featuring a cut of 48 cores and the potential for wildly varying clock speeds, this card is a strange beast. But, we look to pit MSI’s ‘Twin Frozr II’ against our usual fleet of cards to see where it stacks up in the end.

The moment those who’ve been waiting for ‘Welcome Back’ details is over, as Sony has laid out its “customer appreciation” program across three of its regional blogs. In total, gamers in North and Latin America and also Europe will be gifted two PlayStation 3 games and/or (it’s not too clear) two PlayStation Portable games.

After quite a long NAS drought, we’re soon to publish our look at Thecus’ N4200 four-bay offering, which up to this point in our testing is looking good. The last time we published some NAS content, it came courtesy of our networking-guru Greg King, when he looked at Synology’s DS209+. That was over two-years-ago, so to say we’re…

In what’s sure to be a major relief to devout PlayStation gamers everywhere, Sony has finally begun bringing up the bulk of its online PSN service, one piece at a time. There have been a couple of issues that have prevented the service from remaining up since the original restoration, but as it appears now, the service is once again stable.

Remember when MTV was more about music and charts and less about teen pregnancies and glorified idiots? No? To be fair, those days ended long ago, but in its prime, MTV was a great source of discovering some hot music, and to see which tracks were burning up the charts. Today, though, there are a multitude of…

With Nintendo scheduled to take the veil off its “Wii 2″ in the weeks to come, speculation has begun to run rampant with regards to what kind of console it’s going to be, or if it’s going to be the last of its kind. For those who just love their traditional console experiences, there’s no good feeling in picturing the boxes as we know them going…

It should be a secret to no one that there exist a lot of “snake oil” audio and video cables out there, in the sense that they are overpriced but do the same job as a modestly-priced alternative. Most often, even the companies themselves can’t seem to produce definitive proof, and you’d be hard-pressed to see even the most hardcore…

As one might expect, being that I deal with a lot of benchmarking and testing of new hardware, I tear down and build up PCs often – but rarely my own. It’s only on occasion when I’ll take a look at my own PC and realize that a change needs to be made. Sometimes it’s performance-related, other times its aesthetics-related, or it could…

Intel’s super-small Atom processor hasn’t seen a major update since its original launch in 2008, so what’s in store for the future? According to CNET, the major update will occur in 2013 with the introduction of “Silvermont“. And a “major” update it should be, as Atom will become a full-blown SoC, as was to be expected with the rising…

I’m starting to wonder if the designers at NZXT are reading my mind, because with the launch of the company’s “Sentry Mesh”, another one of my ideas has come to fruition. I’ve often thought that with meshed fronts on many chassis today, a fan controller with a brushed aluminum finish kind of stands out. Well, for those who enjoy…

Futuremark has launched the latest version of its popular PC benchmarking tool, PCMark, and as its “7” name suggests, it’s designed exclusively for use with Windows 7. A couple of notable changes were made to both the test organization of the program, and also its pricing schemes. Join us as we take a quick look to see what’s been added or refined.

With the launch of Intel’s Z68 Express chipset came the expected influx of supported motherboards. Because Z68 is meant to be a higher-tier P67, however, there were not quite as many models available at launch that we expected, with GIGABYTE dominating the listings with at least eight motherboards. It’s clear that while GIGABYTE is anxious…

As a long-time fan of CyberLink’s PowerDVD software, I got a hold of the company’s latest version a couple of weeks ago, and thought I’d talk a little about it here. As a commercial media player, PowerDVD 11 isn’t quite as scaled down as a VLC or MPlayer. Rather, it comes in three flavors; all quite robust. Out of the box, Blu-rays and all other…