Content and news by Rob Williams

Hardware vendors are going to love the news that Windows Vista is going to need very beefy hardware to run well. At Microsoft’s TechEd conference, Dan Warne finally managed to squeeze blood from a stone – or rather, answers about Longhorn’s hardware requirements from Microsoft. Nigel Page is a strategist with Microsoft Australia. He told APC today 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.

Now, you know requirements are hardcore when everyone reading this would have to upgrade their motherboards in order to use the specified hardware. DDR3 has not even been released yet, nor will be for a while.

Graphics cards with 256MB of memory is an odd one. It seems like they are focusing more on throwing things at the video card memory than the actual system memory. S-ATA 2 hard drives? They must be planning for some hardcore improvements between now and release, because Beta 1 currently runs great on current computers.

Check out the full article at APC Start.

Headphones have been around for quite some time, and have shot to fame in recent decades ever since the 1950’s. At first restricted to the recording studio or for home use, headphones have become a rather common item in today’s world of computers, walkmans and portable DVD players – and are probably the most economical way of listening to any sort of audio playback, arugably with better quality than a standard set of speakers. Today, a pair of headphones by the Milwaukee-based manufacturer KOSS have been made available to CyberwizardPit; let us further explore the product in greater detail, and what it has to offer.

Check out the full review at Cyber Wizard Pit!

The NGO ATI Optimized Driver is a tweaked version of the ATI Catalyst driver. The main purpose is to satisfy the users with better performance and image quality. The Driver has support for all Radeon cards.

If you love customized drivers, definitely check out this new one over at NGOHQ!

Although the Chipset utilized on the ASUS P5LD2 Deluxe is the
i945P, rather than Intel’s flagship i955X, the motherboard does manage
to pack a wealth of onboard features with an additional ATA-133 IDE
controller, Firewire, and a SATA2 controller. Topping off the P5LD2
Deluxe package is a WiFi+TV tuner card as well as ASUS’s Stack Cool 2
and AI Quiet Technology. Just how well does this motherboard compete
against other motherboards and other Chipsets? We’ll find out today in
this review of the ASUS P5LD2 Deluxe WiFi+TV edition.

Check out the full review of this great motherboard over at Phoronix.

In use, I found the gamepad to have a slight learning curve or perhaps an adjustment period would be a better way of putting it. I can’t say it improved my game, but having the extra keys within easy reach was certainly nice and if you push the keyboard out of the way you do get a lot more room on your desk for your mouse.

Check out the full review over at Viper Lair!

Notebook cooling pads, there is really not much to say about them, and the ones you see out there are really cheap. They are usually loud and don’t really do a good job, just make a lot of noise. Not to mention that they are not stylish at all and most of them are made of plastic. Today we will be looking at a notebook cooling pad that is a bit more than a cooling pad, and actually brings some style to the table. Sure it can look cool, but can it cool your laptop? Let’s find out!

This has to be one of the few laptop coolers that actually does what it promises to do. Expensive, but it may be worth it if you have a crazy hot laptop (Like mine). Check out the full review at Think Computers.

This pad is by far the best mouse pad I have ever reviewed. It scored almost a perfect 10 in terms of its surface, design, size and quality. The only drawback is that it’s a bit pricy and not anybody could empty out their wallet for it, but I can guarantee users that are willing to buy this pad will not regret it. It’s just that amazing.

Head on over to PC Modding Malaysia for the full look.

Join me as I discuss how anisotropic texture filtering works, before moving on to investigating what’s up in the current drivers, followed by a look at what NVIDIA has done in a very recent driver build to fix one of their user-selectable quality modes. Finally, I’ll round things off with a chat about NVIDIA’s filtering choices and what to expect in the future from the major IHVs.

This is a great look at AF and the problem with previous drivers for the 7*00’s. Check it out at Hexus.

Power supply makers have more or less run out of ideas on how
to improve the appearance of their products. They’ve done everything
from LEDs, to fancy cable sleeving, to modular designs, but in the end
none of them tend to stand out. Today from Hiper, however, we have a
unit that breaks away from common designs: the Hiper Type-R Modular 580W
PSU.

Check out the full review at Phoronix!

For those of you that like to sip down your favorite beverage while
at the computer, finding a place to set it down might be rough. If your
desk is cluttered, you might put it in some awkward place. Next thing you
know, it has spilt all over your desk, and maybe onto your computer case.
That is why Geeks sells a device for your computer that attempts to solve
this problem. The computer cup holder will store a beverage on your case.
As an added bonus for you smokers out there, it comes with a cigarette
lighter.

You’ve got to love crazy geek toys like this. If only the holder could keep my coffee warm as well, I’d buy one. Check out the full review at A True Review.

I know plenty of people with TV cards that run an aerial splitter to get a signal on TV and PC, but with this card there is no need for a splitter. This would also benefit media centre owners wanting to run a dual tuner set up as you wont need to send two aerial cables to the MCE PC and would just need to take a cable from the aerial output of the Cinergy 1400-DVB-T card to the second tuner.

Check out the full review at Xtreme Computing.

Fuddruckers, a hamburger chain, hotlinked to a flash game developer’s Burgertime clone on their ‘Fuddrockers’ page. When the developer noticed an abnormal amount of traffic coming from their website, he decided to let the company know how he felt — and maybe teach them about hotlinking..” From the post: “So, I redirected everything coming from Fuddruckers.com. (learned all about .htaccess files also… neat!) Wrote a nice little message pointing out how incredibly stupid their web developer is. And then redirected the main page to a pleasant little website showing photographs of slaughterhouses. And also opened up some more popups, for those that don’t have popup blockers.

Ha, this is great stuff. It will definitely teach them to get a better web developer.. Source: Slashdot.

The XG Magnum is one of the best looking Power Supply’s I have
seen.
The built in LCD and Advanced Airflow & Cooling Design make this a unique
Power Supply.

Head on over to CaseModGod for the full review!

The Asetek Xtreme WaterChill Water Cooling Kit has quality components that are easy to install. With all 1/2″ tubing and fittings, a large radiator with 2 120mm fans, and an excellent pump it performs extremely well. This is a complete solution for the serious overclocker. It’s easily one of the best water cooling kits on the planet! The Watch the Video to find out more…

Check out the full video review at 3D Gameman!

Well, I’ve had my XFX 7800GTX since they first came out, I ordered it the day after they came out publicly. All in all I am very happy with it, why shouldn’t I be, right? It is the top of the line graphics card from a top card maker. This is sort of a review of this card and sort of not, normally we don’t review things that we pay for, it creates a sort of bias towards the product.

Check out the full article at Think Computers.

Commemorating the fifth anniversary of the SmoothWall firewall
comes the long over-due Express 3.0 (Grizzly) Alpha 1 release. Among
other vast improvements, SmoothWall Express 3 now utilizes the Linux
2.6.12 kernel and features a new open architecture so developers can
easily add additional security components to SmoothWall. For your
viewing pleasure, we’ve posted some screenshots of the administrative
web-interface from SmoothWall Express 3.

Check it out at Phoronix.

What is revolutionary about Nintendogs is the control interface… It really is hands-free, using real voice recognition. When you first choose a dog from all the breeds available, you use the touch screen to pet it and stroke it, and while you’re doing this, the game prompts you to give your dog a name. You can call it anything and the game will ask you a few times to repeat the name, so it records your voice and the sound to then associate that sound with the dog’s name… After while you’ll be able to open up the DS, turn the game on and call your dog, who’ll then come over. You can interact with your dog purely by using your voice without even having to have the DS in your hands…

Check out the full interview at Hexus!

The developer day was a massive 10 hours information fest, most of which was aimed at helping developers prepare not only for the Xbox 360 needs, but also for Windows Vista, (we’ll have more on Vista later), but for now, let’s have a look at what’ll be going on with the Xbox 360.

Check out all the information at Hexus!

We realize that AGP is far from fading away, according to our survey, almost 83% of the voters are still using AGP and only 17% are using systems with PCI-e.

All the details can be found here.

Last seen describing ATi Technologies’ CrossfFire multi-VPU technology as “Ingenious And Absurd”, and asking ‘so what lies are behind…’ – oops, sorry! – “So what lies behind the CrossFire technology, and how is it meant to work?”, Lars Weinand – perhaps on a quest to get the inside scoop for hisself – has apparently jumped to the red side, and gotten a job at ATi Technologies.

Check out the full story at Hexus!