Content and news by Rob Williams

I have recently purchased a new laptop. When I bought it, I didn’t think about buying a bag to protect it; I really did not think that I needed a laptop specific bag. I already owned a regular book bag, and a messenger bag, which I thought would work fine for my laptop. Well within a month the top of my laptop was scratched, this may not seem like a big deal to you, but it was to me! So today I’m taking a look at a laptop bag that protects, and looks cool at the same time, the Tom Bihn Buzz Laptop Bag!

Read the full review at Think Computers.

“PCstats knows overclocking. You know overclocking. Everybody knows overclocking. The PC runs faster and hotter, provides more performance, and yadda yadda yadda. Overclocking has become so routine in the hardware world that every processor, motherboard, memory module and videocard needs to be overclocked as part of its review. We never know if the people actually buying the hardware care about its overclocking potential, but as computer journalists and enthusiasts, we know we have to test it out. This got us thinking though; what about under-clocking? Most modern processors and motherboards can just as easily run under a rated speed as it can run over… but is there a point to this? Well possibly.”

This is a cool project. Even unclocked, the computer performed quite well. Check it out at PC Stats.

These modules came to us in small, relatively uninspired cardboard boxes. While these little guys looked fairly unassuming, their contents would be deadly. While it is questionable whether or not these cases will protect the memory during a long and arduous trek, fret with falls and hardware soccer playing couriers, the modules arrived to us in pristine condition, wrapped only in a thin layer of everybody’s favorite – bubble wrap, lining the inside of an envelope. When I slid the little boxes from the envelope, I was at first perplexed by the simplicity of the packaging, a thought which passed quickly as a knife made haste for the box’s seal. On opening the box, we were presented with the module itself, wrapped within an anti-static bag and coddled within a small cardboard insert intended to keep it from moving. Along with the module came a quick start guide and a Ballistix sticker. While it’s not the most extravagant or flashy packaging, it does its job well, and that’s all that matters. It wouldn’t take me long to snip the tops from these packages, and to find myself in possession of two beautiful memory modules, fresh from Crucial themselves, carrying that new hardware smell that we all know and love.

Check out the full review at Motherboards.

Cooler Master is well known for manufacturing quality accessories for PCs. Some of the more popular items they make are their cases, power supplies, and fan controllers. In this review we will be taking an in-depth look at their 550W Real Power power supply. This power supply is designed to conform to ATX 12V v2.01 and EPS12V v2.1 standards, making it a very well rounded PSU. Another interesting twist with this power supply is the “human computer interface”, which is a meter showing power consumption in real-time.

Head over to Extreme Overclocking for the full review!

The past eighteen months have been pretty good to Infinity Ward. After the company’s rookie effort, Call of Duty, was released in October 2003, the game went on to rack up both critical awards and huge sales, topping the PC charts for months to follow. The WWII shooter also developed a huge Comment (0) -->

June 2, 2005 – One thing that was always missing from the original RollerCoaster Tycoon was the ability to create and maintain water parks. Sure, they’re not technically roller coasters, but they sure are fun, especially in those hot summer days. I suppose it’s pretty appropriate that this June when the sun Comment (0) -->

What I am willing to predict, however, even at this early stage, is that the real loser in all of this will be PC gaming. Let’s start with Quake 4, which uses the “old” Doom 3 engine but still came across as one of the more impressive PC titles I saw at the show. Id, Quake 4’s developer, was also showing an Xbox 360 version of the same game behind closed doors, and those reporters I polled at the show confirmed what I thought: they really couldn’t discern any difference between the two versions.

It really depends on the developers and which games will go to PC and which to the consoles. Add mouse and keyboard support, and there would be no reason not to play them on the consoles. It will be interesting to see, no doubt. Read Dave Carnoy’s column over at C-Net.

If you’ve already got a decent S939 motherboard on your hands it would be almost criminal not to try an Athlon 64 3000+ E3-stepping CPU. Sure, it’s not hugely fast at default speeds, but I’d be amazed if 2.5GHz wasn’t a given and 3GHz on the cards with better cooling. There’s just something rather naughty but nice about 50% overclocks with near-default voltage. For once, you can have your cake and eat it! Yum.

As you can see from the news icon, they really achieved a fantastic overclock on a processor that’s a great price. Check it out at Hexus.

Yonah is the code name for the dual-core version of Intel’s Pentium M processor for notebooks and miniature desktops, scheduled for release in the first quarter of next year. Unlike Intel’s first dual-core designs for desktop PCs, Yonah is a much more integrated design that shares storage and power management resources within the chip, said Mooly Eden, vice president and general manager of Intel’s mobile platforms group.

The future of multitasking on our notebooks is looking good. Check out the full article at PC World.

Microsoft’s acknowledgment of the incident was the latest embarrassment for the world’s largest software company, which has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to improve security and promote consumer confidence in its products, the report said.

It goes to show that even after 100’s of Millions being spent to beef up security, nothings bullet-proof, so to speak. Malicious code was inserted to steal visitors passwords. Read the posting here.

Microsoft will make Extensible Markup Language (XML) the default for saving files in its release of Office 12, due next year.

The new file formats will allow Office to be more open to other developers and applications, and could meet the demands of some users that require XML to meet regulatory requirements, said Gartner…

Nice! Finally I can use documents on both Windows and Linux very easily. Check out the full article here.

ECS Demo AGP/PCIe On S939 & New SIMA Cards: If you remember the PF88, it’s the Pentium 4 board that could be morphed into Socket 939 Athlon 64 using an add-in card. ECS are showing off the Pentium-M (Socket 479) and AMD Socket 754 add-in cards, here at Computex. Read about it here.

Laptop lushness from Amacrox: The kit contains a retractable USB mouse, a USB light (something I could do with right now in this dimly lit hotel room), retractable ‘in the ear’ ear phones and a four port USB hub. Expect the kit to hit these shores sometime later this year. Check it out here.

For this and a whole lot more content, head over to Hexus.

As CPU technology advances, the sockets that correspond to them are forced to change as well. The new physical sizes, internal architecture, and thermal properties require that the ‘packaging’ evolve. A negative side effect of this development is that motherboards wind up with limited ‘upgrade paths’ when it comes to adding a faster processor.

Check out the full article at Big Bruin.

The HIS X850XT IceQ II Turbo did well today in our tests, and provides enough performance for AGP motherboard owners to perhaps convince you that it may not be necessary to upgrade to a PCIe board if you’re only interested in a single card upgrade.

Check out the full review at Viper Lair.

Power supplies come in many shapes and sizes. Not many anymore stand out from the pack except for a select few. It seems that every company that makes anything computer related has joined in and decided to make a power supply, Vantec is not any different in that respect, except their power supplies are some of the ones that do stand out from the rest. Today I have the new Vantec 460Watt ION2 Power Supply for review. I would like to thank Vantec for the chance to review it. Let’s find out what makes this power supply different from the others out there.

Check out the full review over at Think Computers.

We take a look at the first Nvidia C19 board we can get our hands on and really like the performance so far. Gigabyte’s features are always top notch and the price is quite decent. There’s a bit of overclocking but nothing extreme.

Check out the full review at Insane Tek.

Third day of Computex. We finally wandered out of Hall 1 and headed to Hall 2. There were quite a few pleasant surprises waiting for us there. Want to find out what? Keep reading!

As always, there is a lot of info to be had, so check it out Phoronix.

Cube was one of the first 3D first person shooters that offered an intelligent game play complete with its own engine, using SDL and OpenGL while complying with open-source standards. Although the graphics aren’t the best in the current Cube Engine version (2004), it continues to be a very popular game for open-source gamers who enjoy the most out of first person shooters. On May 31, 2005 a new GNU game has finally made its way out for public release after nearly four years in development, this game is Nexuiz. The game, in its 1.0 release, contains over 17 maps, 28 playable characters, and 10 music tracks. It even supports up to 64 players on death-match servers. All parts of this game are licensed under the GPL (GNU Public License), but exactly how does this game look and feel? We have plenty of screenshots today to report our initial findings.

For an open source game, it looks pretty good. It reminds me of Quake III and Unreal Tournament quite a bit. Can’t wait to try it out! Check out the many screenshots over at Phoronix.

We can draw several useful conclusions from the results of this testing. First, we have discovered that selection of the system memory should be tightly coupled to processor selection. 1000MHz memory looks like an excellent choice if you are planning to overclock a processor with native 800 MHz front side bus; if you do not plan to overclock, 800 MHz memory is a good choice. The 667 MHz memory offers a good compromise solution, providing strong performance and excellent flexibility.

You can check out the full 8-Page Application Note at this link, (Right click, save as). There are many benchmarks, that you should look at especially if you plan to own a 955Xe chipset.

Millis, Massachusetts − June, 2005 − Kanguru Solutions announces the release of the Kanguru PC Clone Kit, a cost effective backup solution that allows users to create an exact copy of their hard drive.

The Kanguru PC Clone Kit is a hard drive cloning system designed for users to easily recover from hard drive failure within minutes, all without image files to restore from or recovery CDs to boot. This kit can also be used to upgrade a hard drive to a larger capacity, by cloning the existing hard drive onto an 80, 120, 200, or 250 GB hard drive.

To create an exact copy of a hard drive with the Kanguru PC Clone Kit, users need only follow 3 straightforward steps. To begin, users connect a new IDE hard drive of equal of greater size, using the IDE to USB2.0 adapter.

Next, the user runs Acronis Migrate Easy 7.0 on the PC, this program will create an exact copy of the hard drive including all system and registry files. Acronis Migrate Easy 7.0 is a user-friendly program included with the Kanguru PC Clone Kit that boasts an interface similar to Windows XP wizard, and the ability to support large disks over 180GB.

The final step is to store the cloned drive in a safe place until there is a need for replacing the current hard drive. In the event that a PC’s system hard drive becomes corrupted or fails, users can easily replace it with this backup for instantaneous recovery. If users are interested in upgrading an internal hard drive to a larger capacity, then the previous drive can be replaced with the clone at once.

You can find a lot more about the product over on the official Kanguru site.