Windows 7 comes out Oct. 22, and many gamers are wondering whether it will be a boon for gaming, or a disappointment. Former ExtremeTech editor Jason Cross, who’s covered games and tech for 13 years, discusses the pluses and minuses of Windows 7 for gamers — how it differs from Vista, if it’ll run older games, and the benefits of 64-bit computing.
Windows 7 basically takes the Vista codebase and rewrites, refines, optimizes, and overhauls most of the internal stuff without making dramatic changes to the driver stacks that Vista did over WinXP. The changes to the fundamental driver models are small and mostly serve to improve performance. Plus, the hardware makers — especially the graphics guys — are on top of the changes this time around. Nvidia and ATI have been shipping quite good Win7 graphics drivers for months now.
Tracy Jones-Harris Gaming, computers Gaming, Vista, Win7, windows 7, Windows Vista
With help from readers of PC Pro, Sky News in the UK launched an undercover investigation into rogue PC repair shops. As a result, Sky’s cameras caught technicians scouring through private photos, stealing passwords and over-charging for basic repairs. It was a simple enough job: ‘To create the fault, we simply loosened one of the memory chips so Windows wouldn’t load. To get things working again, one needs only push the chip back into the slot and reboot the machine. Any half-way competent engineers should fix it in minutes.’ But these technicians had other ideas, stealing photos and documents, as well as login details for email and bank accounts.
Tracy Jones-Harris computers Dodgy Technicians, investigations, PC Pro, Rogue PC Shops, Sky News, Stealing, Theft, undercover
Kingston has unveiled the ‘world’s first 256GB flash drive, raising flash drive storage to the kind of capacity you normally associate with laptop hard disks. Kingston claims the drive is ‘ideal for netbook users who want to extend the limited capacity of their machines,’ although given that the device costs about twice as much as a netbook, buyers could probably get more storage by purchasing two of the cheap ultraportables. The device is made on a build-to-order basis, with a suggested UK retail price of £650.52 including VAT — that’s an astonishing $1,307.27 at current exchange rates. Not exactly cheap and cheerful.
Tracy Jones-Harris Gadgets, computers 256GB, 256GB Flash Drive, flash drive, Kingston
A Texas startup called Baryonyx plans to build data centers powered entirely by renewable energy. Its first project will be a wind-powered server farm powered by 100 wind turbines in the Texas panhandle. The company has also leased 38,000 acres in the Gulf of Mexico, where it hopes to build hundreds of 300-foot wind turbines that can each generate up to 5 megawatts of power to support additional facilities. Baryonyx plans to sell excess capacity to the local utility, which it will use as a backup when the wind dies down
Tracy Jones-Harris Science & Design, computers Baryonyx, Server Farm, Wind Farm, Wind Power
Mozilla has confirmed the first security vulnerability in Firefox 3.5, saying that the bug could be used to hijack a machine running the company’s newest browser. A noted Firefox contributor called the situation ’self-inflicted’ and said it was likely that the hacker who posted public exploit code Monday became aware of the flaw by rooting through Bugzilla, Mozilla’s bug- and change-tracking database. The vulnerability is in the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine that debuted with Firefox 3.5, said Mozilla. ‘[It] can be exploited by an attacker who tricks a victim into viewing a malicious Web page containing the exploit code,’ Mozilla’s security blog reported.
Tracy Jones-Harris Internet, computers Bugzilla, Firefox, Firefox 3.5, Mozilla, Vulnerability
ITNews reports that Australia’s ever-unpopular Minister for Communications, Senator Stephen Conroy, has foreshadowed new action by the Australian Government to crack down on illegal file sharing under the guise of promoting the digital economy.
Options apparently being considered include the controversial and previously reported French three-strikes approach and an approach which sounds suspiciously like New Zealand’s even more dubious guilty upon accusation approach to filesharing. Needless to say, although the Government is consulting with ‘representatives of both copyright owners and the Internet industry in an effort to reach an industry-led consensus on an effective solution,’ arguably the most significant group — ordinary Internet users — are not being consulted.
Senator Conroy is the man behind the crusade to ‘protect’ Australians from the horrors of the Internet with a mandatory, government run blacklist, an effort which recently earned him the title of Internet Villain of the Year for 2009.
Tracy Jones-Harris Internet, computers Censorship, File Sharing, Government, P2P, Senator Conroy, Stephen Conroy
The SATA 6G standard offers more than simply a faster 6.0 Gb/s data throughput speed, to wit: improved NCQ support, better power management, and a new connector to support 1.8-inch drives.
While modern-day, spindle-based hard drives struggle to keep up with SATA 3G speeds, modern SSDs are nearly saturating the existing standard, and a move to SATA 6G was welcome in the hardware community. It looks like that technology will be delayed, though. The only chip supporting the standard today, the Marvell 88SE9123, is having major issues.
Motherboard vendors including ASUS and Gigabyte, which had planned on releasing SATA 6G technology using the chip on Intel Lynnfield platform motherboards later this summer, are having to remove the Marvell 88SE9123 and redesign their boards at the last minute due to significant speed and reliability issues.
Tracy Jones-Harris Gaming, computers 6.0Gb/s, asus, Gigabyte, Marvell, Marvell 88SE9123, SATA, SATA 6G
In a fresh interview with derStandard.at, Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth talks about GNOME 3.0 — its strengths, but also about what he thinks is missing. He also mentions ongoing talks for a common meta-release-cycle with Debian which could delay the next LTS
Tracy Jones-Harris Internet, computers Debian, GNOME 3.0, linux, Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu
Build 10A402 of Snow Leopard just got pushed out to developers, and we’ll post what’s new in a second. Go ahead and download via Software Update now.
Tracy Jones-Harris computers Apple, build, developer, leopard, leopardsnow, Software
We can’t say we’re entirely shocked to see ‘em, but a new pair of GPUs based on 40 nanometer process technology has surfaced over at NVIDIA’s website. Both of the new devices are expected to be sold exclusively to large OEMs for integration into pre-configured machines, and they’ll both support DirectX 10.1, OpenGL 3.0, and CUDA. The lower-end GeForce G210 arrives with a 589MHz core clock speed, 512MB of DDR2 RAM and a 64-bit memory interface; meanwhile, the GeForce GT 220 ups the ante with a 615MHz core clock rate, 1GB of GDDR3 RAM and a 128-bit memory interface. As for outputs, the former packs VGA, DisplayPort and DVI, while the latter sticks with VGA, HDMI and DVI. There’s no word on when we’ll seen them offered in any entry-level desktop rigs, but surely it won’t be long now
Tracy Jones-Harris computers DisplayPort, GeForce G210, GeForce GT 220, gpu, graphics, graphics card, HDMI, NVIDIA