Earlier this month we reported that Microsoft was on the verge of announcing something major regarding Windows 7, and on April 24th our friend Paul Thurrott finally revealed what we were all waiting for. Microsoft revealed that one new feature in Windows 7 we are going to see before it RTM’s is “Windows XP mode”. All those rumors of a new UI or an early (official) RC release were finally put to rest (As if Microsoft would pull something like that).
Today Microsoft finally discussed “Windows XP Mode” in depth in a full QnA press release entitled “Helping Small Businesses With Windows 7 Professional and Windows XP Mode”, featuring Scott Woodgate, director of Desktop Virtualization and Microsoft Desktop
Optimization Pack (MDOP).
Popularity: 31% [?]
Now all Office users will have the option to load and save OpenDocument files, with today’s distribution of Service Pack 2 of Office 2007. In something of a surprise — contrary to what many at Microsoft led us to believe — upon installing SP2 on our test systems, we immediately located an option for saving files in ODF by default. That means you don’t have to “Save As” and export to ODF if you don’t ever want to use Microsoft’s OOXML or Office 2003 “compatibility mode;” you can at least try to use Word, Excel, and PowerPoint as substitutes for OpenOffice.
The thermal paste market is very vast with many different companies having their own brand or brands; plural. Despite not making as much temperature difference as upgrading a cooler, thermal grease is an integral part of any computer system in supporting the main cooling for your CPU and GPU. A good paste will not only give great temperature readings but will also be easy to spread and clean off as well as being cost effective. The latest contender to enter the fray is the Tuniq TX-3 which follows on from their similarly named TX-2; let’s see what is can do.
Last year we reviewed the OCZ Alchemy Elixir, which was the first keyboard we looked at from this company that once was just known for their system memory and power supplies but since have ventured into all sorts of gaming products. The OCZ Alchemy Elixir was a nice keyboard, but now joining their peripherals line-up is the OCZ Behemoth — a laser gaming mouse with a 4-way LED display, 18 grams worth of customizable weights, and an adjustable DPI sensor.
If you’re sitting on a monster CPU you know the importance of keeping it nice and cool. Most overclockers and high end users know about aftermarket CPU coolers. Unfortunately, a large percentage of end users never give it a second thought. We’ve seen systems come directly from major websites with the wrong CPU cooler, too small a CPU cooler and pieces of plastic stuck between the CPU and the Cooler. CPU cooling bares a little thought and scrutiny. If you’re still sitting a stock CPU cooler on your CPU, perhaps you should look up the term pre-planned obsolesce. That would be planning a part or component in such a way as to cause it to fail prematurely in order to get the end user to buy a new one. Well, stock CPU coolers aren’t quite that bad, but they’re close. In a lot of years we’ve never really seen a stock CPU cooler that cools the CPU properly and none have ever provided and measure of overclocking headroom.
Sometimes it’s more important to choose a high-quality product that suits your needs rather than choosing the largest, more expensive one. Today, we will be testing that theory when we examine a monitor that Geeks.com sent us: the Soyo 24” Pearl LCD monitor. While other computer monitors out there are larger and offer better specifications, does this monitor provide a decent picture at a reasonable price? Read on to find out.
ASUS has it tough. No question about it, everyone loves to hate the front runner. It’s hard to remember when they weren’t one of the top dogs, and in this business, it’s as hard to stay on top as it is to get there. For the last several years, like everyone else, they’ve been paying the bills by selling Intel-based systems. They kept faith with the AMD crowd however, and have consistently offered a full range of products to support the underdog in the CPU race. All that is paying off, now that the new Phenom II AM3 chips have hit the street, and enthusiasts are once again buying AMD CPUs in earnest.
You may have noticed that nearly all of the exciting hard drives in the last year have been 2.5 inch drives. The 2.5 inch standard has long dominated the notebook market and is quickly starting to take over the enterprise server market. When Western Digital released the VelociRaptor analysts took notice as it marked the 2.5″ invasion into desktop systems. Here we are a year later and solid state drives are all the rage. I know several enthusiasts that are using SSDs in their full towers, most of them with multiple drives in either RAID 0 or RAID 5.
Music lovers often look to replace the cheap earphones that come with their MP3 players right away. For the real audiophile what qualifies, as a good set of earphones for the normal user is sub-par. The Audiophile often spends more on their headphones than they do the MP3 player. Today we are going to look at the new Shure SE115 Sound Isolating Earphones. These earphones are available in several colors and offer lots of features for music lovers. Read on to find out how well the Shure SE115 Sound Isolating Earphones perform.
Firefox 3.0.10 fixes two issues found in Firefox 3.0.9:
