Tech [Jo]

Windows live hotmail available

2007-05-07T13:33:00.000-04:00

Usually I don't blog about email clients, but I've been using live mail beta for a long time now...

Microsoft offers it to all regular hotmail account holders. I suggest upgrading to it, it features 2gb of storage, better spam management, and the best feature is non-page refreshing browsing ; which means you cycle through your emails and folders without the wait times!!!

Upgrade HERE

Spiderman 3: hell combo

2007-05-07T02:07:00.000-04:00

You might ask yourself what the title is all about!?
Well, let me tell you my experience with Spiderman 3, the movie and game...
**spoiler alert**

First off, I went to see the movie this week end and left wondering how could they ruin it this bad!? I mean the guy (Tobey Mcguire), cries all along the movie, to a point you just want to leave.
They managed to stuff in 3 villains, it could of been good but you are thrown a place to another without really knowing the back story ; a good example is the venom liquid... It appears in the middle of the movie catching spidey (with is suit on !!!) in the middle of the night without knowing where it came from!

The most stupid scene of all is when Peter Parker starts to wear the black suit and suddenly, is hair turns black and has some kind of black crayon around the eyes. From there he becomes attractive to women and starts to dance a la James brown on the sidewalk, what the hell?!
All that to say the movie is bad, but still managed to break yet another box office record...

On top of that I decided maybe the game will be better, you never know!
The game won't run with a Saitek Eclipse keyboard attached to your PC. Yet another game with that bug. I was able to disable some Human interface device in the device manager and that fixed the startup issue. When I was able to run the game, it looked fantastic ; this is the best looking spiderman game to date. The menus are well done. Controls are intuitive, the gameplay is kind of like Ultimate-spiderman . The problem is the game is so buggy ( 1.0 ). It crashes randomly. Black screens to a point it's not playable. So I hope Activision are working on a 1.1 patch soon.

So as you can understand I can't make a review since I can't play...
This is a screenshot of one of the rare moments the games runs without crashing...

Behold the Geforce 8800 Ultra

2007-05-02T18:09:00.000-04:00

Ultra is back!
Its got 768MB of RAM. 612/2.16 core-memory.
You get some 10 to 20% (rarely) fps gain from the GTX version at 800$ ( yep 800$)!
Worth the cash, nope, get a GTX!!!

Two of them, better have a deep pocket (1600$)!

nVidia also released new drivers 158.18 Vista
and there 158.22 XP (not WHQL)

Spiderman 3: the game PC test drive...

2007-04-30T03:07:00.000-04:00

I'm currently testing the latest Activision spidey game ( PC of course)...
Is it good or is it like those crappy Spiderman 2: the game and Ultimate Spiderman?!
You'll have to stay tuned, I'll post a review next week before the release date (may 4th) , 'till then...

Moving time

2007-04-28T12:47:00.000-04:00

There won't be articles for the week, i'm currently in the middle of a moving trip
I'll be back next week, stay tuned...

More ATI 2k pictures!

2007-04-24T20:15:00.000-04:00

This time, those are the real retail versions...
HD 2600 XT

HD 2900 XT

Intel cuts Core 2's prices

2007-04-24T13:09:00.000-04:00

Intel chops down it's CPU prices, it must be due to the fact that AMD's barcelona ship date is approaching.
224$ for a E6600, not bad...

DirectX 10 on Windows XP ?

2007-04-21T19:27:00.000-04:00

It seems it will be done...
The Alky project is working on Dx 10 compatibility libraries that wiil enable you to run those games on XP.
The cherry on that is you won't need a DX 10 GPU!!!
Nice indeed...

New Forceware and Catalyst drivers out

2007-04-18T21:01:00.000-04:00

Ati posted there unified; Xp/Vista 7.4 drivers.
While nvidia released a couple of beta drivers since there 8600/8500 are out,
including there most recent Beta 158.19
In these drivers they are intruducing yet another control panel, wich is much like the previous one.
You can still roolback to the classic one with the little reg hack..although now you need to go into the new cp/edit ; use classic cp...

Nvidia 8600 and 8500 shipping

2007-04-17T15:50:00.000-04:00

nvidia is shipping it's mid-range Direct X 10 compatible card they go around 200$ for the 8600 GTS..and around 100$ for the low end 8500 GT.

The 8600 GTS seems to be faster than the X1950 pro.
nVidida continues with it's dx 10 line-up while ATI keeps delaying it's R600
Not very good for the consumer..
The line up goes like this;
8500 GT-8600 GT-8600 GTS-8800 GTS 320mb-8800 GTS 640mb- and the beloved 8800 GTX
AMD/ATI, are you still there...?

More ATI R600 pics!

2007-04-13T13:00:00.000-04:00

It looks pretty long although this seems to be the oem version.

Or if you would lke to call it the X2800...
**Edit** Apparently it will be called Radeon HD 2900 XT

Battle of the Processors

2007-04-10T20:24:00.000-04:00

Intel is shipping it's new Core 2 Extreme QX6800 quad core.
It runs at 2.93 ghz. Get a nice review HERE

Meanwhile, AMD has cut it's prices on a couple of there CPU's

The sub 1000$ gaming PC build

2007-04-06T16:27:00.000-04:00

So you've got a grand hitching in your pocket... let's build a kick-ass gaming PC!
Prices comes from newegg.com as the time of writing.

CPU
First off, we need a powerful, multicore all around CPU and Intel Core 2 Duo's are all the rage right now. And because we are on a budget we won't get an extreme version.
I went with the 2.13 Ghz 2mb L2 cache E6400.
I originally wanted to go with the E6600 but our budget is restraint.
It ships for about 200$

Motherboard
So we want a Core 2 duo board (obviously), that has a 1066 FBS since the next generation of Intel CPU's, Penryn, will need it. We also need SLI upgrade path, overclocking features and more.So for this build I wanted to go with the EVGA 680i SLI but the budget was not there.
I choose the bang for the buck, nVidia 650i chipset, dual 16x pci-e Asus P5N-E SLI.
It's about 125$, nice price tag!
Don't forget memory!
I had to it...
So we want 2gig since more and more games needs it. We also want DDR 800mhz with low latency's. So I went with Corsairs flagship XMS2's.
They come in a dual 2x1gb package at 168$.

Hard Drive
We need a massive Hard disk to install all those space hungry...games.
And we are pretty lucky as prices are dropping.
A 500gb, yep 500 gig Western Digital Caviar SE 16mb cache S-ata II 3gb/s will do the job.134$
Graphics Card
It's a gaming PC we're building so we will need a beefy GPU to cope with our Core 2.
I wanted it to be DX10 ready, so uncheck ATI from here since the haven't realesed there R600 yet and since Nvidia just resealed a 320mb version of there Geforce 8800GTS, and they haven't released there mid-range part, I went with th EVGA Geforce 8800GTS 320 mb.
At 279$, it's not cheap but the cheapest DX10 part right now.
DVD drive
So since not all games are online buyable, you still need a dvd drive !
I went with the LG Black 18X light scribe.
It burns and read all formats and DVD's at 18X, no HD-DVD/Blue-ray support here...32$

Power Supply
You need something to power up those power-hungry parts and you want reliability and stability.The Antec True power trio is SLI ready with three 12v rails, 650 watts of power and all the bling bling at 109$ pretty awesome!

Case
Last but not least, the most important part, the case.
You need good airflow and cooling, lots of space, solid , good looking case well
the Antec nine hundred is all the rage right now with LOTS of cooling and space
It's easy to work with and looks great!124$ not bad!

This is it! You might have noticed that there is no sound card as are budget was tight but for 69$ more you get the Sound Blaster X-FI Xtreme gamer. The onboard audio does a great job.
The E6400 is easily overclockable, even with stock cooling, you can get past the 3Ghz bar without a sweat!
So it comes around 1200$, not bad for a Dual core, DX 10 ready (Crysis oh yes), 500gb, 2 gigs of ram PC!!

nVidia forcware 97.94 out

2007-04-05T12:56:00.000-04:00

nVidia just released new official Geforce 8800 series Windows XP drivers
It was about time since the last one was in february.

Download it HERE
Release note .pdf
I'm currently writing an sub 1000$ PC article,
it'll be posted by the end of the week.

Microsoft boot scout

2007-04-02T14:16:00.000-04:00

Microsoft is going to offer a dual-boot with Mac OS X!
Yep, you heard right, just like apple did with boot camp, not to say the name is pretty inspired by it.
The only thing you will need is Vista and OS X obviously.

Supreme Commander : RTS awesomness.

2007-04-02T00:04:00.000-04:00

When I saw a couple of videos of the upcoming Sup Comm with it's Strategic zoom, I was not very impressed.I was never a big RTS fan, so said to myself; yet another age of empires with a little more meat around the bone right?, wrong!
This game is simply the best RTS I have ever played, not to say that Company of heroes is not awesome. You can zoom from a map to close battle, almost firs person like.
Everything is subtle, the graphics are amazing even when those little troops explode it's something to look at.
You choose between three factions, each one has it's own upgradeable commander.You have a lot, I mean a lot of units to work with especially when you level up.You have got to experience a nuke; it fills your whole (or both) screen with an atomic like explosion, pretty awesome to look at.
Even the sound in a RTS has never been this good especially if you own a 5/7.1 system, you can hear every unit move every explosion from upclose and the more you zoom out the more you can hear.
This game supports dual screen setups, although if you have a widescreen monitor you can have one side the strategic map and your upclose combat on the other.
Try the demo you'll want it, I guarantee it!
If you have a dual (quad) core this game will take it as it is multithreaded.
I suggest having at least 1 gig of ram, 2 is better
A dual core and a Radeon X1800 and up
Nvidia 7800 and up for a good sup com experience

+ Gorgeous graphics and revolutionizing gameplay.
Gives a new breath to the genre.

- System hog. no tutorials.

9/10

Nvidia classic control panel, how to bring it back.

2007-03-30T14:04:00.000-04:00

For a couple of months now, nVidia brought a new control panel in forceware, letting choose between the old and new one.
But now they just disabled the old one and people using coolbits are left in the cold.
There is a little workaround for this.
Go into your run prompt and write "regedit".

After go into HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE / Software / Nvidia Corporation / Global / NvCplApi / Policies
Now right click in the right pane : new DWORD value and name it : SedonaDisable

Now right click the new DWORD value, Modify, and then set value data to "2"
Save and close the registry editor and you're done!
Go into your control panel to see if it worked.
Right clik on your desktop / properties settings / advanced...
If the hack worked you will be asked to choose between the classic and new control panel.

This only works in XP.
Enjoy!

Elder scrolls IV: Oblivion 1.2

2007-03-28T01:19:00.000-04:00

Bethesda resealed a new patch for oblivion.
You can get it here
Shivering isle, the much anticipated expansion is supposed to ship this spring.

EGVA 680i LT the light version.

2007-03-27T12:24:00.000-04:00

EVGA and nVidia just launched a stripped down version of the übber 680i SLI.
They didn't strip down the price that much tough.
You can get reviews @
http://www.guru3d.com/article/mainboard/421/
http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTMwMiwxLCxoZW50aHVzaWFzdA==

Ati r600 to be named X2800

2007-03-25T21:46:00.000-04:00

Ati upcoming dx 10 graphics card name as been leaked on the Stalker system requirements label.
" 512 MB DirectX® 9.0c compatible card / nVIDIA® GeForce™ 8800 / ATI Radeon® X2800"
hmm...interesting

The logitech G5 new look

2007-03-25T20:44:00.000-04:00

After the G7 makeover it's now time for the G5 to take a paint job.
As you can see they brought back the second thumb button (mx-series).

Not a major upgrade but if you do not own a laser mouse it's a no brainer..