[H]ardNews 12th Edition

ABIT AX8 K8T890:

Hexus has the VIA K8T890 powered ABIT AX8 motherboard in house for a round or two of benchmarks. The gang had a bit of trouble OC’ing the board so those of you doing a little research on socket 939 boards for your next upgrade will want to see what the Hexus crew thought of the AX8. Here’s a clip to get you started:

Presentation, as usual, is excellent, and enthusiast-orientated options are up to ABIT's usual standards. £79 buys you a decent introduction to S939, and performance, coupled with any compatible CPU, is always going to be impressive, especially so in gaming.

Hard Drive Formatting:

PCStats has a handy-dandy beginners guide to formatting your hard drive that should be helpful to those of you who are “technologically challenged”.

Since this guide deals with the installation, partitioning, and formatting of hard drives, there is a possibility that you may make a mistake and format or delete a partition inadvertently from an existing hard drive whose data is important to you - causing irreversibly data loss.

Opera CEO Rescued:

You have to give Opera’s CEO credit for at least getting in the water in an attempt to make the promised transatlantic swim…even if he had to be rescued 2 days into the journey. Pretty funny stuff, hit the link and check out the pictures. Oddly enough, “Phantom” was the name of the sinking ship/raft.

Opera's CEO, Jon S. von Tetzchner heroically saved the life of his PR Manager in a dramatic development this morning when “Phantom", the company inflatable raft, was punctured off the coast of southern Norway. Rumors circulate about possible sabotage, but it may just have been the raft's poor condition that resulted in its complete breakdown as Jon and his helper started on day 2 of their transatlantic swim.

[H]ardNews 11th Edition

Video Games Treating PTSD:

Anyone who says video games are “good for nothing” needs to read this article that describes video games being used to help soldiers with post traumatic stress disorder.

In conjunction with the military, Pair and a colleague are working to convert virtual warfare scenarios developed for a video game - X Box's Full Spectrum Warrior - into a programme designed for returning vets. A test version is in place at Camp Pendleton, a Marine base near San Diego, and the San Diego Naval Hospital.

This isn’t a fluke either. Video games have been proven to help calm kids before surgery, and video games go a long way to help hospitalized sick children during lengthy stays in the hospital.

[H]ardNews 10th Edition - Blair's Tech Ed.

Supercomputing Grid Passes Test:

If you think your phat pipe to the net is “all that” imagine what a 600MB per second data transfer rate would feel like. The crazy part is that the 500 terabytes of data used in this challenge would take the average 512 kilobit household broadband connection 250 years download. Whoa.

When the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) comes online at the CERN in 2007 it will produce more data than any other experiment in the history of physics. Particle physicists have now passed another milestone in their preparations for the LHC by sustaining a continuous flow of 600 megabytes of data per second (MB/s) for 10 days from the Geneva laboratory to seven sites in Europe and the US.

AOL Replacing AIM:

AOL has decided to replace AIM with a new version called Triton. People will still make fun of you for being on AOL, but the name “Triton” sounds a lot cooler than AIM-II.

Triton introduces an entirely new, simplified user interface that adopts contemporary elements such as tabbed message windows to switch between different modes of communication. Users can also corral all chat sessions into a single, tabbed window dubbed "IM Catcher."

AOL Blacklisted:

Speaking of AOL, due to a huge run of spam, the Mail Abuse Prevention Systems have blacklisted eight AOL IP ranges. If you are using AOL and no one is responding to your mail, it might not be intentional.

According to Kalkea, the company that acquired MAPS last year, the RBL blacklist is used by some of the biggest ISPs in the world, including RoadRunner, USA.net, BT, Telstra -- and AOL itself.

[H]ardNews 9th Edition

MS Adding “Black Box” To Windows:

Here is a good one. Microsoft says they are adding the computer version of a flight data recorder to Windows. I suppose that the privacy advocates are in a tiff over this already, remember how freaked they got over the whole Pentium III ID numbers. I was actually planning on making a big “Windows crashes so much they need a black box…” joke but I decided not to. Feel free to insert your own joke [here].

"Think of it as a flight data recorder, so that any time there's a problem, that 'black box' is there helping us work together and diagnose what's going on," Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates said during a speech at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference here.

[H]ardNews 8th Edition

HIS X850XT IceQ II Turbo:

Viper Lair says that the HIS X850XT IceQ II Turbo makes them "giddy". Awww, isn't that sweet? It has been a while, but I remember my first hardware crush too. For more info on the X850XT you can take a peek at our review of a VisionTek branded card here.

My main concern when initially taking on this review, was that I didn't want to sound like a school girl who just saw her first, well, you know. I have to admit, the HIS X850XT IceQ-II Turbo makes me giddy.

Website Attacks Are Up:

According to information provided by the hackers themselves, web site attacks and defacements rose by 36% (400,000) in the last two years. It looks like the government and the military are favorite targets.

Hackers carried out almost 500,000 more attacks on Web sites and servers last year than in 2003, according to independent research..

SMARTGuard WallFly:

How about a program that prevents kids from playing mature rated games and also limits the amount of time kids can play games and when they can be played. Back before there was software for this kinda stuff, we used a thing called “parenting”.

"We do a lot more than give parents a tool to help control content," Jerald Block, CEO of SMARTGuard, told me. "We also allow parents to setup time zones where gaming and computer use is or is not permitted, allow parents to setup weekly budgets for game and computer use, and provide informative reports that detail game use on the computer."

[H]ardNews 7th Edition

[H]ardForum [H]appenings:

Rejoice! [H]ardForum [H]appenings is here! Since it is Tuesday, we’ll get back to the basics today and start things off with a trip to Case Modding forums and check out the progress on the awesome Batman Begins custom case. You have to check out the latest additions to the project…I’ll give you a two words hint: utility and belt. If custom cases aren’t your thing, what about small form factor PCs? Check out our handy SFF FAQ to help you with all your questions and then hit the SFF Gallery and figure out which SFF you like. Hottest deal of the day is definitely this 1GB of Corsair PC3200 for only $129…shipped. Runner up in the deal of the day department is this 200GB Seagate hard drive for under $70 after rebates. Sweet. If you need cash, hit the For Sale & Trade forum. I guarantee that right now, someone is looking for what you are selling. As always, have fun…we’ll see you in there!

[H]ardNews 6th Edition

Flashy Hard Drives:

Microsoft and Samsung have demonstrated a hybrid hard drive that replaces the conventional hard drive cache with flash memory. Sounds pretty cool, but I will withhold my opinions until after we see them tested. Thanks to Matthew Quon for the linkage.

A hybrid memory system, combining a hard drive and flash memory, has been demonstrated by Samsung and Microsoft. The aim is to combine the fast read/write access times of NAND flash with the storage capacity of a rotating hard drive.

Longhorn Screenshots:

For those of you interested, there are a bunch of Windows Longhorn screenshots posted over at Flexbeta today. Honestly, I thought there would have been more radical changes in the look of Longhorn.

After playing around with this new build I decided to post a few screenshots of it. First impression on this new build is that it seems pretty stable, however, driver support is still lacking.

[H]ardNews 5th Edition

AMD Confidential @ PCP:

Ryan over at PC Perspective gives a look at AMD's upcoming technology with some documentation that has not been public up till today. Can you say socket change and DDR3?

Of course, none of this information has come to me from AMD, nor have they spoken to me directly about anything that is mentioned here. With that in mind, it is entirely possible that the slides I am seeing here are 100% wrong; AMD might never use DDR2, their new socket may not be called M2 and use 1207 pins, and power may actually decrease in the next generation of parts.

[H]ardNews 4th Edition

ATI Radeon X850 XT-PE AGP:

Hexu has ATI's Radeon X850 XT-PE AGP pitted against Club3D’s Radeon X800XL in their latest review. For comparison purposes, you can see our review of the X850XT-PE AGP here.

Examining the performance difference between the X800 XL and the X850 XT Platinum Edition, we can see why X800 XL continues to be enthused about by all who come into contact with it. Compared to GeForce 6800 GT, it hits hard and gives little away to NVIDIA's competing SKU in terms of performance.

Semiconductor Industry Flat In 05:

Not only is DigiTimes reporting that the semiconductor industry will fall flat through the remainder of the year, they are also saying that motherboard shipments will drop 5% - 15% in Q2.

TSMC, Taiwan’s top foundry service provider, saw its net EPS (earning per share) drop 25% to NT$0.72 last quarter, the lowest total since the second half of 2003. Company chairman Morris Chang indicated the company remains cautious about the outlook for the rest of this year, and TSMC has lowered its forecast for next year as well.

[H]ardNews 3rd Edition - Mods & Ends

Cooling:

Arctic Cooling Freezer 4 & Freezer 64 @ HWzone.co.il - Scythe Shogun vs. Ninja Cooler HSF Comparison @ Dirkvader - Arctic Silver ArctiClean @ OcModShop - Sunbeam Modding Accessories @ Spode’s Abode

Etc.:

The ABCs Of LEDs @ Box Gods - Ultra Power Supply Tester @ Computing On Demand - Sky Hawk Power One 620W PSU @ Mad Shrimps - Samsung Yepp YH-925GS Photo/MP3 Player @ PCStats

Cases & Modding:

Lian Li PC-V800 Enclosure @ The Tech Report - A.C. Ryan Modding Products @ Bjorn3D

[H]ardNews 2nd Edition

Frustrated By DRM:

It seems that the U.S. isn’t the only country who thinks DRM is a huge turn off. UK users also do not like the limitations on music they purchase. Complicating matters are different file formats, players, rules and the outright lack of a “physical” product makes downloading music overseas an uphill battle.

"What people don't understand is that when they buy an iPod or other digital music player, they're being tied into a system," said Mr Ross. "Many of our readers have already been caught out, buying tracks but being unable to play them on their player."

Internet Explorer 7 Information:

Everyone is all excited over an entry made on a blog belonging to one of the Internet Explorer team members. A few juicy nuggets of info were dropped but nothing earth shattering…like an expected release date for IE7.

In a blog entry posted on Friday, a member of Microsoft's Internet Explorer development team said the company plans to support key elements of W3C recommendations PNG, an image format, and Cascading Style Sheet, a web page styling standard.

[H]ardNews 1st Edition - Press Releases

AMD64 Performs On Windows XP x64:

AMD today announced all existing and upcoming single- and dual-core AMD Athlon™ 64, AMD Opteron™ and AMD Turion™ 64 processors are designed to be fully compatible with and deliver world-class performance on Microsoft® Windows® Server 2003 x64 Editions and Windows XP Professional x64 Edition. “AMD is setting the 64-bit standard that the industry is embracing today and our innovative AMD64 technology, together with Microsoft’s new x64 operating systems, will give millions of businesses, PC and mobile users a chance to see the power of 64-bit computing come to life”.

NVIDIA Supports Windows XP x64:

NVIDIA Corporation today demonstrated its 64-bit computing platform technology leadership with the immediate availability of a Windows Hardware Quality Labs (WHQL)-certified graphics driver that supports the entire family of Microsoft Windows x64 editions. The NVIDIA® ForceWare™ suite of software drivers works with all of Microsoft’s 64-bit and 32-bit operating systems to provide customers with updated support and features that enhance their computing experience.

SAP AG & Microsoft Jointly Developing New Product:

SAP AG and Microsoft Corp. today announced they are jointly developing and planning to offer a new product, code-named "Mendocino," that will help companies gain a competitive advantage by revolutionizing the way information workers access, analyze and use enterprise data to make better business decisions. "Mendocino" will link SAP process functionality directly to Microsoft® Office applications. Users of this product, the first to be developed jointly between SAP and Microsoft, will enjoy the familiarity of Microsoft Office as they access SAP's best-practice business processes and information. The announcement was made at SAPPHIRE® '05, SAP's international customer conference being held in Copenhagen, Denmark, April 26--28.