The PC Report

According to the latest report from Tech ARP, the first service pack for Windows 7 could be hitting us sometime in Q4 of this year. Originally Microsoft had planned for a 22 month development period for SP1, longer than the dev times for Vista and XP’s SP1s. According to the report though, MS has pushed this date forward to the last quarter of 2010 due to new bugs that need to be fixed.

For those of you using Windows Update frequently, don’t worry because these bugs will no doubt will be patched via an update. However, for businesses that may only update to a new Service Pack, they will need a release sooner rather than later. Many businesses also don’t adopt new operating systems until a Service Pack has been released to ensue that all the bugs have been squashed before they update their systems.

Feeling satisfied with your long-running Core i7-920? Well, no more, because Intel has just released an updated version for sale. Like the i7-940 to i7-950 and i7-965 to i7-975 bump, the only thing new about the Intel Core i7-930 is a speed bump – which takes the 920’s 2.66 GHz and upgrades it to a 2.80 GHz with a 3.06 GHz Turbo Boost. It still packs the same four cores/eight threads setup as well as 8MB of L3 cache and the LGA 1366 socket.

The Core i7-930 is available now from several retailers such as Newegg, who are selling the chip for just $6 more than the i7-920 at US$294.99. Go out and grab one now if you want a cheap i7 on the LGA 1366 platform, or alternatively just overclock your i7-920 if you have one.

If you have poor quality internet you might run into trouble when you attempt to download large files. Almost any time I download a file larger than 50 MB the download will get cut off and tell me the connection to the server has failed. If I click retry it tries to download the entire file again.

I thought everyone knew how to resume a broken download but it amazed my friend when he saw me do it so now I’m sharing this with everyone here.

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A few days ago Microsoft decided that it would share with the world the current status of Office 2010 on the development scale. They revealed that Office 2010 is on schedule to be released to manufacturers (RTM) sometime next month. Microsoft also revealed that they will be releasing Office 2010 to businesses on May 12 this year, around a month before the June 15 release date for the general public.

If you purchase a full copy of Office 2007 and activate it between March 5, 2010 and September 30, 2010 you will be able to download an upgrade to Office 2010 when it becomes available for free. Upon the release date of the latest Office, the price will vary between US$159 and US$499 for the boxed edition.

Remember that iPad that was shown off a month ago? Well now we have confirmation on a release date from Apple: April 3rd 2010. This is the date that the Apple iPad (non-3G version) will go on sale in the United States, with pre-orders starting March 12th. The 3G version will come on sale late April in the US along with the iPad release in Australia, Canada, UK, Japan, France, Germany, Spain, Italy and Switzerland.

Prices for the Apple iPad will start at US$499 for the 16GB WiFi only edition, 32GB will be US$599 and the 64GB: US$699 – just add US$130 if you fancy the 3G on top of your selected storage.

If you’re eagerly awaiting the new GeForce GTX 480 and 470 from Nvidia (set to be released on March 26), then you’ll be happy to know that people have got hold of PCB shots of the cards. Above is a shot of the GTX 480 with the cooler removed; this card is an A2 revision so it may not be the final model. However, if you look closely above you’ll notice the 2 SLI connectors, 2x DVI and 1x Mini-HDMI ports, 8-pin and 6-pin PCIe power connectors and the source notes that there are 12 128MB chips for a total of 1.5GB VRAM.

Below is a shot of the back of the GTX 470. As with the GTX 480, you’ll notice there is a hole in the back of the card to support for airflow for the cooler. The card also appears to be shorter than the GTX 480 above, but features the same 2 SLI connectors and 2 DVI and 1 HDMI ports. The card also appears to only need 2x 6-pin PCIe power connectors. More info on these cards will no doubt be released later.

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Nvidia has just pumped out a new iteration of drivers for their GeForce and ION graphics cards. Version 196.75 adds support for the next generation ION chipsets as well as the new GT 300-series OEM graphics cards (not to be confused with the upcoming GTX 400s), as well as SLI and multi-GPU support for many recently released and upcoming games. Oh, and there’s the usual game performance improvements and bug fixes.

Grab the new drivers straight from the Nvidia website. Full release notes below

Update: It has been reported that these latest Nvidia drivers (196.75) in some cases do not control the graphics card fans automatically and can cause your graphics card to fry. We advise you to roll-back your drivers to the previous version until this bug is fixed.

Update 2: Nvidia has pulled these drivers amid the complaints that it fries graphics cards.

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While Facebook has never publicly shared how much they make from their site, estimates are always coming. Inside Facebook is reporting that Facebook may earn up to US$1.1 billion from ads and other deals this coming year – quite a sum for the US’s second largest website.

Estimates for Facebook’s revenues have said that Facebook’s earnings have doubled over the past few years: 2007 coming in at $150 million, 2008 at $300 million and 2009 came in at around $630 million. With an estimate of $1.1 billion for 2010, Facebook is set to become a multi-billion dollar network.

Today Nvidia launched officially their next-gen ION chips. The ION 2 graphics chips are 10 times more powerful than integrated graphics and allows playback of 1080p videos. They are also more power efficiant thanks to Nvidia’s Optimus technology that powers down the ION GPU when it’s now being used and powers it up for more intensive tasks such as 3D gaming and HD video decoding.

The ION 2 is a discrete graphics chip that has dedicated memory and is attached to an Intel Atom Pine Trail processor via PCIe. It will be available in notebooks/netbooks starting in April with the Acer Aspire One 532G; more than 30 laptops in total with ION 2 chips in them are set to launch by Q2 2010.

Opera Software has just announced that their latest version of their browser is ready for consumption. Opera 10.50 now touts itself as Windows’ fastest web browser, and some of the performance benefits seen come from a brand new JavaScript engine called Carakan and a new graphics engine called Vega. Opera now also supports HTML5 and CSS3 for the latest in web technology support.

You may notice from the image above that the Opera interface has changed for the better. There is now full Windows 7 integration including Aero Glass, Aero Peek and separate taskbar entries for each tab which comes in handy. They have also chucked tabs on the top, similar to Google Chrome, and there is also the option to have large tab previews as seen above.

Opera 10.50 is now available from the Opera website to download, or for EU users you can grab it from the browser ballot. You can head below to see our Sunspider JavaScript benchmark results in Opera 10.50

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