The PC Report

Google Chrome, which turns a happy second birthday today, has celebrated by releasing version 6 to the world. The most noticeable change in Chrome 6 is the slightly revised user interface, which has been made simpler through merging of the two menus into one, removal of some unnecessary interface features and a brand new color scheme that is now a grey instead of blue.

Other than the user interface update, Chrome 6 brings improved syncing tools with new support for syncing of web form data and extensions along with bug fixes, patched security holes and speed improvements. Google claims Chrome’s JavaScript performance is three times faster than it was in 2008.

Why the Chrome team has decided to release a major version number Chrome update (5.0 to 6.0) with relatively minor changes is odd. Usually version number schemes leave the first number for major versions and subsequent numbers after decimal places are reserved for minor changes and bug fixes.

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The new Sandy Bridge architecture from Intel is sure looking to be a great solution for the future after a sample has been tested by AnandTech. The hardware analysis site got their hands on a sample Core i5-2400 processor – a quad-core Sandy Bridge chip running at 3.1 GHz and with 6 MB of L3 cache.

Overall, the chip performed around 10% faster than similarly clocked CPUs available on the market today without consuming any more power. This isn’t the shining area of the chip though. The integrated graphics processor (IGP) present in the Sandy Bridge processor was faster than a discrete ATI Radeon HD 5450 by a fair margin and is powerful enough to play current games such as Dragon Age: Origins on lesser-quality settings.

Sandy Bridge processors will also have a naming scheme that will be easy to follow. Simply take a look at the chart below to get an idea of how the naming scheme will work. K suffix processors denote unlocked multipliers, S will denote “performance optimized lifestyle SKUs” and T denotes power optimized.

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After prolonged exposure to pointless and irritating prompts such as the Open File Security Warning in Windows 7 it is easy to get so frustrated that you want to remove the prompt completely. Luckily this is very easy to do thanks to an editable list of “safe” file types.

In case you’re worrying about compromising your system, this method poses no risk to your system as your anti-virus should clean up infected files before you can open them. It’s surprising that Microsoft includes annoying warnings like this that are rendered useless if you are running AV.

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The second in our Best Music Player series is here and today we’ll be taking a look at Apple’s iTunes music player. iTunes is a music player you’ve all heard of – it’s one of the most used music players available thanks to Apple’s iPod and iPhone range and marketing for their products.

iTunes was announced back in 2001 and started out as a Mac OS 9-only application until it was available for OS X from version 2.0. The latest version, 9.2 (the one used for today’s article) was released along with the release of iOS 4.0 and the iPhone 4, adding support for both. You can download iTunes from Apple’s website now.

One of the most annoying things about iTunes that you notice before you install the application is the massive file size for the download. With a size of 93 MB it’s just ridiculous that there is also a separate installer for those of you running 64-bit Windows like us, the download link of which is hidden in the fine print down the left hand side.

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As per every month, ATI has released a new Catalyst driver for their range of graphics cards. Version 10.8 brings with it full OpenGL ES 2.0 support for Windows XP and up as well as Linux, anti-aliasing for StarCraft II and performance improvements for Far Cry 2, Left 4 Dead 2 and Stormrise. The usual amount of bugs have also been fixed.

Interestingly enough, in these new drivers from AMD a number of code names for as many as 35 unreleased ATI graphics cards have been uncovered. These code names are for the upcoming Radeon HD 6000 Series GPUs (codenamed “Southern Islands”), and include a number of related codes including Cayman, Antilles, Blackcomb, Barts, Whistler, Onega, Turks, Seymour, Caicos, and Caspian.

While we await more details of the HD 6000 series, head over to the AMD Game website where you can download the latest ATI Catalyst 10.8 driver. Head below if you want the release notes for the driver.

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Microsoft Russia has made a major blunder today after posting a screenshot of the upcoming interface of Internet Explorer 9 – the next big revision of Microsoft’s infamous browser. So far Microsoft has teased us with some platform previews showing the JavaScript and HTML5 power of IE9 through the new Chakra engine, but no interface has been revealed.

The image in question, as you can see above, has since been pulled from Microsoft Russia’s press website but they weren’t quick enough for blogs around the internet to download the image and re-post it. Futhermore, Neowin claims to have confirmed the screenshots as real after coercing with sources close to the project.

This single image tells a lot about Microsoft’s direction for IE9. The user interface team has removed the chunky and clunky interface present in Internet Explorer 8 in favor of an ultra-minimalistic design similar to that of Firefox 4 and Chrome. Microsoft has moved tabs to the top area, removed the large Favorites bar to a button on the right hand side along with Home and Settings, removed the search bar and slimmed down the UI as much as possible

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Teclast released a few months ago what it claims to be the world’s first wireless webcam: the W900. Well, we’ve got our hands on this webcam from Chinese manufacturer Teclast and put it through our tests in our labs to see whether it’s just as good as a wired webcam.

Some of the features this webcam has include a 200 metre wireless range, VGA (640×480) video capturing, noise-cancelling microphone and a night vision function. Read on to see if the manufacturer’s feature list is as good as it looks at first glance.

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It was only a matter of time before a search engine would attempt to bring search-as-you-type results to the world, and it looks like Google is trying to be the first to bring this into the wild. As pointed out by SEO consultant Rob Ousbey, Google has begun testing a live updating results page, as seen in the video above.

As Ousbey enters terms into the search box, the results page is automatically reloaded to reflect the changes in search terms. To reduce server strain and loading, the page only refreshes once the predicted search terms (which are already displayed on Google search pages) change, and it appears to only refresh to the topmost result. Once the predicted terms are exhausted it switches to updating every few characters. Ousbey never needed to manually refresh the page.

This new innovation of Google’s is a very interesting one. Constantly updating searches will enable you to find what you are looking for more quickly and should be well received if Google do decide to release it to the world, however it could actually make searching slower for those who have low bandwidth connections -- more refreshes equals constant loading and this can be annoying on slow connections.

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Intel announced a few days ago that it has made one of its biggest purchases in the history of the company. The hardware giant has picked up security and antivirus company McAfee for a whopping US7.68 billion, or around US$48 per share in cash. Intel says that McAfee will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary under their Software and Services subdivision.

This purchase is a mammoth one for Intel – the largest in the company’s 42-year history and the largest in the IT security industry. Intel made a nice US$4.3b profit in 2009 and had a record second quarter of this year raking in US$2.9 billion in profit. McAfee’s profit for 2008 was just US$172 million, so Intel must have some big plans for the security giant if they’re going to turn a 7.7 billion dollar acquisition into profit.

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Toshiba has announced today a storage technology breakthrough that could, in the near future, have our computers loaded up with 10 TB hard drives. Through the use of a new storage technique known as bit-pattern recording, Toshiba has made a prototype hard drive that packs an areal density of 2.5 Tb per square inch – roughly five times more than existing Toshiba hard drives.

Through bit-pattern recording, a hard drive can now utilize only a few magnetic grains per bit rather than hundreds as used in the old uniform magnetic coating system. These magnetic bits are then organized into rows to make it easier for the hard drive to locate data and the result is a huge amount of data per HDD platter that allows a three-platter, 10 TB hard drive by an estimated 2013.

Not only has Toshiba created a 2.5 Tb per square inch prototype, they also have begun work on doubling that density to around 5 Tb per square inch. Again, this leads to bigger hard drives and more TBs per platter.

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