The PC Report

After some time in court it appears as though the decision is final – Microsoft will have to pay i4i US$240 million after losing a second appeal. Last year it was found that Microsoft had infringed upon several XML-related patents owned by Canadian company i4i and so had to pay damages. Microsoft appealed this and lost, so they filed another appeal and lost once more.

The judges apparently explained to Microsoft why the decision was final: the court has evidence to suggest that Microsoft knew of and willingly infringed the patents with the hope that i4i’s product would become obsolete with Word 11. Court documents and a company email support this idea. Microsoft is now waiting for court appeal judges to see whether they can have a wider review of the case, or they may take the case to the Supreme Court.

Surely you all remember the 9.9mm thin Dell Adamo XPS, one of the thinnest laptops you can buy – well it appears to have been discontinued by Dell. The Adamo line of laptops will continue but the Adamo has been pulled from the shelves and listed as “discontinued” by places such as Best Buy. Dell however claims that the laptop was a proof of “Dell’s design and engineers capabilities” and said that the ultraportable was more like a “limited edition” model.

Whether the model is a true, but unannounced Limted Edition model, or just been pulled due to faults or lack of purchases is yet to be discovered by inside sources. One thing still remains though – you can no longer order or purchase the Adamo XPS.

Intel’s latest and most powerful processor has been popping up in the news over the past few months, but now it has been finally released and reviewed. The Intel Core i7-908X is Intel’s first six-core desktop processor released into their Nehalem line-up. Codenamed “Gulftown“, the i7-980X is built on the same 32nm process as the Arrandale/Clarkdale desktop CPUs and fits nicely into LGA 1366 motherboards powered by the X58 chipset with a simple BIOS update.

The 6-core beast comes with 1.17 billion transistors but thanks to the 32nm process is smaller than all the previous quad-core Nehalems. It comes loaded at 3.33GHz with a 3.60 GHz Turbo Boost, 12MB of L3 cache, 6 cores and 12 threads and a 130W TDP – the same as the other Bloomfield i7s. The chip also comes in the package with a new tower cooler that is bigger and presumably better than the cooler that came with previous i7s.

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Today, the PC Gaming Alliance announced the PC gaming software sales have risen by a year-over-year total of 3%, bringing 2009’s sales to US$13.1 billion, despite the NPD group stating that in 2009 the gaming sector as a whole fell 8%. The PCGA also found that high-end subscriptions ($10 or more per month) were down, as well as retail boxed games which fell between 10-15% depending on the region to an all-time low of only 20% of the game sales sector.

It’s great to see that more people are adopting online distribution methods such as Steam and Direct2Drive, which are becoming more popular, having greater ranges of games and often giving away great deals on older games; more than 70% of US/European consumers said they have purchased a game online. For those of you (like me) who use the PC as their main gaming system, hopefully these increased revenues will mean more great games will be coming to the PC, and hopefully without a delay from the console release date.

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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