A friend of mine told me about this handy trick for annoying all your friends. All it is, is a few symbols that you can put in front of emoticons in your quick message, and it seems to make the emoticons several times the size they normally are in the contact list. It works perfectly in Windows Live Messenger 2009 and with all the included emoticons.

Just copy the symbols below into your quick message, then add the code for an emoticon, eg. :@, afterwards and to everyone else, the emoticon will seem huge. For chains, just add the symbol before every emoticon you want enlarged. We’re not sure quite why this occurs, but it does and it sure does annoy some people, so watch out. Still, enjoy the fun this brings to you.

Symbols: ͎⃡

Note: The symbols may appear just as squares in Google Chrome. Copy them anyway, they will still work.

In what appears like an update to this roadmap we saw back in July, we are getting more details of upcoming Intel processors. First off are the S, or low powered, versions of some processors, namely the i7-860 and i5-750, which bring the TDP down to 82W and also lower the clock speeds. These processors still carry the same amount of L3 cache and still TurboBoost up to the same clockspeeds as the non-”S” versions.

Then we get some details on the dual-core i5 CPUs that appear to be coming relatively soon. There is an i5-670, clocked at 3.46GHz, an i5-660/661 clocked at 3.33GHz and an i5-650 clocked at 3.2GHz. All these CPUs come with 4MB of L3 cache and have a TDP of 73W. Interestingly, these CPUs are marked with “2-core & GPU” colors and another chart shows them also to have some sort of GPU combined. We’ll have to wait for more details though.

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Haven’t seen it yet or tested it yourself? Well, you can now just by entering this simple Javascript code into your address bar. To get it working, head over to google.com, paste the following code into your address bar when on the Google homepage, press Enter then refresh the page to enjoy the new look search.

javascript:void(document.cookie=”PREF=ID=20b6e4c2f44943bb:U=4bf292d46faad806:TM=1249677602:LM=1257919388:S=odm0Ys-53ZueXfZG;path=/; domain=.google.com”);

Note that it doesn’t work on country-code prefixes of Google, such as .co.uk and .au – you’ll need to head over to the plain google.com to enjoy the new look. Oh, and if your sick of the new look, just find and delete the above from your Google cookies, or just delete all your cookies.

Update: There are reports that this no longer works. However, still try it for yourself.

We live in a world where the mighty console seems to dominate the gaming world – more games are made for them, there are larger communities for consoles and they’re cheaper and easier to access – but that hasn’t stopped me from continuing to use my PC to enjoy the latest games. Why? Well, here are just a few reasons why I stick with the good ol’ PC for my gaming needs.

Foremost in my passion for PC gaming are the games themselves, which contrary to popular belief do actually keep being released for PC. People are always talking about the death of the PC as a gaming device and I always push them aside because of this reason: quality games still do come out for PC, and enough of them for me to keep going at a steady pace. So, OK, there are fewer PC games than console games, but so what? The difference is negligible considering the volume of PC games that get released every year.

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The latest graphics card drivers for your Nvidia graphics cards, 195.62, is now available from the Nvidia website. The new drivers, like the most recent ATI drivers, include support for the Adobe Flash Player 10.1 beta’s GPU-acceleration for smoother HD videos on the web. They also include the latest version of OpenCL (1.0) and support for SLI/multi-GPU cards in the latest games.

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A very interesting concept really – two screens in the one laptop. This laptop (the Kohjinsha DZ series) packs two screens, one that slides out from underneath the other one, both 10.1″ panels and both with 1024×600 resolutions. The laptop also comes with a 1.6GHz AMD Athlon Neo processor, 1GB of RAM and an ATI HD 3200 for graphics as well as a 160GB hard drive.

The laptop has a 4.5 hour stated battery life, but we all know that these are wrong and with the dual screens and overall small size of the laptop (which means smaller battery) we’ll probably be seeing far less life. If you want to get in on the dual-screen laptop action, you can buy one of these now for ~US$1,110 for the Linux version (add US$60 for Windows 7 Home Premium) and it ships worldwide.

USB 3.0 is starting to make a push into the retail world, as companies start implementing the technology in their cameras, external hard drives and optical drives. With this push though, you’ll need to upgrade your motherboard to support it, and if you’re an i7 user, this Asus X58 board should suit your needs. Unfortunately though, the Asus P6X58D Premium motherboard only sports two USB 3 ports, however I think we’ll cope for now.

Other features of the board include support for 24 GB (yes, twenty-four) of DDR3 RAM via six slots, three PCIe 16x slots for your graphics expansion cards, two SATA 6Gbps ports plus those two USB 3.0 ports and four USB 2.0 ports and the LGA 1366 slot for your Bloomfield i7 CPU. The motherboard is available now for purchasing for US$310 via Newegg.

As it turns out, this monster of a monitor has been on sale for a while now, but as it costs US$6,499 only the military and a few hardcore gamers have been able to afford it. This quad-DLP screen is huge: 43 inches in size and packing a nice 2880×900 resolution via its 32:10 resolution. The panel doesn’t require any special hardware or drivers and has a blazing fast response time of “less than .02 milliseconds.”

Of course, if you can stomach the price you can buy three of these monitors and arrange them around you for some car racing action, or as Ostendo claims, future multi-monitor CRVD applications. If you’re interested in buying one, you can right now from Ostendo, but keep in mind that US$6.5K price tag

It’s still a while away until these chips are released, but in an early review the upcoming Intel Core i9 is shown to be truly top-of-the-line. The 6-core processor, codenamed “Gulftown”, is made via the 32nm process and is based off the Intel Westmere architecture (the 32nm Nehalem die shrink). The test unit shipped to PCLab was an unspecified Gulftown model with a clock speed of 3.07GHz and it uses the LGA 1366 socket.

While the Core i9 is similar in performance to other Nehalem CPUs when it is doing single- or dual-core operations such as gaming and Windows startup, however when you crank up the threaded applications such as x264 encoding and ray-tracing the Core i9 shines. It pulled ahead by 46% in the POV-Ray test and by approximately 50% in the MPEG-2 to x264 encoding. The CPU also pulled ahead in the 3DMark Vantage CPU score, but the main score varied only slightly compared to the Core i7

These processors are bound to be expensive when they ship in 2010, but it’s well worth it considering the performance benefits in some applications.

We’ve seen a few things about Office 2010 over the year, and with the recent announcement that you can grab the Office 2010 Beta from Technet/MSDN, and shortly afterwards the general public, we couldn’t wait to get our hands on the latest update to the well known Microsoft Office branch. We do realise that this is just a beta and that the full version will be coming to us in the near future, but we still couldn’t wait to test it out.

Upgrading from Office 2007 to the 2010 beta was a breeze thanks to the installer for the beta, however it took a loooooooong time to do it on my relatively fast Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550 and 3GB of RAM. The installer appeared to get a colour refresh, with a nice yellow/white tone to match the new, all-yellow Office logo; if you remember, the Office 2007 installer was blue. Entering the key to activate Office was a bit more difficult than 2007, however we hope that they add the key input to the installer rather than buried away inside the actual applications.

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