The PC Report

The Shuttle Barebone XS35 is a new slimline nettop/HTPC from Shuttle that’s just 3.3cm thick – perfect for chucking behind your TV as a media PC. It will come loaded with a 1.66GHz Intel Atom D510 dual-core processor, Intel MN10 Express chipset and a Nvidia GT218 (aka ION2) graphics card perfect for 1080p video playback through HDMI. It also comes with a 2.5″ hard drive and slimline optical drive.

The whole system can be VESA mounted behind a flat-panel display and is passively cooled for a practically silent setup. The XS35 will ship sometime in the second half of the year, and a price has yet to be unveiled. More of this machine will be seen at CeBIT in March.

Microsoft has finally decided when it will be dropping support for old and outdated operating systems. First and foremost, if you’re using Windows 2000 (a ten year old operating system) support for all versions of the OS will end on July 13, 2010. Windows Server 2000 support is also set to be dropped on the same date.

Windows XP SP2 support will be dropped also on July 13 meaning you’ll no longer receive security updates or other support from Microsoft unless you upgrade to XP SP3. Support for Windows Vista RTM (the version without service packs) will be dropped earlier on April 13, 2010.

If you’re running any of the operating systems that are going to have support dropped, we strongly recommend that you update your system to a more recent operating system. We highly recommend Windows 7 for your upgrade, but if you’re not ready for that switch you can upgrade to SP3 for XP users or SP1/SP2 for Vista users and your support will continue.

A new rumour surrounding AMD’s latest six-core processors has leaked out of AMD HQ. Their “Thuban” six-core CPUs will apparently be showcased at CeBIT 2010 in Germany, followed by a release to the public on April 26. This release will coincide with AMD’s 880G chipset debut.

The new hexa-core processors will go under the Phenom II X6 name and start with the 1075T, 1055T and 1035T models. All CPUs will be based off AMD’s 45nm process and compatible with the AM2+/AM3 sockets. Thuban processors will also have a speed boost-type technology that will function similar to Intel’s Turbo Boost technology featured in their Core i5 and i7 CPUs.

Micron has released what appears to be the fastest solid state drive on the market today. Under the Crucial brand, the RealSSD C300 boats whopping 355 MB/s read speeds and 215 MB/s write speeds -  faster than what is on offer from Intel, OCZ, Kingston and more. So you can make use of these speeds, the drive is completely compatible with SATA 6Gb/s technology.

The drives themselves will be available in 1.8″ and 2.5″ form factors in both 128 GB and 256 GB capacities. If you want to purchase one of these drives it will set you back quite a bit: US$499 for the 128GB and US$799 for the 256GB. But you pay for quality, right?

This is now the 8th card to be released into ATI’s Evergreen GPU family and this time it will bridge the gap between the HD 5770 and HD 5850. The ATI Radeon HD 5830 packs the same Eyefinity, DirectX 11 and PowerPlay support as it’s older brothers, and comes loaded with 1GB of GDDR5 memory clocked at 1000 MHz. Joining in with the 5870 and 5850, the GPU present on the board contains 2.15 billion transistors, however it has only 1120 stream processors, 56 texture units and a core clock speed of 800 MHz – the total power of the card is 1.79 TFLOPS.

Looking at the card (check the pic above) you’ll see that the card is roughly the same size as the HD 5870, and almost identical in design. It comes with two DVI ports, HDMI with audio and a DisplayPort (perfect for 3 display Eyefinity). It’s also a dual-slot card and needs two 6-pin PCIe power inputs to support the card’s 175W max power, which is higher than the HD 5850 due to a higher core clock; the idle power is lower though at 25W.

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Remember that Windows 7 Activation Technologies update we mentioned a few weeks ago? Well, it’s now out for everyone as KB971033 via Windows Update marked as Important. Take it or leave it, it’s entirely up to you.

If you’re still using Internet Explorer 6 as your main browser there is even more reason for you to switch now. Following suit with Google, YouTube will now be dropping support for IE6 on March 13, stating that videos may still work however newer features coded into the site will not. Links to newer browsers are also presented if you decide to make the switch straight away.

IE6 is a severely outdated browser with many coding flaws and annoyances to web developers – it’s time people stopped using it and upgraded to a better browser such as IE8, Firefox, Chrome or many of the other browsers available. For the 2% of The PC Report readers that still use IE6, we strongly advise you to switch.

Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) is only in the Alpha stage of testing at this moment. It doesn’t look extremely different from the current version of Ubuntu but there are a few noticeable differences.

I installed Lucid Lynx using VirtualBox OSE. Before I installed, I booted up from the LiveCD just to get a look at it to see if anything looked different. After a quick glance it looked just like most other recent Ubuntu releases. The background is a brown/orange color, the UI is gray, and everything is still set up the same.

It only took around 20 minutes to install on a virtual machine with just over 700 MB of RAM and a 2.16 GHz processor. I haven’t timed any of my other installations but this one seemed to be the fastest of them all. I decided to dig a little to find out what has been changed. The first things I checked were the applications.

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If you’re in the market for a new SATA 6Gbps hard drive with a nice and large amount of storage then you can now pick up the latest drive from Seagate. The Seagate Constellation ES hard drive comes in a 3.5″ package, supports SATA 6Gbps and spins at 7200 RPM with “best-in-class” reliability. It will soon be available in 500GB, 1TB and the advertised 2TB sizes to store all your stuff; no pricing info yet though…

If you’re hanging out for the eagerly anticipated Nvidia GeForce GTX 480 & GTX 470 – aka. the new long overdue Fermi-based cards – then you’re in luck. Nvidia has given all of us a release date for the new cards, March 26, 2010. This date also conveniently coincides with an Nvidia-hosted event at PAX 2010.

The GeForce GTX 480 and GTX 470 will be the first cards released based off Nvidia’s GF-100 (Fermi) architecture. They will be the first Nvidia cards to support DirectX 11, and also they will be the fastest cards to come out of Nvidia, sporting a whopping 3 billion transistors on-board. Keep in tune guys for more news relating to the new Nvidia GTX 400 cards.