The PC Report

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.

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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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.

Remember the browser ballot screen for EU Windows 7 machines that has caused Microsoft so much trouble? Today we all get to see what the browser ballot screen will look like when it hits countries across Europe starting with the UK, Belgium and France next week and then spreading throughout the rest on March 1. The top 5 browsers on the screen (Chrome, Firefox, IE, Safari and Opera) will be randomized to be fair, as well as the next 7 browsers.

If you live in the EU, and you’re running Internet Explorer, you will be alerted that there is “an important choice to make” and you will be redirected to the browser ballot screen where you can choose a new browser to download or stick with IE. Hopefully the browser ballot screen will inform more people of the other browsers available out there and give them some much need market share out of IE’s chunk.

According to Windows watcher Paul Thurrott, Microsoft Office 2010 will be hitting general availability on June 15 this year, while insiders at Microsoft say that they will RTM Office 2010 sometime in late March/early April. Currently, Office 2010 is in the Release Candidate stage, with the RC being released to testers a few days ago.

When available, Office 2010 will be on offer in five different packages: Starter (the free version with ads), Home and Student, Home and Business, Professional and Professional Academic, with pricing ranging from US$99 to US$499. Also, if you purchase a copy of Office 2007 between March 15 and September 30 this year, you will get a free upgrade to the equivalent version of Office 2010.

If you’re one of the few that like to keep all of your software open-source, then chances are you’ve given Microsoft Office the flick and are using OpenOffice. Well, OpenOffice has been updated to version 3.2 and come with a plethora of new features to satisfy your document-making and office needs. OpenOffice should also be notably more stable and faster to open and use.

OpenOffice is available for Windows, Mac OS, most Linux distros and Solaris and is a great free alternative to Microsoft Office. You can grab the download from OpenOffice.org.

Today sees the release of the highly anticipated update to the most popular bittorrent client: uTorrent 2.0. One of the major changes to uTorrent in 2.0 is the addition of the Micro Transport Protocol (uTP). The uTP aims to reduce network congestion and interference between uTorrent and other network-using applications – this is one of the reasons ISPs throttle torrent traffic and uTP aims to solve that issue.

For the end-user the benefits of uTP are faster downloads thanks to less network congestion, and faster web browsing while uTorrent is running. For ISPs, less congestion means that the torrent protocol is gentler on their network, which should benefit them as well as other users using the network. And for those wondering if the interface has changed, it has, but only slightly (see the screenshot below).

You can download/upgrade to uTorrent 2.0 by downloading it from here. If you need to downgrade to 1.8.5 for whatever reason, you can grab it from us here

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I find myself using this really simple add-on for Firefox all the time. Basically what it does is when you highlight text in a passage/title/link/whatever, then drag and drop it anywhere, it will search Google in a new tab for the highlighted text. It also works with unlinked URLs – just highlight an unlinked URL such as google.com, drag & drop it and it will automatically go to the URL – and photos – just drag & drop to download the image (you can disable that if you like).

You’ll find yourself using it a lot if you’re a Firefox user, so head over to the QuickDrag add-on page now to download it.

Of course, not much fresh news here for those who are already using Google Chrome 4.0 via the beta channel, but Chrome 4.0 for Windows has finally gone stable; sorry Linux users, you’re stuck with the beta channel for just a bit longer. The major change for Chrome 4.0 is support for the extension framework, which should rival Firefox’s Add-ons and create more competition between the two browsers.

Currently, there are over 1,500 extensions available for Chrome, including ad blockers, several Google product enhancement tools and a lot of extensions that are available on Firefox already. Also new in Chrome 4.0 is bookmark sync, which synchronises your bookmarks across your different machines so you don’t have to create them on each machine – to use bookmark sync you’ll need a Google account which, as a Chrome user, you should have already.

Head over to Google’s Chrome page to download the browser if you feel like adopting it right now, or you can update to 4.0 from within Chrome.