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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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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Over the next few weeks we will be testing the latest and most popular music players to give you a judgement on which music player is the one to use out of the myriad of players out there. For the first in the series we’ll be taking a look at Windows Media Player, the stock media and music player that comes included with Microsoft’s Windows operating system.

Windows Media Player has been included with Windows since Windows 2000 with Windows Media Player 7, a media player that has slowly evolved from the original “Media Player” that was included in Windows 3.0. The current version, Windows Media Player 12, is included as a component of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 and is not available for standalone download. For those of you not running Windows 7, WMP11 is available for download.

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Today we have with us in our labs the eGreat EG-M32B “Networked Media Tank” courtesy of House of DAP and Digital8. eGreat is a company well known on the Chinese gadgets market for HD Media Players, and the sample we have received today is a fine example. The EG-M32B is capable of Full HD 1080p output via HDMI, Dolby Digital support and room for a 3.5″ hard drive on the inside supporting up to 2 TB of video, music and photos.

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In the emerging netbook market, Google decided it would announce a new-style Linux-based OS that would be perfect for netbook owners, set for release in Q4 2010. Recently, Google has also showed off a new application market for Chrome and Chrome OS. We at The PC Report have used Chrome OS briefly when it was first released, but today we’ve taken an in-depth look at the OS and how it will affect the OS and netbook markets.

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Here is our first ever book review at The PC Report! We were lucky enough to be sent a digital copy of this book from Packt Publishing to give our opinions on, and I will say straight off that I was impressed with what I read in the book and the quality of the writing. If you want a small sample of the book, Packt has a sample chapter available for download here (PDF link).

If you haven’t already figured it out, the VirtualBox 3.1 Beginner’s Guide, written by Alfonso Romero, is basically a book that covers everything a user needs to know about Oracle VM VirtualBox – the free virtualization application that I wrote a small guide on a few months ago. This book blows my guide right out of the water in the sheer amount of content and the detail the tutorials go into to help you understand everything about VirtualBox.

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Today we’re taking a deep look into which out of the two flagship single-GPU graphics cards from ATI and Nvidia is the better buy for your system. The Nvidia GeForce GTX 480 was released into the realm of graphics cards just last week, and the ATI Radeon HD 5870 has been with us for a good six months now.

Both cards support the latest and greatest DirectX 11 technology, each with their own specifications, performance upsides, extra features and also downsides. And each card has a different price point. We look at hopefully everything there is to each of the cards to determine which card is most deserving of your hard-worked cash. Let’s start off with the specifications of each card.

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CyberLink PowerDVD is one of the most well renowned and best programs for DVD and Blu-Ray media playback. With the recent update to PowerDVD 10 we got our hands on a copy to see whether PowerDVD is still the best around for media playback.

New to PowerDVD 10 is support for 3D Blu-Ray playback, which is set to be a big thing later in 2010 with a number of major studios releasing Blu-Ray movies in 3D such as Avatar. PowerDVD 10 also now supports playback of H.264 MKV files, which are generally the standard for Blu-Ray/1080p movie rips and have been supported by a number of other media players for a long time.  H.264 FLV files are also now supported.

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I have always been a PC gaming sort of guy, as I’m sure you know, but in all my years of PC gaming I just cannot see the point of gaming laptops. I personally play on my gaming desktop with my nice and large monitor and proper peripherals, and I paid less than half that of an equivalent laptop of the time. And I wouldn’t even consider playing games anywhere other than my house at my desktop.

Here is why you should never buy a gaming laptop, ever.

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It doesn’t feel like it’s been that long since we saw an epic shooter (read: Modern Warfare 2) and now, just two months into 2010, we’re seeing another one. While I haven’t played any of the past Battlefield games, Bad Company 2 is a fantastic addition into the franchise and EA DICE have done a superb job. As you would expect from first-person shooters as of late, the singleplayer campaign doesn’t really shine by itself; the multiplayer is the star of this show.

We chucked ourselves in the middle of the singleplayer campaign as well as tried our luck in the multiplayer mode to see how the latest Battlefield game out of DICE would fare.

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