The PC Report

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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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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Sun’s VirtualBox is an extremely handy (and free) tool to use for virtualising operating systems inside your current OS. It is one of the best free virtualisation tools available, making it a great solution for those who don’t want to pay for programs such as VMware Workstation.

VirtualBox runs on most of the popular operating systems that are available today including Windows, Mac OS X, Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE, Debian, Solaris, Red Hat and more. You can virtualise most Linux distributions as well as most versions of Windows (both DOS and NTFS); Mac OS X is unsupported unfortunately. We installed VirtualBox 3.1.2 on our Windows 7 32-bit machine and wrote up a guide on how to get an OS running inside a virtual machine.

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The latest thing to appear from Intel at CES 2010 is the AppUp Center: an app store designed specifically for netbooks with an Intel Atom processor on the inside. The AppUp Center, which is available now in its beta stages, will be bundled with new Atom netbooks from Asus, Acer and Samsung and also available for the public to download for either Windows or Linux. Intel has been working with over 3,000 developers to make this happen, so we decided to load it up and give it a try.

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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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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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I recently was sifting through some old stuff of mine and came across my Windows 95 floppy disc collection – all 14 floppy discs required to install the classic Windows 95 operating system. So I painstakingly turned them all into images and managed to install Windows 95 inside a virtual drive in VirtualBox. So, here it is, the comparison between Windows 7, the latest and greatest operating system from Microsoft, and Windows 95 – the DOS-based OS from 14 years ago.

Ahhh, all the memories from such a classic operating system. Check out the full Windows 95 vs Windows 7 comparison in our reviews section.

Australian power supplier Integral Energy, a company “trusted” by 800,000 families and businesses according to their web site, has recently had to repair all of the company’s 1000 desktop computers and replace machines in the control room to contain a Win32 virus. If the Sydney Morning Herald is correct and Integral have been using anti-virus software that hasn’t been updated since before February, this is a huge cause for concern.

According to The Inquirer:
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Don’t get me wrong – I’ve used and own several Apple products myself, and even though I’m mainly a Windows user I just love some of the features and the overall build quality and looks of their products – but I just can’t see myself paying for an Apple Tablet, or using it. And I have my reasons.

Being one of the main news posters on this site means I look through loads and loads of computer related news, and I have sifted through all the latest rumours surrounding Apple’s new device, so aptly named the “Apple Tablet.” After all these rumours, still, nothing really has grabbed my attention about the device apart from it’s coming and it’s probably going to be the next big Apple thing, like the iPod and iPhone.

So, I’ve compiled five reasons as to why I will not be purchasing Apple’s new Tablet:

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You might think that your computer is running fine, but there are always things that can be done to increase the life of the components as well as reduce noise and temperatures. Cleaning out dust and cable management are two really easy things to do that are covered by this guide, and if you want to reduce noise, temperatures or just keep your computer running nicely it might be a good idea to open up your computer and follow the guide to clean it up a bit.

Check out the easy to follow guide in our tutorials section