The PC Report

While Facebook has never publicly shared how much they make from their site, estimates are always coming. Inside Facebook is reporting that Facebook may earn up to US$1.1 billion from ads and other deals this coming year – quite a sum for the US’s second largest website.

Estimates for Facebook’s revenues have said that Facebook’s earnings have doubled over the past few years: 2007 coming in at $150 million, 2008 at $300 million and 2009 came in at around $630 million. With an estimate of $1.1 billion for 2010, Facebook is set to become a multi-billion dollar network.

Today Nvidia launched officially their next-gen ION chips. The ION 2 graphics chips are 10 times more powerful than integrated graphics and allows playback of 1080p videos. They are also more power efficiant thanks to Nvidia’s Optimus technology that powers down the ION GPU when it’s now being used and powers it up for more intensive tasks such as 3D gaming and HD video decoding.

The ION 2 is a discrete graphics chip that has dedicated memory and is attached to an Intel Atom Pine Trail processor via PCIe. It will be available in notebooks/netbooks starting in April with the Acer Aspire One 532G; more than 30 laptops in total with ION 2 chips in them are set to launch by Q2 2010.

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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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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Have you heard people talking about Linux but had no idea what it was? Are you a full time Windows XP, Vista, or 7 user and can’t understand why anyone would want to use anything besides Windows? Or perhaps you are getting tired of dealing with the hassle that can come with Windows but you don’t know what to do about it? If you answered yes to any of these questions then this is something you should probably read. There is a lot to Linux. I will probably leave a lot out of  this article but, then again, this is not a comprehensive guide. This is just to give you a peek at Linux so you can decide if you want to try it out.

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If you’re still running the Release Candidate (RC) version of Windows 7 then your machine will begin shutting down every 2 hours. This is an intentional annoyance placed by Microsoft to encourage you to upgrade to the fully fledged version of Windows 7. On June 1 of this year the RC will be completely phased out so we urge you that if you’re still using the RC you really should upgrade to the full version right away.

I was personally sick of my huge right-click context menu that has been getting larger and larger with every program I install. So I endeavoured to clear out all the crap from my right-click menu by some simple registry editing. It’s not difficult to do and it works like a breeze.

The following trick should work and has been tested on Windows 7, Vista and XP.

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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.