The PC Report

Today’s the day another update for the ATI range of graphics card drivers (known as Catalyst if you haven’t been following our posts) has been released. It supports enhancements for ATI’s Eyefinity Technology and HydraVision including new support for Eyefinity on all ATI-supported Linux distributions, enhancements for those of you using rotated displays on CrossfireX setups and finally a fix for allowing GPU acceleration in VLC 1.1.1, which you can see how well it works below.

If you care about the full released notes to see what your updating you can head below as usual, or if you feel like downloading the drivers straight off head to the ATI Catalyst driver website. Don’t forget to check out how well GPU decoding in VLC 1.1.1 performs on the latest drivers, previewed below.

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The new Windows Live Messenger Wave 4 Beta has been released, and is packed with possibly the most alterations of any Messenger since the old interface. It appears that this revision of Messenger attempts to connect all social aspects of the internet and integrate them into one program.

Updating from to the beta is very easy, and follows a similar process to the current version. Once updated, you’ll have to reboot which is a slight annoyance but nothing too strenuous. When you open the program for the first time, you’re greeted with a set of options asking whether or not you wish to connect to various services (such as Facebook, Myspace, YouTube and heaps more, but oddly no Twitter yet) or update your profile information. This process takes about a minute and is pretty straight forward.

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If you have recently checked out Google Image Search then you would have immediately noticed the fresh new look given to the image search service. One of the great new features of the image search is the removal of all text below the images, along with adding instant scrolling between pages with no page refreshes in between. This new tiled layout gives it a great fresh new look and provides fantastic ease of use, especially for those with larger monitors.

Google Images now also has larger thumbnail previews, which are activated by mousing over the image for a short period of time. This not only brings up the larger preview, it also brings up the image information in-case you need to know where the image comes from and how big it is. Upon clicking on this thumbnail you are presented with the full image in a pop-up box over the source website. This is a absolutely fantastic way to view the images and greatly improves upon the old way which required several clicks to save images from Images. Read the rest of this entry »

A few days ago we saw the release of the latest and greatest Nvidia GeForce drivers straight from the Nvidia labs with a WHQL certificate. The 258.96 drivers released on July 19 come with support for the new GeForce GTX 460 as well as Nvidia 3D Vision Surround if you have a capable set-up. Apart from those new features there are the usual bug fixes and game performance improvements, listed below in the release highlights.

As always, you can download the latest drivers for your Nvidia graphics card here, and we advise that you keep them updated so you can enjoy the best performance out of your GPU.

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Wine, our favorite piece of software to run Windows applications on Mac OS X and Linux, has been updated yesterday to 1.2 – the second major stable revision of the software. There has been some major new features to join Wine, the biggest of which being support for loading and running 64-bit applications in the program on x86-64 processors (unfortunately you can only do this on Linux right now). The 64-bit update brings the addition of two prefixes – one for 32-bit only and one for 64- and 32-bit, much like the current flavours of Windows available on the market.

A few user interface tweaks have also been made in Wine 1.2, including a new icon set for built-in applications, animated cursors, a new application wizard control panel to deal with installed applications and support for a myriad of new languages. This is just the beginning of a long list of over 23,000 changes and 3,000 bug fixes over two years of development effort – a small section of the most important changes can be viewed over at the WineHQ

If you’re in need of a fantastic Linux/Mac program to run Windows applications in for whatever reason, Wine is your best bet for compatibility and stability without having to create a Windows virtual machine inside your operating system. You can download Wine, or get instructions on how to download Wine through your Linux distribution at the WineHQ downloads page. Note that Mac OS X is not fully supported however it will work if you follow these simple steps.

Released on Monday by Microsoft is the Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 (SP1) public betas. While Windows 7 SP1 includes just minor hotfixes, all of which were probably available to download via Windows Update at some point, Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 contains some new virtualization tools to help enterprise users with the VMs as well as prepare them for cloud computing.

RemoteFX, now included in Server 2008 R2 SP1 (unfortunately not present in Windows 7 SP1), is a new upgrade to RDP’s “graphical remoting capabilities”. It enhances the remote desktop client so that remote clients can use multiple displays, multimedia streaming and Aero if the server PC is currently utilizing any of those features. Basically RemoteFX renders the entire screen on the remote PC locally before compressing it and sending it to the remote host/client. How well this actually works and whether or not there will be lag present will depend on your setup and you’ll probably need some powerful hardware to run it smoothly.

The beta is available right now for your consumption via the Microsoft TechNet Evaluation Center. To install the beta, you will need an existing copy of the RTM version of Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 already installed on your machine; the copy on TechNet does not include a full version of either. For Windows 7, the SP1 beta update weighs in at over 1.2 GB.

It has been a while since we have been able to call an Nvidia card a “winner”, but today’s the day we see a true midrange winner with the Nvidia GeForce GTX 460. Basically the GTX 460 is one step down from the GeForce GTX 465 we saw a few months ago and is set to compete with the ATI Radeon HD 5830 which carries the same price tag. This is also the first Fermi graphics card that has launched with two, slightly different versions – a 1 GB version and a 768 MB version.

Today’s release has also seen a new core being used for the GPU. So far, the GTX 480, GTX 470 and GTX 465 have all used the Fermi GF100 core, however the new GTX 460 uses a different Fermi-based core known as the GF104. The GF104 core carries just 1.95 billion transistors compared to the 3 billion on the GF100 which helps keep prices down, power, size and temperatures down and also fairly moderate performance which brings it into the mid-range section of graphics cards.

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After the recent revelation that Windows 8 could contain some sort of application store to try and make it easier for users to find and install applications that they like, I have a few words to say. Basically, the Windows 8 app store is bound to fail.

Most readers here are probably used to some form of app store – maybe it’s a smartphone app store like the Android Market or the Apple App Store or maybe it’s a game app store like Steam. These things work. Smartphone app stores work because it’s the easiest and pretty much only way to download apps to your phone, and Steam and other game services work because they’re cheap and offer a load of great features.

Some how I don’t think these great qualities of other app stores will carry over to the app store we might be seeing in Windows 8.

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There has recently been a huge leak of confidential details concerning Microsoft’s plans for Windows 8 via “Microsoft Enthusiast” Francisco Martin’s blog. It appears as though Microsoft is heavily focusing on performance improvements in the next major revision of Windows.

Microsoft will enable high-speed data transfer solutions such as USB 3.0 and Bluetooth 3.0 in Windows 8 to thankfully bring the operating system up to speed on the latest revisions. However, it would be nice to see these specifications enabled in Windows 7 as well, maybe through an update or service pack.

Windows 8 will also be optimized in such a way that the system can be booted nearly instantly or much more quickly than previous Windows versions. Systems should also be ready to use without any major delays and available content in their systems such as email, media and sports scores will be ready to use at the drop of a hat with speedy performance. Performance improvements are always welcome, especially with plans for instant-on boot-up which should be fantastic for people who want instant access to their powered-off systems.

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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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