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Posts Tagged ‘computer’

Steven P. Jobs, the founder of Apple, passed away today after a long battle with pancreatic cancer.

Although we’ve voiced a lot of complaints about Apple over the years, there’s not one of us on the Maximum PC staff (even Gordon) who isn’t saddened to hear this news. Steve Jobs was a one-of-a-kind figure in the tech community, and his passing is a tremendous loss.

Rest in peace, Steve. You were a true innovator and you’ve left a hell of a legacy.

This article was written by MaximumPC (Source)… [Read More...]

We don’t bring products into the Lab just to beat them up, so we almost didn’t bite when Genius pitched these speakers. We also try not to prejudge products, but we didn’t have high expectations for this 2.1-channel speaker system: It looks cheesier than a wedge of Vermont cheddar and sells online for less than 50 bucks. We were fully prepared for a craptastic audio experience. Wow, were we ever off base.

Corsair needn’t worry that Genius will bump its exceptionally good SP2500 speakers off our Best of the Best list—the SW-G2.1 1250 isn’t that good—but it is better than … [Read More...]

As many of you know, I’m pretty new to Microsoft but I love finding those who have been here for much longer and listening to their jokes and stories. There is a cool culture that surrounds living and working in the Pacific Northwest with smart, driven and talented individuals. It sort of makes you wonder how one gets here.

It was this last question that @windows and I started chatting about a few months ago. The following is  our informative, super serious and deeply researched list of how you know your child will grow up to be a Microsoft Windows … [Read More...]

Over the course of millions of years of evolution, the human race has come quite a long way. We’ve created mountains of sophisticated literature, skyscraping architecture, and the collected works of King Crimson. Sometimes, though, we can’t help but slip into Old Ways. Which is all to say, “Ooooo, pretty picture!” That’s pretty much how we felt looking at screenshots of id Software’s megatexture masterwork RAGE. Sadly, the game in motion tells an entirely different story – at least, on PC.

Early buyers have reported – and posted video evidence of – texture pop-in issues that render RAGE nearly unplayable. … [Read More...]

Among a host of other things, Google is also a mighty successful browser vendor, what with both its desktop and mobile browsers occupying the third spot in their respective markets and constantly conquering fresh ground. However, a lot of people are wondering why Google continues to have two separate browsers for the desktop and mobile markets. But soon enough these people will have better things to do, for an effort to port Chrome over to Android now seems to be underway.

According to the Chromium codebase website, Android has been set up as a build target. It will be interesting … [Read More...]

A number of people have been complaining about a fan control issue affecting their Corsair Hydro Series H100 Extreme Performance Liquid CPU Cooler. After tearing into some units, Corsair was able to root out the problem and confirm an issue exists with a “small number of H100 units with lot code 11359403.” The lot code is printed on the box, and if yours matches up, Corsair recommends running a simple test.

“If you have this lot code, test your installed unit while the system is running by pressing the profile change button,” Corsair says. “If you push the profile button … [Read More...]

The Hurt Locker is known in BitTorrent circles as more than just an Oscar winning blockbuster, but also the poster child for movie industry lawsuits. The maker of the film, Voltage Pictures, has been working alongside the U.S. Copyright Group to pursue over 24,583 IP address across almost a dozen ISP’s. Up until recently the lawsuit has only been expanding, but now suddenly the folks over at TorrentFreak are reporting that all but 2,300 of the defendants are being dropped from the case.

A list of IP addresses being spared the wrath of the U.S. Copyright Group has been posted … [Read More...]

Capable-but-unexciting Budget Box

You want to know a secret? Building a high-end PC on an unlimited budget ain’t that hard. You just click the “Bestest” button and add to cart.

What’s hard is building a PC on a strict budget. Do you sacrifice CPU, GPU, or storage? Do you cheap out on the case or the PSU?

So when WarFactory decided to ship us its Immortal budget box instead of the usual shoot-for-the-moon rigs we test, we thought it would be interesting to see how the more modest PC would measure up.

The Immortal can’t win any benchmark battles but … [Read More...]

Intel introduced the world to the next generation of Thunderbolt controllers at IDF 2011 recently. We were told that the next-generation controllers, codenamed “Cactus Ridge,” will be available next year when chips based on the Ivy Bridge architecture begin shipping. But a fresh rumor suggests that the two Cactus Ridge chipsets revealed earlier in the month aren’t the only Thunderbolt controllers that Intel has lined up.

If VR Zone is to be believed, Intel has a third, much smaller controller in the pipeline that should enter production before the end of 2011 and reach vendors in early 2012. Reportedly called … [Read More...]

The Microsoft patent juggernaut keeps on rolling. As you all know, Microsoft has managed to force yet another bright star in the Android firmament to sign a patent licensing deal with it. Redmond’s patent deal with Samsung, which requires that the latter pay royalties to MS for every Android device it sells, hasn’t gone down too well with archrival Google. The search engine giant on Wednesday called the Windows developer on the carpet for its tactics.

“This is the same tactic we’ve seen time and again from Microsoft. Failing to succeed in the smartphone market, they are resorting to legal … [Read More...]

With the advent of E-readers like the Kindle, the publishing industry has been blown wide open. Before, getting your book in front of somebody meant flying to New York and scaling the granite walls of giant publishing houses. Failing that, you could always go to some shady vanity publishing company, but their primary concern was separating you from your hard-earned money.

The e-book Gerda and Kai displayed on a Motorola Xoom.

Nowadays it’s much easier to get your work into the hands of your eager audience. Whether you’re looking to publish the next great American novel or just want to … [Read More...]

Biostar has been trying to reinvent itself as an enthusiast brand, a hard sell considering most seasoned vets have a hard time shaking the notion that Biostar’s focus is squarely on the budget buyer. The truth of the matter is Biostar holds several overclocking records under its belt, and it’s because of high end boards like the new TA990FXE.

In case there was any doubt, Biostar comes out and says it’s targeting “the most demanding overclockers and gamers” with its new board. The appropriately named TA990FXE is based on AMD’s 990FX chipset. It supports all socket AM3+ processors, including AMD’s … [Read More...]

Spotify’s a pretty awesome streaming music service, but the Facebook integration it’s rolled out in the past week has left users with a pretty not-so-awesome taste in their mouths.  Never mind the fact that new users need a Facebook account just to sign up now; even old users woke up the other morning to find their Spotify listening selections blasted on their Facebook feed. Here’s how to disable the feature from either application.

Spotify

Open up the Spotify app, then click on “Edit” > “Preferences”. Right near the top you’ll see a “Facebook” header over a section that reads “Get … [Read More...]

Tomorrow’s shaping up to be a big day for Amazon, assuming all those reports turn out to be true. Word on the Web is that Amazon will officially unveil its first tablet, which TechCrunch says will be called the “Kindle Fire.” Think of it as Amazon’s answer to Barnes & Nobles’ Nook Color, only perhaps a bit more versatile and, according to reports, with the backing of several major magazine publishers. Here’s what we know so far.

According to TechCrunch, Amazon is definitely going to call its tablet the Kindle Fire to help separate the device from the rest of … [Read More...]

Google Plus’ big killer feature from the start has been that it lets users organize their friends and acquaintances into Circles to control what is shared, and with whom. But creating all these curated groups seemed a little like a half baked feature seeing as you couldn’t let anyone else in on that perfectly organized group. Well, now you can. Google is rolling out the ability to share circles on Google+.

To share a Circle, just click on the Circle in question and choose Share. This will pull up the familiar composition field where you can choose who to share … [Read More...]

The ultimate GTX 580 is one big muthah

The Asus Matrix GTX 580 Platinum is quiet, fast, and really, really easy to overclock. It’s also massive.

How massive? When we got the box, we thought Asus had shipped us a motherboard by mistake because the box was so large.

The size of the pacage is a clue to the size of the card itself. Asus builds a variant of its DirectCU II dual-fan technology onto the GTX 580, resulting in a card that’s fully three expansion slots wide. If you ever plan on running two of these in SLI mode, … [Read More...]

Rumors of a Google branded cloud storage solution are almost as old as the company itself, but yet, it never materialized. The search giant offers a ton of solutions to help migrate your computing needs online, but when it comes to managing files they have been pretty slow to respond. In Steven Levy’s in-depth look at the inner workings of Google titled “In The Plex”, he claims Googlers viewed files as an outdated concept, and uses that logic to explain why the Gdrive never came to be. Years of silence, combined with recent confirmation in print would normally have lead … [Read More...]

A leaked user guide has outed Comcast’s upcoming AnyPlay service, which will let customers stream live TV to assorted mobile devices. On initial offering will be iPad support, but other tablets are expected to be added as well. The service will rely on in-home Wi-Fi, and users will have to get a special Motorola cable box from the cable provider.

Comcast plans to make most channels available to the user for streaming, but some content will be missing. For instance, on-demand and pay-per-view content won’t be available through the AnyPlay service. Comcast’s document did not make mention of any additional … [Read More...]