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Posts Tagged ‘MaximumPC’

Everyone was a little flummoxed last week when Microsoft announced it had acquired Skype for a whopping $8.5 billion. The price seemed to be excessive and Microsoft to be an unlikely suitor. But today Microsoft co-founder and chairman Bill Gates has told the BBC that he advocated for the deal.

“I was a strong proponent at the board level for the deal being done,” gates said. He went on to describe the deal as great for both companies. Skype, a Luxembourg-based enterprise, has struggled to maintain profitability in the past, but Gates claims that is no longer the case. He … [Read More...]

With a cash cow as fat and absurdly profitable as Call of Duty, you’d think Activision would be a bit more excited about its next first-person assault on your wallet. Despite that, for whatever reason, the publisher’s remained oddly silent about the game, leaving players in agonized suspense about which dude will be shot in the face/exploded/shot in the face with an explosion next. You can breathe easy now, though, because The Internet managed to dig up dirt on, well, pretty much everything.

Kotaku’s spoken with “multiple sources” about all things Modern Warfare 3, and – from the sound of … [Read More...]

From the caliber of their parts to the breadth of their abilities to their unconventional shapes and sizes, today’s small form factor PCs are a tasty treat for power users

It has long been considered common wisdom that the smaller the size of a PC, the greater its compromises. Notebooks, no matter how fat, for example, will never touch the power of a desktop machine.

The same held true for small form factor rigs. But is that still the case? To find out how today’s SFF rigs compare with their full-size desktop brethren, we tasked five top PC makers with … [Read More...]

We’ve recommended Dropbox in so many features & how-to’s we’ve lost count. It’s an amazing service that just keeps getting better, but the company has found itself in hot water with the FTC over concerns of anti-competitive behavior related to its file encryption.

Wired has done an excellent deep dive on the full FTC complaint against Dropbox, however the main allegations stem from the way Dropbox says it handles your files, and what it actually does in reality. Many of these complaints have resulted in changes to its terms of service, but the FTC is investigating competitor’s allegations that the … [Read More...]

Microsoft recently updated its Office Web Apps online productivity suite to add a few useful features. The service update, which was announced by the Office Web Apps team on its official blog on Wednesday, only concerns the Excel and PowerPoint Web Apps.

The Excel Web App is the larger beneficiary of this system update. The browser-based version of Microsoft’s popular spreadsheet application now allows users to “insert, delete or rename sheets in a workbook within the Excel Web Apps, and use familiar tools like AutoSum and formula assistance to crunch data more efficiently.”

The other beneficiary of this update, the … [Read More...]

Adobe has announced the release of Flash Player 10.3 for Android, Linux, MacOS, and Windows. The latest stable release of Adobe’s ubiquitous plugin packs a bunch of new features and security enhancements. But its most notable user-facing feature is the ability to clear hitherto hard-to-delete Flash cookies, or local shared objects (LSOs) as they are formally known, from the comfort of the web browser’s privacy settings.

Till now, there was no way of slaying Flash cookies alongside normal web cookies from within the browser’s privacy settings. Although there has been an option for clearing Flash cookies separately, it is far … [Read More...]

We usually think of the relationship between torrent sites and ISPS as an adversarial one. In fact, Comcast was caught filtering torrent traffic a few years back. But when the Pirate Bay began having connectivity issues today, Comcast reached out to help them.

The Pirate Bay goes through some technical acrobatics to keep their servers obscured from the outside world, so it’s not unusual for the site to be intermittently unreachable. But the site was gone for Comcast (and a few other ISPs) customers for most of the day. Comcast confirmed early on they were not blocking the Bay. … [Read More...]

Recent games haven’t exactly been at a lack for assassins. Even so, for every Ezio silently skewering organs or throwaway baddie pegged with that ominous title, there’s been a small (thankfully non-hidden-blade-shaped) hole in our hearts. Fortunately, after quite the absence (and a short-lived movie career), Agent 47 finally has the gaming world in his sights again. So, uh, you probably ought to take cover.

Titled Hitman Absolution (or HITMAN ABSOLUTION, according to the very loud press release), the game sees everyone’s favorite tastefully tattooed assassin taking on “his most dangerous contract to date.” Which is a relief, as it’d … [Read More...]

With Vista and Windows 7, Microsoft has been making some big strides in the quality of Windows’s native search. For regular, targeted searches (finding a file in your downloads folder, for instance), it does a great job of giving you near-real-time results. Unfortunately, that’s not always good enough.

Sometimes you know you’ve got a file, but you just can’t remember where you put it. That means you’ve got to resort to the dreaded Search Local Disk (C:), or even worse, Search Computer. It doesn’t take as long as it used to, but it can still take quite a while to … [Read More...]

Our desire for Diablo III has been well-documented, but – for the uninitiated – we would do terrible, terrible things to obtain it. Talking during a movie? In a heartbeat. Eating food that someone’s clearly claimed with a Sharpie scrawling of their name? Without a second thought. We might even change lanes without signaling, but frankly, we’re not breaking that glass unless an unlikely Skyrim delay emergency pops up. At any rate, the Diablo III beta’s now just around the corner. Join us in rejoicing. 

Blizzard confirmed the news during a recent Activision investor call. In news less worthy of … [Read More...]

A CNET report on Tuesday revealed that a spiritual successor to the now discontinued Dell Adamo ultra-thin laptop is in the works and fast approaching its retail debut. The first pictures of that rumored Adamo successor, supposedly called XPS 15z,  seem to have already found their way to the Internet.

The pictures of the 15.6-inch Dell XPS 15z  first appeared on Mobile Review on Thursday. The images reveal an island-style keyboard flanked by speakers, two USB ports, a FireWire port and an HDMI output. As for the innards, all we know is that the 15-incher will be powered by second-generation … [Read More...]

There are few services on the internet today more ubiquitous than Google Maps. Originally designed to be downloaded by users as a desktop application, it quickly became a web-based service once the company that gave birth to it was acquired by Google in 2004. By 2005, the user-friendly mapping solution was a household name. Six years later, developers are still discovering new ways to leverage the venerable mapping service to produce more information and expand its functionality, making an already awesome free service even better. To show you what we’re talking about, we’ve put together a list of our ten … [Read More...]