Archive for October, 2009

You know you’ve thought about it… wouldn’t it be great if YouTube just ran with QuickTime and H.264, instead of Flash. If you’re a Mac owner, that’s almost assuredly a yes. Adobe Flash runs poorly on Mac, even Adobe has admitted the performance gap between platforms can’t be ignored. Ergo, YouTube runs poorly on a [...]

Have an NVIDIA graphics card? Time to update ForceWare once again… ForceWare 191 branch drivers are now available from NVIDIA.com. The drivers for modern versions of Windows make significant improvements, of most significant is improved HDMI support. Many TVs that had poor overscan support are now improved via NVIDIA’s enhanced compatibility modes. HDMI audio passthrough [...]

Memtest86+ 4.00 has been released. The first major revision to Memtest86+ in years, the free memory diagnostic adds several new features. For those wondering what happened to Memtest86+ 3.0, the developers skipped that version mark, in order to avoid confusion with the original Memtest86, for which Memtest86+ was forked from. Most notably, Memtest86+ 4.0 branch [...]

Barnes & Noble has placed their long rumored Nook ebook reader up for pre-order ahead of a scheduled debut later at 4PM Eastern right at the close of the NYSE. The Nook is an e-reader with two screens, a 6-inch E ink main display for displaying book text and a 3.5-inch touchscreen LCD below for [...]

As expected by the myriad of overpaid analysts, Apple has refreshed their MacBook, Mac Mini and iMac lines along with introducing new accessories such as the multitouch Magic Mouse.

Amazon has officially placed the International version of the Kindle up for pre-order ahead of its October 19th launch and has confirmed that it uses AT&T /GSM/3G service in the US while relying on AT&T’s roaming partnerships abroad for international service. The unit is otherwise identical to the prior versions with a 6 inch e-ink [...]

Apple today issued Performance Update 1.0 for Intel-based Macs with NVIDIA chipsets. The update finally brings to an end user frustration with 3Gbps SATA II hard drives on Intel-based Macintosh systems. Early in 2009, Apple issued firmware updates for Unibody MacBook Pro models, which enabled support for 3Gbps communication on MacBook and MacBook Pro models. [...]

Like many, we have multiple HP and Compaq notebooks around the office… and like our Apple notebooks, we like to keep the health of those batteries well in-check. Unfortunately, upgrading to Windows 7 breaks the HP Battery Check utility from functioning. It won’t even install (if you can find a copy). Thankfully, there’s a simple [...]

Some in the media saw a big, black screen and declared the DreamScreen as “HP’s iTablet rival.” They were very, very wrong. But, we take a look at what HP really built with the DreamScreen… and they do have something worthwhile here. Let’s get the misconceptions out of the way first. The DreamScreen is not [...]