AMD introduces bug-fix three-core Phenoms

AMD has rolled out a trio of tri-core processors, all revised versions of the Phenom X3 CPUs it introduced last month.

The new line-up comprises the 2.4GHz 8750, the 2.3GHz 8650 and the 2.1GHz 8450. They're priced at $195, $165 and $145, respectively.

All three contain 'B3' cores, an improved version of the 'B2' X3s released to PC makers less than a month ago. At the time, AMD provided benchmark numbers that indicated a small but significant performance boost over the B2 models.

For example, the 8650 yielded numbers up nine per cent on those produced by the 8600, despite identical specs beyond the core stepping.

AMD insisted the older core was "perfectly fine". But not so fine that the 8400, 8600 and 8700 haven't been kept on the chip maker's official price list. All three have been dropped to make room for the new versions.

AMD also introduced two low-power, 45W Athlon X2 chips, the 4450e and the 4050e, clocked at 2.3GHz and 2.1GHz, respectively.

Form : http://www.channelregister.co.uk/

Technorati Tags: AMD, Three Core

Nintendo's profit surges on strong sales of Wii, DS

Nintendo Co.'s net profit surged 47.7 percent to a record high, powered by strong sales of software and accessories for its popular Wii video game console and brisk sales of its DS handheld devices.

The Kyoto-based company reported a group net profit of 257.34 billion yen ($2.5 billion) for the March-April period compared with 174.29 billion yen a year earlier. Sales shot up 73 percent to 1.672 trillion yen ($16.2 billion).

The video game industry performed well despite a slowing global economy. Nintendo said it would continue expanding the gaming audience to both novices and experienced users — a strategy that has paid off against rivals Sony Corp. and Microsoft Corp.

Nintendo said it sold 18.61 million units of its Wii console globally last year, for a total of 24.45 million units moved since it was launched in November 2006. The company also sold 30.31 million units of the DS worldwide.

Nintendo expects to continue its growth this fiscal year through March 2009, though at a more modest pace. It projects a 26.3 percent rise in net profit to 325.0 billion yen ($3.15 billion), a 7.6 increase in net sales to 1.800 trillion yen, and an 8.8 percent climb in operating profit to 530.0 billion yen ($5.14 billion).

"Nintendo's strategy is to accelerate the current sales momentum from 'must-have for every family' to 'must-have for everyone' by continuously introducing new and unique software and introducing new services which take advantage of its expanded installed base," the company said in its report.

Form : http://ap.google.com/

Technorati Tags: Nintendo, Wii, DS, Blog

EPA on XP, Balmer on Vista, PCW on Browsers

Do the power management settings in Windows XP waste energy? The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency thinks so, although many readers disagree. Do you have power management enabled on your computer? Let us know.

Microsoft's Steve Ballmer recently called Windows Vista a "work in progress." Should Vista have been released if it really is a work in progress? Tell us what you think about this and other subjects that Ballmer addressed.

Which updated Web browser is your favorite? Advocates for Opera, Firefox, IE, Seamonkey and more gathered to state the case for their favorite browser. Join the discussion.

Our
most recommended stories this week cover EarthLink, PayPal and...
William Shatner? To vote for your own favorites, click one of the
thumbs-up icons on an article's page.

We end with product reviews
from users like you. Have you gotten any new high-tech goodies
recently? Let us and your fellow PC World readers know what you think
of them. Go to PCW Shop & Compare to search for your gear and add a review.

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Is Windows XP Environmentally Incorrect?

Number 3124 says:
I am so sick of hearing about this "Environmentally Correct" bull c*#@!
They just gave me another reason to stick with XP. The EPA has
relentlessly pushed its pseudo-science and now everyone believes it
like it's real science.

Piyushsingh says: Ha ha, another reason why Vista is better than XP.

Evildave says:
It's Microsoft's buggy implementation of power management that's to
blame. If you have to support 1000 computers, and Microsoft's crappy OS
keeps them from shutting down reliably, or starting back up again if
power management is enabled, just what do you expect the IT team to do?
Walk around and shut 1000 computers off by hand every evening before
they leave work?

RNR19952 says: 50 cars vs 1000
PCs? How about the EPA build some freaking roads, maybe some
clean-burning buses, and we will eliminate pollution that way.

Read the posts in this thread and contribute your own opinion.

Ballmer: Vista Is 'a Work in Progress'

pcdos says:
I would have liked to hear issues like security, a lean and fast OS
(max of two: home and business), no Registry, and a move toward
consumer rights addressed instead of the focus on the needs of Big
Business, DRM, and spyware. Go back to sleep Ballmer.

Binary says:
This is an OS that seriously needs to be rethought. Like Steve Ballmer
said, Vista is already bigger than XP, and we need to make sure it
doesn't get any bigger. But yet, Microsoft is trying to come to a
compromise with their own programs. Many users who have tried both
Vista and XP would opt for XP. As mentioned earlier, Microsoft and
Steve Ballmer both stated that there is still room for improvement on
Vista, but if they are aiming to keep it no larger than it already is,
there is no room for improvement.

TheBigOldDog says:
Instead of focusing all of their efforts on taking care of the "golden
Goose" that is their OS business, Microsoft spent its time trying to be
something else: Google. Instead of making sure Vista exceeded customer
expectations they launched a hostile takeover of Yahoo. Instead of
listening to their beta testers and their own insiders who we know
warned about Vista's massive shortcoming they decided instead to simply
use their monopoly to shove it down people's throats while they focused
on selling advertising.

Candyceweber says: Shame
on Ballmer and the rest of them for even considering putting this
garbage on the market. I don't tolerate "fast and sloppy" in the
classroom and I shouldn't have to tolerate it from them. Here's a novel
idea--put a finished product on the market, one that even they can be
proud of. Foreign concept!

Read the posts in this thread and contribute your own opinion.

Updated Web Browsers: Which One Works Best?

pcworldbtg says: I prefer Seamonkey for three reasons: integrated browser, e-mail, and editor.

Darkmonk says:
Firefox is superior. It can do anything with add-ons. I hate it when
you talk about features; with add-ons, Firefox can Have them all, and a
million better ones too. I think you need to get used to the bookmarks
icon in Firefox; I love it, now. Under the hood, Firefox is better, as
well.

Seanbickford says: I'm also glad that Opera
was mentioned, but disappointed that it wasn't included in the
comparison. Really, truly, in my opinion, there is no reason to use
anything else besides Opera. It's not perfect, but it's the best
option. It must be disheartening to Opera developers to see Firefox
steal all their ideas and get credit for them.

Slider9499 says:
As a user that simply needs a browser to surf the Net, listen to some
tunes, and watch and download an occasional video, is there any real
reason that I would need to switch from IE? Going on the premise that
if it ain't broke don't fix it, I really do not have any problems with
IE.

Read the posts in this thread and contribute your own opinion.

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Form : http://www.pcworld.com/

TinyBooks v5.0.3: Family and Small Business Accounting for Macintosh

Merrimack, New Hampshire - Ken Winograd and Space-Time Associates announced today the release of a new version of the Macintosh accounting and bookkeeping program called TinyBooks(tm). TinyBooks is a simple, flexible, non-bloated, single-entry bookkeeping and accounting system for the Macintosh. TinyBooks is designed for Sole Proprietors, home and other small businesses, and family finances.

TinyBooks is the simplest way to handle the books for most small companies. You enter your expenses and income, and TinyBooks does the rest. Current and year-to-date "on-the-fly" totals are continually displayed. Fully automatic bar-charting of all expense and income accounts make the determination of monthly trends intuitively obvious.

A fully non-modal Reports Window offers easy standard and custom reporting and searching. All transactions are easily exportable to other programs as standard tab-delimited text files.

Expense, income and special mileage entry forms can be printed for "off line" entry of data as desired. Non-fiscal years are supported, as is the concept of recurring expenses.

TinyBooks includes a Professional Invoice/Estimate Printer, that is as easy to use as the rest of the program. It prints professional-looking invoices/estimates on plain white paper. No special, expensive forms are required. These invoices can also be customized with your own logo, fonts, etc.

TinyBooks also includes intuitive support for handling virtually any kind of taxes from any country, including State Sales Taxes, GST (Goods and Service Taxes), PST (Provincial Sales Taxes), VAT (Value Added Taxes) and more.

TinyBooks, based on years of experience "doing the books", is written exclusively for the Macintosh (OS9 and OSX) and is available now. For more information, to download a Free Trial, or securely register the program, please visit the TinyBooks web page.

Form : http://prmac.com/

Improving Windows XP Performance Part I

If you’ve been working with Windows XP Professional for some time and you’ve noticed a decline in system performance from when you first started using XP, you may be at a loss to explain the problem. As a Windows power user or IT admin, you most likely keep an eye on your system’s performance with the Task Manager. And you probably run Disk Defragmenter frequently as well as the Disk Cleanup utility. Yet none of these practices seem to be doing the trick.

Here are several built-in XP options you can tweak to adjust your visual effects, memory usage, virtual memory, and processor scheduling, each of which has a direct bearing on how well your system performs. We’ll explore each of them in detail as I show you how to optimize the way your system runs and how to prevent a degradation in performance from occurring in the future.

Tweak XP for better performance

To optimize XP’s performance and keep your workday running smoothly, we’ll show you how to adjust several of your operating system’s settings so you can get the most out of XP. We’ll begin by showing you how to configure XP’s visual effects to troubleshoot performance issues. Next, we’ll delve a little deeper by exploring processor slowdowns, and how you can make some adjustments to memory usage to improve performance. Finally, we’ll explore several quick and easy tweaks you can implement to jump-start your sluggish system.

Visuals

Windows XP Professional’s visual effects encompass such enhancements as animated menus, fade effects, cursor shadows, menu shadows, and more. While these effects are pleasing to the eye and can add to your overall XP sensory experience, they also have a negative effect on how quickly your operating system responds to your requests. The more visual effects you have activated, the slower your system performance. Let’s begin by taking a look at how you can adjust XP’s visual effects settings to improve performance without losing all of the effects that make XP cool.

To access your visual effects, click the Start button and then choose Control Panel. In Classic view, double-click on the System icon, and then in the System Properties dialog box, select the Advanced tab. Then, under Performance, click the Settings button to display the Performance Settings dialog box.

Note: If you’re using Classic view, open Control Panel, click on the Performance And Maintenance link, and then click on the Adjust Visual Settings link.

Now that you’ve located this area, you can allow Windows XP Professional to choose what’s best for your computer, manually adjust these settings for best appearance, manually adjust them for best performance, or choose Custom and pick and choose your own settings. As you can see, you can turn on and off visual effects by selecting or deselecting the appropriate check boxes.

So which options should you choose? For computers that are a few years old and are running with XP’s minimum system requirements, I recommend choosing the Custom setting—which gives you the most control over your system—and deselecting all of visual effect options. Next, use Windows XP as you normally would over the next 24 hours to see if your system performance is improving. Slowly re-enable your favorite visual features and see how your system performs. By conducting this experiment, you should be able to determine exactly how many enabled effects your system can tolerate without experiencing performance problems.

If you find, however, that your system doesn’t respond well to restoring the visual effects, you might want to consider turning off all the visual effects for good. You’ll lose most of the effects of XP’s cool new interface, windows won’t slide into place, and the desktop won’t have its 3-D appearance, but you’ll get some added power and performance. And the loss of the visual effects is a small price to pay to save you the price of a costly upgrade.

Form : http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/

Wii Fit coming to U.S. in May

First
announced way, way back in July of last year, the nifty, wireless balance board
accessory for the Wii finally has a North American release date: May 19. Get
ready to engage those abs.

The Wii Fit bundle (available in Japan since last
December) will sell for $89.99, according to Crave—not exactly
cheap, but at least it'll come bundled with a battery of exercises—involving
yoga, aerobics, strength training, and balance—that’ll get you off the couch
and, with any luck, make you break a sweat.

IGN (via Yahoo! Games) has a
thorough
preview of Wii Fit, but I’ll tick off some of the main points: You get the
wireless, plastic balance board (which, apparently, supports a whopping
660 pounds, although it stops measuring over 330 pounds) plus the battery of
40 mini-games and exercises.

Among them: strength-training exercises,
including a push-up/yoga combo (which sounds devilishly difficult), single-leg
extensions, arm/leg lifts, a variety of squats and lunges, and side planks
(ouch). There’s also plenty of aerobic action, including steps, runs, and rhythm
boxing. Then there’s the yoga, complete with your standard deep breathing, half
moons, a potpourri of poses, you name it. This ain't no button-mashing on the
couch.

What makes Wii Fit more fun than your standard exercise DVD is the
on-screen trainer (either male or female, as IGN notes) who critiques your form
and doles out encouragement, as needed.

Of
course, the coolest element of Wii Fit is the wireless balance board, which
incorporates two plastic pads—one for each foot—that precisely measure you
weight and balance.

From the demos I’ve seen, the board does an uncanny
job of detecting your overall stance and posture; indeed, based on your weight
and balance, it’ll compute your body mass index (BMI) and tell you if you’re
overweight, underweight, or just right. The Wii Fit software will also track
your BMI daily and tell you your progress over time.

Early reviews have
been generally positive; for example, Chris Kohler at Wired News
tried Wii Fit for about a month and came away pretty happy, calling it a
"convenient and helpful way for me to get back in shape." Keep in mind, however,
that Kohler didn't so much lose weight as build muscle (not such a bad thing,
considering that you're playing a video game).

I haven't had a chance to
try Wii Fit myself, but the demo during last year's E3 gaming conference looked
pretty impressive; I especially liked the soccer ball head-butting game, which
lets you (natch) head-butt a torrent of virtual soccer balls, all from the
comfort of the balance board—nice. (Hmmmm...how about a surfing game? Or
skateboarding?)

So, who out there's looking forward to Wii Fit? Anyone
else tried it? What about the price tag?

Related:
'Wii Fit' craze set to
launch May 19 [Crave]
Wii Fit
preview [IGN, via Yahoo! Games]

OLPC Switch to Windows on XO Is 'muddled,' Developers Say

Open-source developers should stop bickering, unite and jointly develop a Windows user interface to make XO laptops more appealing to users, One Laptop Per Child Chairman Nicholas Negroponte has urged in a public note to that community.

Developers in the open-source community did not take lightly to Negroponte's comments, expressing outrage and questioning the judgment of OLPC's shift from Linux to Windows for the XO laptop. Developers called Negroponte's appeal "vague" and "demoralizing" for the future development of Sugar, the user interface that currently works with Linux on XO laptops.

In a note on OLPC's community site, Negroponte wrote that Sugar is less than perfect and needs to be developed for Windows to expand the laptop's appeal. The nonprofit has engaged in discussions with Microsoft to load Windows on dual-boot versions of the XO laptop.

"I attribute our weakness to unrealistic development goals and practices," Negroponte wrote. "Our mission has never changed. It has been to bring connected laptops for learning to children in the poorest and most remote locations of the world. Our mission has never been to advocate the perfect learning model or pure Open Source."

Sugar needs to be separated from the OS core and made platform agnostic, Negroponte wrote. "To do that, we need to hire more developers, work more together and spend less time arguing."

This week developers began debating XO's possible shift from Linux to Windows after Monday's resignation of Walter Bender, OLPC's president of software and content. Bender gained a following in the open-source community by promoting open-source software for the XO despite growing efforts to load the laptop with Windows XP.

In a note posted Monday at OLPC's community news, Bender said that he was leaving to advance the quality open-source software for learning and would continue to work with the OLPC community "by adopting the spirit and methodology of the open-source movement."

Observers contend that Bender left because he was less than happy with OLPC's move from open source to Windows on the XO laptop. Some developers saw it as a sign that OLPC is scaling down Sugar's development.

Drawing that conclusion from Bender's departure is incorrect, Negroponte wrote: "We are scaling Sugar up, not down."

Developers replied that his vision of Sugar for Windows is muddled and that he is further dividing himself from OLPC's developer community.

"If you are not serious about Sugar on Windows within the next year, please continue to avoid 'now' and use 'might' and 'someday' when you talk about it, and we'll continue to try to make Sugar-on-Linux achieve its potential," wrote C. Scott Ananian in a community posting at the OLPC site.

"I approve of keeping OLPC's options open, in case your current development team (myself included) cannot deliver on Sugar's potential, but setting vague (and demoralizing) goals for future development -- without actually devoting the resources to achieve those goals -- is madness. You have only succeeded in alienating the developers you need to make Sugar-on-Linux work, without actually achieving any progress on Sugar-on-Windows," Ananian wrote.

Porting Sugar, which runs on multiple Linux distributions, to Windows shouldn't be hard, but the question is whether users will have the same experience on both OSes, wrote Tomeu Vizoso.

Negroponte wrote that Sugar needs to be changed from an omelet to a fried egg "with distinct yoke and white, rather than having the UI, collaborative tools, power management and radios merge into one amorphous blob."

Vizoso wouldn't chew on Negroponte's vision of a fried egg. "My understanding is that the Sugar UI is composed of inseparable components because we wanted to give an integrated and coherent experience. In which way are you suggesting to split Sugar?"

Form : http://www.pcworld.com/

Technorati Tags: OLPC, Windows, Microsoft, Blog

Web 2.0: Microsoft's Live Mesh To Reinvent The Platform

Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT)'s Live Mesh, which will be demonstrated at the Web 2.0 Expo at San Francisco's Moscone Center West later Wednesday, is a platform. That's what Amit Mital, Live Mesh general manager, calls his company's new data and management service.

'Tis the season of platforms. Facebook has one. So does Bebo and MySpace. Google (NSDQ: GOOG) too has a platform, as does Adobe (NSDQ: ADBE), and Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN), not to mention Sun's Java.

The platforms differ in terms of scope and capabilities, but they're all at heart places to run software.

Currently, there are a lot more places to run software than there used to be, thanks to the proliferation of mobile phones and other devices, and the simultaneous standardization that's required for such devices to interact with the Internet.

So it is that much of the buzz about platforms at Web 2.0 has to do with defining platforms: their relation to the Web, their capabilities, and their boundaries.

Microsoft's Live Mesh, in its current preview form, represents an effort to define the Windows operating system as a platform that spans PCs, the Internet, and Windows-capable devices. At its heart, it is a data synchronization service, but it is also a bid to define Microsoft as the source of cloud computing.

Indeed, Microsoft claims to have ambitions beyond the wedding of Windows and the Internet. "[O]ur vision of your device mesh extends far beyond this," says Mital in a blog post. "In the near future, we'll add support for the Mac and mobile devices, and then we'll build upon that foundation."

Microsoft, it seems, is embracing software as a service, rather than as a reason to commit to Windows. It remains to be seen however whether Windows users will occupy positions of privilege on Microsoft's evolving platform.

Mital characterized the debut of Live Mesh as "the beginning of an ongoing dialog with you that spawns lots of new ideas and opportunities."

That's another way of saying we still haven't entirely figured out how this works as a business, which is more or less an issue for everyone deploying platforms and developing on them at the moment.

At Web 2.0 Expo session called "Comparing Social Platforms," representatives from Bebo, Facebook, Google, MySpace, and Six Apart mulled how social networks would work as platforms.

While Dave Morin, senior platform manager at Facebook, said that he expected the distribution system for apps on the Facebook platform would become more market-based, he also expressed uncertainty about how things would develop.

"It's sort of a new territory and we're all going through it together," said Morin.

That's not the sort of detailed, sober road map that developers or corporate users like to see. (Of course, at a time of daily application builds and perpetual betas, such Soviet-style five-year plans for software don't really exist anymore.)

Toward the end of the session, an audience member, perhaps reacting to the lack of certainty about the future of social platforms, asked whether, as developers come to rely on such platforms, there will be service-level agreements (SLAs), premium models, or support options?

Allen Hurff, senior VP of engineering at MySpace, confessed that wasn't something MySpace thought a lot about for smaller developers, despite having SLAs with large companies.

Morin acknowledged that was a good question and valuable feedback to consider. But like MySpace, Facebook had no reassurance to offer. "We're literally in the first year of a new kind of operating system," he said.

Welcome aboard your new platform, and watch your step.

Form : http://www.informationweek.com/

Technorati Tags: Web 2.0 , Microsoft, Live