"With the impending release of Service Pack 1 for Vista, Microsoft looks to slow down the pirates by cutting off two popular hacks to circumvent the Windows Genuine Advantage Program.

Testing both these methods of circumventing Windows activation and Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) has shown me that SP1 effectively ignores both these hacks. Systems that previously were shown to be genuine prior to the installation of SP1 then require activation - and if the system isn’t activated it is marked at non-genuine and enters the nag state.

Are Microsoft stepping up in the world to prevent hackers reveiving the most from the new operating system, Windows Vista? We are soon to find out!"

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Two Under Sea Cables Repaired

"Two of the undersea cables that were cut in the last few weeks have been repaired. Maybe we can stop hearing the conspiracy theories for a few days.

FLAG Telecom, a subsidiary of India's No. 2 mobile operator Reliance Communications (RLCM.BO: Quote, Profile, Research), said in a statement the breaks in its FLAG Europe-Asia (FEA) and FALCON cables had been repaired and services routed back through these cables.

With this awesome news, hopefully everyone can back to their hobbies with no problems at all, but will more problems be coming soon?"

Read Here..

CPU3D Review: Everglide DKTBoard Gaming Keyboard

With a slim, compact and light-weight design, the Everglide DKTBoard is ideal for LAN party goers, and for gamers on the go. Its build quality is very good with the outter casing made from Aluminum. It also features blue leds and backlight illuminated keys which is great for night time gaming.

"... if you’re a hardcore and professional gamer who's always on the go, the Everglide DKTBoard is definitely worth considering.  " 

Read the rest of the review ... HERE

BBC

"Yahoo has reportedly decided to reject Microsoft's unsolicited takeover offer. Several newspapers and news agencies say Yahoo's board will on Monday dismiss the $44.6bn (£22.9bn) offer as being inadequate.

When it was made, Microsoft's $31 a share offer was 62% above the level at which Yahoo's shares were trading. Yahoo's shares closed on Friday at $29.20, which may suggest doubt that the offer will be successful or that a higher price will be offered. A source quoted by the Wall Street Journal said that Yahoo's board would be unlikely to consider anything below $40 per share.

A $40 a share offer would be a 109% premium to the $19.18 closing price of Yahoo's shares the day before the original offer was announced."

LINK

TomsGames

"Valve announced yesterday that its digital distribution service Steam has surpassed 15 million accounts and realized year-over-year sales growth of 158 percent through the holiday season. According to Valve, the increase in members and sales has largely been attributed to the popularity of the Big Three: Call of Duty 4, BioShock, and The Orange Box. The question is, in a year when retail sales for PC games were down in the U.S., how much business has Steam and other digital download services done?

Valve unfortunately doesn’t release sales figures for Steam, so we have no way of knowing for sure how many copies of Call of Duty 4, for example, have been sold via Steam. But apparently, Steam sales are good enough to convince a growing collective of top-tier developers and publishers to distribute their games on the network. Eidos has added its upcoming shooter Conflict: Denied Ops to Steam, and GCS will be releasing its S.T.A.L.K.E.R. prequel Clear Sky on Steam and in retail stores later this year."

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 DailyTech

"Best Buy for Business leaks pricing for the Lenovo ThinkPad X300
Last month, DailyTech told you about Lenovo's impressive new 13.3" ThinkPad X300 notebook. Nearly every aspect of the device was covered except for its availability date and the price of admission.

Best Buy for Business tackled one of those unknowns by leaking the price for a ThinkPad X300 equipped with a 64GB solid state disk (SSD). Best Buy for Business lists the price at a whopping $2,743.99.

The price may initially make you stand back and take pause, but an Apple MacBook Air with a 64GB SSD will ring up even higher at $3,098.

Lenovo's ThinkPad X300 packs a plethora of features into a 12.5" x 9" x 0.73" - 0.92" frame that weighs a mere 2.5 pounds in its base configuration. The display is a 1440x900 LED backlit unit, two DIMM slots are provided for up to 4GB of DDR2 memory and a DVD burner is included with the package.

Wireless connectivity is handled by Bluetooth and 802.11n WiFi, while HSDPA, EV-DO Rev A and WiMAX options also exist.

Lenovo is sure to make an announcement any day on its latest and greatest, so be sure to stay tuned for updated details."

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TomsHardware

"After our initial benchmark tests of Crysis on Falcon Northwest's 3-way SLI Mach V model, we decided to go back for another round of tests using Nvidia's recently released 169.28 beta driver, which was designed to help improve SLI and 3-way SLI performance in conjunction with Crytek's official Crysis v1.1 patch. And after more than a week of extensive testing, we have some good news and some bad news. The good news is, Crysis is almost playable at a maximum resolution of 2560x1600 with all DirectX 10 settings enabled. The bad news is, you have to disable 3-way SLI to achieve it.

If you're scratching your head right now, well, you're not alone. For some bizarre reason, the 169.28 ForceWare doesn't play nice with a 2560x1600 resolution. In fact, as our results show, disabling 3-way SLI and using just one of the 8800 Ultra GPU's inside the Mach V yielded better frame rates for Crysis than using all three video cards. At first we thought we had reversed the findings accidentally - after all, our tests results for other resolutions such as 1920x1200 using the 169.28 driver were quite impressive and saw no such problems. But we ran the tests again and again over several days (and several game and operating system crashes) and confirmed the results.

We used two sample sections of the game: the "First Light" radar station encounter of the first level and the "Paradise Lost" section of the ice level. Let's start with the "First Light" section; we had all settings at very high with a maximum resolution of 2560x1600 and no anti-aliasing (we also had the Nvidia 3D settings at performance for all tests). Here are the results:

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TomsHardware

More details............

Video proof: Micro stuttering may destroy the performance gains from current multi GPU technologies

Why the advantage of SLI, Crossfire and multi Chrome is questionable.

"For several months, the IT forums have a new buzzword: Micro stuttering. It describes a serious shortcoming with current multiple GPUs technolgies. We explain the symptoms.

Crossfire X: Crossfire with four GPUs could make the effect of micro stuttering even worse. With this thread in German 3D Center Forum, the whole things starts and reached almost any IT website. The summary of the thread creator: Although SLI allows higher frame rates, the perceived outcome is often not better than the lower framerates of a solo graphics card. Meanwhile, it is clear that not only (triple) SLI, but Crossfire is also concerned. And as we said in our testing of multichrome, S3 doesn't make it better than AMD / Ati and Nvidia.

It's a personal matter when a movement for the human eye appears to be "smooth". The fact is, however, that 30 frames per second (Fps) is perceived by almost every human as being liquid. A second consists of 1,000 milliseconds, therefore you should expect that every 33 milliseconds, a new frame is displayed (one second divided by the frame rate). The single frames appear in this account at regular intervals, so that our eye exercises a smooth and fluid motion. The rhythm is right."

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