beforeyoukillyourcomputer.com

What’s in your computer? If you’re like most of us, you can probably name the processor (Intel or AMD, Celeron or Pentium), maybe how much RAM it has, and maybe how big the hard drive is.

When you go to a computer store and see all the bright shiny PCs laid out next to each other, most will have tags or stickers indicating the:

• Processor brand and model
• Hard drive size and speed
• Amount of memory (RAM)
• Graphics card
• Operating system

Two or three years later, when it comes time to upgrade your computer, that tag or sticker may be long gone. Speccy was designed as a free electronic “what’s inside” sticker for your PC.

Please note this is a beta version of Speccy and should only be used by advanced users on test machines. We recommend you wait for a final release version before downloading.

Download Speccy v1.00.089 Beta

Western Digital is beginning to use a new hard disk drive format that opens up between 7% and 11% more capacity on hard disk drives, meaning a 1TB drive could gain more than 100GB in capacity.

The disk expansion technique, known as Advanced Format, takes advantage of industry changes in drive sector sizes to consolidate overhead information and free up that additional space for data storage. Advanced Format is also being adopted by other drive manufacturers to wring more capacity out of existing hard drive technology.

There are 3 basic methods for increasing capacity on a hard drive: increase the bit density; increase the number of tracks per inch; or increase the number of surfaces (i.e. disk platters). WD chose to boost bit density because it takes advantage of additional space already available on every track of a hard disk drive platter, the company said in a document posted on its Web site.

Hard disk tracks are currently composed of 512-byte sectors. But for efficiency reasons, the industry as a whole is moving to larger sectors that store 4,096 bytes of data. Each sector on a drive has a natural gap that contains Sync/DAM (lead-in) and error correction code information (ECC). Multiple blocks of ECC require a lot of overhead.

The Advanced Format removes Sync/DAM blocks that handle data addressing, inter-sector gaps and 8 separate blocks of ECC, and consolidates that overhead into one block on the drive, gaining the extra disk space when compared to traditional formatting, the company said.

WD said Advanced Format also increases data integrity by providing a more efficient error correction scheme by using longer ECC code words, improving error correction by 50%, according to WD.

Source ~ Computerworld

In the future, everyone will have their own Jeopardy-style video walls. Or at least that’s the future AMD envisions.

In addition to new notebook chipsets, AMD today introduced Eyefinity, a new technology that allows for up to six displays to be driven off of one video card.

Eyefinity will make its way into upcoming DirectX 11-based ATI Radeon graphics cards, the company has announced. With Eyefinity, you’ll be able to arrange up to six displays per graphics card in any configuration, using either landscape or portrait mode.

How insane can this get, you ask? At a media event aboard the USS Hornet in Alameda, CA, AMD demonstrated 24 monitors hooked up to a single PC, driven by four Eyefinitiy-based cards. The four GPUs–each driving six 24-inch Dell LCD monitors–powered a 3D flight simulator across all 24 screens.

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For a limited time only, get Batman: Arkham Asylum FREE with any qualifying NVIDIA® GeForce® Graphics Card!

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Get the definitive version of Batman: Arkham Asylum with NVIDIA® 3D Vision™ technology support and enhanced GPU-accelerated NVIDIA® PhysX® effects. For a limited time only, purchase a qualifying GeForce GTX 260, GeForce GTX 275 or GeForce GTX 285 graphics card and receive a coupon good for the digital download of Batman Arkham Asylum, PC version.

This coupon is valid between Sept 15, 2009 through December 31, 2009 or while supplies last. Terms and conditions apply. See terms and conditions for details.

If games and Vista Aero didn’t pursuade you to buy a graphics card for your PC, perhaps DirectCompute will.

That’s a new technology in Windows 7 that lets applications tap the power of graphics processors to accelerate performance, giving the system processor a boost. It sounds really promising, but so did ReadyBoost for Vista and it never seemed to take off.

Nvidia today announced that it’s the first manufacturer of graphics processing units to get Microsoft’s DirectCompute driver certification. People running Windows 7 with a GeForce GPU can download the driver (Version 190.62) from Nvidia later today.

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Netgear on Monday announced the availability of its ProSafe 8-Port VPN Firewall (model FVS318G). It’s priced at $139.

The device is intended for small businesses that need remote access and Internet access for employees with secure connections. It provides Virtual Private Networking (VPN) access using the Internet Protocol Security (IPsec) standard, and sports eight Gigabit Ethernet ports, one Gigabit Wide Area Network (WAN) port and up to 25 megabit per second broadband throughput.

The new firewall also employs a software-configurable hardware DMZ port to help facilitate a server connection or another connection for a device on the network that remote users need to access.

Other features include Network Address Translation (NAT) routing and “classical” routing, support for up to five simultaneous IPsec VPN tunnels, Denial of Service (DoS) attack protection and multiple VPN passthroughs. It integrates with network monitoring software and products using SNMP, features IKE authentication, e-mail reporting and more.

The ProSafe Control Center configuration screen and install assistant is Web-based, and the device is compatible with Mac OS X, Windows, Linux and Unix operating systems.

Source

Today, NVIDIA officially announced the GeForce GTX 275 mid-range video card, the latest addition to its performance GPU lineup. With the goal of being the best bang for your buck graphics card on the market, the GTX 275 offers a combination of performance, physics, and GPU computing power for budget conscious consumers. Interested? Check out a few highlights:

* 633 MHz GPU Clock
* 1404 MHz Shader Clock
* 1134 MHz Memory Clock
* 240 Processor Cores
* 80 Texture Processing Units
* 448-bit Memory Interface
* 896 MB GDDR3 memory

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Nokia has some seriously amazing people making their commercials these days; remember the epic “Fourth Screen” commercial? Recently, I found a commercial that’s been airing for the past few months for the N96, and they’re using old footage of martial arts icon Bruce Lee. During the ad, Lee is is playing ping pong with nunchucks (in addition to flashing his image on the phone itself).

Do they want the N96 to seem as legendary, or astonishingly capable as Lee was? Maybe. Is it an awe-inspiring video? Certainly.

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When the credit crunch and the financial turmoil first hit Wall Street, the tech sector remained blissfully untouched by the market weakness. However, as the economy has sunk into a recession and consumer spending slowed, the tech sector has at last been dragged into the muck and the mire.

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