Jack Cairns posted an article on The PC Report - Jan 7, 2011, 6:17 pm
The hacking group Hackulous, responsible for cracking Apples DRM in iOS has now cracked the Mac App Store. The crack software called “Kickback” will allow a user to download any app off the Mac App Store free of charge essentially enabling piracy. A member from the group named Dissident has stat...
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Jack Cairns posted an article on The PC Report - Jan 6, 2011, 8:53 pm
Back in October, Apple announced the new and upcoming Mac App Store to be launched first for Snow Leopard and then for 10.7 Lion in mid 2011. Today, Apple is opening the App Store doors to all Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard users via a simple OS update. The Mac App Store launches with over 1,000 applic...
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Jack Cairns posted an article on The PC Report - Jan 6, 2011, 5:12 am
Early last year Micron appeared and produced the fastest solid state drive available on the market at the time – the RealSSD C300. Now, they’ve come back to produce another super-fast SSD in the same series: the RealSSD C400. At the Storage Visions show just before CES 2011, Micron has shown of...
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Jack Cairns posted an article on The PC Report - Jan 5, 2011, 8:39 pm
If you read our desktop launch article for Intel’s new Sandy Bridge processor line you’ll already know the basics of what Sandy Bridge means for the processor market. Along with the desktop release, Intel has launched 15 next-gen mobile processors. The mobile Sandy Bridge processors also includ...
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Jack Cairns posted an article on The PC Report - Jan 4, 2011, 8:01 am
After many, many months of planning and development AMD has finally released the first of their new Fusion Accelerated Processing Units, or APUs. The Fusion core is a hybrid chip that fully integrates a CPU and a DirectX 11 GPU into the one unit, which AMD is calling an APU. AMD is touting that the...
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Jack Cairns posted an article on The PC Report - Jan 3, 2011, 3:48 pm
If you have been following the development of Windows 8 with eyes of a hawk, you will have found out that Milestone 2 has been reached in the development of the next major operating system from Microsoft. According to sources around the web, it appears that Redmond has compiled builds in which the b...
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Jack Cairns posted an article on The PC Report - Jan 3, 2011, 8:01 am
Today the veil gets removed from Intel’s next generation Sandy Bridge processor line-up, and it is without a doubt the biggest launch from Intel ever. Sandy Bridge launches today with no less than 29 different SKUs, which encompass 15 mobile CPUs and 14 desktop CPUs. The biggest change between th...
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Jack Cairns posted an article on The PC Report - Jan 2, 2011, 9:33 pm
VSO Software’s ConvertXtoDVD is an extremely handy utility that allows you to convert almost any format video to be played on a standard DVD player. It converts, encodes, burns and even creates menus for your DVD including chapters and more. ConvertXtoDVD is available in two versions – a fre...
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Jack Cairns posted an article on The PC Report - Dec 31, 2010, 3:44 am
Twenty Ten has been an interested and exciting year for the computer industry. Microsoft kept raking in Windows 7 sales to become the fastest selling OS ever, while launching SP1 and two new Office distributions: 2010 for Windows and 2011 for Mac. Apple started the tablet revolution with the iPad wh...
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Jack Cairns posted an article on The PC Report - Dec 30, 2010, 3:51 am
Intel today has launched another solid state drive, this time with a tiny form factor. The Intel SSD 310 is based on the 34nm MLC Intel X25-M G2 controller and will be available in 40GB and 80GB capacities, initially for laptop OEMs. The SSD 310 utilizes the mSATA interface to provide the drive in ...
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Jack Cairns posted an article on The PC Report - Dec 29, 2010, 9:54 pm
The folks at TechPowerUp have released have released an update to their GPU-Z program. This update adds full support for the AMD Radeon HD 6950 and 6970. The voltage monitoring for the Nvidia GeForce GTX 570 has been improved. The texture fillrate rounding error has been fixed for Nvidia cards. Mult...
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Jack Cairns posted an article on The PC Report - Dec 29, 2010, 3:33 am
Amazon has just been awarded a patent that aims to stop your disappointment at gifts received through Amazon via a simple and configurable service. The service enables gift recipients to automatically exchange their gifts for something different before they physically reach them, with the option of ...
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Jack Cairns posted an article on The PC Report - Dec 27, 2010, 9:16 am
As we already know, the recently released AMD Radeon HD 6950 is essentially a Radeon HD 6970 with some disabled stream processors and texture units. Thanks to findings by techPowerUp, it turns out that AMD disables these sections of the GPU via the card’s BIOS, which can be exploited. If you flas...
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Jack Cairns posted an article on The PC Report - Dec 25, 2010, 9:00 am
Facebook has officially achieved another milestone as it climbs the internet ranks: the site has passed Yahoo in terms of traffic to become the third largest website in the world. Recent statistics provided by ComScore place Facebook just ahead of Yahoo, with 648 million visitors in November 2010 co...
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Jack Cairns posted an article on The PC Report - Dec 22, 2010, 8:25 pm
Avatar, the film that took the highest grossing film ever award  from Titanic at the box office, has now been awarded a slightly less happy award for the film’s creators. According to TorrentFreak, Avatar is most pirated move of 2010 with a grand total of 16,580,000 downloads across thousands of ...
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Jack Cairns posted an article on The PC Report - Dec 20, 2010, 8:51 pm
Google have recently released their latest experiment into Google Labs: Google Body Browser. This 3D browsing tool relies on WebGL to explore the human body without actually having to cut one up: it allows you to filter down the different systems of the body, it allows you to search for different bo...
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Jack Cairns posted an article on The PC Report - Dec 18, 2010, 8:01 pm
DealExtreme is one of our favorite websites for purchasing cheap gadgets online, not all of which are genuine products, but nevertheless good quality gadgets. When purchasing a new wireless adapter for your computer it may be tempting to go for a known brand, but it is equally tempting to purchase a...
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Jack Cairns posted an article on The PC Report - Dec 17, 2010, 8:37 pm
After just a couple of days of release candidates, Opera have released their updated Opera 11 web browser with a loads of new features that are both innovative and also bring Opera up to speed with other browsers such as Firefox and Chrome. Opera 11 now packs support for extensions, which you can b...
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Jack Cairns posted an article on The PC Report - Dec 16, 2010, 6:52 am
Highly respected magazine Time has announced that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has been awarded the Time Person of the Year for 2010. Zuckerberg follows previous awardees such as economist Ben Bernanke (2009), US president Barack Obama (2008), Russian prime minister Vladamir Putin (2007) and You...
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Jack Cairns posted an article on The PC Report - Dec 15, 2010, 9:17 am
After a successful launch of the mid-range HD 6870 and 6850 graphics cards in October, AMD are now pulling out the flagship single-GPU cards – the AMD Radeon HD 6970 and AMD Radeon HD 6950. Both cards are major step up from the previous Evergreen front runners thanks to the new Cayman GPU microarc...
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Jack Cairns posted an article on The PC Report - Dec 14, 2010, 11:06 pm
AMD today have released their monthly graphics card driver update with Catalyst 10.12. AMD Catalyst 10.12 driver includes DivX GPU acceleration for the Radeon HD 6800 and HD 6900 series graphics cards, support for OpenGL 4.1 and the AMD Stream 2.3 Software Development Kit. Ubuntu 10.10 support has a...
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Jack Cairns posted an article on The PC Report - Dec 11, 2010, 11:12 pm
The Nullsoft team have released v5.601 of their popular media player Winamp. This update  includes numerous bug fixes from the recently released Winamp v5.6. A security vulnerability in the midi has been patched, the installer will now disable unsupported 3rd party skins and plugins. The sync and e...
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Jack Cairns posted an article on The PC Report - Dec 11, 2010, 10:32 pm
Our old theme here at The PC Report was looking a bit dated and inconsistent, and it wasn’t particularly nice on the eyes either. Today we are launching our site redesign, dubbed The PC Report v2, which hopes to rectify many of these problems. We would like to credit NewWpThemes.com for the base ...
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Jack Cairns posted an article on The PC Report - Dec 10, 2010, 9:54 pm
My recent browser switch has moved me from Firefox to Chromium, the open source equivalent of Google Chrome. The very two browsers are intertwined however when it comes down to features and other content. This is not the purpose of this post. The point is that an interesting notification has appeare...
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Jack Cairns posted an article on The PC Report - Dec 1, 2010, 4:18 am
The Nullsoft team have released v5.6 of their popular media player Winamp. This releases brings a ton of fixes, improvements and a few new features from v5.581. Notable additions include added support for Android Wi-Fi, mouse wheel support, and the option to add ratings to tags for wma/mp3/flac/ogg/...
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Jack Cairns posted an article on The PC Report - Nov 30, 2010, 5:39 am
Coming fresh out of the Googleplex in Mountain View today is Google Earth 6, which adds numerous improvements and upgrades to your Earth viewing experience. Google’s Street View imaging, used mostly on Google Maps, has been integrated now with Google Earth. You can easily fly to places with Street...
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Jack Cairns posted an article on The PC Report - Nov 27, 2010, 3:37 am
The Svea Appeals Court in Sweden has today upheld the convictions placed on the three creators of the torrent search and tracker website The Pirate Bay. In April 2009 a Swedish court ruled that the men – Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde, and Carl Lundstrom – were guilty of assisting users break Sweden�...
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Jack Cairns posted an article on The PC Report - Nov 24, 2010, 6:45 pm
We all have had those days where we would venture to the market to scope our purchase only to find out that it is slightly out of our reach. Not too far from the market, you find the Chinese knockoff equivalent that is cheap but not quite the same thing that you were originally looking for. Here’s...
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Jack Cairns posted an article on The PC Report - Nov 23, 2010, 11:52 pm
Asus has announced today a brand new laptop that is apparently the world’s thinnest notebook to use a standard voltage Intel Arrandale processor. The U36 will come with either an Intel Core i3 or Core i5 processor rather than the standard ULV processor for ultraportables, and will measure in at ju...
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Jack Cairns posted an article on The PC Report - Nov 21, 2010, 8:42 pm
When Andy Warhol uttered his prescient quip about fifteen minutes of fame in 1968 he may not have foreseen the YouTube phenomenon, but the explosively popular website has certainly made his vision a reality.  As a plethora of relatively cheap digital recording and editing equipment converges with r...
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Jack Cairns posted an article on The PC Report - Nov 20, 2010, 8:27 pm
A few days ago the PCI Special Interest Group (PCI-SIG), who are responsible for all things relating to PCI and PCI standards, released the final PCI Express 3.0 standard. After missing two previous release dates to ensure backwards compatibility, PCIe 3.0 is now fully ready to begin being implement...
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Jack Cairns posted an article on The PC Report - Nov 19, 2010, 6:04 am
Today, both MySpace and Facebook held a joint press conference to announce a new “partnership” between the two social networking site. MySpace, once popular in the American teen social market, has bowed to the whims of social giant Facebook by allowing users to use Facebook Connect to quickly lo...
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Jack Cairns posted an article on The PC Report - Nov 18, 2010, 3:03 am
AMD has released their monthly driver update today. This update brings a small amount of changes and fixes compared to the 10.10 drivers. Mainly focusing on the Radeon 5800 series game performance increases for Battleforge with a 3% increase and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Pripyat benchmark with a 5% inc...
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Jack Cairns posted an article on The PC Report - Nov 18, 2010, 1:33 am
Do you have an old router sitting around doing nothing? Do you need to expand your home network to include more computer, video game systems, or media centers? Do you want to do this by using an old router that serves no purpose instead of buying a new hub or switch? If so, you’ve come to the righ...
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Jack Cairns posted an article on The PC Report - Nov 17, 2010, 5:15 am
Today NVIDIA has quietly introduced a new variant of the GeForce GTX 460 graphics card – the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 SE. The new card packs almost identical specifications to the GeForce GTX 460 1 GB model except it has less CUDA cores making it run slightly slower, but still has the 1 GB of memory...
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Jack Cairns posted an article on The PC Report - Nov 16, 2010, 2:47 am
Today Facebook held a press conference to unveil their latest project: an email service. Facebook is billing the service as “The New Messages: Texts, chat and email together in one simple conversation” – implying that Facebook will be including some sort of mobile text message and instant chat...
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Jack Cairns posted an article on The PC Report - Nov 13, 2010, 10:19 pm
VideoLAN have released an update to their popular media player. This is a minor update mainly containing bug fixes from v1.1.4 and a few new features. Support has been added for RTP access  for H264 streams. Multiple language translations has also been updated within VLC, a new Austrian has also be...
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Jack Cairns posted an article on The PC Report - Nov 12, 2010, 10:20 pm
It seems that today, over on the official Windows Video YouTube channel, Microsoft has again attacked Apple for the lack of Blu-ray support in Apple’s range of Mac computers. The advertisement’s description reads “See how PC & Mac stay entertained on a long flight together with the help of Blu...
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Jack Cairns posted an article on The PC Report - Nov 10, 2010, 4:16 pm
The folks at TechPowerUp have released have released an update to their GPU-Z program. This update adds support for the newly released Nvidia GeForce GTX 580. Bug fixes have been included for various AMD Radeon cards including the 6000 series for memory clock monitoring, CrossFire detection glitches...
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Jack Cairns posted an article on The PC Report - Nov 10, 2010, 8:01 am
Every graphics card enthusiast will remember the launch of NVIDIA’s GTX 480 – the card that brought Fermi into the light but, despite being the most powerful card at the time, was too hot and too power consuming to beat AMD’s Radeon HD 5870 for value. NVIDIA today hopes to rectify this with th...
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Jack Cairns posted an article on The PC Report - Nov 9, 2010, 9:49 pm
Today marks the 6th birthday of the popular Mozilla Firefox internet browser. Taken up from the source code of the Netscape browser, Firefox powers on through today to serve more than 400 million (and 45% of The PC Report’s readers) in performing just what it’s built for. Throughout its run, Fi...
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Jack Cairns posted an article on The PC Report - Nov 8, 2010, 5:15 am
When you start to collect a reasonably sized digital movie collection the standard Windows browsing experience can be a bit mediocre – a randomly taken screenshot of the movie plus some file information and a title is just about all you get. Even Windows Media Center, while providing a fluid i...
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Jack Cairns posted an article on The PC Report - Nov 5, 2010, 7:37 pm
The CPUID team have released version 1.56 of CPU-Z. This update brings new support for the following CPU’s:  Intel Core i7 970 Gulftown, AMD Sempron II Caspian,  AMD Athlon II Caspian, and AMD Phenom II Caspian. This update now supports the Intel P67 Northbridge chipset. The Intel Core I3/i5/i7 ...
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Jack Cairns posted an article on The PC Report - Nov 4, 2010, 7:14 am
Fedora has always been one of the more popular Linux distributions after Ubuntu, and today the Red Hat sponsored distribution received a major update to version 14. Fedora 14 (codenamed “Laughlin”) is aimed at “developers, system administrators and open source enthusiasts”, with most of the ...
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Jack Cairns posted an article on The PC Report - Nov 3, 2010, 6:09 am
Sophos has decided to target relatively small Mac antivirus market with a brand new solution to those worried about infections on their Mac. While enterprise and paid antivirus solutions have existed for a while, Sophos Anti-Virus Home Edition for Mac is completely free to download and use and promi...
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Jack Cairns posted an article on The PC Report - Nov 1, 2010, 6:08 am
Our Best Music Player series is back with another addition, this time it’s the lesser known music player MediaMonkey developed by Ventis Media. MediaMonkey is available in two versions: a free version packing most of the features that the standard user will need, and a gold (paid) edition that com...
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Jack Cairns posted an article on The PC Report - Oct 30, 2010, 6:22 am
YouTube, the massive public video sharing site owned by Google, has just hit the major one billion subscription milestone. This means that as of today, at least one billion clicks have been made on the yellow subscribe buttons scattered around the site – first seen in 2006 as the Official YouTube ...
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Jack Cairns posted an article on The PC Report - Oct 29, 2010, 10:00 am
Mozilla has released Firefox v3.6.12 and have also announced they would delay Firefox v4.0. Firefox v3.6.12 fixes a crucial security flaw that was present in earlier versions of Firefox and Mozilla has urged everyone to update immediately to prevent infection. The security flaw in question was foun...
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Jack Cairns posted an article on The PC Report - Oct 28, 2010, 2:46 pm
With the release of Ubuntu 10.10 approaching it’s third week, more details have been revealed about the next major version – Natty Narwhal. Last night at the Ubuntu Development Summit, Mark Shuttleworth has announced a couple of new features for Narwhal as well as the focus that developers will ...
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Jack Cairns posted an article on The PC Report - Oct 28, 2010, 5:51 am
Microsoft announced several days ago that the latest version of Office for Mac, Office 2011, is now available to all. Office 2011 brings updates to all componetns of the Office suite to Mac users, including collaboration tool support, a new Outlook for Mac replacing Entourage and the return of Visua...
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