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This falls under the give me a break category. This whole memory stick deal is really crappy, let one standard rule please. It looks as though compact flash is on the way out and SD is the new commer.

Memory Stick is used in devices such as handhelds and digital cameras. Memory Stick Duo is about one-third the size of the original, and is meant to fit into devices such as cell phones and small digital audio players.

AMD can take it on the chin and even dish it out.

AMD has developed a smaller, thinner package than it currently uses to affix the mobile Athlon XP to a motherboard inside a notebook. The new package--along with the fact that the new chip consumes about 25 percent less power than AMD's older Athlon 4 mobile processor and produces less heat as well--will allow the 1800+ to be used in thinner and lighter notebooks.

Judge says stop those popups!

According to the suit, Gator is "essentially a parasite on the Web that free rides on the hard work and the investments of plaintiffs and other Web site owners. In short, Gator sells advertising space on the plaintiffs' Web sites without (their) authorization and pockets the profits from such sales." You got that right.

I missed these yesterday, but ieXbeta has a bunch of beta build links available. Here's the listings-

-Windows XP SP1 Build 1073

-First beta of MSN Messenger 5.0 leaked

-MSN Messenger 5 Sign on and Stay on Fix

-DirectPlay Update for DirectX 9.0 Beta 1

-Internet Explorer 6.0 SP1 Beta (Build 2800.1067)

Remember these are betas and knowing M$, they may or may not have a time bomb. It usually informs you whether it does or not.

I found this linky from Darken over at the ieXbeta boards for new detonator drivers.

For your convienience here are the direct download sites which come from Suma-

Detonator v30.30 W2K/XP

Detonator v30.30 Win9x

A new beta 4 in 1 is available for downloading from the nice folks over at Fileconnect.

They report this version to having new-

AGP driver v5.0.0.3430 for XP.
GART v5.00.00.0430.

...of it all. Way to go M$! Microsoft declines to use own security product Need I say more?

This story I just saw on MSNBC as well (The TV Station).

AOL Time Warner spokeswoman Tricia Primrose confirmed Friday that the company has hired executive search firm Spencer Stuart to lead the initiative. However, Primrose would not elaborate on whether Pittman plans to remain with the company once his term concludes.

I guess Mike doesn't realize that these are most likely photoshopers. There is no WAY Intel will make a Celeron that is the same exact CPU as the Pentium 4 (with the same cache).

The CPU and BIOS information in Sisoft Sandra clearly shows that the 1800MHz Pentium 4 Celeron with 512K of cache is a chip that's clearly under test right now. Sandra scores are easily made on photoshop. Take this with a huge grain of salt.

It seems Micron has already demoed a system running the new memory.

DDR-II memory enables data transmission speeds of 400mbps (megabits per second) on a 100MHz bus, and up to 600mbps if the bus frequency is cranked up to 150MHz--a scenario envisaged for high-speed networking applications. Micron's demonstration system enabled data transfer speeds of 533mpbs. Sounds like RDRam, but with a wider bit path.

Hexus reviews yet another Ti 4200.

Overclocking the card in my machine led to a final stable clock of 302/552, Ti4400 speeds without issue and in a friends machine the memory is doing a heady 594MHz, not bad for 4ns Samsung TSOP modules but of course, your mileage will vary. That's why I haven't featured overclocking results here since the speeds obtainable are pretty machine specific. Ti4400 speeds should be easy for 24/7 running however, I will venture that much.

Viarena's dynamic duo John and Fiona Gatt have put together an article about VIA's new audio chip. And no we aren't talking about any kind of pathetic AC'97 deal here. The ENVY24 is a high powered chip that has been around for some time now.Thier new ENVY24HT that was launched during Computex during June of this year, should be making it's way into the sound card arena shortly.Here's thier write up of the ENVY24 chip which is paired with the Terratec DMX 6 Fire 24/96.

True 24 VIA Audio

I look forward to writing up a preview of the game as it is now. The game is awesome. If anyone plays it, give me an email.

This Russian site has a picture of Radeon 9000 (RV250) that is to be announced soon. They are not sure about the specs, but the speculations are pretty much standard. They believe the memory clock will be 550 Mhz(DDR). The memory chip manufacturer on this particular card is EtronTech and the timing formula 3.6 ns. If you would like to see the picture yourself click here. It seems like ATI is keeping its promises with their new policy of cards being available almost immediately after the official announcement.

Run down to you 7-11 (what's the date today?) and pick up a free Slurpie, if the store feels like it of course. I filed this one under cooling .

Get those boards up to 2.11v.

The Vcore maximally attainable by the modification is afterwards in the hardware monitor of the Bios readable. Owing to the modification now well 2.1 V are attainable, whereby here above all also the used power pack plays an important role. (Translation)

The Tech Report has a review of the aging Radeon 8500.

In the end, Hercules serves up a pretty sweet gaming card with the 3D Prophet 8500 128MB. While it gets beat up in the benchmarks by the GeForce4 Titaniums, it largely undercuts them when it comes to price, and that makes the 3D Prophet 8500 128MB a solid buy for the gaming enthusiast.

Anandtech has updated their UT benches to show CPU scaling.

What's also interesting to note is that if you extrapolate based on this data then you'll see that the forthcoming generation of GPUs will need even more powerful processors than an Athlon XP 2100+ in order to get the most out of their performance. With AMD slowly ramping the clock speed of the Athlon XP line between now and Hammer's release, it looks like we'll be testing R300 and NV30 on Pentium 4 systems.

They will make 802.11b devices starting this fall.

The software giant has a team developing 802.11b wireless home networking products within the same hardware division that creates keyboards and mice. Company representatives declined to comment on the details of the future products, but said that entering the home networking market was in line with the software giant's interests.

Who else saw this one coming?

A terrorist-sponsored cyberattack against major U.S. networks and businesses is no longer a question of if, but when and to what extent, according to former senior intelligence and security officials.

I'm guessing people are just being overly paranoid about this, but that's just my stupid opinion.

VR-Zone has a review of a ECS Xabre Pro.

Right now, the only concern is that the Xabre drivers aren't anywhere mature enough to compete with NVIDIA drivers. In some games, Xabre cards are not well optimized enough. Also SiS right now has to really build up their relationships with the game developers to optimize their future GPUs and drivers for games since SiS is trying to capture some of the mid end market share now which they previously weren't able to. ECS is always behind supporting SiS by producing cards based on Xabre 400 GPUs and this time their ECS AG400 is a neat card with good features such as TV-Out and 3DVR Connectors.

Aces Hardware has put up an article going over the various multi cpu systems that are available now or in the near future. It covers quite a wide range of platforms from the upcoming AMD Hammer to the tried and true P3. This is a very extensive guide and long read. There latest and final installment is located Volume Multi-Processor Systems: Part 3. If you'd like to start from the begining, you can go here to Part 1 and Part 2.

Anandtech has a review of an ECS i-Buddie.

On top of the performance issues, we were also disappointed with a few kinks that are present in the i-Buddie XP. Although the fan in the AC adapter may not seem like a big deal, it did get quite bothersome quite quickly. Also problematic was the heat that the i-Buddie XP with its 2100+ processor produced. The CPU was never bothered by the temperature of the system (meaning that the cooling solution works well) but our laps were (meaning that perhaps the cooling solution works too well). Obviously going with a slower Athlon XP processor or a Duron would decrease the heat produced by the system.

Maybe equal isn't good enough, but what do I know.

The FireGL 8800 performed equally as well as the GeForce 3 that had been in this system before, for gaming at least. ...

If you are looking for a good entry-level video editing card, I would recommend this product to you. It offers a lot of features, good performance at a low cost.

[H] has a review of an MSI Ti 4200.

The performance of the MS-8870 Ti4200 is fantastic, running neck in neck with the other top performing Ti4200s we have reviewed and coming out on top of the majority of tests we ran today, even when tested against the 128MB version of the Ti4200. The faster memory helped edge out the competition while leaving a lot of leg room for the overclockers out there, an added bonus. After all, no one wants a fast card when it is at its ragged edge already. Most of us enjoy the 'room to play'.

What a shiny board.

As the personal choice of this reviewer, Soyo has definitely redeemed themselves. It seems that any lack of performance is obviously the direct result of a BIOS issue. Surely, as the company receives more feedback, the SY333 Dragon Ultra Platinum will continue to become better. There may not be any fire, but this is a hot product and a great buy.

Legionhardware has a review of this new board with the new chipset from VIA.

Overall, the P4X400 is really just the P4X333 chipset with the ability to “officially” support DDR400, and I guess that was all VIA wanted to do with the chipset.

This story just confirms what I heard at PC Expo. AMD will support it and they said to me it wouldn't be a problem.

So, in order to benefit from the the expected performance gains DDR-II will bring, AMD will need to re-engineer the northbridge controller, which, on Hammer, is embedded on the chip to permit faster memory throughput.

Original Story.

Still no Pentium 4 boards.

Mercury Research analyst Dean McCarron said changes in the new nForce are likely to focus on chipset functions--including support for new connection technologies such as USB 2.0--rather than graphics enhancements. "There are a number of new technologies that are making inroads in the market, and they have to incorporate those," he said.

Nivram has updated his case for his watercooling project. Take a look.