Archive for Alex Watson

AX:GS - The Final Reckoning

Posted at 11:10 by Alex Watson with 22 comments

Alex Watson
So here we are, at long, long last - delayed by timezones, product launches, snow, and even Christmas (who could have forseen that, coming, as it did, out of the blue on the 25th of December?), this is the end of the Asus Xtreme Global Summit (AX: GS) competition.

Well, not quite the end - because one bit-tech reader will be heading to Taipei, the capital city of Taiwan, to meet up with various members of the Asus R&D team, including motherboard designers, BIOS gurus and product managers. In addition, the winner will also bag themselves an Asus Sabertooth 55i motherboard. One runner up will also win one of these very sexy boards.

Over the last few months, the lucky readers who won the chance to attend the AX: GS event last summer in London have been blogging about the day and their hardware prizes. We've been scrutinising the blogs, posting highlights here on the bit-tech blog, and we've now picked an overall winner.

Drum roll - or mouse click, whichever you prefer - if you please!

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Written on 21st January 2010
Tags asus, competition, prizes, taiwan, xtreme global summit

Upgrading your graphics card is so easy even a monkey can do it

Posted at 10:55 by Alex Watson with 27 comments

Alex Watson
AMD's marketing gets criticised for lacking the clarity and presence messages of Intel's campaigns - and though what the two firms spend is vastly different (Intel's ad ad spend is a story in itself), it's somehow not surprising to find out that AMD hires Marketing Executives who openly admit that they wouldn't buy its products if they didn't work there.

What's most frustrating about AMD's marketing is that it lacks the strong, coherent story Intel usually manages to present - take, for instance, laptops. Centrino, with its colourful little butterfly logo, was great at saying "this laptop has good battery life, WiFi and decent performance." For most people, who are uninterested in CPU architecture and clockspeed, it was ideal; clear, simple and in tune with what the majority of people wanted. AMD still - over six years late - has no rival to Centrino, opting instead for a confusing jumble of AMD, Radeon and WiFi badges to tell consumers the same thing.

Which brings us onto AMD's latest marketing idea. Monkeys - yes, real, actual, live monkeys - installing graphics cards. It's true! The video is embedded after the jump.

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Written on 20th January 2010
Tags amd, how to, marketing, monkeys, strategy, tutorial, upgrading

How to enable Windows 7 God Mode

Posted at 10:09 by Alex Watson with 22 comments

Alex Watson
Did you know Windows 7 has a God mode?

It sounds cooler than it is in reality - you're not invulnerable to BSODs, and the system doesn't play One of Us when it starts up.

That said, it's not completely useless either - it gives you a shortcut to all the options in Control Panel and allows you to easily get to usually buried controls.

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Written on 8th January 2010
Tags cheat, god mode, vista, windows 7

More opportunities at Dennis

Posted at 11:48 by Alex Watson with 5 comments

Alex Watson
You might remember we posted before Christmas about a job vacancy on PC Pro - which, incidentally, is open until the 8th of January, so you've still got time to apply - but today's post is about another job opening at Dennis.

This time it's bit-tech's business orientated sibling, IT PRO, that's on the look out for a staff writer.

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Written on 4th January 2010
Tags dennis, it pro, jobs

Want to work for Dennis?

Posted at 17:03 by Alex Watson with 16 comments

Alex Watson
OK, so it's not a job vacancy on the mighty bit-tech - but our sister title PC Pro is on the look out for a news and features writer, working across both the magazine and the website.

You don't even need a CV. Not yet, anyway - all PC Pro want to know is how well you write and why you think you’re right for the job. So, email a 300-word technology news story based on that day’s events to Barry Collins: barryc [at] pcpro.co.uk.

They also want one feature idea, either for the website or the magazine, along with a covering letter explaining what makes you perfect for PC Pro.

It's a full-time, freelance position with an equivalent salary of £17-£22K depending on experience, and 28 days’ fully paid holiday.

You've got until January the 8th. Make sure you read the full details before firing off your emails.

Good luck!

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Written on 15th December 2009
Tags dennis, jobs, pc pro

Kickstart fundraising for your mod with Kickstarter

Posted at 10:50 by Alex Watson with 6 comments

Alex Watson
We’ve featured some great mods on bit-tech this year, and behind the scenes Antony and Rich are at work sourcing prizes for upcoming extravaganza that is our renowned Mod of the Year competition.

It's one thing to have a great idea for a mod - but it's quite another to actually get it done. The amount of work that goes into making something as mighty and radical as, say, The Phinix Cube or Neptune’s Trident is epic.

It's not just work, either - it's cash too, so the question is, how do you raise the money to mod?

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Written on 10th December 2009
Tags cash, funding, modding

WIN: Asus Xtreme Design VGA Competition Week 1

Posted at 15:46 by Alex Watson with 2 comments

Alex Watson
It’s said that if good design is obvious, then great design is transparent. Perhaps this is why badly designed PC products are so frustrating – when designers get it right, design takes a back seat and you can easily enjoy the performance and features you bought the product for.

That said, given that so many PC components these days are commodity products with razor-thin margins that win favour by simply being the cheapest, you do have to wonder whether there’s room for anything as graceful and quiet as good design. Props to Asus then as they’re expanding their Xtreme Design approach from motherboards (which we’ve covered in depth previously), to graphics cards. It’s not just high-end graphics cards either – the Xtreme Design range covers, for instance, the newly launched GeForce GTS 240. Co-incidentally, we’ve got five Xtreme Design Asus ENGT240/DI/512MD5 cards to give away. Stay tuned for an update next week where we’ll tell you exactly how to enter,

So what does Xtreme Design for graphics cards entail? According to Asus ‘it’s about producing innovative graphics cards for the best performance, reliability and safety.’ Fine and dandy, but what specifically does this X-toting name endow a graphics card with?

Click through to find out.

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Written on 4th December 2009
Tags asus, competition, cooling, dust, fan, graphics cards, pcb, xtreme design

Leaving Live Mesh and the mess Microsoft is in

Posted at 11:24 by Alex Watson with 16 comments

Alex Watson
It’s not often PC Pro gets the drop on us in terms of new technology (unless you’re into laser printers), but they were well ahead when it came to Microsoft’s Live Mesh, and prompted by their enthusiastic praise, I gave it a try.

Live Mesh really is pretty nifty; sign up for an account, add your computer to 'the Mesh' (your own of group of machines) and any folders you select are uploaded to the servers. You can then access these folders and files via a web browser, or – and this is the brilliant bit – set them to by synced across multiple computers. Make a change to a file on one PC, and it’ll be uploaded to the servers, then downloaded when the other machines turn on so they all mirror each other.

For a while, in fact, it was so good, I wondered if it was the start of a turnaround for Microsoft.

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Written on 20th November 2009
Tags cloud computing, gdrive, google, live mesh, microsoft, storage, sugar sync, sync

Nvidia posts picture of a real Fermi card

Posted at 15:48 by Alex Watson with 22 comments

Well, this time it's real - probably. Nvidia PR man Brian Burke just posted a picture of a Ferm-based graphics card - which he called the GeForce 100 - on Twitter.

In the tweet, Burke says it's running the "Unigine Heaven" DX11 benchmark.

Nvidia posts picture of a real Fermi card
Here it is!

You may now commence your speculations about how it will stack up against the new Radeon HD 5970.

And speaking of Twitter, don't forget you should follow bit-tech!

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Written on 18th November 2009
Tags directx 11, fermi, gpu, hardware, nvidia

What we're reading

Posted at 17:13 by Alex Watson with 7 comments

Alex Watson
Probably the laziest way to start any article is to take a pertinent word and tell readers how many times it shows up in Google.

'Did you know that death by jam is a real danger? Well it is! There are over 44 million pages on Google talking about it!'

We get it. There's a lot of stuff on the internet. But what's good? What's worth reading? How can you avoid being killed by jam?

Well, now we can answer the first two questions with our brand new 'What we're reading' section.

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Written on 29th October 2009
Tags bit-tech, links, publish2, site news