Archive for Alex Watson

Leaving Live Mesh and the mess Microsoft is in

Posted at 11:24 by Alex Watson with 10 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 18 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

Dirt 2 Demo Impressions

Posted at 08:23 by Alex Watson with 8 comments

Alex Watson
After the disappointment of Fuel – which was about as dull and exciting as the coarse fabric pants you could expect to win if you triumphed driving one of its leaden, fart-coloured racers through a fart-coloured post-apocalyptic landscape – I had to admit I approached the demo of Codemasters’ next racer, Dirt 2, with some trepidation.

Fortunately, the recently released demo reveals that we’re mostly back on safe ground, and despite the name it’s not even that brown. That’s because while Fuel was developed by an external studio, Dirt 2 is an inhouse game, and you can tell: Dirt 2 is basically Grid for off-road racing.

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Written on 27th August 2009
Tags demos, dirt 2, gaming, racing

Asus Xtreme Global Summit Competition Week 4 Winners

Posted at 17:54 by Alex Watson with 90 comments

Alex Watson
And so we reach the end... the end of the beginning, at any rate, as we're ready to announce the final five winners of tickets to our Asus Xtreme Global Summit event along with the prizes that entails.

This week's blog post was all about overclocking, and the question we asked was simple: "what single tweak, invention, feature, BIOS option or idea would make overclocking better for you?

Read on to see who the lucky winners are!

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Written on 21st August 2009
Tags asus, competition, motherboards, overclocking, xtreme global summit

WIN: Asus Xtreme Global Summit Competition Week 4

Posted at 16:18 by Alex Watson with 18 comments

Alex Watson
So far we’ve announced 15 of the 20 winners in our Asus Xtreme Global Summit competition, over the course of three previous blogs looking at the various design innovations Asus is introducing in its upcoming P55 boards. It’s now time for the fourth and final giveaway of tickets! Read on to find out how you can get your hands on one.

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Written on 19th August 2009
Tags asus, competition, motherboards, overclocking, xtreme global summit

Asus Xtreme Global Summit Competition Week 3 Winners

Posted at 16:16 by Alex Watson with 47 comments

Alex Watson
So, here we are in the fourth week of the Asus Xtreme Global Summit competition, so we’ve got another five winners to announce. Last week’s post covered Asus’ T.Probe VRM technology and after such a techy post, the question we posed was a fun one:

“The challenge involves coming up with a new name for a Republic of Gamers motherboard - we've seen the Maximus (1, 2 and 3), the Commando, the Crosshair, the Rampage... what should follow this illustrious line-up?”

Read on to see who the winners were after the jump!

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Written on 18th August 2009
Tags asus, competition, design, future, motherboards, names, xtreme global summit

Will Boxee’s $6 million help make media PCs less rubbish?

Posted at 08:17 by Alex Watson with 18 comments

Alex Watson
Last Friday we sent the latest issue of Custom PC off to the printers – and it’s back already, looking mean and moody with a water-cooled PC on the front – so it means this week I’ve been starting my tasks for the next issue. First up, the letters page, and I’ve just answered an interesting one about media PCs.

Specifically, why they’re rubbish – I had a long email from a reader detailing a pretty tortuous experience building and setting up a media PC. Despairingly, he’d turned to us to see if we could alleviate any of his misery.

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Written on 14th August 2009
Tags boxee, media pc, windows mce

WIN: Asus Xtreme Global Summit Competition Week 3

Posted at 13:23 by Alex Watson with 40 comments

Alex Watson
We’ve previewed one of Asus’ upcoming P55 boards, the P7P55 Deluxe, taking a look at its overall layout, heatsinks and ports. We recently had a chance to catch up with the Asus design team to talk about the board’s power management design.

The P7P55D features a new design – branded ‘hybrid phase’, which adds a ‘T.Probe’ chip to a 16-phase power design to provide increased reliability by actively managing the VRMs to keep temperatures under control.

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Written on 12th August 2009
Tags asus, competition, epu, motherboards, power, tprobe, vrms, xtreme global summit

Asus Xtreme Global Summit Competition Week 2 Winners

Posted at 08:25 by Alex Watson with 5 comments

Alex Watson
We were a little late getting week two’s Asus Xtreme Gaming Summit post up, but it still attracted lots of great comments answering the question: “What’s been the trickiest, most complex or most frustrating problem you’ve had when building a PC?”

We’ve been through the comments and picked our five favourite answers – all five win tickets
to the event on the 28th of August in London, and of course, snagging themselves some choice hardware to boot. As stated in the T&C’s, every winner gets £50 towards travel expenses, too.

Before we announce this week’s winners, a quick shout out to forum users Spiny and ffjason – you both won last week and have been PM’d details which you need to respond to! Get on it or your tickets will go to other people!

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Written on 12th August 2009
Tags asus, competition, design, future, motherboards, xtreme global summit




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