Archive for category: News

Toshiba Satellite L, new Windows 10 ready laptops

Toshiba debuts the Satellite L series laptops to welcome Windows 10 and Cortana, as they are among the first notebooks to include the famous dedicated key for the Microsoft virtual assistant. Interestingly, these laptops have come out before the release of Windows 10, scheduled for July 29, so they initially come with Windows 8.1 and may be updated later.

With screen sizes of 15.6 and 17.3 inches, the Satellite L come with Intel or AMD processors, up to 16GB of memory and 1TB of storage. There will be versions with WiFi 802.11 ac and others that will have to settle with 802.11n. Their maximum resolution is of 1920 x 1080 pixels with an IPS panel and will have SkullCandy DTS sound.

The 15.6-inch models will come out on the 21st this month with a base price of 530 dollars, while the larger 17.3-inch will have a price of 570 dollars, released on July 29, the same day of Windows 10’s release.

June 28, 20150 commentsRead More

AMD introduces their New Carrizo processors

AMD has finally revealed its first processors with new architecture. It is literally their first new line in years, as for example, the current FX 8350 were released three years ago, though these are likely to remain on sale for one more season. But the highest interest of the company lies in integrating CPU and GPU on a chip, the APUs.

The new APUs come with Carrizo architecture, the sixth generation of Serie A processors from the company. The promises are the usual: more performance, lower consumption and more autonomy in laptops as these processors are designed for the mobility industry.

AMD Carrizo processor

Improvements for low-cost laptops

AMD’s goal with these processors is to provide gamers with the chance to get laptops that are good enough to play StarCraft or League of Legends with good graphic quality, without going broke. Moreover it’s usually counterproductive to spend so little on a laptop if you want it for gaming because, well, you can’t upgrade it (at least till Thunderbolt comes up).

June 19, 20150 commentsRead More

AMD Radeon 300: its rumored prices are well restrained

The new generation of AMD Radeon 300 dedicated graphics is close to being released. AMD needs to regain lost ground to NVIDIA after a devastating end of 2014 for AMD, by dropping to an alarming 24 percent in the dedicated graphics niche and staying in an overall 35% this year compared to 64% of NVIDIA.

The AMD Radeon 300 must recover sales and moreover if the leaked prices from WCCF are confirmed, and that you will see in the table below:

The top model (single core) would be the Radeon R9 390X. A model that could be marketed under the name Fury X and it is noted for its use of HBM memories, whose performance and efficiency is higher than the GDDR5.

June 13, 20150 commentsRead More

OCZ will present two new high-performance SSD at Computex

The company is preparing to launch two new SSD, one in SATA format for a new series, the OCZ TRION 100, which will be accompanied by the OCZ Drive 6300 NVM Express and breathtaking speeds.

Beginning with the TRION 100, it will be an SSD formed of Toshiba TLC memories consisting of 19 nanometers along with an Alishan controller also from Toshiba itself, which now owns OCZ. These SSD can reach sequential transfer speeds of 550 MB / s and random speeds of 91,000 read IOPS.

Moreover, the OCZ Drive 6300 NVM Express is passed to NVME technology, allowing you to achieve much higher speeds than any SATA SSD. We are talking about almost 6 times the speed of the Trion, with a frame rate of over 3,000 MB / s and its random speeds are also impressive, with 700,000 IOPS.

In this case they will be oriented to the professional market with storage capabilities that can reach 6.4 TB. We’ll tell you more details next week from the Computex 2015, so stay tuned.

June 6, 20150 commentsRead More

Microsoft wants to reign again with Windows 10: this are the keys to achieve it

Microsoft, far from neglecting its operating systems or from performing incomprehensible and uncomfortable changes – like many users have reported about the last systems released by the North American company – is more committed than ever in revitalizing Windows in the best way possible.

Windows 10, the most popular operating system’s next version will make its apparition in the following months, improving what we saw on Windows 8 and promising a chameleonic evolution that will allow it to exist in all kinds of current devices: PCs, smartphones, tablets and even consoles. Let’s get to know its strengths.

Windows, adapting to the environment and to its users

Windows 10

Years ago it used to users who would await with eager anticipation for the new features that the following Windows version would bring to their PCs. This time, interestingly, it’s the other way around.

June 5, 20150 commentsRead More

Acer updates its AIO Aspire Z series

Acer has announced the update of its “All in One” AIO Aspire Z series PCs with 2 models, 20 and 24 inches respectively. The release is planned to be in the third quarter of this year.

The Aspire Z3-710 offers a capacitive multi-touch screen with 10 points of simultaneous contacts with 23.8 inches diagonally, while the ZC-700 reduces its size to 19.5 inches. Both have backlit LED panels with Full HD resolution (1920 x 1080 pixels).

June 3, 20150 commentsRead More

AMD showed us the AMD A10-7870K and now the APU AMD Godavari has arrived

AMD has launched a small update for its APU’s while the new generation arrives. The new AMD A10-7870K has the top performance, compared to the whole 7000 Series, since has an increased CPU and GPU operating speed.

Thus, the new APU A10-7870 has 4 CPU cores working at 3.9 GHz and a small turbo at 4.1 GHz, while the 8 cores of the graphics card work at 866 MHz. The previous APUs Kavery family flagship, the A10-7850K worked 3.7 at @4.0 GHz for the CPU and 720 MHz for the iGPU.

It will support DirectX 13, MANTLE with technologies such as asymmetrical rendering along with a dedicated graphics card, VSR, or the FreeSync technology.

It will come with a price of 129.99 Dollars, a price, an amount for which we’ll get a superior performance than from the combo formed by the Intel Core i3-4360 processor with an NVIDIA’s GT 740 GPU, according to the company. AMD A10-7870K

AMD A10-7870K

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How to force Windows to connect to the Wireless Network with the longest range

We don’t need third party apps. But it is true that not all adapters allow this “aggressive roaming” mode, nor it is always advisable because sometimes it is better to connect to a further but less saturated access point. But anyways, I make mention of it because it may be handy to some of you. Evidently, this only works with access points already preintalled on our computer or with our Microsoft profile. This is not a hacking method or anything similar.

Wireless Network

The secret is in the advanced properties of our network interface. So let’s head to the Network Administrator in the Control Panel. Then let’s open the properties of our wireless adapter and let’s click on “Configure”.

May 28, 20150 commentsRead More

Microsoft Edge is already faster than Chrome and Firefox running JavaScript

Things have changed a lot after two decades of Microsoft browsers. If by the late 90s the company attacked Java (and JavaScript) in browsers, Microsoft is now a champion of the importance of browsers having a good JavaScript engine to speed up websites and web applications.

Microsoft Edge is the new browser that will come with Windows 10, and JavaScript performance tests now place it as the fastest engine. This has been made possible by changes in Chakra (the name of the JS engine in Edge) in the 10122 update of Windows 10 that was distributed yesterday.

The tests are Google Octane 2.0, doing better than even Chrome, and Apple Jet Stream with the same results. It outperforms Internet Explorer 11 by far, but this is actually something that has little merit today.

Microsoft Edge

Microsoft has improved JavaScript performance using various techniques, such as inserting JavaScript code functions within the code of the functions that call them (not in all cases, but in those that can improve the context switching times), improvements in the use of global constants, improvements in try-catch blocks, execution of non-minified code blocks, and optimized access to certain positions of an indexOf array.

You can read more about these exciting changes in this article by Microsoft.

May 26, 20150 commentsRead More

NVIDIA blocks again the overclocking feature in their notebook graphics cards

If you follow us regularly you will probably know the story. In mid-February, NVIDIA launched the 347.09 and 347.29 drivers and decided unilaterally to block any possibility of overclocking in laptops with Maxwell graphics cards (specifically the 860m, 960M, 965m, 970M and 980M models), and this soon triggered the fury of all those who had acquired a high performance laptop with these cards, as there are indeed manufacturers that promote this feature.

The first official response from Nvidia indicated that overclocking in laptops was not a desired function and that it was a “bug”, and thus they had resolved such “bug” and removed the overclocking option. Naturally this explanation did little to calm the situation, actually quite the opposite, with users even filing joint petitions with the courts. In the end, on February 20, the company had to rectify and announced that they reactivated the ability to overlock.

Unfortunately this didn’t end there and several owners of notebooks with GTX900M graphics detected that the new vBIOS creeping into some new laptops with these cards blocked the overclocking feature, but this time at the BIOS level. These vBIOS integrate a bit created for drivers to disable overclocking if detected as active. Luckily the company launched after that the 347.88 drivers that jumped over that limitation and reactivated the overclock, even on laptops with these new vBIOS.

But now there’s a new chapter in this saga, as new drivers of the company (350.12 and 352.86) are blocking the overclock again if they detect that specific bit responsible for limiting the OC in these vBIOS, so, again, the users of these gaming portables who want to speed up their cards may not do so.

There have begun to emerge changes in vBIOS that disable the locking bit, so that users can overclock even with new drivers specifically released to run The Witcher 3, but loading a modified vBIOS to a graphics card always has its risks and it can cancels the warranty.

We will follow up on the developments of this issue to see how the saga ends.