A warning to all of our readers in Brazil: If your system is powered by Microsoft's 32-bit version of Windows 7, you should disable automatic Windows Updates. Patch number KB2823324 will cause 32-bit Windows 7 systems in Brazil to enter an infinite reboot loop, something most would like to avoid.

Oddly enough, the problem only presents itself in Brazil: "The problem is isolated to Brazil and we are working on a solution," Microsoft said.

To fix the problem, you'll need to load a recent System Restore points. If you don't use System Restore, you might be able to use Command Prompt in Safe Mode to remove the botched patch. Run the following command:

DISM.exe / image: C: [windows8 install]/ cleanup-image / revertpendingact

Of course, your mileage may vary. If all else fails, you can wait for Microsoft to issue an official fix or reinstall your operating system.

According to a document obtained by PhoneArena, Sprint will be rolling out LTE to 21 new markets tomorrow, April 12. Sprint has said that the roll out in Los Angeles will be more of a soft roll out as they continue to test bits and pieces much like the San Francisco roll out has taken place.

The markets below are said to be receiving LTE tomorrow:

• California: Los Angeles, Contra Costa County
• Florida: Palm Bay, Port St. Lucie, West Palm Beach
• Indiana: Bloomington and Lafayette
• Illinois: Rochelle
• Minnesota: Mankato-North Mankato
• Missouri: Joplin
• North Carolina: Charlotte, Shelby, Albemarle, Sailsbury, Lincolnton
• Tennessee: Memphis, Greenville, Tullahoma
• Texas: Denison, Kerrville
• Virginia: Norfolk-Virginia Beach-Newport News

The document says that users will be able to enjoy download speeds of 6-8 Mbps down and 2-3 Mbps up. Of course, to use LTE, you'll need an LTE compatible Sprint device such as the LG Optimus G, Samsung Galaxy S III, Samsung Galaxy Note II, or Apple iPhone 5. I'm still waiting for LTE to come to a city near me.

The latest rumor to surface regarding the Xbox 720 talks about what games will be available at launch. According to The Verge, who have been active with numerous Xbox 720 rumors as of late, the Xbox 720 will be launching with several new games including a new Forza and Ryse.

Ryse was originally shown off during E3 2011--the trailer can be seen above--but has yet to materialize. Crytek and Microsoft Studios have reportedly been working on rewriting the game to make use the hardware and features present on the new Xbox 720. Ryse is said to be the mega launch title for the new Xbox 720 console. It will apparently be Microsoft's new Gears of War or Halo series.

Verizon's chief executive has come out swinging, saying that video streaming now accounts for 50% of Verizon's traffic. Verizon CEO, Lowell McAdam, was speaking at the National Association of Broadcasters, when he said that his company's investment in their LTE network has benefited their customers, making high-quality streaming video possible.

He also said that with 3G you could only watch small video clips that require heaps of buffering, but with 4G LTE there are endless possibilities. The network believes that streaming video will continue to be popular with customers, and that by 2017 it could consume two-thirds of all traffic on the Verizon network.

LinkedIn have announced that they have acquired the company who make the news reader app Pulse for a reported $90 million. Pulse has over 30 million users, and could give LinkedIn an injection of tools as they continue their mission to move from being a socially-enabled site to resumes and business connections to a complete information destination.

LinkedIn took to their blog announcing the news, with the company's senior vice president Deep Nishar writing "We believe LinkedIn can be the definitive professional publishing platform - where all professionals come to consume content and where publishers come to share their content."

AMD have been kicking all sorts of ass when it comes to their Never Settle Reloaded program, which offers up some of the best games on the market for free when you purchase an AMD Radeon GPU.

The chipmaker have just announced that they're extending this offer, and will give gamers Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon for free to any customer who has redeemed a Reloaded code! How can it get better than that?! AMD will offer the keys to be redeemable through Ubisoft's Ubisoft for UPlay, and will be send by May 1.

We reported the bad numbers of PC shipments in Q1 earlier today, and since then Microsoft stocks have dropped by around 4.4% to $28.93 at the time of writing. Not only that, but other technology stocks have dropped, too.

Dell, HP and Intel were down in stock prices riding the news of Q1 shipment numbers. Research firm IDC had partly blamed Windows 8 for the drop in PC sales, noting that HP's shipments declined 24% year-over-year, backed up by Dell's numbers which dropped 11%. Now several Wall Street analysts have downgraded Microsoft stock, so I'm sure we'll see it tumble more in the coming days and weeks.

Samsung are looking to take a few steps outside of the current ring of competitors, and quickly speed ahead of their competitors with the announcement of mass-production of 128GB NAND flash on their 10nm process. Samsung have said:

We will continue to release next-generation chips at the right moments to actively react to consumer demands.

More consumers are moving to SSDs, using them as their primary drives, which will obviously lift demand for NAND flash. iSuppli reports that the 128GB chips will account for 30% of the 40.5 billion NAND flash shipped this year alone. Samsung are also going for more SSDs over 500GB to help the adoption rate of SSDs as primary drives.

NVIDIA announced at today's investor day that they intend to return roughly $1 billion back to shareholders. The money will be returned mainly through a structured stock repurchase program, though some will also be returned through the company's quarterly dividend of $0.075 per share.

NVIDIA said they have already returned $200 million to shareholders since the dividend was first announced in November 2012. Jen-Hsun Huang:

NVIDIA's strategies are gaining traction in the market and make us confident in our ability to continue generating cash. We are now broadening our program of giving back cash to our shareholders and plan to return a further $1 billion by the end of this fiscal year.

More details regarding the buyback plan will be provided next month when NVIDIA releases its financial results for Q1 2014.

Things aren't looking so good for BlackBerry. According to various analysts, BlackBerry's flagship Z10 suffered from weak sales. Now analysts are suggesting that the number of returns are actually outpacing the number of sales. This is not good news for BlackBerry.

"We believe key retail partners have seen a significant increase in Z10 returns to the point where, in several cases, returns are now exceeding sales, a phenomenon we have never seen before," Detwiler analyst Jeff Johnston wrote.

BlackBerry responds:

BlackBerry wishes to respond to media coverage today regarding speculation that there have been abnormally high levels of returns of BlackBerry Z10 devices. This is absolutely false. Our data shows that return rates for BlackBerry Z10 devices both in the U.S. and on a global basis are in line with or better than our expectations and are consistent with return rates for other premium smartphones in the market today.

Today, NVIDIA is hosting its investor day at which CEO Jen-Hsun Huang showed off graphics produced with its next-generation mobile GPU. The new GPU is currently known as Kepler Mobile and Huang said that NVIDIA made a huge investment to take its high-end Kepler products and shrink them down for use in mobile devices.

The interesting benefits of this is that smartphones and tablets could soon be able to play games that utilize DirectX 11. "We want to get multiple years ahead of the competition. It was worth the sacrifice," Huang said.

To show what Kepler Mobile is capable of, Huang demoed Kepler Mobile playing Battlefield 3. The future of tablet gaming looks bright indeed.

We know you all loved Psy's hit single Gangnam Style. After all, it was the first YouTube video to surge past one billion views on YouTube. Not wanting to be forgotten, Psy has announced that his next single will be livestreamed from Seoul World Cup Stadium via YouTube on April 13 at 5:30 a.m. EDT.

If you're not going to be awake at that time, YouTube will rebroadcast the event for 24 hours after it first airs. Psy has promised that Gentleman will feature a new dance move. "I can't tell you about the dance but all Koreans know this dance - but [those in] other countries haven't seen it," Psy said.

If you want to hear the song ahead of the live event, you can check it out on Soundcloud. Let us know what you think of the song in the comments.

Google has introduced a new tool that Facebook and other sites with lots of personal information should take note of. Called Inactive Account Manager, the new tool allows you to decide what to do with your data after your death or inability to access Google's services.

Like the name implies, the tool keeps track of how long it has been since you last logged in to a Google service. Once it passes a certain threshold set by each user, Google will either delete the data, allow someone else to access it, or something else. Before the inactive period time is up, Google will warn you with a text message and e-mail.

For example, you can choose to have your data deleted - after three, six, nine or 12 months of inactivity. Or you can select trusted contacts to receive data from some or all of the following services: +1s; Blogger; Contacts and Circles; Drive; Gmail; Google+ Profiles, Pages and Streams; Picasa Web Albums; Google Voice and YouTube. Before our systems take any action, we'll first warn you by sending a text message to your cellphone and email to the secondary address you've provided.

The Inactive Account Manager can be accessed via your Google Account settings page. I'll now patiently wait for Facebook to introduce a similar feature.

Intel has detailed overclocking the new Haswell architecture at IDF Beijing and not much has changed from overclocking Ivy Bridge. One major difference between Ivy Bridge and the upcoming Haswell architecture is that Haswell features just one voltage input that can be as high as 3.04v. Ivy Bridge had numerous different voltage inputs that were controlled externally.

The one new rule of thumb for overclocking Haswell is that the input voltage (VCCIN) needs to be at least 400mV higher than the core voltage (VCORE). This yields VCCIN >= VCORE + 400mV.

Other changes include an increased max multiplier--80x vs 63x--though this doesn't mean Haswell will be able to achieve 8Ghz. Intel has also included BCLK ratios that are present on the X79 platform.

There are plenty of other nuances for overclocking the new Haswell CPUs and HWBot has done a great job of detailing all the ins and outs, so head over to source #1 below to check it out!

Images have popped up on the internet this morning that are rumored to picture some of the hardware components for the next-generation iPhone. Obtained by iLab Factory, the image shoes off the vibration and button controls for the upcoming low-cost iPhone.

In the photo we can see a dual-head vibration motor, which is said to be a cheaper solution to a larger counter weighted single head motor. Also featured is three push buttons and some form of a sensor.

Electronista says that the motor is actually more similar to that used in the forthcoming iPhone 5S, and that the report could have been misinterpreted, or that both products could be using the same motor and button hardware.

Either way, images of production parts could mean that all of the rumors of a pending new iPhone along with a redesigned iPhone 5 could be launching in the near future.

The most popular Bitcoin exchange, Mt. Gox, has suspended all trading for the next 12 hours amidst massive fluctuations in Bitcoin value. Yesterday we saw Bitcoin's reach a record value of $260, which was quickly followed by a massive crash, that resulted in the virtual currency loosing half of its value in minutes.

When the market reopened this morning, prices quickly recovered to about $190, which was soon followed by another big drop back down to $120. With speculation most likely driving the roller coaster ride, Mt. Gox decided to close trading for 12 hours in hopes that things would settle down.

In a statement, Mt. Gox said:

"Market Cooldown for 12 hours

 

Orders will not be accepted for the moment as we need to upgrade our database to accommodate the trading volume. However, you may still cancel your pending and open orders. Trading will resume at 11.00 am JST. Our apologies for the inconvenience caused and thank you for your patience while we work to resolve this issue."

This morning Samsung announced the release of its much anticipated Series 9 Premium Ultrabook with full HD resolution. Featuring a 1920x1080 SuperBright display, the Series 9 laptop reproduce 16 million colors, giving users a photo and video experience like never before.

Weighing in at just 2.5 pounds and slimming down to half an inch thick, the Series 9 looks to be a formidable contender in the ultra-portable class of Ultrabooks. The weight saving and slim size are attributed to an all-aluminum uni-body design that rivals the MacBook Air in beauty.

The Series 9 not only looks good, but it packs a punch as well by sporting hardware such as an Intel Core i7 processor, 128GB SSD and an Intel Integrated HD 4000 graphics chipset. A battery life of 5.8 hours will get users through most domestic flights, as well as any situation where connectivity to the power grid is not feasible.

Retailing at $1399.99, the Series 9 Ultrabook is now available for purchase through major retailers.

This week we have teamed up with Plextor who are giving away one of its new and fast M5 Pro Xtreme 256GB SSD drives.

When our own Chris Ramseyer reviewed the M5 Pro Xtreme 256GB he awarded it with our TweakTown Best Features Award, and gave it a high rating of 92%. He had this to say:

"The M5 Pro Xtreme 256GB does cost less than 840 Pro and Vector and that makes up for the slight decrease in performance. All three drives in this capacity size are smoking fast and I doubt anyone would feel a difference while in use. The benchmark tests highlight the micro differences and they appear much larger than what you would notice in the real world, but for some that matters.

Plextor did raise the bar of their products with the new Xtreme drives. The new NAND flash also produces a nice increase in sequential performance, but at the cost of random performance. The sequential increase easily outweighs the small loss of random performance though since you will actually notice the sequential boost."

This morning Twitter users found themselves unable to navigate to any links that were shortened by Twitter's own URL shortening service. AllThingsD reported that the company had no comment on the issue, and Twitter's status blog had no information on the outage either.

At one point in the morning, Twitter switched over to the URL shortening service Bit.ly, which fixed the situation temporarily. At the time of this writing, the service has been restored to Twitter's in-house URL shortener and several test confirm that everything is back to normal and working fine.

We just noticed an issue with our link to our Twitter account from TweakTown, which doesn't work with the trailing slash in the URL, whereas it did before this morning. We're not sure what happened to Twitter, but we'll report back if details come to hand.

The dwindling popularity of Windows 8 has suffered another major setback this week with research firm IDC blaming Windows 8 for the first quarter's awful PC sales numbers. IDC and rival Gartner have both released their estimates for 2013's first-quarter PC shipments. According to IDC a "perfect storm" of struggling PC companies, aversion to Windows 8, and wider mobile device adoption are all factors that have caused the already struggling PC market to drop into a free fall so far this year.

IDC has reported that worldwide PC shipments in the first quarter totalled 76.3 million units, a figure that is down 13.9% compared to the same quarter last year. The 14% decline has been the largest ever in IDC's nearly two decades of tracking. This is a gloomy picture, far worse than the forecast of a 7.7% drop that was initially anticipated by IDC. According to the analyst firm, PC shipments fell across all regions worldwide, and the market is headed into further contraction than previously expected.

IDC's Bob O'Donnell said, "It's brutal. These are disastrous numbers. Huge". O'Donnell was one of the IDC analysts who blamed Windows 8 for the unprecedented drop in consumer PC purchases during the quarter. "Not only has Windows 8 not helped, but it has actually hurt PC shipments," he said.