In the world of graphics you are usually stuck with x16 mechanical (and electrical) add in boards for your GPU love. This makes it a little rough on many an HTPC builder. Sure you can get a half-height card and even ones with an extra tang for the low profile cases but unless you want to shell out a ton of cash you are still getting an x16 card.

Thankfully, that all may be changing; HIS and Club3D are offering x1 PCI-e cards that won't break the bank.

HIS is offering an ATi Radeon HD 4350 with 512MB DDR2 (Core clock 600MHz Memory Clock 800MHz). The 4350 is a great card for and HTPC or for anyone looking to run just business graphics and features DVI and HDMI out as well as the typical VGA. If you go half height you still get to keep HDMI and DVI.

First it was Norton now CA is having issues where their latest AV profiles are targeting Windows system files as malicious code.

It is simply not a good thing when your Anti-Virus starts listing off system files and says they are quarantined. It can really ruin your day.

According to posts at CA's Forum many people were receiving these false positives and causing systems to crash.

Something interesting has come to light about Google's new Chrome OS project. It seems that Intel has been helping them out with the project.

This would run contrary to the popular belief that Intel and Microsoft are best buddies. After all the term WinTel was used to describe the alliance between Microsoft Windows an Intel CPUs. If this is so why would Intel help Google?

Also why would Intel want to help a direct competitor, Chrome will compete with Moblin in the netbook and nettop space.

This just in, it looks like the rumors and accusations being hurled at different companies over the general explosiveness of their batteries might not be just disgruntled owners.

Recently a 2007 Saab 9-3 Combi was burned pretty much to the ground. The owner was barely able to rescue their dog before the car burned. Saab, after hearing of this incident took possession of the car and checked it over for anything that would have caused the blaze.

At the time of the fire the car was not running and had a "cold" engine. The review of engineers at Saab showed that there was nothing wrong with the vehicle electrically or mechanically. Using fire propagation investigative techniques they determined that the fire started on one of the seats.

We told you yesterday that nVidia was pushing out to low-end desktop 40nm GPUs. Well now we have confirmation that these cards have reached OEMs and should be popping up in systems soon.

The two quietly launched GPUs are the G210 and the GT220. Both will have DX10.1 support as well as HDMI outputs. They will differ in number for cores (16 got the G210 and 46 for the GT220).

Speeds will be different as will the amount of memory and width of the memory controller.

It has been about a month since Apple announced its new line of Mac Book Pros. This new line was supposed to dove-tail in nicely with the release of Snow Leopard and usher in a new era of Mac Book dominance.

Well there is trouble in Mac land. It seems that some of the trouble that existed with the last line of Macbooks is following the new ones too.

This trouble is all about the colors man. You see Apple says that its new MacBooks have support for "Millions of Colors" this is great right? Well you see it is not all good. Apple uses 6-bit panels as such they are really only capable of supporting 262 thousand colors.

A blogger has managed to snap a shot of Google's new Chrome OS. Now these shots are nothing special and really only show a task bar, and a wall paper saying that it is a Private Developer's Beta.

Pretty simple really. But is it? According to the Blog the shots were taken at an Acer Preview of the OS that was given by Acer and Google together.

The Blogger does say that the OS is very fast and seemed to be rough due to its early beta stage. There was only one app installed and that was Google Talk.

Our friends over at XFASTEST managed to spend some quality time with the ASUS P7P55 EVO motherboard, which is based on Intel's upcoming P55 Express chipset.

Intel seems to be playing annoying games at the moment with what can be posted and what cannot - and it's horrible as media to work with. Just last week they allowed motherboard manufacturers to show off their P55 boards (with no benchmarks) and now this week the rule has changed and it's been banned again. I wish Intel would make up their minds. That is the reason why our GIGABYTE P55 introduction video disappeared, but it's likely to re-appear at anytime with the way Intel changes rules every five minutes. Get your act together, Intel.

Remember when we told you that Activision was considering dropping Sony if they did not lower some pricing? Well Sony has spoken up about the original comment and it is not a very nice comment either.

It seems that Howard Stringer (Sony CEO) feels that Robert Kotic (CEO of Activision Blizzard) "likes to make a lot of noise". Now I don't know about you but that does not sound like we are going to see a price cut and in the world of poker you just heard "I'll see your twenty and raise you fifty".

In fact when asked if Sony would consider price cuts Stringer said that is they did that they would "lose money on every PlayStation I make -- how's that for logic".

After being out shown by eVGA it looks like nVidia is finally catching on to what their users want; more frequent updates for gaming.

eVGA has been getting great press as they put out their SLI enhancement patches. These handy little patched include updated SLI profiles for games and often provide for much faster and stable performance running SLI.

nVidia traditionally does not do interim updates to the SLI profiles and instead waits for driver revisions to add them in. However, nVidia has just pushed out its own SLI patch which does pretty much the same thing as the eVGA patch.

After denying the rumors for the better part of a year Google has finally come clean on its attempt to enter the operating system world.

The new GoogleOS (???) will be based on their fast and (in many security experts opinions) insecure Chrome Browser.

The core design is Google Chrome running with a windowing system on a Linux Kernel. The developer's blog for the new OS sounds very much like a Mac add. Including making the comment "we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don't have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work".

Sony has entered the netbook market in the US. This is really not shocking news as just about everyone has a netbook these days. It is just the thing to do.

The new offering will still fall under the Vaio name (Vaio W). This confusingly named product will run similar to most other netbooks. The Vaio W will have an Atom N270, 160GB HDD, 1GB RAM, Windows XP and the rest of the usual trimmings.

What is different is the price, Sony is asking for $500 for this 10.1-inch book. I am not really sure if this is going to be worth it for most as you can get a similarly speced netbook from a couple of different vendors for much less.

Codemasters have confirmed today that their upcoming addition to the Colin McRae series, Colin McRae: DiRT 2, will support DirectX 11 features in the PC 'Games for Windows' version.

The downside? the PC version now won't be out intil December - a good 3 months after the release on the consoles.

Still, you'd be hard pressed to find a complaint from any PC gaming enthusiasts, who will no doubt look past the delay and focus on the feature set DX11 will introduce into the game - support for hardware tessellation, multi-threading and Shader Model 5.0. Sure, DX11 could very well be just as overhyped as DX10 was and the delay could be a big waste of time, but comeone dude - hardware tessellation. Does that not speak for itself? (on a slightly related note, what is hardware tessellation?)

Everyone knew it was only a matter of time before someone broke the 7GHz barrier with the AMD Phenom II X4 955 BE processor and it seems that the time has come.

At a recent overclocking event held by AMD in Finland, overclocker Massman and friends managed to push the Phenom II X4 955 chip right up to 7000.4 MHz. The results were accomplished by cranking the multiplier all the way up to 28 and cooling it down to below -230°C with the help of some liquid helium.

McAfee seems to have goofed up bigtime with their latest update for virus definitions, causing VirusScan to quarantine many valid files.

So far the glitch seems to be when older scan engies install the 5664 DAT file. Once the update has been applied, all sorts of critical files are getting inadvertantly flagged as the PWS!hv.aq trojan.

In what one could describe as to be expected, Intel has declared the Gulftown is slated to become the Core i9 series of processors when launched.

The news from INPAI.com.cn follows earlier decisions by Intel to rebrand the Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad chips as Core i3 and add confusion to consumers who were actually starting to understand the rebranding when Intel originally shifted to the Core 2 branding years ago. Now while the average enthusiast is going to know what is going on and not be fooled by what is going on here, the average consumer is going to get screwed into thinking Core i3 is something new, much like NVIDIA has done with the the 8800GT.

Hmmm this is interesting; despite hearing about how little AMD is interested in the netbook market we find news that there will be a new AMD based netbook available soon.

The company responsible for this is called Medion the name of the book will be the Akoya Mini E1312.

What makes it even more interesting is that although the product is classified as a netbook it is using a low powered Sempron 2100U and an ATi Radeon TM Xpress 1250 Graphics Chip. The rest of the E1312 is pretty common with an 11.6 Inch display, 160GB HDD, 1GB DDR2 RAM, 1.3 MP web camera, WiFi (b/g/n) you know the drill by now.

Although not really computer related news I thought this was interesting. The new LRO (Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter) has sent back some of its first images.

The images were shot right on the edge of the terminator (the line between the dark and light sides of the moon) they were intended to map out suitable areas for future manned landing sites.

Now the interesting part is that although none of these images are near any of the landing sites, many "no-moon-landing" skeptics are already using this to "prove" that man never went to the moon.

Information about Intel's next generation 32nm CPU has found its way onto the internet. The new chunk of silicon is being called SandyBridge and represents a new architecture all together.

Intel has always followed a tick-tock schedule. In this way each CPU design gets to run on two separate Processes while each Process will see a new architectural design. SandyBridge is the new design for 32nm.

The new CPU will feature more integration including an integrated graphics chip. So far SandyBridge has only been taped out, but they still expect it to reach production grade by 2011. SandyBridge should maintain the 1156 Socket used by the upcoming i5 CPU.

AOL could be facing some legal troubles. It seems that in an effort to gain a little more money they have been upgrading former employees free AOL accounts to paid accounts without notification or indeed without any kind of billing.

Now this would have gone unnoticed but one of the former employees now works for the Wall Street Journal. The former Employee (Jason Zweig) wrote his experience up on the popular online publication for the world to see.

Apparently AOL is threatening to send this not to collections without any signed agreement, bill, or any other type of documentation. The upgrade was "automatic" according to one support representative Zweig spoke with, yet they could not provide any supporting documentation other than to say the agreement was on "page C" (or was that D?).