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I really do love it when a new OS comes out. It is a time for experimentation. Finding the hidden tweaks to make the OS run faster, more secure and generally exactly the way you want it too.

As always there are numerous articles that give you ideas on how to get the most from your installs. But what about getting the most out of the features offered?

With the inclusion of Windows Media Center in Windows Vista many people (myself included) have used Microsoft's OS as a front end for a Home Theatre PC. The problem with Vista was that it was sort of clunky and slow. granted it was light years ahead of XP MCE but still not exactly what most were looking for.

With the recent announcement of the XP Mode for Windows 7 hitting the release candidate stage people are eager to check this out to see what, if any, advantage it will have.

But all is not good for the world as has already been commented on (both for good and for bad) XP mode requires a some form of CPU based Virtualization technology. This comes as either Intel's VT or AMD-V. But no matter the flavor you have to have one or the other. Of course not all CPUs have this. But you can always make sure that the CPU you have does support the virtualization technology.

So what happens when your CPU supports it, but the OEM that built your system has it turned off and does not give you the option to turn it on?

There are a lot of cool things about the new ZuneHD. One of the biggest is that it is going to use nVidia's Tegra under the hood. It should also have native support for Flash and a few other Codecs that are commonly used for media playback.

These differences have propelled it into the mantle of "iPod Killer" This is really quite a possibility as it certainly has the hardware and the Codec support to back up its bid for the throne. The problem is, how to beat Apple Marketing.

But all that aside one of the things that people are looking to see if can MS improve the interface on the Zune HD. Well someone has managed to get a sneaky little video of the new Zune HD in action. If nothing else we can see some of what we can expect from the new PMP from MS.

The dream of SLI on a non-nVidia chipset has been the dream of many. It was finally realized for the Core i7 and Core i5 (X58 and P55) when nVidia and Intel came into a licensing agreement.

But that left everyone else on the Intel side of the market out in the cold unless they were lucky (or unlucky) enough to have a board with an NF200 bridge.

Well there is hope for all the others out there. It looks like someone over at Expreview found a way around this through software. They were able to use this software in Directory Services Restore Mode to enable SLI on both an X38 and a P45 chipset.

Ok this seems like a line from about two years ago, but nVidia's CEO and all around top guy Jensen Huang says that DX10.1 is not important. No, what's important is that two stood against...Oh sorry slipped into a movie there.

Basically Huang feels that incremental updates to DX are not enough to get excited about. This is interesting as ATi's support of DX 10.1 allowed them to outperform nVidia DX10 cards in Assassin's Creed. This was enough to prompt Ubisoft to pull the DX 10.1 support; at least according to the rumors at the time.

Still Huang says that nVidia is very excited about DX 11. They are working hard to support these features but feel that DX 11 games are probably about two years away. This is due to the lack of acceptance of DX 10 by many game developers who are still coding for XP to keep the majority happy.

If you are looking forward to the six core Gulftown but are concerned that you will need a new socket there might be some good news.

According to a blurb at Tech Power Up the new Gulftowns are seamlessly compatible with the existing X58 chipset. Yep that is right, they are making Gulftown 1366 compatible. This means that many existing X58 based mainboards could support these new CPUs with as little as a BIOS update.

The TDP is also the same as the Core i7 900 series so t should run at 130 Watts. The Gulftown will also be one of the first CPUs from Intel to be made under the 32nm HKMG process. This will be ahead of AMD's entry from Globalfoundries who will not have 32nm HKMG ready until sometime late next year.

With the release of the RTM to Technet you have to wonder how people are going to make the move from their existing OS to Windows 7. In the past (especially with Vista) Microsoft pushed for a full upgrade from one retail product to another.

However we were all told that Windows 7 upgrades would be much easier.

I am not sure if that is true but I am looking forward to checking out just how easy an upgrade is in the next few days. One issue for many people is going to be the move from any of the Beta or RC versions to the retail or even the RTM. According to existing information if you are running one of these you will have to backup your personal files and start from scratch with a clean install.

With the lifting of the NDA on the 785 is not s surprise to see everyone announcing mainboards with this new chipset from AMD on it.

So it is no surprise at all that Asus has let slip what they have planned.

According to the Asus Website (and a small blur on Fudzilla) There will be three 785 boards that have support for the AM3 and one with AM2+ support two of the boards are the same model except for the memory and CPU support.

Yesterday we covered a tale of Apple and the Dictionary. This is a harrowing tale of an intrepid developer against the mongering troll.

Nah not really, it is a story about a developer getting the shaft from Apple and after the internet press got a hold the story Apple back peddling.

The complete story is very long and can be found at Daring Fireball as can the follow on part of this particular drama.

Developing new and interesting ways of charging phones is going to be a booming business in the near future. After we saw the birth of the Palm Touchstone we knew that there would be other companies that would do their own take on this concept.

Of course, who better to get the contact charging system than the Apple iPhone. After all if you believe Apple, the iPhone charges everything it touches so it stands to reason that this phone should pull power from the very air itself.

Now while the WildCharge contact charging system for the iPhone 3G S does not pull power from the air. It does enable contact charging. There are a couple of cons to this. The first is the pad itself; it is not the most attractive item out there. The next is that you have to use the iPhone case they provide. So, if you have one you already use (like my OtterBox Defender for iPhone) you either have to give it up or constantly swap cases when you want to charge your phone. The case has small "nubs" embedded into the back that need to make contact with the charging pad to work.

On July 20th 1969 the first humans walked on the surface of the moon. This was a technological and scientific achievement of unprecedented scope.

On July 20th 2009 we celebrated the 40th anniversary of this historic event. It was a time for people to think on the concerted effort involved, movies and specials to be replayed and the return to the moon effort to be pushed. But it was an occasion that was marred by an unfortunate event.

You see when the video from the moon was broadcast to the earth it was recorded in high definition but sent to everyone's Television sets by rebroadcast. Not in the traditional sense but in that a camera was pointed at a monitor and that broadcast to the world. These are the images we think of about the first moon landing. And this is all we will ever have as NASA cannot find the original footage and some even claim it was destroyed accidentally.

Well if you were waiting for a new PCIe standard before upgrading you are in for a long wait. If you did not know that a new standard was due out and has now been delayed, well you are not alone. The PCI-Special Interest Group has announced that they are going to delay PCI 3.0 until sometime next year.

The new protocol would have enabled faster data rates (32Gigbits/second) and better (lower) power consumption. According to the PCI-SIG the new protocol is a bit more work than expected, but that is ok as, well apparently we do not even need it yet.

You have to wonder about these new standards that keep getting delayed. After all USB 3.0 got dropped for now, SATA 6Gb/s had stability issues and now PCIe 3.0 is being pushed back. One possibility is that slow economic times could delay development of products that can actually support the new interfaces. This would realistically delay adoption of the new standards by OEMs, but that is just speculation on our part.

Today we had a chance to visit the PhotoFast office here in Taipei to take an exclusive look at one of its upcoming SSD products.

The product in question is the PhotoFast 'Quad'. It has available internal slots for a total of four CFast 32GB SATA cards - and no, they aren't compact flash cards despite how similar they look! They are actually tiny flash cards with SATA connectors. Maximum read and write times inside the video.

Well the XP Mode for Windows 7 is still kicking around. In fact Microsoft has just released it to Release Candidate phase.

The Win 7 add-on is designed to allow legacy applications to operate in a virtual mode. This is intended to allow for an easier transition to the new OS from XP.

This development is designed to allow Microsoft to finally stop support for Windwos XP. There are some prerequisites that will hinder this app though. For one, older systems that do not have either AMD-V or Intel's Virtualization will not be able to use this.

So what is the price of Advertising in Gaming? If you are a player of WipeOut HD then it means slow load times, poor performance and host of other problems. Of course to me it means much more.

When I purchase a game I pay for gaming content, this comes in the form of graphics, AI, sound, immersive game play and storyline. I will happily shell out as much as $60 for a good game. This is in addition to any upgrades to hardware I might need to make sure I can play the game properly. What I do not want is to have to deal with advertising in my game.

I despise the presence of ads in games as much as I hate FUD (Fear Uncertainty and Doubt) both have no place in gaming and technology in general. Both are the last ditch efforts of the desperate.

When nVidia broke into the netbook chipset market is started a great deal of speculation, chest thumping and even a minor war between Intel and nVidia.

But the one thing it did not do was force a major change in the netbook market. There are a few reasons for it; the first is of course price. Intel typically bundles the chipset with the purchase of the Atom CPU in addition to reducing the price of the Atom when bundled. So to implement ION an OEM would need to pay considerably more.

Granted the ION performs better than the Intel Chipset, but as netbooks are meant to be low cost the price difference hurts adoption and sales. So how does nVidia counter this? They are launching a reduced price/reduced functionality ION platform dubbed the ION LE.

Well, well, well; Acer is going to have another go at releasing the Predator. This is the same system that had massive cooling problems earlier this year.

By massive we mean that some were reported to have actually caught fire.

So now they are going to put even more heat generating hardware in the box and stuff it inside that nice eye catching orange case.

This is a good one, apparently the deletion of the book 1984 is having unforeseen consequences. These consequences are in the form of a lawsuit from a student that purchased the book for the Kindle in order to use it for his homework.

Of course the book was removed due to, according to Amazon, the publisher not having the rights to the book. So when that happened is when 1984 was no longer on the Kindle the student claims that all of his notes were rendered useless.

I think this has got to be one of the most ridiculous claims I have ever heard. The copy of the book on the Kindle is the same one that can be found for free in a public library, bought in a book store (cheap at a used one). As the file containing the note remained it could have been fairly easy to recreate the work with a physical copy of the book.

There is a lot of talk recently about the rumored/possible tablet from Apple. This is the 10-Inch book that many are now calling the iPad. I have heard that it is going to be everything from a media player to an e-book reader to a netbook.

I guess the real questing that needs to be answered is what does Apple feel it is missing in the market? We know they will not enter the budget system market just as they will not enter the netbook market.

No they have very important niches they tend to cling to. Take a look at their product line and you will see a tremendous amount of overlap. Each product touches the functions of at least one other. The iPhone, iPod, iPod touch, etc if you look you can see this repeated all over Apple's line up.

It seems like it was just yesterday that Intel announced there was a data corruption problem with the X25 SSD. Well I guess it is yesterday that it was announced. But it is not the one you are thinking of.

The first generation of SSDs had an issue where the drive would become fragmented and loose performance over time. This could also lead to data corruption in severe cases.

Now the issue is with the latest 34nm X25 SSDs. The problem is connected to a very small number of drives becoming corrupted when a BIOS password is used. Still to ensure that this does not become a major issue Intel has suspended shipments of the new drive and are working on a firmware fix for this problem.