Neowin says that Microsoft is internally testing the Windows 7 Release Client and if everything goes well, we will be seeing the RC for download on April 10th.

Little is known about what changes we will see from the beta other than a few changes to the UAC.

With ATi moving to 40nm a new rumor that claims the new RV790 will stay at 55nm seems out of place.

But that is what Nedim Hadzic over at Fudzilla is repotting quoting an Expreview.com report (the link was down as of this writing) the RV790 will be a superclocked 55nm RV770.

The new part could be named HD4970 and might feature a 950MHz core clock and 800 Stream Processors.

In what is sure to be sad news for HD TV aficionados Pioneer is getting rid of their TV business. This means that the Kuro, a plasma TV with an "almost infinite" contrast ratio is also going.

It is sad to see as the Plasma TV had picture quality that LCD has not yet, and may never, match. The Kuro was impressive due to advanced technology that reduced the light emissions from black areas of the screen to almost 0.

Plasma met its downfall due to its significantly higher cost compared to LCD TVs, coupled with the fact that LCDs were able to increase resolutions and screen sizes to match Plasma and at a much lower cost although LCD screens still have not reached the vibrancy or crispness that Plasma has.

Looks like Citrix has found a new way to compete with VMWare; they are going to give XenSever 5.0 away for free.

Of course the Express Version has been free for a long time, but Citrix is claiming that the enterprise version is also now free. The problem is one of features. According to Roger Klorese "the new free XenServer does not include high availability, advanced StorageLink storage integration, persistent performance management, or monitoring -- which continue in Enterprise Edition and Platinum Edition -- or dynamic provisioning services -- which continue in Platinum Edition."

Citrix is a new comer in the Virtualization market, but have scored a big win by partnering up with Microsoft and getting a great Interoperability deal between their XenServer product and MS' Hyper-V.

Something for the SFF crowd, Asus has launched a MiniATX version of the high-performance Rampage II.

This new powerhouse will be the first ever mATX board to carry the Republic of Gamers tag and will features an X58 chipset complete with SLI (with room for dual slot coolers).

The Rampage II GENE also sports six RAM slots with support for up to 24GB of RAM, six SATA 3G ports, 12 USB ports, and a ton of other features.

You knew it was going to happen sooner or later; Intel is now bad mouthing the ION platform and going after nVidia pretty hard.

I am sure nVidia will spin this again in response but here are the details of what I am sure is Intel's response to nVidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang's comments over Intel filing suit to invalidate the four-year old licensing agreement.

"At the heart of this issue is that the CPU has run its course and the soul of the PC is shifting quickly to the GPU. This is clearly an attempt to stifle innovation to protect a decaying CPU business."

Now this is just plain cool, Lenovo allowed its ThinkPad series of laptops to but put through the US Army's tough test to get certified for Semi-Rugged computing.

When I first read Semi-Rugged I laughed, then I read what they went through to get that and I was pretty impressed. The ThinkPads were run through the torture tests even though the model is not advertised as a ruggedized notebook.

Military Spec Tested Against the Elements

Hitachi GST announced today an agreement to acquire Fabrik Inc, a privately-held supplier of personal and professional external storage solutions.

Fabrik, whose leading storage brands include G-Technology and SimpleTech, strategically positions Hitachi in the fast-growing external storage business. The acquisition will provide Hitachi GST with immediate market presence, and access to innovative storage solutions for the consumer, small business and professional Mac and PC markets. Hitachi GST is committed to maintaining and growing both segmented product lines, which will provide the foundation of the company's new external storage business.

You can read the full press release here.

Palit has announced its next GPU to the market. The Palit GTX 285 2GB kicks it up a notch by increasing the onboard GDDR3 to 2GB instead of the reference design's 1GB.

(Click the above image for the large version)

It looks like the new P55 and P57 will not ship with SATA 3 support.

Despite the fact that AMD is planning one with SATA 3 support for Q1 2010, Intel will not make that feature available on tits next two chipsets.

SATA 3 can support up to 6Gbps (750MBps) while the older SATA 2 only supports up to 3Gbps (375MBps).