James Bannan, our former collegue over at APC Magazine, has got hold of build 16549 of Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista - and as you do, it played around with it all weekend.

It's no secret that there's a leaked beta of Vista SP1 floating around, but no-one yet has really taken the time to analyse it in detail to find out what it really does.

I made it my mission this weekend to trawl through the registry and file changes in SP1 to find out as best I could exactly what SP1 does.

There has been numerous reports floating around the web that Intel's upcoming X38 enthusiast chipset motherboard will officially support not only AMD Crossfire dual graphics but also Nvidia SLI technology.

We heard plenty of those rumors ourselves from one source to the next and at one point, we were even so sure it was going to happen we even started saying you could probably look forward to X38 supporting SLI. Sadly though, all these rumors are untrue!

During Computex back in June of this year, a couple motherboard companies slipped up and claimed that their X38 boards would support SLI. Technically and as far as the hardware goes, X38 does support SLI but it is not officially sanctioned at all by Nvidia. During a drunken Taipei rampage last year in a place which will be left unnamed, we asked the question to an Nvidia senior rep who is high up on the food chain and the answer was something along the lines of that Intel would never get a SLI license unless Intel gave them a free CPU bus license in return (loosely quoted). Of course, neither are likely to ever happen.

Boy Genius Report has scored some real information as well as some pictures of the upcoming Blackberry devices which have been heavily rumored. The trio of new devise is the updated Pearl (no real name given as yet), the Curve 8310 (already available in Europe) and the 8820, which coincidentally launched in Spain on the Orange network a couple of days ago.

The new Pearl will be available in two different versions, one for GSM/GPRS/EDGE networks and it will have Wi-Fi as standard. However, we can't but feel sorry for those looking at getting the CDMA version, as it won't have Wi-Fi. In its place is a GPS receiver, which as handy as it may be will never replace Wi-Fi.

Other new features include an externally accessible microSD card slot, a 3.5mm headset jack, a 2 Megapixel camera with better flash, twin speakers, a spell checker, better wind noise protection and an improved SIM card holder. Looks like a full on upgrade then and it's expected to be available within the next couple of months. It's just a shame that it's still missing 3G.

Buffalo has released four external USB SSD drives with capacities of 8, 16, 24 and 56GB. The 56GB version would set you back US$750, with the 24GB version coming it at $336, the 16GB model at $234 and finally the 8GB one at $142. Although we dig SSD drives, this seems like a strange way of making the most out of them.

Buffalo has designed a fairly attractive drive enclosure for the SSD drives that measures 89 x 57 x 14 mm (H x W x D) and weighs in at just under 61g for the 56GB model. The drives are meant to be shock proof up to a drop of 2.5m, so dropping one of these off your desk shouldn't do any kind of damage to them.

Normally we wouldn't cover something as basic as a voice recorder, especially as it comes built into many MP3 players these days, but Olympus has launched four new models that features a built in USB port. Again, this might not seem like a big deal, but it's taken until now for a voice recorder company to release such a product.

The first two models, the WS-110 and WS-210S features 256 or 512MB of built in memory and measures 94.7 x 38 x 10mm (H x W x D) and features a built in LCD screen. They're powered by a single AAA battery and Olympus claims it has enough juice for up to 21h of recording.

According to a story on the Inquirer, DirectX 10.1 will make the current crop of DirectX 10 cards more or less obsolete, as the new revision requires new hardware support. This is not going to make the GPU guys happy at all, especially when you consider the time it takes to design a GPU these days.

But what's even worse is the current install base of DX10 cards, as everyone that's spent their hard earned cash on one of these babies, will have to save up more money again for a new graphics card just to get a few new features that will appear in the latest games.

According to the Inq, DX10.1 isn't meant to add much that the game developers are really likely to care too much about, as the new revision makes certain optional DX10 features compulsory. One of those features is 4x Anti Aliasing as standard, but Microsoft hasn't limited to what kind.

Vista will get its first Service Pack in the near future, dealing with a number of annoying issues in relation to ReadyBoost, copying and moving large files, sleep/hibernate and stacks more - some of these problems have already been resolved via some hot fixes I mentioned last week.

It's been said that Microsoft's software testers have been given several private beta builds of Vista's SP1 recently so I would imagine it wont be much longer now before it is released. The lads at WinBeta have also managed to score some screenshots of the most recent SP1 build in action here.

More at the Dailytech.

Last week these updates also leaked onto the world wide web but now they are official - Microsoft just added them to their downloads area.

It is "Update for Windows Vista (KB938979)" and the description is as follows:

This update resolves the following issues on a Windows Vista-based computer:

OCZ has released a tool called SPD-Z that will allow you to program the SPD on your OCZ memory. Don't know what it means? Then you're probably not going to want to play around with it. The SPD or Serial Presence Detect is a way that information about the settings of a memory module is stored. If you've ever looked at a memory module without heatspreads you might've noticed a small chip near one of the corners, this is the SPD EEPROM.

Although OCZ is far from the first to release such a utility, it's the first memory manufacturer to offer such a utility to its users. Inside the SPD EEPROM information such as CAS latency is stored, but other information such as SLI memory certification and the multiple settings for different speeds that SLI memory offers.

A Russian website has had a utility called Thaiphoon available for quite some time and it enables similar options on none OCZ modules. The difference with SPD-Z is that your warranty is still intact, something it wouldn't be if you used a third party utility such as Thaiphoon.

According to a news post on Smarthouse.com.au, Palm is about to release a Windows Mobile 6 update for its Treo 750 and it will be available first in Australia to customers of 3. The update should be available in the next couple of weeks from Palm's Australian website and apparently other customers will be able to download it from next month.

Palm's Country Manager for Australia and New Zealand, Olivier Rozay said,

"Building upon the successful launch of the Treo 750 in Australia earlier this year, Palm is pleased to introduce the new Windows Mobile 6 update to the Treo 750 smartphone. The hallmark Palm experience combined with the Windows Mobile 6 Professional Edition on the award-winning Treo 750 delivers a compelling mobile experience to customers."

It's great to see that some things actually come to Australia first, even though this might not be the most important event ever. Then there's of course the question of how many people in Australia own a Treo 750, but I guess we shouldn't complain, no matter how many or how few users there are.