There are many people that feel nVidia is in the hurt wagon. ATi has been dropped two single card solutions (the 4870 X2 and 4850 X2) that make light work of the GTX 280. Looking for any hand hold to get back in the race it seems that the Green Team will be refreshing the GT200 (55nm die shrink) just in time for Christmas, with a possible release later this month.

Read more at Fuzilla and at The Inq.

We keep hearing that Solid State Drives are the future with performance estimates to match the claims. The problem is that when people try and put them to the test we do not see the huge leap we should.

Much of this is due to bandwidth limitations of the SATA 3G transfer standard. According to CNET Microsoft sees another area of concern inside the OS itself. To improve on this Redmond is going to be adding in code to ID your SSD and optimize performance for this

Read more here

How many times have we seen the pop-ups telling us that your system is infected? If you are smart and have good (and up to date) Mal-Ware protection probably not many.

But it seems that there are enough people out there that do not have protection (or common sense) and click on that frightening pop-up despite some glaring red flags.

FairFax Digital has an entertaining read about how these malicious pop-ups are netting some scammers over $150,000 dollars per week. Now that is a lot of gullible people.

There is certainly no doubt that Google is a giant in the Internet Search and Ad industry. But many are seeing Google's growth as dangerous to consumer privacy. It is not the fact that Google captures information on your searches or that their Google Desktop and Toolbar index information on your system, no it is the fact that Google does this without most people knowing anything about it. The launch of Google's Chrome web browser brought much of this to the surface as hacks around the web found caches of personal information (including cached banking web pages that could be recalled), search information, and to top it off it was uncovered that Google shares the same security loopholes that Safari does (a browser known for being insecure).

FairFax Digital has a good read on the issue and includes statements from both sides (Google and the Consumer Groups).

I think that it is summed up best by this quote "Google's founders may say, 'We're going to protect that information,' but no other company," he said, "is positioned to exploit that information in the way Google is."

EVGA's E-LEET Tune Utility has been captured on camera, courtesy of VR-Zone, according to this report from TechConnect Magazine.

From CPU multiplier adjustments (on applicable CPUs), to QPI/PCIE frequency and voltage adjustments, EVGA's tool takes on a rather CPU-Z style and format which should give users a degree of familiarity.

Steam will launch a new cloud service that will allow gamers to save their game settings online.

This new service called Steam Cloud (very inventive) will be able to store keyboard and mouse related settings as well as paint tag settings. This is a great feature if you are in the habit of playing your Steam games from different systems. The saved setting will be automatically applied as soon as a user launches a game through their Steam account and any changes made will be saved to the Steam servers.

Steam will make this available to all game companies using Steam for distribution free of charge and will go live with the upcoming demo of Left 4 Dead.

It seems an AMD internal memo related to the upcoming Shanghai CPU has found its way into the hands of the polish site PCLab.pl.

In the memo Randy Allen, Senior Vice President, Computing Solutions waxes enthusiastic about what Shanghai means to AMD at one point calling it "the industry's price / performance-per-watt leader for x86 servers, with dominant performance in workloads that matter: virtualization, web serving, and database."

He then goes on to relate how Shanghai will launch under expected TDP and exceed excepted clocks (unlike Barcelona) and for a nice poetic touch quotes CS Lewis to get the team motivated.

While thumbing through the news this morning I found an interesting read on some 5870 (RV870) rumors that are showing up. Theo Valich (formerly of the Inquirer and TG Daily) took a look at these an injected some logic into the mad ramblings that abound.

He points out that the going claim that ATi will add 25% more shaders just to get a 50% performance boost flies in the face of the way ATi currently engineers their GPUs.

Theo also makes a bold claim that the RV870 will have a 256 bit memory interface and not the 512 bit one that most seem to think will show up.

Even though we saw a brief look at this product a little while ago, Sharkoon has just officially announced its 2.5-inch sized Flexi-Drive S2S, which is a DIY SDHC based SSD.

This SATA I and SATA II device supports up to six 32GB SDHC flash cards using either MLC or SLC memory. That means it will create a drive capable of 192GB, but for best performance, RAID 0 is used and that will halve the maximum capacity to 96GB.

Ina Fried from the CNET Beyond Binary blog was able to catch up with a couple folks from Microsoft at the Professional Developers Conference last week.

Ina has a quick hands-on look at the latest build Windows 7 desktop and its features including the new taskbar, "Jump List" mini menus and some other stuff which make the upcoming OS that little bit different than Windows Vista.

Take a look at it below and there is another below when you're done.