The parent company to such publications as Electronic Gaming Monthly and PC Magazine, Ziff Davis, has filed for voluntary Chapter 11 in order to restructure their debt.  The decision to file was reached by a group of concerned investors as well as senior management.“Importantly, as part of the restructuring, the ad hoc noteholder group has agreed to set aside up to $24.5 million to fund the Company’s operations during the Chapter 11 case as well as after the Company emerges from Chapter 11. These funds,

The second patch for Crytek’s highly-acclaimed shooter Crysis is now available. Patch 1.2 continues to tune and improve stability and performance according to notes in the changelog.  The main improvements in Patch 1.2 include tweaks to multiplayer, mod support and balance of weapons, AI and vehicles, including: Added mod loader to main menu Increased damage of most player-fired weapons and decreased damage of most AI-fired weapons Added auto team balance Added grenade indicator for enemy and friendly team

A few months ago, we evaluated the 1-terabyte (TB) Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 SATA hard drive and found the drive to offer many positive features in addition to its massive capacity.  In this article though, we’ll be looking at Seagate’s new flagship enterprise-class, mass storage solution, the 1TB Barracuda ES.2.  While the Barracuda 7200.11 and ES.2 are almost identical drives, there are some important differences to highlight between them.  For instance, the 7200.11 has a mean time between failure

AMD sent word this morning of product demos with their new 780G chipset and platform that we recently covered here for you in full detail.  At the time, we provided a detailed look at the capabilities of AMD’s IGP (Integrated Graphics Processor) in gaming and 3D rendering scenarios, as well as their new Hybrid CrossFire technology but we didn’t get a chance to cover HD video decode and playback performance just yet.  We’ll be following up on the product’s performance ourselves shortly with an update

In addition to the previously reported Centrino 2 (Montevina) IGP chipsets GM45, GS45 and GL40, Intel will add a performance/mainstream level model, the GM47 to the list, according to sources at notebook makers. Intel will also launch the non-IGP PM45. All the chipsets will pair with Intel's ICH9M southbridge.

The GM47 features a built-in GMA X4500HD graphics engine like the GM45, but with a higher core frequency of 640MHz. The engine will support DirectX 10 and Shader Model 4.0, and feature built-in HDMI, DVI and Display Port support.

Google Calendar is great, but wouldn’t it be great if you could sync your Google Calendar events with your Outlook calendar at work? Well, maybe not, it might give an idea of just how busy your life really is.I’ve suffered major headaches trying to sync all my calendars. I used the Microsoft Outlook calendar on my desktop computer at home, but since I wanted to be able to access my schedule from anywhere, I also kept a copy of it on Google Calendar. When I traveled, I’d import my Google Calendar data into my

I don’t know which I dread accidentally clicking on more: A PDF link (Adobe) or a Quicktime video (Apple). But unless you live under a rock, you’re looking at Flash video every day on the Internet. Steve Jobs doesn’t seem to be; he’s publicly  announced that Flash is unsuitable for the iPhone in any of its current iterations. Adobe countered that if your smartphone doesn’t play Flash video, it’s a pretty dumb smartphone. Rather than support Flash, Apple requires that video be delivered in a particular file

POWERCOLOR HAS some of the most advanced GPUs at CeBIT, as well as the most advanced TV cards. If you like either the vanilla 3870X2 and the Theater 550, you will love these.

What you see here is a GDDR4 based 3870X2. It has Samsung GDDR4 running of 1126MHz and they bumped the clocks to 825MHz. The bridge chips is still PCIe1.0, but that will not hurt performance, all the ones out there now use it. Basically, this is going to be fast, very fast. Look for it in early April.

Panasonic is developing a tough little UMPC based on Intel’s Atom technology and they’re calling it the Toughbook.  The specs aren’t entirely clear other than the platform itself and the fact that it should live up to its name:“Little information is available, but we have a water, dust, and shock resistant computer with 5.6” touch screen.”We’re curious to see how they’ve pulled off water resistance in a device that is rumored to feature have several ports of various kinds, but we’re not sure how many divers

Maybe it’s just me, but the unexpected words “ready for download now” referring to a Microsoft product seem… unusual. Microsoft was outlining the features and interoperability of its next generation web browser at the MIX show in Las Vegas yesterday, and shocked a lot of developers by announcing it was ready to download right away as Beta release. Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of the Internet Explorer team at Microsoft, said IE 8 Beta 1 delivers increased interoperability, offers developers better predictability