Asus 2600XT and 2600Pro - ATI mid range performance

ATI released their HD 2900 XT to an awaiting enthusiast audience who were (it has to be said), a little disappointed. Apart from the price and awesome bundle the card offered little new to the market.

Now the mid-range cards are upon us and once again ATI trail behind nVidia on release schedule. Having said that, Asus have given us a couple of nice looking cards with some 3rd party coolers so it will be interesting to see how these go down.

R600 becomes R630

In the spirit of making the lower chips have higher numbers than the top end, ATI have named their mid-range R630. With a scaled down version of the R600 architecture and boasting a nice 194 GFLOPS of power, the 2600 series looks pretty sweet on paper.

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Blue-Ray / HD-DVD / TS / DVD / AVI -> TO H.246...

Using MEGui to convert any DirectShow compatible video source to H246 (MPEG-4). With this guide you will be able to convert AVI, DVD, Blue-Ray, HD-DVD, Real Media, or any other video source that can be played via the DirectShow interface (the file plays in Windows Media Player). All of the tools listed here are open source or freeware.

Tools Needed:
MEGui ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/megui )
Note: there are many sub tools that are loaded under MEGui. Those tools are downloaded automatically the first time you launch MEGui.

Suggested Tools:
FFDShow
Haali Media Splitter
Media Player Classic
VirtualDubMod (for AVI Sources)

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Sony Launches Expanded Recycling Program

Starting on September 15, Sony Corporation will accept its products at 75 recycling stations around the USA, thanks to a partnership with Waste Management Incorporated. The recycling drop-off centers will accept any Sony or Sony Ericsson-branded gadgets for free, and other brands for a fee. The 75 stations are spread unevenly over the country, with 17 stations in California and 19 in Minnesota but none in 32 states. Eight states, including New York, have only one station each. Sony and Waste Management plan to double the number of drop-off centers within a year, with the aim of having at least one in every state and the ultimate goal of having a center within 20 miles of 95% of the U.S. population. In the meantime, the only option is to pay for shipment of used Sony products to some of the recycling locations.

Physorg

Notepad++ 4.2.2

Notepad++ is a free source code editor (and Notepad replacement), which supports several programming languages, running under the MS Windows environment. This project, based on the Scintilla edit component (a very powerful editor component), written in C++ with pure win32 api and STL (that ensures the higher execution speed and smaller size of the program), is under the GPL Licence.

Features Include:
Syntax Highlighting and Syntax Folding
WYSIWYG
User Defined Syntax Highlighting
Auto-completion
Multi-Document
Multi-View
Regular Expression Search/Replace supported
Full Drag 'N' Drop supported
Dynamic position of Views
File Status Auto-detection
Zoom in and zoom out
Multi-Language environment supported
Bookmark
Brace and Indent guideline Highlighting
Macro recording and playback

Notepad++ Website

ATI Catalyst Display Driver 7.8 WHQL For WinXP/Vista

AMD have released version 7.8 of their ATI video card driver package.

The Catalyst™ software suite 7.8 contains the following:
- Radeon™ display driver 8.401
- Multimedia Center™ 9.16
- HydraVision™
- HydraVision™ Basic Edition
- Remote Wonder 3.04
- WDM Driver Install Bundle
- Southbridge/IXP Driver
- Catalyst™ Control Center Version 7.8

Release Notes

Opera 9.23 Build 8808

Opera is a free Web browser with a pop-up blocker, multiple-window navigation, mouse gestures, keyboard shortcuts, an e-mail client with a spam filter, and integrated search for user security and speed. The cross-platform browser includes IRC-compatible chat, support for RSS newsfeeds, a password manager, and one-click customization and privacy-protection settings.

Features:

* New in version 9: Fraud protection, BitTorrent, Add your favorite search engines, Content blocker, Site preferences, Widgets, Improved rich text editing, Thumbnail preview
* Efficient surfing: Transfer manager, Tabbed browsing, Password manager, Integrated search, Pop-up blocking, Mouse gestures, Fast Forward, Sessions, Quick preferences, Notes, Voice, Keyboard Shortcuts, Trash can
* Security and privacy: Security bar, Encryption, Delete private data, Cookie control
* Mail and Chat: Opera mail, IRC chat
* Customization: Drag and drop, Skins, Language
* Accessibility: Zoom, Text size and colors, User style sheets,
* Web development: Standards support, Small-screen mode, Validate code, Toggle graphics and style sheets, Info panel, Reload from cache,
* Special: Full-screen mode, Kiosk mode aand more...

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WinPenPack 2.9

WinPenPack is a collection of free and open source portable programs optimized for use with a USB pen drive and also directly from a folder of your Hard Disk. You can choose between some standardized configurations, all small enough to fit on your USB Pen Drive.

Standard configurations include:

- WinPenPack FLASH 128
- WinPenPack FLASH 256
- WinPenPack FLASH 512

containing the best open source and freeware software found on the Internet, made portable and divided by categories:

- Graphics
- Internet
- Multimedia
- Security
- System

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