November Nukes

Autumnal chills, gaming thrills and product frills…

Innovation follows funny timelines. Mankind took over two million years to invent the wheel. And another 5,000 years more to plug a steam engine betwixt those wheels. The downsizing from the world’s first gen, mammoth, room-sized comps to the squat little desktop PC took 35 years. But the shrinking of the desktop to the laptop took less than a decade…

We follow some gaming thrills and product frills that helped this ajeeb daastan of innovation jiggle on through November.


Microsoft Xbox 360
The Big Boy is ready to play, nutty buddies! A gig that the global gaming community has been waiting for with bated breath and fidgety fingers, X360 game console is here. The console is based on an IBM PowerPC-based "Xenon" CPU. The CPU boasts of three separate core processors clocking in at 3.2 GHz each. A 500 MHz ATI R500-based "Xenos" graphics processing unit powers the graphics. Games are required to be authored for 720p and 1080i and optimized for the 16:9 widescreen viewing ratio.

The X360 is rigged with 512 MiB 700 MHz GDDR3 RAM. It supports DVDs, CDs, DVD-R/RW, MP3s, JPEGs, and more. A wireless controller—in fact, up to four wireless controllers—provide the interface to the console. The controller has a 30 feet (9.14 m) range and holds 25 hours of juice on a NiMH rechargeable battery pack.

Go wow!

http://xbox360.com


Mozilla Firefox 1.5
I am hopelessly devoted to Firefox. Nope, no IE for me. Firefox has a cleaner, no-nonsense, “tabby” (for a number of web pages in a single window) interface. It’s more malleable. And it’s more secure than IE primarily because it doesn't run ActiveX components or VB script. Being a modular browser it lacks the extra sweet smell of excess. It banks on downloadable extensions to provide additional functionality (https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/?application=firefox). An Extensions Manager gets you the add-ons: precise pop-up blocking, easy text zooming, faster text search, or the scent of Java etc. And it has an in-built RSS reader (joggle your RAM and you’ll recall we’ve talked about this).

Its next avatar, version 1.5 is due November 29. Not many differences visible to the naked eye for 1.0 Firefoxers in this, except some new updation, accessibility and privacy options. It’s what lies beneath that has been overhauled--to make it render better and run slicker and quicker.

Go try.

www.getfirefox.com


2GB miniSD Card
Yeah, you read that right. TEC has launched a monster 2GB miniSD for your dinky little mobile phonua. Wondering what you’ll do with such storage? With Nokia’s ma kasam to surpass the Apple iPod as the leading seller of digital music players, you won’t be wondering too long. With read speeds of 18MB/s and write speeds of is 12MB/s, this wispy TEC heavyweight is currently selling for US$ 160 in Taiwan. But space hogs in India can look forward to it landing here any day now.

Go bow.


Creative Zen Neeon
More music makers in pint-sized packs. Creative has launched three skip-free flash memory-based models (512MB, 1GB and 2GB) of its Zen Neeon portable audio players. Also on the shelves now is a new 6GB hard drive-based model--which can hoard up to 3000 songs.

All the Zen Neeon MP3 players are 79.9mm x 46.9mm x 15.9mm and feature and integrated FM radio/recorder and voice recorder, direct line-in recording from CD/DVD players, turntables, and cassette tape players. They also double-up as plug-and-play removable portable mass storage drives. The 55gm Zen Neeon 512MB, 1GB and 2GB come with a duo-tone OLED screen, re-chargeable Li-ion battery delivering 32 hours of playback per charge. And the 75gm Zen Neeon 6GB is available in 7 selectable backlit display colours and a rechargeable Li-ion battery for 16 hours of playback.

So play on pape!

www.creative.com

Tailpiece: For those of you who revel in mankind’s latest fascination, Sudoko, here are two enthralling sites: WebSudoku (www.websudoku.com/) and Sudokulist (www.sudoku.org.uk/). And pssst, for those of you who (like me) are in the league of the extraordinarily logic-challenged duh-dhakkan biradari, I have some solve-all Sudoku kunji sites. Heh heh heh! Wanna know? Mail the evil I! Cos one whisper here and I’ll be nuked for diabolical intent.

Peak Performance

Some lightweight mountain gear to help your silicon box attain new heights.

Nearly nine kilometres up in the sky, higher than most airplanes fly, there a rocky little stretch of terra firma, about the size of a room. It takes the nimble-footed about two months to get to it. But you can’t spend more than a couple of hours here because it’s a mite chilly with an icy 150 kmph wind in your face. The place is called Sagarmatha in Nepal and Chomolungma in Tibet. The world knows it better as Mt. Everest.

To get to Mt. Everest you need months of training to be in peak physical form. And Lady Luck beside you. But to get your PC in peak form, you just need software. And no Lady Luck. So here’s some lightweight mountain gear to help your silicon box reach new heights.

Fresh Diagnose
Like a compass, this free utility give you your bearings. It scans, analyses and benchmarks your PC to furnish a comprehensive list of hardware and software details. This includes info about the motherboard, video system, PCI/AGP buses, input and output peripherals (mouse, keyboard, printer, etc.), and the network. The program also tests the performance of your CPU, hard drive, CD/DVD ROM etc. and let’s you compare it with other PCs. No bundled ads, no spyware.
OS: Windows XP, 2000, ME, NT, 9x
www.freshdevices.com


FreeRAM XP Pro
As you use Windows, surf the Net, open and close apps, your PC's RAM starts dwindling. This freeware flushes and defrags RAM, thereby freeing memory and optimising system response time, speed, stability, and efficiency. It is ideal for uncouth, badly-written chipku programs that cling to your PC's RAM even after you have exited them. Quite customisable, it offers real-time memory monitoring and optimisation, system metric and performance monitoring, memory reporting and diagnostic logging, memory compression, process memory usage reporting, RAM-cuts (RAM-freeing Windows shortcuts), and customisable hotkey support among a host of other features.
OS: Windows XP, 2000, ME, NT, 9x
www.yourwaresolutions.com


Super Utilities Professional
True pro league maal with a whopping 27 system maintenance tools to help your PC scale the performance crest. It features four sections: System Cleaner to remove spyware, clean your disk and Registry and perform routine maintenance tasks. Privacy Protector to hide or lock folders, clean system tracks, password-protect apps, secure file deletes, hide IE Favorites and Start menu items. System Maintenance for Task Manager-like functions, valuable system information, and IE customization. And Special Tools to schedule shutdown times, locate and back up drivers, identify space-hogging folders, and modify context menu options. And then there’s the startup organizer, BHO cleaner, password manager, uninstaller, defragger, optimizer… Need we say more? Yes; SU is free to try, but costs $50 to keep.
OS: Windows XP, 2000, ME, NT, 98, 9x
www.superlogix.net


MyRegistryCleaner
Everyone knows a saaf, suthri Registry makes a PC boot faster, run quicker and stay more stable. And that is why umpteen Registry cleansers are born unto this universe. However, most of these over-eager scrubbers use their own limited intellect to swipe clean whatever they feel like. MyRegistryCleaner instead shows you the invalid, orphaned registry entries and lets you decide the items to kill. Once you've made your choice, MRC takes a backup and then destroys, or attempts to correct the damaged objects, as the case may be. And in case you prefer the automatic route, that’s possible too. The proggie is free to try but requires 40 US to possess.
OS: Windows XP, 2000, ME, NT, 9x
www.myregistrycleaner.com

Okay Himalayputrs, now go climb www.free-soft.ro/everest/everest.html and see if you like the view.