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Mac OSX Lion and Why a PC Owner Should Care
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 Is this not a website for PC enthusiasts who care about Windows and about gaming and modifications to their computers?· Yes, yes it is. But there are several reasons why the PC world should look towards Lion as a way that the entire PC world may end up going.
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An In-Depth Look at Fedora 15
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Fedora has long been touted as being one of the most professional, stable, cutting-edge distros out there, and seeing as though its latest version brings GNOME 3 along for the ride, I couldn't help but download and install it. I've since used Fedora 15 for an entire month, so read on as I take a look at this release from all angles.
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Enabling and Testing SSD TRIM Support Under Linux
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Owning an SSD that supports TRIM is great, but while Windows users have the benefit of having TRIM enabled for them, Linux users need to take the manual route - at least, at this point in time. In this article, we tackle the simple process of doing so, and also show how to verify that TRIM is indeed working as it should be.
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Linux 3.0 Kernel With EXT4 & Btrfs
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"With the Linux 3.0 kernel carrying CleanCache support along
with various improvements to the EXT4 and Btrfs file-system modules, it
is time for another Phoronix file-system comparison. This time around
the EXT4 vs. Btrfs performance is particularly important with Fedora 16
possibly switching to Btrfs by default. Due to this level of interest,
for our Linux 3.0 kernel benchmarks of the EXT4 and Btrfs file-systems,
an Intel SSD was tested as well as an old 5400RPM IDE notebook hard
drive to represent two ends of the spectrum."
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Run Chrome OS From a USB Stick or as a Virtual Machine
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Chrome OS notebooks from Acer and Samsung are expected to launch next month at $349 and $429, respectively. The fact that you can get a more powerful netbook with Windows 7 pre-installed for roughly the same price, or even less, is already putting some people off. But that doesn't mean you should disregard Google's operating system without so much as giving it a try -- especially since it's available as a free download for you to test on your own hardware.
While you'd normally have to build Chromium OS from source to try it out on your computer, several developers have released installable builds that will save you the trouble. We'll show you how to create a bootable USB flash drive with Chrome OS or run the it using a free virtual machine.
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An In-Depth Look at Ubuntu 11.04
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After months of anticipation, Ubuntu 11.04, codenamed 'Natty Narwhal', has launched in its final form. The big news this time around is that the OS ships with Canonical's 'Unity' desktop environment as default - a large risk on behalf of the company. To see if that risk paid off, let's take an in-depth look to see what Unity's made of.
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GCC 4.6 Compiler Performance With AVX On Sandy Bridge
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While we are still battling issues with the Intel Linux
graphics driver in getting that running properly with Intel's new Sandy
Bridge CPUs (at least Intel's Jesse Barnes is now able to reproduce the
most serious problem we've been facing, but we'll save the new graphics
information for another article), the CPU performance continues to be
very compelling. Two weeks ago we published the Intel Core i5 2500K
Linux benchmarks that showed just how well this quad-core CPU that costs
a little more than $200 USD is able to truly outperform previous
generations of Intel hardware. That was just with running the standard
open-source benchmarks and other Linux software, which has not been
optimized for Intel's latest micro-architecture. Version 4.6 of the GNU
Compiler Collection (GCC) though is gearing up for release and it will
bring support for the AVX extensions. In this article, we are
benchmarking GCC 4.6 on a Sandy Bridge system to see what benefits there
are to enabling the Core i7 AVX optimizations."
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Asus SBW-06C1S-U Slim USB External Blu-Ray Writer Review
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"Ultimately, Asus' portable Blu-Ray drive has a lot going for it. USB bus power makes it convenient to pick up and take anywhere, the ultra-slim design and blue LEDs look fantastic, and the drive reads and writes everything from a simple CD-R's to recordable BD media reliably."
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Windows 7 Service Pack 1 Graphics Performance Analysis
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Today Microsoft released Windows 7 Service Pack 1 to the public. We wanted to check if there are some gaming performance gains included the upgrade, so we ran NVIDIA's and ATI's flagship graphics cards through our VGA benchmarking suite.
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Windows 7 Service Pack 1 Performance Analysis
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" Windows 7 is the best Windows yet, at least that’s my opinion of it. Think what you like, you’re entitled to your own opinion of course. I’m not going to get into an arguing match with you about Win 7 and XP, Vista, OSX etc, this is not what this article is for, take it elsewhere please. If you want to know more about how Windows 7 Service Pack 1 might affect your computer then this is where you want to be. I’ve taken quite a bit of time to run many test on three separate computers with Windows 7 installed, both 32bit and 64bit versions. From my experience I’ve learned a bit and I thought I’d share that with you today, so read on to learn what I learned about how the new Service Pack affects your system."
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VirtualBox 4.0 OpenGL Acceleration Leaves Room For Improvement
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"VirtualBox, the Sun/Oracle virtualization platform, has
supported OpenGL acceleration and Direct3D acceleration within virtual
machines for more than two years. When the host system has hardware GPU
acceleration, OpenGL/Direct3D calls can be passed from the guest to the
host when the VirtualBox guest driver is installed. There has been the
Linux 3D support since VirtualBox 2.2 and was initially limited to
OpenGL 1.4 support and in the summer of 2009 it turned to OpenGL 2.0. We
had not delivered any early benchmarks as the initial support was too
buggy, but even with the recently released VirtualBox 4.0, while the
support is usable and stable for the most part, it is still far from
being very efficient and will crash under some OpenGL software."
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Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6
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“There’s little doubting that this new release of RHEL is a worthwhile investment, enabling customers to take full advantage of the latest multi-core hardware with the promise of even greater scalability in the future. New buyers and those deploying new servers should certainly have no hesitation in choosing RHEL 6 to host their Linux applications. Whether it’s worth rushing out and upgrading existing systems is less clear cut. Especially, for customers with large numbers of Xen virtual machines who may prefer to wait a while before going through the pain of migrating to the new KVM technology in this release.”
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Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1: Hands On
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“Microsoft has made Service Pack 1 for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 available to all of its customers. Not sure if you need them or not? It's not a very glamorous update, but consider that SP1 for Windows 7 includes under-the-hood updates to security and stability. There are a few service improvements within the desktop OS, but they're for very specific issues.”
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When It Works, Intel Core i5 2500K Graphics On Linux Are Fast
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"After a month of headaches for Intel and myself, there are now
Sandy Bridge graphics benchmark results from the Intel Core i5 2500K
under Linux to finally publish. Sandy Bridge was a tough launch for
Intel in terms of the Linux coverage with the media having problems
building a working driver stack and then when I finally got my hands on
a CPU, I ran into an entirely different set of show-stopping problems.
The developers still have not solved the biggest original issue yet, but
Intel sent out a new motherboard and another CPU and it happens to "just
work" nicely under Linux. When using the latest bits of their
open-source Intel Linux graphics code, the performance on the Core i5
2500K is actually quite impressive compared to other open-source Linux
drivers."
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Service Pack 1 for Windows 7 Performance-Test
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A service pack for Windows is usually meant to fix Bugs and bring along the one or the other new function. But also performance increases could be seen in the past. HT4U.net presents, if Enthusiasts can expect their systems to perform better with Windows 7 and SP1.
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Running Ubuntu 10.10 in a Virtual Machine
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Ever feel like you have been chained to your current operating system? Have you thought about switching to something new before but never got around to finding the right one? Well here is your chance to explore something new. Ubuntu 10.10 released this past October and has amazed me the more I started using it. This guide will show you how to install a virtual machine with Ubuntu 10.10 installed straight from your Windows desktop.
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| The best Guides by the best writers on the internet; PCstats Beginners Guides explain computers, software, and all those other wonderful things that cause you frustration.
Learn how to use your computer better, master the internet while protecting yourself, and know what to do when your hard drive kicks the bucket.
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"Get the 'Stats and Stay Informed!"
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Beginners Guides
