ARTECH

Cool Undeleting Program – FreeUndelete

04:29

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Cool Undeleting Program – FreeUndelete

I know everyone and their dog has tried to search for “free image resizing application”, “free anti virus”, “free file recovery” etc and been subjected to the entire malware arsenal of the entire internet (just don’t search for free smileys whatever you do).

Well I thought I’d share an undelete software that seems to be fairly simple to use, works under vista 64-bit, and is completely free. Enjoy: http://www.officerecovery.com/freeundelete/

I haven’t tested it extensively, but it helped me restore some videos that I accidently deleted from the SD card in my camera.

CoolIT Boreas – Initial testing done

04:26

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Hardware Tweks

CoolIT Boreas – Initial testing done

So far I’m really enjoying my time with the CoolIT Boreas. I set it up last night on a test bed PC running a Core i7 860, 4GB Corsair RAM, an MSI P55-GD65, and a Topower OEM 900W PSU. Overall at idle the unit is reasonably quiet and performs quiet well, but I’ll definitely be making some changes to it. Here I show idle temps with the Core i7 860 running at 3.6GHz using OC Genie. At load though it jumps up to 60C. It’s very important to manage the heat output of your CPU for the Boreas to perform well. Unlike a conventional water cooling system which can actually dissipate more heat as the CPU gets hotter, the Boreas will perform exceptionally well until it is overwhelmed as we’ve seen demonstrated in reviews and end-user testing.

I’ll be making some major changes to this unit including new CPU block, new pump, new (bigger tubing), and we’ll see what it’s capable of.

Intel Pentium Dual Core E5200 Overclocking Results

04:19

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Hardware Tweks

Intel Pentium Dual Core E5200 Overclocking Results

Intel’s first 45nm “Pentium” chip showed up quietly in the last week or two and there doesn’t seem to be much buzz about it, but I decided to take it for a spin to see what kind of overclocking results I could get out of it. I don’t know if the one that I have is exceptional or not, and bear in mind this IS a suicide run, but I think what you’re about to see may shock you.

Will update later with pics of the water cooled test bench as well.

Okay here’s my update with pictures of the test bench. I’m using a Maximus Formula X38 motherboard with OCZ Reaper PC2-8500 C5 RAM modules, a Corsair 750W power supply and a GTX 280 video card.

I’ve also included a photo of the box from the CPU I used. This is a regular retail sample. No cherry picking going on here. this is one cool chip :)

Core i7 Overclocking Report

04:13

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Hardware Tweks

Core i7 Overclocking Report

Well I had a chance to play with an engineering sample Core i7 with a Gigabyte EX58-EXTREME motherboard and 12GB of Aeneon DDR3-1333 C8 memory for an upcoming NCIX Tech Tips, and I’m actually very impressed with the platform.

I’ve mellowed out in the last couple years going from balls to the walls overclocking (think E6600 @ 4.0GHz 24/7 with a custom -25C chiller under my tower) to being more concerned with overall platform stability and maturity (while also loving speed).

On another note, I have a confession to make. My name is Linus and I have a memory addiction. I don’t need lots of memory. Frequently with 8GB in my system I was looking at up to 7GB of “cached” memory under Vista only being used to store frequently used programs. That didn’t stop me from salivating when I saw that high end X58 motherboards were going to feature 6 RAM slots. Naturally the first thing I did was load each slot up with 2GB of RAM.

Here’s a shot of the test bench I used including the less-than-stellar stock heatsink from Intel (got an APOGEE GTZ hold down en route from Swiftech), a 6800GT that has served me well over the years, and my ghetto sleeved OCZ GameXSTream 600W (also present in the top picture with my chiller). I will be doing a complete overclocking walk through for Nehalem on NCIX Tech Tips, but I wanted to share my initial impressions with a dog CPU, all 6 RAM slots loaded up (far more stress on the memory controller), and terrible stock cooling:

- 200x base clock multiplier without much fuss

- 1480MHz C8 @ 1.66V on this random set of 3 dual channel kits of memory primed for 12 passes overnight.

- QPI speed of over 1700Mhz without much trouble

- 3.7GHz on the CPU before running into what I think was a combination of a thermal limitation (80+C under load) and having a less than steller overclocking chip

Annoying Windows 7 Bug

04:04

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Computer

Annoying Windows 7 Bug

Well I’m not sure yet if I can replicate this or not but it’s been annoying me enough over the last 5 minutes that I thought I’d post about it. System is running Windows 7 Ultimate RC1 (64-bit) and I kept running into issues transferring some files over from another hard drive that also has a boot partition on it where the board kept booting to the other drive. Since I’m also tweaking some BIOS settings and whatnot, the boot order keeps rearranging, so the solution I came up with (clever me) was to switch SATA cables so that the system would always automatically boot from the correct drive.

The drive in question is an OCZ Vertex 120GB SSD, so it’s a plenty fast drive. Man was I ever suprised to see 10,000ms access times in the resource monitor when all I was doing was downloading adobe flash player with literally nothing else open. Switching back to the SATA port that the drive was originally on has everything back to normal, but those 10s response times were VERY noticeable and it was not mis-reporting.

I also know that the issue was not caused by putting the drive on a different SATA controller. They are both connected to the ICH10R southbridge and drivers are installed for that as well. Very random. I would have taken a screenshot but the system was soooo painfully slow I had to do something. It would respond just fine for about a second (I could type into search fields, click things, etc) but then it would become completely unresponsive for 5-10 seconds.

Microsoft Office 2013 Customer Preview

00:15

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Office Tool

Microsoft Office 2013 Customer Preview

Microsoft has released the much anticipated Office 2013 beta for customers. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said that this version of suit embraces the new technology, connectivity & productivity.

New Metro Interface

If you are Metro UI fan like me, then it’s a very good news for you! All Office products now comes with a more clean & sleek UI, Microsoft’s Metro UI.