Dave Salvator

If you had an older sibling growing up, youre no doubt familiar with hand-me-downs. Parents have always tried to foist siblings old stuff—everything from action figures to nylon parachute pants—in an attempt to avoid the expense new purchases. What may have meant some indignity for a kid turns out to be a great way to […]

In a talk about the current status of its 802.11n efforts, Intel reaffirmed its backing of the TGn Sync Alliances approach to achieving 100+Mbit/sec throughput in future-generation wireless networks. This presentation gave a high-level technical overview to several approaches under consideration as the best blend of performance and cost in the final 802.11n spec, due […]

USB thumb-drives are a good thing, putting up to a gigabyte of storage into a device the size of your pinky. In a case of too much of a good thing can be wonderful, small USB 2.0 hard-drives that can easily slip into your pocket have now come to market, offering 5, 10, 20, and […]

Microsoft Corp. is working away on the next-generation of Windows, code-named Longhorn, due in 2006. According to developers, the new operating system will reshape the Windows graphics architecture, from 2D to 3D, with the Windows Graphics Foundation. The new architecture was given a sneak peek at Microsofts Meltdown conference, which is all about building games […]

Creative Labs Inc. and Analog Devices Inc. on Tuesday announced a deal that will bring the SoundBlaster brand to a motherboard near you. This fall, Creative plans to ship a software application that will use the power of ADIs onboard audio chips to provide SoundBlaster-quality audio and enhanced support for Creatives EAX audio standard, the […]

Motherboard audio has long been the ugly stepchild to its PCI-based sibling. For the longest time, if you wanted really solid audio in your PC, you had to get a PCI-based sound card. That started to change with the arrival of Nvidias nForce chipset, which put three DSPs into the south bridge and encoded Dolby […]

The MP3 player market is swamped to the gunnels with me-too products, and its gotten pretty tough for new arrivals to distinguish themselves. Some have gotten smaller (iPod), some have added capacity, such as Creatives Nomad Zen 60GB. Others have added video, the key example being the Archos AV320. With so many available products, you […]

Recently, we got our first look at the Mobility Radeon 9600 (formerly code-named M10), and were impressed by the early test results. At that time, we hadnt yet tested nVidias latest mobile GPU, the GeForceFX Go5600. The problem we encountered was the usual suspect when testing laptop-based GPUs: matching the other system components. We looked […]

Whats the right product to buy? Were impressed with TiVo and the Prismiq, but still see PC alternatives as offering the best mix of features. There are a lot of different ways to get a media client into your living room, and each one is a study in tradeoffs. Of all the offerings we surveyed […]

TiVo and broadband routers dont have a whole lot in common, except for the OS that powers them: Linux. Between its versatility, power and always-improving driver support, its now possible to put together a Linux-based home server in a small-footprint case that can store and display your digital photos, rip and then serve up audio, […]