Consumers have been reporting issues with their brand new Apple i7 iMacs, some with a cracked screen casing, and others are reporting theirs are dead on arrival.

This issue doesn’t appear to be universal, only affecting some of the new iMacs, but is still enough of a problem to raise concern if you plan on purchasing one this Christmas.

View: Full Story
Source: Neowin

Microsoft officially confirmed today that it has finished Windows 7 and released the final build to manufacturing (RTM).

Steve Ballmer, Chief Executive Officer at Microsoft, confirmed that Microsoft has finalised Windows 7 during his speech at an employee conference in Atlanta, Georgia. Microsoft Global Exchange (MGX) is an internal Microsoft conference for Microsoft’s global sales teams and evangelists. Employees have been posting updates to Twitter today.

Source: Neowin

Microsoft Windows Internet Explorer 8 is the next version of the world’s most popular browser that has been built from the ground up to be the best browser for the way people really use the Web. Faster, easier and safer than ever before, Internet Explorer 8 optimizes developer and end-user experiences to provide a window to the Web of online services.

Moreover, Internet Explorer 8 offers new features and functionality that enables people to reach beyond the page in a number of faster, easier, and more secure ways. Following are brief descriptions of the new and enhanced features that Microsoft Corp. has introduced in Internet Explorer 8.

Note: Windows 7 Beta already includes a pre-release candidate version of Internet Explorer 8 that is optimized for that release.

View: Fact Sheet
Download: Internet Explorer 8 RTM
View: Microsoft Internet Explorer 8
Source: MSFN

As expected, Microsoft Monday released Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) Release Candidate 1 (RC1) to the public. You can grab the download from the Microsoft Download Center: for Vista and Server 2008 32-bit, for Vista and Server 2008 64-bit, for XP 32-bit, for Server 2003 SP2 32-bit, and for Server 2003 SP2 64-bit and XP 64-bit. At time of publishing, the release notes have not yet been updated (but should be soon), though the Technology Overview for Developers is available. Please note that this build is newer than the one in Windows 7 build 7000 and cannot be installed over top of that version of IE8. Testers using Windows 7 will have to wait for a new build of the operating system.

Microsoft already gave testers an RC1 build (8.0.6001.18343) last month and then updated the build number 8.0.6001.18344 that same week, due to an out-of-band security update for the browser. The software giant gave the public IE8 Beta 2 in August 2008 and Beta 1 in March 2008.

View: Full Story
Source: MSFN

Normally, I would frown upon testing beta software against final code that has been updated frequently, but the results this time around are very interesting. Instead of using benchmarking programs, Adrian Kingsley-Hughes from ZDNet put together 23 real-world scenarios to see which operating system would be the quickest to complete all of the tasks.

He tested the 32-bit versions of Windows 7 build 6.1.7000.0.081212-1400, Windows Vista SP1, and Windows XP SP3. Two separate test machines were used:

An AMD Phenom 9700 2.4GHz system fitted with an ATI Radeon 3850 and 4GB of RAM
An Intel Pentium Dual Core E2200 2.2GHz fitted with an NVIDIA GeForce 8400 GS and 1GB of RAM

Source: One Microsoft Way via MSFN

Australia, known for their high levels of censorship, is planning on filtering peer-to-peer (P2P) and Bit Torrent traffic in live pilot tests.

“Technology that filters peer-to-peer and Bit Torrent traffic does exist and it is anticipated that the effectiveness of this will be tested in the live pilot trial,” Senator Conroy said.

The country is making a drastic step to stop piracy, but who assumes that all P2P and Bit Torrent traffic is used only for piracy?

Two legitimate uses are the popular games World of Warcraft and America’s Army: Special Forces. The games use a Bit Torrent system of distribution to update their updates.

With all rash decisions, the idea has obviously stirred up a serious debate Down Under. “I’m aware that this proposal has attracted significant debate and criticism on this blog and at other places in the blogosphere,” Senator Conroy said. A lot of the complaints are about Senator Conroy himself and how he seems to be acting like the “big brother”.

Source: News.com.au

With 3rd quarter sales, revenue, and earnings posted and evaluated, several surprising facts come into play. iSuppli, a market research firm, has evaluated desktop and laptop sales, and for the first time ever, laptop shipments this quarter have been above desktop shipments.

38.6 million laptops were sold last quarter, only slightly above 38.5 million desktops sold. Notebook PC shipments rose 40 percent over 3rd quarter 2007, while PC shipments fell 1.3 percent over 3rd quarter 2007.

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CCleaner is a freeware system optimization and privacy tool. It removes unused files from your system – allowing Windows to run faster and freeing up valuable hard disk space. It also cleans traces of your online activities such as your Internet history. But the best part is that it’s fast (normally taking less than a second to run) and contains NO Spyware or Adware!

Fully tried and tested with Windows 98/NT4/ME/2000/XP/2003/Vista. It’s currently partially compatible with 64bit XP and Vista, there are a few non-critical issues which are still being worked on.

Download: CCleaner v2.14.750 | Other Builds
View: What’s New | CCleaner Homepage
Source: MSFN

I thought I would let people know, that the final build of µTorrent is officially out now. It comes in as v1.8 build 11758. The first thing I noticed about the new build is a new icon, aqua-ish, whilst a minimal change, it still is nice.

You can download µTorrent over here, and for the people that like change logs, it’s also available here.

Well, that’s all for now, happy µtorrenting. Now remember, stay legal .

This third Firefox 3 Release Candidate is a preview release of Mozilla’s next generation Firefox browser and is being made available for testing purposes only.

Firefox 3 is based on the Gecko 1.9 Web rendering platform, which has been under development for the past 34 months. Building on the previous release, Gecko 1.9 has more than 14,000 updates including some major re-architecting to provide improved performance, stability, rendering correctness, and code simplification and sustainability. Firefox 3 has been built on top of this new platform resulting in a more secure, easier to use, more personal product with a lot more under the hood to offer website and Firefox add-on developers.

View: Mozilla Firefox 3 RC3 Main Page
View: Mozilla Firefox 3 RC3 Release Notes

Downloads (via official distributed mirrors):
Mozilla Firefox 3 RC3 English Windows | 7.15 MB
Mozilla Firefox 3 RC3 English Mac OS X | 17.2 MB
Mozilla Firefox 3 RC3 English Linux | 8.7 MB