This is a problem that has existed in Vista from the very beginning, as I found out the hard way after its release in December 2006. If you use any Nvidia Forceware drivers other than version 158.24 you will get screen corruption like in the picture below when changing resolutions.

This situation only applies to factory overclocked 7900GT cards and the solution is to either under/overclock the card slightly.

I’m posting about this today because I had forgot about it until recently when I was reinstalling my brother’s computer, upgrading him from XP to Vista after a nice virus he got on MSN. I preferred to modify the card’s BIOS directly instead of just changing the clocks in software with Rivatuner.

To change the clock speed at the BIOS level download NiBiTor, first saving your current BIOS. If you are having trouble you can use GPU-Z for this instead, which I did.

The change is very straightforward, just change the 2D & 3D clock speeds on the main page and then save the file in .rom format as modded.rom. Obviously make sure that the card is 100% stable at the new speeds and corruption free. For flashing use nvFlash, make a clean MS-DOS boot floppy and copy the nvFlash util and BIOS to it, to flash just boot from it and type “nvflash modded.rom”

Although I rely on my desktop PC for long work sessions and I stand by the fact no laptop will ever beat a fully equipped desktop (dual monitors, and in general, the works…), there is an obvious need for a laptop whenever I’m on the move.

When my old Thinkpad T needed to retire, I looked into the Vaio TX series, at the time the best 11″ ultra-portable money could buy with its mere 2.9 pounds. That was months before the MacBook Air and other similar ultra-portables arrived to the market. Unfortunately the small size didn’t cut it for me and had to look elsewhere to replace the Thinkpad until I finally decided to get a MacBook Pro. In spite of the fact that I’m a Windows user, I did it with the purpose of checking out the then new Leopard OS X release.

Today the MB Pro remains as my primary laptop. Although I have my gripes about OS X, I have remained more or less content about the hardware which has proved to be of top quality construction, all while running Windows Vista. You have probably heard the stories of how the MB Pro makes for a great Windows laptop anyway, and in my case that has hold true - in fact, I haven’t touched Leopard in months.

And now with the well publicized release of the new MacBooks, I started looking into the possibility of getting a new laptop, but instead of the Pro I was checking the upgraded MacBook which is cheaper, has got many of the Pro’s biggest selling points like the aluminum body, powerful specs, but sports a smaller 13.3-inch screen that is also LED illuminated. Sounds good so far? Until I saw this…

Those images were taken by Gizmodo in their first look at both the new MacBook and MacBook Pro. As you can see, the colors on the standard MacBook get all washed out depending on the viewing angle. Then my disappointment has been further reinforced by the fact that many, many of the outgoing reviews for the MacBook barely touch on this point, just mentioning the use of the glossy display which would be less of an issue if the laptop shipped with a quality LCD panel like its more expensive sibling.

In my experience those screen issues are characteristic of older laptops or current entry level models (any brand). Then again my Thinkpad T42, which admittedly wasn’t entry-level four years ago doesn’t suffer from that issue, and at $1300-1600 for a new MacBook, you can’t call them budget either.

With a strong pro-Apple movement going on around the web and growing Apple laptop sales, the word is that the new MacBook is like a smaller Pro without the discrete graphics. I have to dissent, and now you know why.

Update: I’m glad to see Anandtech’s review of both new Mac laptops give light on my assertions above unlike a majority of reviews I have read so far from so-called experts.

As it turns out, the new MacBook screen is an improvement over the older generation which had an even more lacking viewing angle. Really bad for a laptop at that price point IMO. But if you want a superb quality screen, the MacBook Pro will have to be your choice. As I understand it, the MacBook’s Air screen is not too bad either though I have used them on a very limited basis.

I was checking out today’s hottest deals in our deals section and noticed that my current monitor, the Dell UltraSharp 2709WFP is selling direct from Dell at a hefty discount. I paid about $1,000 at the beginning of the year and IMHO it’s worth every penny with its large size but not too extreme resolution, so things are not as tiny as in other 24 or 30-inch models.

Here’s the info straight from our deals section:

Dell LCD Display Price Check: UltraSharp 27" falls to $699, more (updated)

In the market for a Dell LCD? Dell Home dropped the Dell UltraSharp 2709WFP 27" Widescreen LCD Monitor by $200. It’s down to $699 with free shipping, the lowest total price we’ve ever seen for this display by far. Sales tax is added where applicable.

As for other models, Dell decreased and increased a few prices compared to our roundup a week ago. The other latest prices on Dell’s top LCDs, all with free shipping:

• new: Dell SE198WFP 19" Widescreen LCD Monitor for $159 (down $10)
• Dell UltraSharp 1908WFP 19" Widescreen LCD Monitor for $239 (up $20)
• Dell E207WFP 20" Widescreen LCD Monitor for $219 (unchanged)
• Dell E228WFP 22" Widescreen LCD Monitor for $269 (down $10)
• Dell SP2208WFP 22" Widescreen LCD Monitor for $349 (up $30)
• Dell E248WFP 24" Widescreen LCD Monitor for $329 (unchanged)
• Dell S2409W Full HD 24" Widescreen LCD Monitor for $349 (unchanged)

Having had my friendly and not so friendly encounters with my MacBook Pro and the bundled OS X operating system, at the end of the day I believe that for a powerful laptop I couldn’t have done much better other than buying another ThinkPad. The last one I got was a T42 and still runs like a charm even after a very embarrassing “wrong-screw-in-the-wrong-hole” moment :).

In the world of expensive ultra-portables though, the MacBook Air and the new ThinkPad X300 are two jewels to be had… check this out before buying though…

While browsing around this morning I stumbled upon this bit of news: “Apple released a new graphics upgrade kit today.” For those Mac Pro users out there (that is, the tower desktop system, not the laptop) can now upgrade to a GeForce 8800GT for about x1.5 the actual price of the card, ain’t those wonderful news?

From Macrumors.com:

When Apple released the Early 2008 Mac Pro, they offered the NVIDIA 8800GT as an upgrade option, however due to firmware issues, the 8800GT was not compatible with previous generation Mac Pros — until today.

And here’s a reaction by a Mac Pro owner, taken from Apple’s website:

YES! We all know how good this card is and 1st Gen Mac Pro owners can now use it…
Hooray!

Perhaps you may want to grab an overpriced memory upgrade kit from the manufacturer as well?

Having a UPS is fairly common these days. However, one gripe I’ve always had and that you might too is the limited capacity you get on them. Even nicer $200+ ones might only give you a few minutes on a powerful PC, and for large capacity you could easily spend $1000 or more. Neither option was good for me. So I decided to make a better one myself.

To start with, I purchased 3 “Ultra” brand UPSs about a year ago. They are completely silent, small, and functional. Cheap, yes, but functional. However, with my machine on one of them, it only lasts around 3 minutes before powering off. This might be enough to shut it down, but if the power is out for only 15 minutes I’d rather just ride it through. Inside the UPS were 2 small sealed lead acid batteries, like you find in most UPS units, 12V each, in series. They are the same type of battery you find in cars, trucks and boats - just smaller. Using that logic, I took some common hardware and rebuilt this UPS. I did a small bit of research to determine the proper wire size given the load. The UPS used is an Ultra 1000VA. (warning, a small bit of profanity is in the video)…

The tools involved were simple. I had 20 feet of 10 Gauge wire, two ring terminals and several Male/Female disconnects. I needed wire strippers and wire crimpers for that. The UPS itself only required a screwdriver to take apart. I used a nice Dremel to bore a hole in the plastic, though realistically you could do that with a knife. For the batteries, I purchased battery boxes. It was a simple matter to remove the stock batteries, run and terminate the wire, then put the new batteries in place.

There are downsides to doing it with these batteries. Space, of course, and safety. These are standard lead-acid deep cycle batteries, meaning that they can and do release gas when discharging. For that reason, I have these batteries situated outside. To do this safely indoors, you need a well-ventilated room OR you need to use sealed batteries.

I am going to do this with the other two UPS units, too. Next time, however, several things will change. I am going to use sealed batteries, slightly more expensive but completely safe to use indoors. I will also use shorter cable lengths. I will remove the buzzer inside that makes that awful beep, and I will install a slow 80MM or perhaps 120MM fan inside, quiet but enough to bring some air over the unit in case sustained operation heats it up too much.

All in all, I spent about $300, including the tools, to make a UPS with an ~80AH capacity.

There is no better advice to give than one you follow yourself… That’s what I was thinking when I finally bought a Dell UltraSharp 2707WFP monitor last week to use as my primary monitor and replace my older but still trusty Dell 24″ screen. Back in November I was the one who recommended to include this 27 incher in the holiday gift guide. This is what I wrote:

You can upgrade every single component in your PC but at the end of the day if you are still living with a crappy 19″ monitor or generic input devices, you are simply wasting your money and effort. Now, you may be asking yourselves why a 27-inch monitor and not 30″?

Well, bigger is not always better, and leaving all technicalities aside, many of today’s 27″ monitors are using a 1920×1200 pixels native resolution which is comparable to that of a typical 24″ monitor. The idea is that by upgrading to a 27″ screen you will get bigger text and icons, in the other hand 30″ monitors usually use a higher resolution of 2560×1600 which gives plenty of extra desktop space but makes stuff even tinier, so it’s up to you to decide what you prefer.

I know there is people that don’t have any problems at all with small fonts in large displays (24″ and up), so you may attribute my advice to premature eye problems on my part, though I don’t wear any glasses and last time I checked (a year ago or so?) I had near flawless vision. The thing is, I spend countless hours in front of a computer screen and I definitely think going up in dot pitch (what this 27″ monitor essentially does to keep the same resolution in a larger space) could have a very positive impact to my eye strain in the short and long run.

Add to that the fact that the monitor is currently on sale with $200 off, the $999 price tag is not a bargain but every bit helps. I actually ended up buying it from eBay (new) for $959 which is only slightly less money but it includes shipping and taxes, so that saves around $200 extra.

While on the topic, the latest 30″ monitors like the Gateway XHD3000 and Dell’s own 3008WFP, partially solve this problem by offering a built-in scaler chip. The panels’ native screen resolution is still set at 2560×1600, however these don’t rely anymore on videocard processing which reportedly reduces image noise considerably when not using the native resolution, as well as offers other benefits like no longer requiring dual link DVI. The feature obviously adds up to the price (think $1700+), making it a less attractive option today but a good hint of better things to come nevertheless. In the meantime, I can’t wait to receive my new 27″ monitor later this week and pair it up with my current 24″ for total desktop space that will measure 3840×1200 pixels.

Erik posted this on his NATW (News around the web) post yesterday, but in case you missed it, this is too cool to bypass just like that - see the video after my comments below…

In case you haven’t noticed, every week day we have in our frontpage the “News around the web” coverage with 4-5 hand picked items of interest that sometimes deviate from our usual news but are well worth a read. The post also features a “Five years ago in TechSpot” story from our archives, just to give you some perspective of the technology today. Then it’s all rounded up with reviews and articles from fellow websites.

Major thumbs up to Johnny Chung Lee for his creativity using Wii’s hardware. I wonder where did the millions spent in the PS3 and Xbox 360 go? Especially when the later is essentially a rebadged PC.

The guys at Futuremark (developers of the popular 3dmark benchmark) emailed me late last week letting me know of the launch of a new service available through their YouGamers portal that gathers submitted benchmark results, system specs, and ultimately pricing information to build a table of the best values in videocard and processors.

There are obvious shortcomings inherent to the way data is being gathered (all user-submitted, 3dmark tested only, features are not considered), but from a quick glance I took to the stats, it’s at the very least an interesting thing to watch.

An obvious miss I thought was the “Best Bang for the Buck” graphics card where the GeForce 8600 GT is sitting on top, and we know this has never been a product of our particular choice, even when considering the price. But yet, the thing costs less than a hundred dollars nowadays, so perhaps we should revisit those budget choices. The quad-core CPU best value went to the Core 2 Quad Q6600, no surprises there, although it appears to be AMD Phenoms are not even getting listed yet.

You will be surprised when you see the Athlon 64 X2 3600+ getting the most CPU Marks per $, in fact all Athlon X2s were on top of Intel Core 2 Duos, which are generally better choices for gaming but perhaps this is not reflected as dramatically in 3dmark.

While there, I recommend you also check out statistics gathered for the most popular hardware used by 3dmark users in the past 12 months. Nvidia GeForce cards dominate 9 of the top 10 positions (#1 GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB/640MB), while the Core 2 Duo is also comfortably on top of the CPU chart.

While I barely touched on the subject of high system requirements yesterday on my post about Vista and gaming, it got me thinking about my plans of upgrading my desktop system, where gaming Crysis is basically my only justification for upgrading an otherwise very responsive system. And I know what you are thinking, as TechSpot’s Executive Editor I must be running on the latest hardware out there but that is hardly the case, after all we are better off keeping all test hardware under the same roof (in this case, Steve’s roof!) so whenever we need to crunch some numbers and deliver the goods to you, it’s all handled as quickly as possible…

So, my last batch of major upgrades was over a year ago, when the Athlon X2 was still hip and so I’m running a 4400+ CPU with 2GB of memory on a speedy, but unfortunately very noisy 150GB Raptor HDD. Also just recently got to switch from an oldie GeForce 7800gt to a Radeon HD 3850, in fact I got two cards, but my SLI motherboard won’t let me run them in Crossfire. So, what’s the next step? Intel’s Core 2 Quad is my favorite route at the moment but I haven’t quite yet decided that, after all if my only motivation is gaming then a videocard upgrade should take precedence, but as you know both ATI and Nvidia will be playing the Multi-GPU card early this year which is not necessarily the GeForce 8800 Ultra we all wanted.

In the meantime I’m letting my plan unfold where I play Crysis as little and as slow as possible so when my upgrade finally comes, I still get to play it a bit with some more eye candy turned on :). Not to despair though, Far Cry 2 is up and coming, not to mention the wide number of good PC game releases we got last year, oh, and did you know Crysis is set to be a trilogy? Hopefully the sales will justify it.

Finally, here’s some Far Cry 2 video that recently hit the web: