Update #3: The prize went unclaimed, so we are picking up a new winner: Congratulations Ben Katz! Same rules as below apply, hopefully someone will claim the Asus netbook this time.

Update #2: Congratulations Matthew Iselin, you are the winner of our survey giveaway. We have contacted you at the email you provided, so we can send you the Asus Eee PC 904HA netbook. If we don’t receive a response in the next 72 hours we will have to select a new winner, so get back to us soon :)

Update: Thanks to everyone who filled the survey! We have collected enough information now to be able to tell we have a very educated audience composed in good part of technology enthusiasts and IT professionals. A majority of you plan to spend money on computer hardware and CE equipment in the coming months and plan to make those purchases online. Wait, we knew that already :).

The Asus Eee netbook giveaway winner will be contacted and announced within the next 7 days. Watch out for that email. Thanks again!

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About once a year we ask our readers to help us filling a short survey which will help us targeting our audience better. The best part, we will randomly giveaway an Asus Eee PC 904HA netbook among those who fill the questionnaire.

We use the gathered information to create a profile of TechSpot’s audience, so we can keep offering relevant technology-related advertising on the site. Our business model relies on advertising, so we’ve seen our ups and downs over the last couple of years as you can imagine. But then again, we’ve kept growing strong and just last January we broke our traffic record serving content to a staggering 3.9 million readers.

It shouldn’t take more than a few minutes and make sure you include your email at the end to enter the giveaway drawing. Thanks in advance for your support.

If you’re holding back from testing your copy of Windows 7 because you’re not sure what to do as far as device drivers are concerned, there is something you ought to know (if for some reason you didn’t until this point). Under the hood, Windows 7 is essentially the same as Windows Vista and as such Vista drivers will work just fine a majority of the time.

So, head to your hardware manufacturer’s website and download the latest drivers available for Windows Vista – we also keep a healthy catalog of the latest drivers for graphics cards and other devices in our own drivers section.

After downloading the drivers, run the installation setup and follow the prompts as if you would any other time. If you are presented with any errors due to compatibility, cancel the installation, right click the on the install package’s .exe and choose “Troubleshoot Compatibility”.

This will present you with a “Program Compatibility” wizard of sorts, which is a bit more friendly than on previous version of Windows.

Read the rest of this entry »

Since we redesigned around mid last year, we updated our favicon to match our new looks. Now, whoever told you making a nice and sleek looking favicon was easy, they were blatantly lying!

As it turns out, it’s quite the challenge to turn up with something that looks good within 16×16 pixels, though I’m confident you will like our updated favicon as it looks distinctive, which is perhaps the most important attribute in a favicon when you are browsing around and switching tabs on Firefox, or accessing a bookmark from your favorite browser.

TechSpot new favicon

Google updated their favicon just a few weeks ago and we thought why don’t we as well? I got to work and came up with an improved version of the “T” favicon, adding a bit of a gradient/depth and rounded corners. Kudos to favicon.cc for making my life easier when porting the 16×16 image to .ico format.

We are always working on new and improved features at TechSpot, whether it is fresh new content or new services to help you get the best information out of the web.

Call this the silent launch of TechSpot’s new deals section which is far and away improved over the aging deals we managed just until now. So check it out, here’s your reward for checking out this not-so-often updated staff blog :)

Google Analytics started tracking Chrome visitors just recently which can give us a preliminary but still very incomplete view of the market share the search giant has been able to build from scratch, out of a very celebrated launch of the browser.

As I commented earlier on, this will have to be measured on the short term of at least a couple of months instead of a few days.

For sure Google has got the word out big time, but real success comes when people actually stick to the browser rather than trying it out for a little while and going back to their usual browser of choice.

Here’s some stats from TechSpot visitors for the past couple of days…

Chrome browser share

After a very successful redesign launch on early July, I have been spending some sizable amount of time over the past few weeks catching any bugs and annoyances that inevitably arise after such a dramatic revamp on the site code.

The good news is that the process of optimizing seems to be over, the forums were moved quite successfully, and luckily we were able to blend the old forum style into the new layout with ease.

Now I have started to take some time away from content direction again to polish further certain areas and convert other pieces of the site that are still using the old look. The newsletter, this blog, TS in Spanish, are just some of the areas that still need work. For now I have improved the usability and looks of the TechSpot search engine (Google powered), the user’s login and registration screens, and we are also launching (FINALLY) a reviews/articles RSS feed that had been requested for so long.

As always, thanks for your support and keep on enjoying the site.

Until next time…

Earlier this month I visited New York City and my hotel happened to be a mere block away from the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue. Despite of my love-hate relationship with the brand (I own a Mac Mini, iPod, iPhone and MacBook Pro, but I can’t say I love them all), I had to pay the store a visit… it’s exterior looks are a thing of beauty.

I had been to a few Apple’s stores in the past in Chicago, California, and in Florida, and most of them look about the same on the interior, but this one along with the other one in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District, just make for a serious statement of the company and what they want to achieve with their products. Seriously, for once I felt Apple was making computer enthusiasts a favor by portraying a cool image of technology in general, one that contrasts with the bland beige box.

Here are a few shots I took, some of them showing TechSpot’s homepage on a MacBook Air.

Now you can catch up with the latest technology news from your cell phone using our new gorgeous looking mobile portal.

Although we already offered RSS feeds that are mobile friendly, and depending on your device Opera Mini could let you render the full fledged frontpage, this is even better. We used the tools from startup company MoFuse to build an optimized mobile site that is much friendlier, faster and easier on the eyes. The result is that you can now get our full news coverage (not just headlines and an excerpt, but the full text) from the latest 15 topics covered.

If you are using an iPhone, you get an optimized version, here’s how that looks:

You can access the new TechSpot Mobile using the following address:
http://www.techspot.com/mobile

With the upcoming TechSpot redesign proving more challenging and time consuming than anticipated, I have been optimizing a few things here and there on the current site despite of the fact it’s now officially EOL soon.

But because I’m planning on a few giveaways and we will have people browsing and landing on news story pages a lot, I thought I would improve that on the current layout which had become rather cluttered with too many headlines, so a tabbed box was the solution, here’s how it looks:

Next in my development to do list: TechSpot Mobile!

When time came to think about a new topic for TechSpot’s biweekly poll, I thought that doing something about the state of PC gaming and how sales are being generated was very timely considering the many recent headlines about just that…

The results have been very surprising to an extent:

The poll is not over yet and we are not closing it until later on, but there are a few things that I wanted to point out based on the results already in from 3,000+ voters:

+ First big shock, 30% are not PC gamers. Wow. So, TechSpot is about more than just PC gaming, I get that ;). But still quite a large number of people that are simply stating, “no, we are not here for the games.” And to be completely clear about it, this doesn’t imply that these people are gaming on consoles either.
Even when I consider myself a PC gaming evangelist, I have to admit I’m very happy to see this trend going on here, as it describes in part a prominent future outlook for TechSpot with or without gaming built into the equation… it’s also about the technology, the hardware, and the innovation on the field.

+ The largest group of people (36%) still prefer to buy games at the store, hmm?

+ A minority of 7% buy games through digital distribution. I expected something in this range considering the many, many games not using this medium yet, however for a PC enthusiast site it could still be considered a low share. Personally, I don’t belong in this group either, although I bought the Orange Box through Steam, I still prefer to keep around my shiny box of Crysis and physical DVD just because…
This also gives some weight – even if minor – to the select few who pointed out a few weeks ago how PC game sales are not being measured correctly because those don’t include digital distribution. Agreed on that, also for non-hardcore casual games that are very much ignored despite of growing sales. The pain is still felt however when major development studios focus more on consoles than the PC.

+ 10% do online and boxed. Here’s where I stand, although for the Crysis case above I ran to the local BestBuy on the launch date.

+ 15% pirate games, most likely using BitTorrent. Thank you for your honesty! And no, we don’t collect your IP addresses or anything like that =)