I have implemented an useful feature on the site, so with little to no effort you can suggest your friends to visit a given news story, article or download available on TechSpot. With your collaboration we could further expand using word of mouth, you can identify this feature across the site with this icon:

More new features.

Mountain Dew is arguably one of the most popular drinks for computer geeks (especially for those long nights of gaming). I recently received a six pack of Mountain Dew X [variant 516] (because I think Pepsi approached me about testing it). I am also curious if any of you entered to get a few cans of Mountain Dew X for free. I’ll just quickly list some of my first impressions about the new product!

The color of MD X? It still has that yellowish color of the original Mountain Dew. Some people complain that they wish it was a different color, but I can’t say that I care about what color it is. (Come on now, I am going to be drinking it down too quickly to really pay attention to what color it is.)

Guarana, ginseng, taurine maltodextrin and D-ribose are some of the ingredients that you will find in the latest drink from Pepsi.

The most surprising aspect about Mountain Dew X is that the flavor hasn’t changed too much, even though it appears that it is supposed to be a bit more like an energy drink. It really is difficult to describe the taste of soda over the Internet, so I will just recommend that Mountain Dew fans try it at least once. Pepsi has been doing a fairly good job not releasing too much information about the new product, so it is very possible that you will read a lot of information that isn’t true.

I will have to e-mail Pepsi and see if I can get a bit more information about the new product. Do you guys have any thoughts, questions or comments? It should be interesting to hear a bit more about the product in the next few months.

This looks awesome, even if it never gets released…

foobar2000 v0.9 beta 6 is now available. Changes to this version are “at least”;

* Fixed: Scanning for files would abort upon encountering an unaccessible directory, it now skips to the next directory.
* Fixed: “Playlist/Remove duplicates” crashed when used on an empty playlist.
* Fixed: Invoking foobar2000 with commandline options could crash other applications including Microsoft Outlook & Windows Explorer.

As per the previous post, be sure to leave feedback for the current foobar2000 guide (Or what you’d like covered) in this topic.

If Firefox 1.0.5 doesn’t interest you, Deer Park Alpha 2 (Firefox 1.1) is now available for testing. The main changes over Alpha 1 are;

# Software update system to streamline product upgrades (currently disabled)
# Faster browser navigation with improvements to back and forward button performance
# Drag & drop reordering for browser tabs
# Improvements to popup blocking
# Better support for Mac OS X (10.2 & greater)
# Several security enhancements

The Burning Edge has a more complete changelog. The new Auto-Update feature will apparently be tested over the following weeks. Instead of needing to download a whole new setup, this will allow users to download only the component that needs to be updated. This will significantly reduce the size of updates, not to mention the speed up the installation process, i.e. no more downloading a 5MB file, uninstalling & installing the new release.

I have added a local search engine for the downloads and news archive. Similarly to the one found in the drivers section, it works internally, searching at the database level. You can find it in both section homepages or at this location. This should add yet more functionality to both of our sections, especially for recently added items or very specific searches, where the Google engine might not be as up to date.

For a couple of weeks I’ve been having some problems with Firefox, especially annoying when working with many applications at once, completely slowing down my computer showing 90%+ CPU usage figures, even when idle… a bug for sure, but one that I can not stand anymore. I didn’t want to look around for possible fixes (I did but not for long – with no success – Deer Park Alpha seems to fix this but still too buggy to rely on completely), so I decided this would be a good time to give Opera 8.01 a good big try.

In the past I had only looked at the platform and used it for a limited amount of time, and while I liked it a lot, it seemed like it didn’t justify the move. But now I will use it as my main browser and who knows, maybe it’ll be bye-bye to Firefox and IE this time.

Continuing on with the post-beta-software-on-the-blog, I noticed Foobar 2000 Version 0.9 Beta 5 is now available. This adds changes to tagging & many other fixes also (Apparently). As you know we posted our own Foobar 0.8.3 guide recently (I’ve made a few minor changes to 2 settings BTW). I’d planned on covering additional components at the time, but as the 0.9 Beta’s had begun figured, well, best wait until 0.9′s out for that as they’ve all got to be recompiled.
Columns UI (Of which a 0.9 compatible version is actually out) seems to be a given. If you’ve any other suggestions of course be sure to comment here or in this topic.

Noticed over on The Burning Edge that the latest Deer Park (aka Firefox 1.1) nightly build has some interesting new fixes/changes added;

Fixed: 216466 – Use error pages instead of dialogs for e.g. HTTP networking errors (default browser.xul.error_pages.enabled to true).
Fixed: 298293 – Turn on fastback/bcfache by default in ff 1.1a2 / gecko 1.8b3. (default browser.sessionhistory.max_viewers to 3.)
Fixed: 296850 – Frame injection spoofing with targets (bug 246448 returns – SA15601).
Fixed: Several other security holes.
Fixed: 76831 – [Windows] Slow to restore from minimized state (default config.trim_on_minimize to false).
Fixed: 176079 – Popup blocking does not stop Flash from opening windows.

Be sure to read the page itself for other fixes/bugs & download links if you’re feeling experimental. A lot of the preference changes are covered in our Firefox Guide already.