I have to say that Microsoft have surprised me this time round, not only have they created a device that I would like to get my hands on due to its sumptuous looks, it has had decent reviews, sold out (though from what I’m told, not many Zune’s were actually available anyway) and improved the software on it no end.
Well I finally got my hands on an X25-M SSD drive from Intel (Thanks Alistair!) and have put it through its paces on my home built PC. The main thing to say here is that you don’t need the latest SSD to get an improvement when using Windows 7 as the operating system is an improvement in itself in terms of performance tweaks and such like.
The UK Government have this past week, announced that a “broadband tax” increase of 50p a month (£6 a year) may well become law in the near future in an attempt to push forward high speed broadband across the United Kingdom. Though some will argue that minimum high speed broadband is no longer the 2mb speed that the UK Government wants to push for.
As you may already know – Windows 7 ships with DirectX 11 – testing that part of the OS is a little hard right now as not one manufacturer is shipping any DirectX 11 hardware. So this performance guide is based on Windows 7 RTM and an nVidia GTX 295 with the latest 191.00 Beta Forceware drivers and on an i7 920 overclocked to 3.8 GHz. All games were played in 1920×1200 resolution with every title running on its highest settings.
What a Broken Zune HD Display Looks Like
Gizmodo has posted about some faulty Zune HD’s. It’s tough to know just how often this particular problem is occurring, but we’ve heard a fair share of reports on the Zune HD’s otherwise gorgeous OLED display having performance glitches. And needless to say, you’d notice it.