Tech Olive

For the first two months of 2010, Gigabyte is said to have sold between 3.1 million and 3.3 million motherboards, which is up to par with the 3.2 million to 3.3 million of Asus’ sales. However, Asus won’t go down without a battle. It’s said that they are looking to slash prices of their motherboards to increase sales. The company thinks they’ll be able to ship 5 million motherboards for the first quarter.

via [DigiTimes]

Image Credit: Mike Babcock

Personally, I thought I’d never see this coming, but seeing the swarm of modders fitting their netbooks with HD decoders has persuaded Asus to go ahead and put their own HD decoder in their upcoming 1005PR Eee PC. Other notable features include the new Atom N450, a 10.1″ 1366×768 display, 11 hours of battery life, 250GB HDD, up to 2GB of DDR2 RAM, Bluetooth, WiFi, USB 2.0, Ethernet, 0.3MP webcam, multitouch trackpad, and the Broadcom BCM 70015 HD decoder, which will be able to play full 1080p HD video without a hiccup, something older netbooks can’t brag about. Sadly, no official word from Asus yet on pricing and availability.

[Asus via Hot Hardware]

Redmond’s newest operating system, Windows 7, has sold 90 million licenses since its release in the Fall of 2009. This makes Windows 7 the fastest-selling operating system of all time. The announcement came early last week at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference by Microsoft CFO Peter Klein.

[Windows Blog via MCV]

While most of us are doing the smart thing by utilizing torrents, stragglers still using LimeWire will be thankful to know that AVG will be heading their way to make the LimeWire file sharing client more secure. Using licensed AVG Antivirus SDK, LimeWire will scan files that are downloaded to the user’s PC and let them know if they grabbed a virus on accident. One of the downsides is that the integrated AVG will only be available to LimeWire Pro users. The rest of you using the free version will have to continue doing virus scans of your downloads the traditional way.


via [Download Squad]

Instead of bloating this post with filler, I’ll just get right to the images. You’re welcome. Follow the break.

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In such economic turmoil, who will you turn to for the best cheap games? Well, Tech Olive’s Bargain Bin, of course. Every week, we’ll pick a nice game for under $10 that you should check out. This week, we’ve got a horror title: Penumbra Black Plague; the newest game in the Penumbra series for the paltry sum of $4.97 (with shipping, my total was about $8).

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The past week’s best news…

The Bargain Bin: Call of Juarez
- We’ve all heard about recent budget cutbacks that have caused all of our favorite game developers and producers to cut many jobs to keep up in today’s economy, but what you never hear about is anything that helps the gamers in today’s rough times. We at the Olive understand that gaming can be an expensive hobby and we feel your pain. So, we’ve enlisted ourselves to find, test, and report some great, cheap games every week.

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Good news for all prospective buyers of Microsoft Office 2007. If you buy the 2007 suite between now and September 30, 2010, you’ll be able to grab Office 2010 for free when it’s released this June. We’re not sure why you would want Office 2007 anytime after June, but who knows what crazy things people do these days.

[Microsoft]

Finally, we get to see if Nvidia’s new Fermi card is any match for ATI’s monster HD 5870. Tom Petersen, Director of Technical Marketing at Nvidia gives us a quick walkthrough of their benchmark for the GTX 480 and how the new card really excels in tessellation, but looking at the graph of the results themselves doesn’t really make us ooh and ah. Yes, the GTX 480 does perform a bit better than its competitor, but isn’t this thing supposed to blow it out of the water? It’s a brand new card going up against another card that’s a half-year old….By any means, you can catch the video after the break.

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Bioshock 2’s DLC is scheduled to begin its release with the first piece coming next week on the 11th. The first release will be the Sinclair Solutions Test Pack. While 2K Games has only detailed a few multiplayer changes and additions, we have been assured that there will be even more new multiplayer features, as well as some new content for singleplayer. 2K has promised more details in the coming week. Until then, follow the break for a list of confirmed changes.

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