ID Software has announced that it is hiring developers to build a new version of Doom 4...

While many people would love to see another version of Doom, with the latest range of 3D graphics many punters would be wondering where the plot will go.

Popular download site TorrentSpy has lost its case against the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and has been ordered to pay $110m in damages...

US District Judge Florence-Marie Cooper imposed a fine of $30,000 on the site's owners, Justin Bunnell and Wes Park, for 3,699 cases of copyright infringement.

Just about a week after re-branding its GeForce 8800 GS into GeForce 9600 GSO, Nvidia finally admitted that its product lineup was too confusing for consumers because of its model numbering scheme...

“It is a challenge that we are looking at right now. There is a need to simplify it for consumers, there is no question. We think that the people who understand and know GeForce today, they are okay with it – they understand it. But if we are going to widen our appeal, there’s no doubt that we have to solve that problem,” said Roy Taylor, vice president of content business development at Nvidia, in an interview with Gamesindustry.biz web-site.

I personally have never had a use for a PC with four network controllers but I understand there are those that have. For those that have will be probably interested in this new Gigabyte P45 motherboard...

For the two of you that have, Gigabyte has just the board for you - its new P45-DQ6 motherboard, based on Intel's P45 chipset which sports four (count 'em) gigabit ethernet jacks.

Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics have already launched 22x DVD burners and now Sony and BenQ plan to launch competing products in July and the third quarter of 2008...

BenQ will have Lite-On IT, the largest Taiwan-based maker of half-height optical disc drives, undertake ODM production of its 22x DVD burners, while Sony's will be produced by either Sony NEC Optiarc, a joint venture of Sony and NEC, or an ODM/OEM maker in Taiwan or South Korea, the sources indicated.

You think your personal information is priceless. But everything has a price, even your stolen bank account information...

McAfee Avert Labs has discovered a price list that criminals use to buy and sell credit card numbers, bank account log-ins, and other consumer data that have been filched from unsuspecting Web surfers.

Boys who don't play videogames at all are at greater risk of getting into trouble than those who play violent games occasionally, according to two Harvard psychologists...

"If you look at the violent crime in the US over the past 20 years among teenagers it's gone down, and gone down significantly, and if you look at videogame play, it's gone up," said Dr Lawrence Kutner and Dr Cheryl Olsen of Harvard Medical School in a recent interview.

All this protection and for what, it seems developers are just hurting those that fork out their hard earned cash with all this ridiculous protection. Bioshock was a joke and now Mass Effect PC is set to be every bit as bad.

Just today I upgraded my motherboard. However to get Windows Vista working again I had to ring up the Microsoft support line and enter a 45-digit code which then allowed me to receive another 45-digit code. I then had to re-enter this new code to re-activate my genuine copy of Vista. Whereas alternatively I could have downloaded the OS for free, installed one of the countless cracks that takes less than 10 seconds to install and be on my merry way.

Furthermore this would mean that next time I want to upgrade my motherboard or hard drive for example I do not need to re-activate Windows. Software developers have been up in arms for years now about piracy but what have they done to discourage it? Increase prices and make it almost impossible for paying customers to register the software, sounds logical. Anyway I will stop ranting and you can read more on this matter at fastsilicon.com...

Mass Effect PC will require an online connected activation courtesy of SecureRom servers every ten days. Apparently, for forever. Now, while it's clear Bioware and EA will go out of it's way to insure they avoid the activation debacle that hounded releases like Bioshock, it is also clear that when you purchase games these days you're not actually buying a consumable product that you "own" in the sense that you own a towel or a pair of shoes.

After a decent freshman year, the Zune appears to be having a bit of a sophomore slump...

In its first year on the market, Microsoft shipped 1.2 million Zunes, reaching about 3 percent of the U.S. market for MP3 players by the first quarter of 2007. A year later, the company's market share stands at about 4 percent, but that slight gain comes as Microsoft has expanded from one hard-drive model into a family of products that includes both flash-based and hard drive-based units.

EVGA has announced new USB graphics adapters (UGAs) for personal computers that can be plugged directly to USB connectors and do not require any spare PCI Express or PCI slots...

“DisplayLink technology enables us to deliver a UGA that is affordable, portable, and easy to use, which dovetails perfectly with EVGA’s strategy of penetrating broader consumer markets. At the same time, we hope that the EVGA UV12 and UV16 will help bring DisplayLink’s exciting USB display technology to a wider mainstream audience,” said Joe Darwin, director of marketing for EVGA.

Microsoft has finally unleashed Windows XP Service Pack 3 as well us pumping up its delivery of Vista SP1...

The firm put the software on its Windows Update and Download Centre sites, having sorted out a fix for its Microsoft's Dynamics RMS retail management package.

Weapons manufacturers are planning the next generation of military robots using designs based on creatures from the natural world...

BAE Systems had signed a $38m contract with the US Army Research Laboratory to develop autonomous intelligence-gathering robots for use in military operations.

OCZ has released a rather impressive and I imagine expensive DDR3 memory kit that can reach 2GHz using two 2GB modules...

OCZ Technology, a leading supplier of advanced dynamic random access memory, on Monday unleashed the world’s first 4GB memory kit that can operate at 2.0GHz clock-speed. The product may become popular primarily among gamers seeking for absolutely highest performance with their desktop computers.

Intel will officially launch its 4-series chipsets at Computex 2008, while motherboard makers will start shipping products in the third week of June...

Initial 4-series chipset shipments will consist of the P45 and P43, for which the previously reported PCI Express compatibility bug has been fixed already. However, the G45 and G43 IGP versions will be delayed for another 2-3 weeks while Intel works to correct issues with VC1 hardware decoding and to increase the graphics core frequency to 800MHz.

Gigabyte said they will be showing off its new Intel P45 board, named the Gigabyte EP45 Extreme at Computex 2008 in Taipei...

The board boasts a new cooling system called the Hybrid Silent Pipe, which the company claims allows for cooling through “ventilation from nature”, effectively removing heat through a sort of tower-like heat sink. The cooling system is also made out of pure copper, to facilitate water cooling.

Two individuals have been arrested after a raid on a computer fair in Bradford...

The pair were arrested for allegedly selling copied computer software and computer games, and approximately 12,000 counterfeit software discs and over 150 devices used for 'chipping' various games consoles were seized from their stalls.

This summer we are going to see an large scale GPU war, something we haven't really seen for a few years now...

Last year, the mere suggestion of ATI doing well was laughed at, but the firm took the outright lead with the X2 cards and forced NV into the reactionary GX2. ATI can do three and four-way adequately, albeit with the the Broken OS, while NV can only do it in name. Same with the bucket called 'hybrid' for both power and frame rate.

Bounceback e-mail messages are becoming a real pain as they tend to come in at a constant trickle, maybe one or two every hour...

Spammers like to put fake information in their e-mail messages in order to sneak them past e-mail filters. Because e-mail filters now just delete messages that come from nonexistent domains, the spammers like to make their messages look like they come from real e-mail addresses. That means, if your e-mail address has been published on the Web somewhere, you're a prime candidate for backscattering.

Some young guys have created a company called "Xobni" and they plan to release a new type of e-mail client soon that is said to outclass Outlook...

Outlook is now the most popular e-mail tool in the world, used by hundreds of millions of people. And Mr. Smith, now 23, thinks that the program is so poorly suited for most people’s intensive e-mail habits that he has co-founded a company, Xobni, intended to fix it.

Due to the fact that Intel is restricting its Atom processor to only be used with mini-ITX-based motherboards, mini-ITX chassis are expected to see a surge in demand in June...

In order to make a clear separation between nettop products and traditional entry-level PCs, Intel only allows Atom processors to be used with mini-ITX motherboards, limiting the platform with a lack of PCI Express and only a single DIMM slot for up to 2GB DDR2 memory.

Webware has spoken with the guys at Flickr about their new video hosting service...

It's proven to be popular, despite a small uprising from a portion of its diehard users that was later quelled with Yahoo-subsidized doughnuts. Flickr wouldn't share the exact number of videos that have been added, but the site is teeming with them. A casual advanced-search for videos with a space in the title yields more than 124,000 clips, but the true number is likely to be significantly larger.

The high volume of Atom processor orders from PC vendors has left Intel unable to meet demand...

The company expects 8.9-inch Eee PC shipments to surpass those of 7-inch models by the late May. In the third quarter, the proportion of 7-inch models to overall Eee PC shipments will drop below 30%. However, although the 8.9-inch model contributes a better gross margin, overall gross margins have slid slightly.

Critically acclaimed video game Grand Theft Auto (GTA) IV is on course to beat the record for highest first week sales of any video game in the UK...

The title sold a record 609,000 copies on its first day of release, generating an estimated £24.4m ($48.5m).

The new Intel P45 chipset will be launched next week and we will be brining you a review on it. For now here is some info on the Foxconn version...

What we do know is that it's blue, it's got two PCI Express graphics connectors for Crossfire support, a dual BIOS, 8-phase PWM for the processor and two-phase PWM for memory power regulation. In what we think might be a first, it also has solder points for hooking up a multi-meter to measure voltage, which will no doubt appeal to the geeky modding crew.

Analysts are expecting the graphics card market to further soften in Q2 2008...

Inline with expectations, the market of graphics adapters dropped noticeably in Q1 2008. Even though ATI, graphics product group of Advanced Micro Devices, posted one of the lowest market share results in over six years, it still managed to steal a tiny piece of the market from its rivals, however, the biggest winner in Q1 2008 was Via Technologies and its S3 Graphics business unit.

Yerli from Crytek believed that piracy is a big problem for Crytek but he also said the game would run better with more memory and quad-core processors so is he right?

Let me begin by saying that I’m a huge fan of the game Crysis. I’ve bought more than half a dozen copies of the game and we’ve spent many pleasant hours in the lab fragging one another. But there’s a problem with Crysis, and that it that it quickly became known as a game that a computer won’t play well, no matter how powerful or expensive it is.

So, why was it PC owners aren't getting a version of Madden this year again? Oh, yes, of course. Piracy. EA Sports boss Peter Moore explains:

Piracy's a big issue on the PC. I can't turn a blind eye to the fact that it's very difficult for us...and we lose money making a game. At some point, I have an obligation not to bring out products that lose money.

AMD has promised that its next-generation CPU marchitecture will be, as the Pythons would have it, something completely different...

Giuseppe Amato, the grandly-titled Technical Direct of Sales and Marketing for EMEA, let slip in a recent interview that "If I look at the next generation architecture of our CPU, then it will definitely not be, how can I say, comparable with the Phenom. It will look completely different."

Though Hewlett-Packard (HP) has launched its 2133 Mini-Note, channel vendors expect the Eee PC to still lead in the low-cost PC market...

Though the HP Mini-Note has a larger storage capacity because of its hard drive, its overall performance, price and battery capacity come behind those of the Eee PC, according to sources in the channel.

AMD's next-generation processors will solve problems that cannot be addressed with hardware...

“If I look at the next-generation architecture of our CPU, then it will definitely not be, how can I say, comparable with the Phenom. It will look completely different. [It will] solve problems that today we think can never be addressed by hardware,” said Giuseppe Amato, technical director of sales and marketing for EMEA region at AMD in an interview with Custom PC web-site.

We are still yet to test a SSD mainly due to their immature state. Things are moving forward slower than we had hoped but these new Intel versions look promising...

Benchmarks and real-life usage situations show massive improvements over hard disks in some cases, just to give terrible disappointments in others. Ever seen the otherwise pointless Sysmark? Well, SSD vs HDD there doesn't look too 'flashy'.

The best new 802.11n wireless routers deliver strong performance, coverage, and compatibility but picking the right one for your network is more complicated than ever. Our lab tests reveal the top choices, whether you are looking for a basic bargain or consider speed and range paramount.

What a difference a couple of years makes. In our first roundup of draft-802.11n Wi-Fi routers (see "Wireless Routers: The Truth About Superfast Draft-N"), we found so many problems, we couldn't recommend any of them: Firmware was buggy, interoperability between vendors was hit-and-miss, and performance was not as good as that of some enhanced, earlier-generation 802.11g routers.