photo credit: Ioan Sameli

All this goes quite transparently, but in some cases, you may be willing to influence this for your own purposes and I found two situations that can be easily tweaked with the help of the following tools.

Process Tamer is a tiny (140k) and super efficient utility for Microsoft Windows that runs in your system tray and constantly monitors the CPU usage of other processes. When it sees a process that is overloading your CPU, it reduces the priority of that process temporarily, until its CPU usage returns to a reasonable level. That way, you avoid seeing one program hugging all the CPU to death.

Exactly on the opposite, it may happen that you want to strongly favor the process that is running in front of you. It may be a game, your spreadsheet program or anything else. MZ CPU Accelerator automatically boosts foreground apps without your changing of internal setting.

With these, you are ready to tame your process for sure.

The US retailer NewEgg indicated this week that they found in their stock what appears to be fake Intel Core i7 920 CPUs. Actually, they would have sold a small number of them before becoming aware of the issue.

What a world!

Those elements resulting from the observation of long-term markets and futures, they have quite good reliability. But if the recession does not seem ready to end, why this move up? As a matter of fact, memory buyers are probably preparing themselves for the arrival of the new Windows 7 and its unavoidable additional resource demands. Furthermore, while many processors (specially from AMD, but not only) may be using DDR3 memory but also older DDR2 with no perceivable performance loss, the transition from DDR2 to DDR3 is slowly happening. And this is pushing DDR3 quantities up.

So, if you have a clear need today, I would recommend you to buy your DDR3 memory now. But if you think that you can use DDR2 memory (if you have to ask, that’s your situation), you’d better wait for the relative price slowdown that will be happening on DDR2.

If you are visiting Paris, you must know about rue Montgallet. This is the nice little geek secret here. A street (and a couple of neighbouring ones) where you will find literally one computer shop every other door step. Prices are as low as they can get in France.

I usually start from the top (Metro station Montgallet), moves down the street collecting prices, possibly continuing in rue de Charenton. Then, having decided about the model-price I want to buy I come back to the metro. This is done very easily because for most products the prices are displayed in lists outside the shops. If it’s not listed, the prices is not worth asking for inside.

This is the first-hand observation I made this week. I wanted to add 2GB of RAM memory to my main PC (going from 2GB to 4GB RAM allows to accelerate all my activities in Photoshop when I open more than 3 or 4 12-mega-pixel images at the same time). So, as the normal Parisian geek I am, I ran to the Paris Mecca of PC computing: Montgallet street.

There, I could buy 2 memory modules in a matched XMS2 set of DDR-2/800 PC6400 (CAS5) from Corsair for a mere 41€ and observe that -if you accept lower performance or less famous brands- prices can go as low as 19€. This is the right time to buy RAM!

However, I should also indicate that DRAMexchange announces a possible small increase of RAM prices during this Summer. Maybe the beginning of a small recovery for a market that has been very favorable to the customer for a long time?

Important notice for those intending to do exactly like me: Under Windows (at least if you do not use the 64-bit version of the OS), installing 4GB of RAM will only provide 3.5GB of really available memory. But at this price, I have no issue with wasting 512MB…

Now DOSBox.com offers a real solution with a free emulator.

Usable for MS-Windows, most Linux boxes, some Apple OS and OS/2.

I observed not the forum itself, but people going to the Forum (located in the Shanghai International Convention Center). Some of them were cramed in the Sofitel Jin Jiang Oriental Pudong (Tong Jin Jiang Pudong Hotel). Man! Do they think that the attendees are dumb? Any person (probably identified by his/her westerner/caucasian appearance) staying more than 30 seconds in the lobby would be met by some Intel-appointed people asking “are you here for the Intel forum?” and immediately trying to help you to the shuttles.

This is nice, I suppose, if your lost. But it seems that the Intel people were guessing that any IDF participants would have to be too dumb to see the buses stopped in front of the hotel doors.

Was it an evaluation of the mental capacity of developers or of journalists?

Intel Developer Forum – Shanghai 2008.

Prices may keep plumetting but sales are stabilizing, and this could be the end of it in 2008.

As said before, this is a great way for AMD to differentiate itself, but the prices are not expected to go down immediately. Either because AMD does not want to shoot itself in the foot or because the quantities will not be huge for a few more weeks.

Let’s wait for the next price war between Intel and AMD, remembering that most games do not take advantage of more than 2 cores.

AMD, wake up!

This is not a very good omen for the financial come-back of Intel’s main competitor that is still depending a lot of this year’s launch of 3- and 4-core processors.

Source: Tom’s hardware.

It appears that it’s only a matter of checking the kernel configuration to go further. All the details in “Got more than a gig of RAM and 32-bit Linux? Here’s how to use it“.

This means that if you need either DRAM modules to upgrade your computer or Flash memory cards, you are both quite alone on this market and prices should be nice to you.

• 13 graphics cards tested under Crysis by Revioo.com (français)
• DirectX 9 vs 10 in the Crysis Demo (English)
• Tweaks to get Crysis DX10ish Features in Windows XP (English)
• “Crysis 32 vs 64 bit – the real story?” is YouGamers commenting on the “Crysis (Demo Performance)” short post of Legion Hardware (English).

What you will notice is that plenty of these web sites consider that a normal display must have 1440×900 or 1680×1050 resolution to play Crysis confortably (I did not say “to play cheaply”).

Today is Blog Action Day: The day that bloggers chose to try and help save the planet from the impact of Human activity. For my own part, I decided to collect a few ideas to save energy in your computer usage:

• Upgrade your gear
• Dim your screen
• Consolidate and virtualize computers
• Turn off peripherals
• Kill unnecessary processes
• Get a smart power switch
• Enable energy saver settings
• Unplug energy vampires
• Spin down your hard drive
• Shut down the computer

Another trick: Power saving remote computing.

Expect no less than:

• Hellgate: London is for multiplayer action
• Gears of War brings more action on the PC
• Crysis is expected to be the First Person Shooter of the year
• John Woo’s Stranglehold is already on the market and looks impressive on wide screens at 1920×1200 resolutions (or more) if you have a good hardware

I can forecast that you will be buying some of these and that it will mean that you will look into multi-core CPUs, new graphics cards and possibly a new Windows Vista (for DirectX 10 compatibility).

The basic principle of adding Flash memory to a disk drive is to provide some kind of cache memory buried less deeply into the disk system and that the Operating System (Windows Vista) would be able to use at will to improve disk system performance.

Thanks! But no thanks! It increase the cost and the complexity of the whole PC system. Where cache memory was a simple mean for the disk sub-system to optimize its operation without asking anything from the Operating System (it only sees a slightly faster drive), Flash memory of hybrid disks add one more task to Windows. Even worse, Windows already use several cache systems to optimize disk susb-systems. They all rely on the DRAM central memory of your PC; They are able to adapt to the size of the memory, to the user behaviour, to the list of active tasks/programs. But here, without even removing any of that feature (which is easily forgotten because it is nicely embedded) another layer is added.

Seriously, rather than buying a hybrid disk drive with all its added costs, I recommend that you go and invest into some more central PC memory. A little more SDRAM is what has the best impact on your PC performance (including the visible performance of the hard disk drive).

Last minute: Now, disk manufacturers are willing to explain that this is not because of thechnology that the hybrid disks are not more common. It’s merely that Flash memory prices are too high (!) and you should put more than the ususal 256MB usually found nowadays in hybrid models currently on the shelves [1].

When you manufacture a quad-core CPU, it is quite common to find on that it not working properly during the tests. So, what do you do with this slice of non-functional silicon that you cannot sell as a quad-core CPU? A triple-core CPU! Instead of loosing the silicon slab that they wanted to sell to the highest bidder, they can sell it for a definitely lower price while grabbing a lot of media attention. It puts AMD on the fast track again!