Western Digital finally released its long-awaited 2TB hard drive on Tuesday. WD will release the internal version first, and external version will come afterwards.

The new hard drive, called WD Caviar Green 2TB, is part of the company’s cool and quiet “WD Caviar Green” family. This hard drive family is also available in 1.5TB and 1TB versions.

“While some in the industry wondered if the end consumer would buy a 1 TB drive, already some 10 percent of 3.5-inch hard drive sales are at the 1 TB level or higher, serving demand from video applications and expanding consumer media libraries,” said Mark Geenen, president of Trend Focus, in a statement. “The 2 TB hard drives will continue to satisfy end user’s insatiable desire to store more data on ever larger hard drives.”

WD Caviar Green 2TB is designed with four-platter (500GB per platter) and offers a total of 32 MB cache used to increase throughput.

Western Digital also stated that the 2TB hard drive already available at selected resellers and distributors, priced at $290.00.

As Wordpress has become more and more popular open source blogging and publishing platform, the number of customization options continues to grow. There are many ease-of-use plug-ins and free Wordpress theme contributed over the last couple of years. But, most of them only have simple design and basic functionality.

In this post, I’ve compiled over 40 most popular premium Wordpress themes to choose from. These wordpress themes is labeled as premium because they provides more functionalities and features than simple theme does. Themes are in price range from $30 to $200.

Continue Reading - Most Popular Premium Wordpress Themes…

AMD has continued its rivalry with Intel’s Core i7 processor with the introduction of their two new quad-core Phenom II processors.

The new Quad-Core Phenom II is built using 45-nm processor technology, which makes the chips more complex and lower power consumptions than previous AMD’s processors. The 45-nm process also allows AMD to put more memories on the processors compared with their previous 65-nm technology.

The processors comes in two versions, which is X4 920 (2.8 GHz) and the X4 940 Black Edition (3.0 GHz) with up to 8MB of cache, and offering the performance level in between Intel’s Core 2 Quad and Core i7 processors.

The chips also come with built-in overclockability, which is targeted to enthusiasts and gamers that are looking for a good gaming system, the company said.

Compared with the previous Phenom II chips, the Quad-Core Phenom II has additional 4MB cache, and support for DDR3 memory. The Quad-Core Phenom II will still compatible with the current AM2+ socket, then transformation to a new AM3 socket. AM3 socket is expected to be released in the next few months.

The new processors will be part of AMD’s new Dragon platform, which includes AMD Phenom II X4 processor, 790-Series motherboard chipsets and ATI Radeon 4800-series for media-intensive and gaming desktops.

Google has released a new open-source project, named Google Blog Converters, which can be used to convert (export) between different blog engines.

The script is written in Python, so your server must Python enabled in order to use the script. The current version of the script could only run through command-line or Windows batch script, so you must have the proficiency in Python in order to use the script. For the non-programmers, you can host the script at Google App Engine, that able to run Web-Based application written in Python.

Currently, it only supports the conversion between Wordpress, MovableType, LiveJournal and Blogger blogging system. That means bloggers should be able to convert their blog data into another blog system format.

The future version of this script will support the BlogML data format and a capability to synchronize between blog system using API (application programming interface), but not import-export abilities.

Read more about Google Blog Converters at: http://code.google.com/p/google-blog-converters-appengine/

Microsoft made the Windows 7 Beta download available again after its servers overload with user trying to download the operating system.

According to the latest update at Windows 7 Blog, they have decided to remove the 2.5 million limit and the download page will be up until January 24th 2009.

You can directly go to the download page here: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/beta-download.aspx

Updated: Microsoft just announced that the beta download will be available through February 10th

If you’re often take a screen shot on your PC, you’re already noticed some inefficiency of Windows built-in screen capture software. Windows 7 and Vista has a lot of improvements over Windows XP by adding a Snipping Tool that can capture a rectangle, a single window, or a free-form shape. But, the built-in tools still unable to capture the mouse pointer, and doesn’t have a timer.

Windows 7 Snipping Tool

If you plan to take a screen shots for your software documentation – in order to create illustrations to give more understanding for your software users, those limitations could be a problem and you need to do extra job of capturing what is happening on your screen. Without a timer, for example, it is impossible to capture a drop-down menu unless you press the ‘Print Screen’ button on your keyboard, but you need to crop the picture to get only the area you need. But even you get the screen shot you want, the Windows built-in screen capture tools still can’t capture your mouse pointer.

Continue Reading - Take Better Screen Shots in Windows 7 or Vista…

Microsoft has delayed the public release of its Windows 7 Beta download due to overwhelming server load that Microsoft servers couldn’t handle.

Microsoft main website and the Windows 7 download page were unreachable this morning.

The announcement was made late Friday afternoon at Windows 7 Blog.

“Due to very heavy traffic we’re seeing as a result of interest in the Windows 7 Beta, we are adding some additional infrastructure support to the Microsoft.com properties before we post the public beta” the message says.

The announcement doesn’t give a specified time for when the Windows 7 beta will be available again.

According to Microsoft, the beta has already posted yesterday that offer 2.5GB to 3.2GB download starting 3 p.m. EST. But, it was temporarily removed due to overwhelming server load.

On Wednesday, Microsoft has set today as the date for Windows 7 Beta download. Microsoft also noted that they will cap the number of activation keys for Windows 7 Beta at 2.5 million.