Thomas De Maesschalck's blog » Technology

First Gamescom articles are up

Thomas De Maesschalck — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 21:55:58 +0000

I went to Cologne, Germany for a couple of days this week to visit Gamescom. This new trade show is the replacement for the Games Convention in Leipzig and it was immediately a big hit, Koelmesse announced today that the first edition of the five-days long fair received a total of 245,000 visitors, making it the biggest video game expo in the world.

Here’s some coverage of Gamescom I posted this weekend:

Gamescom boothbabes

DCMM 2009 casemods at Gamescom

A closeup of the 1099EUR ASUS MARS graphics card

And some hands-on photos of the Razer Naga

A full Gamescom report and a blog post about my trip will follow later this week.

Going to GamesCom this summer

Thomas De Maesschalck — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 20:37:18 +0000

It’s been a while since my last post blog post, didn’t really have much to say

This week I booked a hotel room for GamesCom, this is a new games and entertainment show in Cologne, Germany. It’s somewhat the unofficial successor of the Games Convention event that took place in Leipzig the last couple of years.

I don’t really know what to expect as it’s a new expo, but I hope it will be good. We’ll be staying in Cologne from August 19-21 to cover the event. Hopefully lots of exciting stuff will be announced at the show.

Windows 7 beta leaked, looks good

Thomas De Maesschalck — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 03:24:26 +0000

As you may have heard by now, the first beta version of Windows 7 has been leaked on the Internet. Windows Vista shipped in November 2006 and the next version of Microsoft’s operating system may arrive a lot sooner than most people anticipated because, too put it mildly, Windows Vista didn’t really manage to capture people’s hearts.

Vista received lots of bad press and Microsoft is probably desperate to get Windows 7 out asap to fix this PR problem.

Although vaguely hinting at a 2010 release date, Microsoft hasn’t publicly disclosed the launch date of Windows 7 yet and the latest beta indicates it could well be a lot sooner. Earlier this week I heard a rumour that it may be in the first half of 2009, and judging by the quality of the first beta this shouldn’t be a problem.

There are already a couple of previews of Windows 7 on the web and today I had the opportunity to lay my hands on a system with VMware and the Windows 7 beta ISO. I never bothered to upgrade to Windows Vista but my first impressions of Windows 7 are pretty good, the beta is very stable. It feels a lot like the operating system that Vista should have been.

A peek inside Intel’s press sample cabinet

Thomas De Maesschalck — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 22:11:53 +0000

While browsing around a bit on Intel’s blogs to find out if there were any new juicy bits of information I found an funny post by Daniel Snyder, Intel’s press sample guy. He provides a very brief peek into his press sample cabinet and shows a couple of interesting things. First up is a photo of the new fast Intel X-25M SSDs but there’s also a photo of an ancient relic: a 10MB PCMCIA flash card next to some Intel bunny suit dolls. Snyder says that many years ago, the 10MB solid state disk was one of the most popular items in his sample cabinet. I’m not exactly sure how old this card is but I estimate it’s around 15 years old.

Snyder also recalls that HardOCP reviewer Steve once told him his iguana ate his Pentium 4 Northwood 2.40B review sample, and he even had the X-rays to prove it!