As you all may know, Sony’s Playsta­tion Net­work has been down over the last 6 days, due to an “Exter­nal Intru­sion” (in other words, it’s been hacked)

Sony have con­firmed this morn­ing that “Per­sonal Infor­ma­tion”, for exam­ple: Names, Addresses, PSN User­names & Pass­words have been stolen from their systems.

They have yet to con­firm if Credit/Debit Card details have been compromised.

We advise EVERYONE that is signed up to Playsta­tion Net­work to change ALL pass­words, if you use the same one for Playsta­tion Network.

Also, Sony have stated that any­one sub­scribed to PSN+ will NOT get com­pen­sa­tion for the down­time.

The new GeForce GTX 550 Ti brings awe­some DX11 per­for­mance to the main­stream $149 PC gam­ing segment.

The new $149 3D Vision wire­less glasses kit trans­forms PC games, videos, pho­tographs, and Web brows­ing into an amaz­ing, immer­sive 3D experience.

PC gam­ing just got a lot more fun today with the intro­duc­tion of two new prod­ucts: the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 Ti graph­ics pro­cess­ing unit (GPU) and a new ver­sion of the NVIDIA 3D Vision wire­less glasses kit, both with an esti­mated e-tail price of $149 USD.

The GTX 550 Ti is the lat­est in NVIDIA Fermi line of con­sumer GPUs, designed to deliver stun­ning DirectX 11 (DX11) per­for­mance. It brings a new level of price/performance to main­stream PC gam­ing, while main­tain­ing excep­tion­ally quiet acoustics and requir­ing min­i­mal power.

Like all NVIDIA “DX11 Done Right” GPUs, the GTX 550 Ti deliv­ers the world’s fastest per­for­mance in its class for DX11 games. Compared with the clos­est com­pet­i­tive prod­uct, the GTX 550 Ti is up to 50 per­cent faster in today’s newest DX11 tes­sel­lated games, and 38 per­cent fasterⁱ in previous-generation DX9 and DX10 games. And with NVIDIA SLI tech­nol­ogy, the industry’s most scal­able multi-GPU plat­form, gamers will be able to increase their PC’s gam­ing per­for­mance by adding a sec­ond GeForce GTX 550 Ti.

Intro­duced two years ago, NVIDIA 3D Vision has quickly trans­formed con­sumers’ gam­ing, pho­to­graphic, and video expe­ri­ences, and cur­rently sup­ports more than 500 3D games, a broad ecosys­tem of hard­ware and soft­ware part­ners, and 3DVisionLive.com, the first ever online 3D Vision com­mu­nity. Today, NVIDIA is pleased to announce a new ver­sion of the 3D Vision wire­less glasses kit that costs $50 less than the orig­i­nal ver­sion, but also offers the same great 3D qual­ity and fea­tures, and a recharge­able bat­tery life of 60 hours, a 50 per­cent improve­ment over the original.

“The GTX 550 Ti paired with our 3D Vision tech­nol­ogy pro­vides gamers with an amaz­ing low-cost plat­form that deliv­ers an awe­some immer­sive expe­ri­ence,” said Drew Henry, gen­eral man­ager of GeForce GPU busi­ness at NVIDIA. “As the leader in PC gam­ing hard­ware, we are excited about the future of PC gam­ing and how we can make those expe­ri­ences as immer­sive as possible.”

With an esti­mated sell­ing e-tail price start­ing at $149 USD, the GTX 550 Ti is avail­able start­ing today from the world’s lead­ing add-in card part­ners, includ­ing ASL, ASUS, Col­or­ful, ECS, EVGA, Gain­ward, Galaxy, Giga­byte, Inno­vi­sion 3D, Jet­way, Lead­tek, MSI, Palit, Point of View, PNY, Sparkle, Zotac and others.

Sony Vaio will cover the costs to repair your nVidia chip if the machines is four years old or less!

Dis­torted video, ran­dom char­ac­ters or blank screen issues due to fail­ure of the NVIDIA graph­ics chip.

In July 2008, NVIDIA pub­licly acknowl­edged a fail­ure asso­ci­ated with some of their graph­ics proces­sors (GPU) due to a man­u­fac­tur­ing defect in the graph­ics chip pack­ag­ing. At that time Sony and NVIDIA jointly inves­ti­gated whether VAIO mod­els equipped with this GPU were impacted by this issue. This inves­ti­ga­tion revealed that the issue had not occurred in such VAIO models.

How­ever, after closely mon­i­tor­ing the sit­u­a­tion, Sony has now deter­mined that a very small per­cent­age of VAIO com­put­ers with the NVIDIA graph­ics chips may be affected.
These PCs may exhibit dis­torted video, ran­dom char­ac­ters or a blank screen due to a fail­ure of the NVIDIA graph­ics chip.

Res­o­lu­tion
As a part of our com­mit­ment to qual­ity, for any cus­tomer who requires repair of their VAIO com­puter due to the NVIDIA graph­ics proces­sor issue, Sony will cover the cost of repair (parts and labor) at no charge dur­ing the first four years fol­low­ing the date of pur­chase of the mod­els in ques­tion (see list below).
In case your model is shown in the list below, we invite you to con­tact SONY VAIO directly to arrange ser­vice for your VAIO.

Applic­a­ble Mod­els
• VGN-FZ11x, VGN-FZ18x, VGN-FZ21x, VGN-FZ31x, VGN-FZ38x
• VGN-AR11x, VGN-AR21x, VGN-AR31x
• VGN-C1Zx, VGN-C1Zx
• VGC-LM1xx, VGC-LM2xx
• VGC-LT1xx, VGC-LT2xx

Annoyed by adverts? Trou­bled by track­ing? Both­ered by ban­ners? Install Adblock Plus now to regain con­trol of the inter­net and change the way that you view the web.

* Block all ads auto­mat­i­cally, no dis­trac­tions
* Browse faster and safer
* Fully cus­tomiz­able — you are in con­trol
* Easy to con­tribute, report issues when you see them

Down­load for Fire­fox here: Click here
Down­load for Chrome here: Click here

Adblock Plus allows you to regain con­trol of the inter­net and view the web the way you want to. The add-on is sup­ported by over forty fil­ter sub­scrip­tions in dozens of lan­guages which auto­mat­i­cally con­fig­ure it for pur­poses rang­ing from remov­ing online adver­tis­ing to block­ing all known mal­ware domains. Adblock Plus also allows you to cus­tomize your fil­ters with the assis­tance of a vari­ety of use­ful fea­tures, includ­ing a con­text option for images, a block tab for Flash and Java objects, and a list of block­able items to remove scripts and stylesheets.

If you have recently re-installed win­dows on your Advent Roma Lap­top, you may strug­gle to find the dri­vers for it.

Click here to down­load the dri­vers from MediaFire

Part One: Click here
Part Two: Click here

Advent Roma Audio Dri­vers
Advent Roma Chipset Dri­vers
Advent Roma Intel Matrix Stor­age Dri­vers
Advent Roma LAN Dri­vers
Advent Roma OSD Dri­vers
Advent Roma Touch­pad Dri­vers
Advent Roma VGA Dri­vers
Advent Roma WLAN Drivers

The files are 127MB in size in total, so it may take a while to download.

A mali­cious peice of soft­ware called “Sys­tem Tool 2011″ has swept the Inter­net over the last few days in a mas­sive attack.

The cre­ators of this mali­cious soft­ware have attacked a num­ber of third-party adver­tis­ing web­sites which dis­play ad’s on thou­sands of web­sites, such as the Lon­don Stock Exchange, eBay, Auto­trader, Megau­pload, Medi­afire and MyVue.
This soft­ware installs itself onto a machine by using a popup claim­ing your pc is infected, the user clicks this, often through an equally fake red ‘X’ in the top right cor­ner which in turn gives the popup per­mis­sion to install the ‘Sys­tem tool’ pro­gram on your PC.

We can how­ever remove this mali­cious soft­ware from any com­puter for £49.99 includ­ing a 1 year licence of Bull­guard Inter­net Secu­rity Ver­sion 10.

Call us on 01902 713 137 or con­tact us using the con­tact form.

Here are a cou­ple of exam­ples of what you may see if you are infected with Sys­tem Tool 2011:

Packard Bell Easyn­ote SJ51 XP Audio Drivers

If you have rein­stalled your Packard Bell Easyn­ote SJ51 with Win­dows XP, you may stug­gle to find the dri­vers for it.

Fol­low these steps:

Try…  Click here for Dri­ver Download

If Conex­ant installer gives the com­mon error.….force install the conex­ant sound drivers.

Device Manager>Audio device on High Def Bus

Right click, Update Driver

Say “no, not at this time” for con­nect­ing to Win­dows Update

Select> Install from a list or spe­cific location

Select> Don’t search I will choose the dri­ver to install

In the list of com­mon hard­ware types,choose “show all”

Remove the check from “Show Com­pat­i­ble Hard­ware” and click on “Have Disk”

Next…browse to C:\Swsetup\sp34386

Choose the “inf” and ignore any protest from XP

Reboot.

Your audio will be working.

As a lot of Advent lap­top own­ers may know, there is a lit­tle fan but­ton on most Advent lap­tops which turns “Silent Mode” on and off.
After re-installing win­dows, you will need to install the fol­low­ing soft­ware called “Advent OSD”. This will enable you to use Silent Mode.

Silent mode slows down the Cen­tral Pro­cess­ing Unit and qui­etens down the fan(s)

Link: Click here for OSD Software