259w ago - If you've been waiting with bated breath for the battle between motherboard giants Asus and Gigabyte to come to blows, it looks like your hopes may come to naught after all.

For a while it looked like Asus was going to take Gigabyte to court over claims the company made regarding the quality of Asus's products, not to mention the veracity of information provided regarding its Energy Processing Unit technology.

With Gigabyte insisting that it did nothing wrong and it was all Asus's fault for passing off shoddy hardware, everyone was waiting for the inevitable courtroom showdown and damages settlement.

Now, however, saner heads at Gigabyte have made the decision to issue a very public apology for the slurs cast upon its competitor's good name before the company finds itself in front of an unamused judge.

According to Digitimes, who broke the news on Friday, Gigabyte has slunk off into the sunset still grumbling that its DES technology is the better option for power saving than Asus's EPU but will smooth things over by paying for an apology to be published in various Taiwanese news publications.

Asus, knowing a good result when it sees one, has in turn agreed that this little spat needn't see the inside of a courtroom and has dropped all legal proceedings against Gigabyte.

260w ago - After nearly 5 years a new version ePSXe, one of the best PSX emulators for PC, has been released.

ePSXe 1.7.0 has been updated to v1.7.0 and is available for download below.

Download: ePSXe v1.7.0

Short Changelog:

- Multiple changes has been done in the Pad support.
- The internal SPU plugin has been updated to the 1.7.0 version.
- The iSO support code has been rewritten.
- The MDEC decoder has been rewritten.
- A new version of the Pete's Software Plugin is included.
- The XA/CDDA support has been worked in this new version.
- Many things have been fixed in the cd-rom decoder and the core.

260w ago - Tech support is going mass market, moving out of the office and into homes as the proliferation of gadgetry in the average house makes a geek contact essential.

Tesco is currently trialling its recently acquired PC Guys service in several branches of the supermarket.

And a host of other companies are springing up, promising to troubleshoot all those IT niggles from the comfort of your home.

BBC News spent time with three of the more established services - The Geek Squad, The Tech Guys and BT's Home IT Visit service - in an effort to learn what people are using such services for and how the firms measure up.

If someone needs a plumber or a mechanic there are some basic professional qualifications they can measure them against and, although there are plenty of qualifications available to IT workers, there is no one recognised standard.

With so many independent firms offering home IT support, this could be a problem, says Matthew Poyiadgi, vice president of CompTIA, an IT trades body which designs training courses.

"There needs to be standards in place," he said.

He has seen take-up of its A+ scheme, which teaches people basic computer skills, go up three-fold in the last six years.

"We find guys are doing it as hobbyists...

260w ago - Open worlds aren't exactly new in gaming nowadays. Just look at Grand Theft Auto. There's something liberating about an open world, as you're able to go where you want when you want; you don't feel like you're being funneled along a very narrow path.

With Far Cry 2, Ubisoft and its Ubisoft Montreal team want to deliver what is quite possibly the most convincing and realistic open world yet, but instead of trying to build urban jungles they're building actual jungles, as well as Serengeti plains, forests, and more.

We finally got our hands on Far Cry 2 this month to explore its African setting for the first time, and it's an impressive game in terms of technology and gameplay.

The mission that we got to play demonstrates the complex open world that's being created for the game. You play as a mercenary (you get to select from a pool at the start of the game) who is tasked with bringing down a merciless arms dealer who is arming both sides of a civil war in Africa. However, you need to work your way up the ladder to get to him, which means that you'll have to do missions and align yourself with various factions.

You start in a swampy area, with a safe house nearby. Go to the house and you'll meet a couple of characters, one of whom will task you with destroying a nearby pipeline...

260w ago - With Vista struggling Windows 7 it's the OS on everyone's lips at the moment. It could be set for an early release in Q4 2009. Chris Flores, from the official Windows Vista Team Blog brings us up-to-date.

Flores has conceded that Microsoft is working on Windows 7, but has stated that this is normal in the Windows OS cycle. "...we started working on Windows Vista even before we released Windows XP. So naturally, we've been thinking about the investments we made in Windows Vista and how we can build on these for the next version of Windows," he said.

This time around Microsoft has taken a new approach with Windows 7 by strategically sharing information with key partners. While this has already begun, neither Flores or Steven Sinofsky, Windows and Windows Live Engineering SVP, in a chat to CNET, would be drawn on a firm release date for Windows 7.

Sinofsky stated that they didn't want another five year wait as was the case with Windows XP and Vista, and it was more likely to be three years between the day Windows Vista went on sale to the day Windows 7 does. If you do that math, that would still mean start of 2010, but not far off late 2009. The possibility of an early release is still alive.

Flores has also confirmed that Windows 7 will be a major release. It...