US tech giant Microsoft has ended sale for both the Windows 7 and Windows 8 operating systems and these can no longer be bought with a new PC.

"End of sales refers to the date when a particular version of Windows is no longer shipped to retailers or Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs)," Forbes.com reported on Thursday.

 

Examples of OEMs include Dell and Toshiba, PC manufacturers who often pre-install Windows software.

While Windows 7, launched in 2009, was on sale for seven years, Windows 8/8.1 was on sale for just four years.

Despite ongoing updates support for Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 until January 2020 and 2023, the end of sales is likely to give the flatlining Windows 10 a boost, the report said.

Earlier this year, Microsoft announced that it would roll out two major updates for Windows 10 next year.

According to Windows Central, while the first major update for 2017 -- codenamed Redstone 2 -- would release in the early part of 2017, the second one -- codenamed Redstone 3 -- might be released in 2017 summer

Hit by the Note 7 fiasco, Samsung Electronics has now decided to recall about 2.8 million top-loading washing machines due to risk of impact injuries.

The affected washers are manufactured between March 2011 and current production dates.

 According to the US Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), the washing machine top can unexpectedly detach from the washing machine chassis during use, posing a risk of injury from impact.

"The voluntary action was driven by reports highlighting the risk that the drums in these washers may lose balance, triggering excessive vibrations, resulting in the top separating from the washer," Samsung said in a statement on Friday.

"This can occur when a high-speed spin cycle is used for bedding, water-resistant or bulky items and presents an injury risk to consumers," it added.

This recall involves 34 models of Samsung top-load washing machines, CPSC said.

Samsung has received 733 reports of washing machines experiencing excessive vibration or the top detaching from the washing machine chassis. There are nine related reports of injuries, including a broken jaw, injured shoulder, and other impact or fall-related injuries, it added.

"This is a recall of certain Top-Load washers manufactured between March, 2011 and current production dates. Front Load Washers are not affected," Samsung added.

Consumers can choose either a free in-home repair that includes a free one-year extension of the manufacturer's warranty; a rebate to be applied towards the purchase of a new Samsung or other brand washing machine; or a full refund for consumers who purchased their washing machine within the past 30 days of the recall announcement, CPSC said.

Good morning once again our computer game compatriots! We hope your Saturday was a swinging one and you are enjoying the last lie in of the week, make sure you make it count. As another weekend morning treat we’ve plucked a great trailer that we’ve enjoyed recently so that you don’t have to, and have brought it on a silvery internet platter to relax with with your morning beverage. Today it’s that of something only know as Project Wight, in early development by David Goldfarb and co, a man known for working on the Battlefield series and Payday 2. We’re very excited to see how this game will play out and hope once you've seen the trailer you are too.

Project Wight let’s you play as less than cuddly creatures in an eternal struggle with a burly Viking Civilisation. Set in the early Viking era yet in a world where there are intelligent monsters hanging about, you must continue the fight with your monstery chums against being eradicated by these pointy hatted plonkers. With a system of ageing where younger creatures are weak, small and nimble while their dads are well harder than yours. With the graphics looking like they do this early on, this is definitely one we’re going to be keeping an eye on. 

Enjoy Below:

Titanfall 2

Release date: Oct 28, 2016 ▪ Developer: Respawn ▪ My Score 8.5/10

With the addition of a single-player campaign and no season pass to divide the community, Titanfall 2 sheds two common complaints about the original—and also does what it does fantastically. "If this were a game from the late nineties or early noughties, we'd likely look back at the mission 'Effect and Cause' as one of the greats of the genre,". The multiplayer is better than before as well, but there's one worry—Titanfall 2's population could suffer from its proximity to Battlefield 1 and Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare. Let's hope it doesn't.

Battlefield 1

Release date: Oct 21, 2016 ▪ Developer: DICE ▪ My Score 9/10

The leap back in time to WWI had good results, as Battlefield 1's focus on infantry combat pairs well with more meaningful planes and tanks, and its finicky guns slow things down a little, giving us more time to move and more pride in our good shots. The campaign is enjoyable too, which hasn't quite been the case in a Battlefield game for some time, So it brings much needed change of pace.

Civilization 6

Release date: Oct 21, 2016 ▪ Developer: Firaxis ▪ My Score 8.4/10

There's of course room for improvement, but Civilization 6 is nevertheless the "ultimate digital board game," as we put it in our review. It's the most transformative version of Civ so far, changing the rules of city-management and tweaking just about everything else. And Civ 6 will only get better with expansions and user-made additions—even though the mod tools aren't out yet, the modders are already at work.

So here’s an exciting breakthrough in CPU technology that’s happened recently. Researchers from Intel and North Carolina State University have managed to make a breakthrough into making multi-core cpus, especially 8, 10 and 16 core CPUs much more effective than before. To set the scene, Dual and Quad cores have massive benefit in performance compared to a single core, but as soon as you start going to much higher core counts the boosted performance becomes less and less for each additional core. These researchers have managed a way to get round this, achieving result as much as 2000% performance in data processing from a 16 core CPU.

The reason why this bottleneck occurs is due to the communication that these cores need for them all to work together. This communication comes with a significant overhead per core relationship so the more cores there are, the more relationships, and therefore diminished performance increase. For anyone who wants the maths, the number of relationships for n cores is n(n-1)/2, which as you can imagine get’s pretty big pretty quick.

So is there any way we can get around this? Well the solution these researchers came up with was moving the software queue to hardware. Not exactly a clear idea but we’ll try and our understanding on what appears to be happening. Instead of the cores having to constantly “remember” what each other core was doing, their system moved the queue of what was to be done to a hardware source. So instead of the CPUs having to manage these relationships, they only had to go to one place, the queue of operations that needed to be done. The three steps they explained that the cores had to worry about being: add data to the queue, take data from the queue, and put data close to where it's going to be needed next, a lot simpler as you can imagine.

Currently this system has been called hardware queue management device or QMD and as said before, in data processing QMD had massive performance increases for large multi-core CPUs, while also this QMD logic has been shown to increase performance in other core communication dependent tasks. Hence will possibly have a much larger scope, even for us gamers!

Just think about it for a second, if this technology was backwards compatible, the mind boggles, a 7 year old Intel i7-950might play GTA V on Ultra or an FX-6300 could play Dishonored 2 on Max Settings at 60FPS plus. Processors could be given a whole new lease of life. Unlocking all that performance that was lost for so little gain, future proofing them for years ahead of their time. An exciting prospect for sure and one that would change the face of our future proofing function beyond recognition. The days of whether I should buy an i7 or i5 are seemingly whizzing by us.

Whether this technology will start cropping up in future products is unsure right now, it is still in very early development, but to us it definitely feels like a step in the right direction for the utilisation of more cores ready for the future of processors. So if you are currently thinking about upgrading your PC maybe consider how many cores your new CPU will have, as it could mean Ultra gaming for the next decade, that or until those awesome game developers start to push to the new performance boundaries.

The Wi-Fi Alliance this week began to certify products featuring wireless modules compatible with the 802.11ad standard (aka WiGig). The certification will help to ensure that all WiGig-branded devices, which have been around for some time, can flawlessly operate with each other and deliver expected multi-gigabit performance over 60 GHz spectrum.

The WiGig technology (IEEE 802.11ad) is a short range communication standard that enables compatible devices to communicate at up to 7–8 Gb/s data rates and with minimal latencies, using the 60 GHz spectrum at distances of up to ten meters. Since 60 GHz signals cannot penetrate walls, the technology can be used to connect devices that are in direct line of sight. Given the limitation, WiGig cannot replace Wi-Fi or even Bluetooth, but it can enable devices like wireless docking stations, wireless AR/VR head-mounted displays, wireless high-performance storage devices, wireless displays, and others devices which need a lot of bandwidth.

To date, Intel and Qualcomm have released several tri-band chipsets that support the 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz and 60 GHz spectrums as well as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and WiGig technologies. The Wi-Fi Alliance has already certified Intel’s Tri-Band Wireless 18260 (Maple Peak) and Qualcomm’s QCA9500 802.11ad-compatible chipsets as well as multiple devices that use them (including Dell’s Latitude E7450/70 as well as 802.11ad 60 GHz USB adapters from Peraso and Socionext). Going forward, the organization will certify other products, including smartphones and docking stations.

It should be noted that the start of WiGig certification on its own isn't going to be the catalyst to cause WiGig adoption to take off, but it will increase chipset developers', device makers', and end users' confidence in the standard. Designers of Wi-Fi chipsets and manufacturers of actual systems have been reluctant to adopt 802.11ad so far because the infrastructure is absent and so is demand, a classic chicken and egg dilemma. With the official certification process things will likely get a little better, mainly because of added confidence.

Meanwhile, analysts from ABI Research believe that 180 million of WiGig-enabled chipsets will ship inside smartphones already next year with 1.5 billion WiGig devices shipping in 2021.

Ever complained that why doesn't your Far Cry 3 does not have neon, dinosaurs, synths and robotic arms? Not to fear as Ubisoft are bringing Christmas early. After an elaborate internet cat and mouse game of hide and seek befitting to the comedic 80s fest that Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon is, it has now been the title confirmed that Ubisoft will be chucking at us later this month. 

Continuing with their genial mood this year celebrating their 30th anniversary, Ubisoft has announced their giving us another great title to add to the already mounting collection of stellar freebies. All you need to do is visit their website, sign up for a free Ubisoft Club account and you will be able to download this title when it comes out later this month. Although nothing’s been confirmed, last month's free release of Beyond Good and Evil, which is still free by the way if you have a Uplay account (seriously, go get it), was released on October the 12th, so we wouldn’t be mocked for assuming it might be a similar date this month for our neon dinosaurs to arrive.

It’s been well worth keeping an eye on Ubisoft this year as (not to rub it in if you missed it) they have already given us The Crew, Rayman Origins, Splinter Cell, and Prince of Persia Sands of Time. So make sure to note it in you diary as it’d be another cracking title to miss. Oh and hey, if you’re pining for a free time, make sure you hit up beyond Good and Evil, so good it might even get a sequel.