MSI GT75VR Titan Pro and GE63VR, GE73VR Raider Gaming Laptops Launched in India

  MSI has launched a new lineup of gaming notebooks in India. It has announced the GT75VR Titan Pro, GE73VR Raider, and GE63VR Raider notebooks for Rs. 3,24,990, Rs. 1,85,990, and Rs. 1,49,990 in India. All the three laptops feature the latest seventh generation Intel Core i7 processors, Nvidia's current generation GPUs, and are VR ready as well.

MSI GT75VR Titan Pro

Starting with the most expensive GT75VR Titan Pro, it sports a 17.3-inch full-HD display with 120Hz refresh rate. It is powered by the Core i7 7820HK CPU with over 4GHz overclock capability, 32GB of RAM, 512GB SSD, 1TB HDD, and Killer N1535 Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chipset. The GT75VR Titan comes with 3 GPU options: GeForce GTX 1080, GeForce GTX 1070 SLI, or GeForce GTX 1070.

The notebook sports a mechanical gaming keyboard with tactile feedback, more durability, and RGB backlighting under every key. The keyboard was designed in collaboration with Steel Series. It incorporates a sophisticated cooling system, and is loaded with gaming features like True Color Technology 2.0, NAHIMIC VR, an upgraded Dragon Center, and much more.

 

Intel Skylake-X and Kaby Lake-X CPUs, Motherboards, and Coolers: Your Complete Guide

HIGHLIGHTS

• Intel's new Core X-series family includes a confusing variety of models
• The Skylake-X and Kaby Lake-X processors are very different
• Not all CPU and motherboard combinations deliver the same experiences

For nearly ten years, Intel's Core i3, i5, and i7 brands have held strong in the PC and laptop space. Everyone immediately gets the idea of a hierarchy, with Core i3 at the entry-level and Core i7 at the top end. You don't necessarily need to know that you get two cores and HyperThreading with an i3, and four cores without HyperThreading if you choose an i5. You don't need to know clock speeds, cache sizes, or manufacturing processes - what matters is that when all capabilities are taken into consideration, moving from a lower number to a higher one gives you an incremental boost in performance. Within each generation, all chips work on the same motherboards, use the same kind of RAM, and have the same architectural advantages - with one key exception.

At the very high end, there are Intel's High-End Desktop (HEDT) models, awkwardly clubbed into the Core i7 family. These are often called Extreme Edition chips, though not all of their model numbers actually have that suffix. These CPUs need a different platform altogether, lack integrated graphics, and are based on a souped-up version of the previous-generation architecture. For example, the Core i7 6950X was codenamed Broadwell-E, which is a derivative of the 5th-gen Broadwell architecture, whereas the rest of the 6th generation was codenamed Skylake.

While you can still only get up to four CPU cores with the top mainstream Core i7 after all these years, Intel has pushed out six-, eight-, and ten-core models under the HEDT Core i7 umbrella over the years, and has charged enormous amounts of money for them. In the beginning, it was rumoured that Intel would use the name Core i9 for these products since they were so obviously different from the rest of the lineup, but that did not come to pass. They were called Core i7 even though they didn't really fit that name.

Adding to the confusion, HEDT generations have been launching later and later each year. In our review of the 10-core Intel Core i9-6950X, we pointed out how the much cheaper quad-core Core i7-6700K outclassed it in some tests. Broadwell-E, technically based on the 5th-gen architecture, launched at around the same time as the 7th-gen Kaby Lake lineup.

Now, in 2017, Intel also needs to fend off new competition from a resurgent AMD, which is now selling octa-core Ryzen 7 CPUs and gleefully pointing out how they outperform Intel's latest and greatest while costing a fraction of the price. With Ryzen Threadripper shipping soon, clearly, Intel has a lot of cleaning up to do.Introducing the Intel Core X-series

Finally, we have a Core i9 brand to distinguish HEDT CPUs from the mainstream. Unfortunately, there are a few new layers of complication to replace the old ones. For starters, all new Core i9 models fall under what Intel is calling its new Core X-series, which also includes a few Core i7s and one Core i5 model. Core X clearly isn't about superior performance. Core X also mixes two Intel architectures, Skylake-X and Kaby Lake-X (Intel swapped out the -E suffix, but the idea is the same). The two CPU lines are referred to collectively by the code name Basin Falls.

The new Core i5-7640X and Core i7-7740X are based on Kaby Lake-X, while the other two Core i7s and all Core-i9 models are based on Skylake-X. All Core-X CPUs use the new LGA2066 socket and X299 platform controller - which means that not only is the Core i7 family just as fragmented as before, the Core i5 family is too. Core i9 encompasses a few new parts and a few renamed ones, and Intel hasn't improved its segmentation at all in the bargain. The only advantage of this is that the company gets to leapfrog the generation-lag issue and use a shiny new name against AMD's Threadripper when it comes out.

As for the differences between Skylake-X and Kaby Lake-X, things can get quite confusing, but we'll try breaking it all down. Skylake-X is what we'd usually consider the "extreme" CPUs for any generation There are seven models in all, starting with the six-core i7-7800X and going up to the top-of-the-line 18-core Core i9-7980XE. Models with up to 10 cores are already available, and the rest are set to begin shipping between August and October this year.

Microsoft's New Kaizala App Is What WhatsApp for Business Should Have Been

HIGHLIGHTS

• Microsoft today launched Kaizala, an app that it has built in India
• The business-focused Kaizala app is already popular with government depts
• The app works swiftly on 2G network and offers offline support

As Facebook chases business and enterprise customers for its popular instant messaging and voice calling app WhatsApp, Microsoft may have just beaten the social juggernaut to the punch. On Wednesday at an event in New Delhi, the Skype-owner launched Kaizala, a messaging app designed to 'get work done' that has already garnered interest from several state governments and businesses in India.

A messaging app in 2017 ought to do more than just enable a few friends talk to each other. This is essentially the pitch of Kaizala, a made-for-India, mobile-only app available on Android and iOS.

One of the major limitations of WhatsApp has been its inability to handle large groups of people. First, there is a cap on how many people you could add to a group (256, to be precise). Then there is the major challenge of making any sense of the conversation that ensues between those tens of dozens of people.

In effect, Microsoft is tackling those two challenges. You can add as many people in the group as you want. If that wasn't enough, you can then add those groups to other groups, the company says. Second, the app offers the ability to create polls, documents, and surveys that could be created from within Kaizala app and then shared to the group to get response from the masses.

If these features don't strike a ring, it's because they are not really meant to make conversations between two friends any more convenient. And that remains one of the most interesting pitches of Kaizala, which had its origin as a Microsoft Garage project. The company wants to serve to customers who have to talk to dozens, hundreds, thousands, and lakhs of people at once.

Microsoft has been testing Kaizala with governments and businesses for months in India. During this period, the company says, more than 30 government departments signed up to the platform. More than 70,000 people from the state government are already using Kaizala for day-to-day work.

Earlier this year, during the state election in Uttar Pradesh, the Election Commission used Kaizala when it wanted to efficiently survey people in the state. Andhra Pradesh's state government is also one of the major users of the service. The chief minister N Chandrababu Naidu often sends message to the hundreds of thousands of citizens in the state through the app and listen to the feedback.

But Kaizala's appeal isn't limited to government offices. Several major businesses have already signed up for the service. One example is Republic TV, a newly launched media outlet. The company is just getting started. It is now exploring more applications for Kaizala, one of which is using location data of people to offer them texts from nearby groups.

Imagine walking to a mall and automatically getting all the interesting discounted-sales pitches from different shops in that mall in Kaizala app. That's one area Microsoft is exploring, Rajiv Kumar, Corporate Vice President, Office Product Group told this correspondent earlier this year.

There is a pro version of Kaizala too, which gives an organisation advanced admin and user group rights. The pro version is priced at Rs. 130 per user every month. Both of the versions integrate with Office 365 subscription, offer offline support and work swiftly on slow Internet network, the company said.

The public launch of Kaizala comes at a time when Facebook is increasingly looking at businesses and enterprises and wondering how it could make WhatsApp relevant to them and also find a revenue source. Last year, WhatsApp said it will open its platform so that businesses could hook into its service. Months later, the company is still working on the project. And now it already has a major competitor

Microsoft Paint will be removed from Windows 10: Here’s when it will happen

Microsoft Paint is on the chopping block, if you go by a recent announcement from the company, which has put out list of features that will be removed or deprecated in the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update. There's no word on the final date when Paint will be removed.

Microsoft Paint is on the chopping block, if you go by a recent announcement from the company, which has put out list of features, functionalities that will be removed or deprecated in the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update. Paint is an iconic software, if not in capabilities, but in terms of how long it has been around on Microsoft’s Windows systems. Paint, which was first launched in 1985 and has been around for nearly 32 years.

                      So what happens to Microsoft Paint next? Microsoft says Paint will be ‘deprecated’. What this means is that the software is not in active development and it can be removed entirely in future releases of Windows. Further below, the post adds next to Microsoft Paint, “Will be available through the Windows Store. Functionality integrated into Paint 3D.” So while the application will be ‘deprecated’, it looks like for sometime Microsoft will have Paint on the Windows Store, but its features will be integrated in Paint 3D in the future.

AMD Ryzen 5 1600X Review

 AMD's Ryzen 7 launch earlier this year went off pretty much without a hitch. A lot was riding on it, considering that before this, AMD hadn't managed to put out a CPU worth getting excited about in nearly a decade. The Ryzen 7 family targets relatively high-end buyers, and we were promised that the Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 3 lines, with fewer cores and lower speeds, would follow in due course. So far, the company has kept all its promises, and so we now have with us a Ryzen 5 1600X CPU for review.This is the most powerful and highest priced of the four Ryzen 5 models currently available. It is carefully calibrated to take on Intel's Core i5 CPUs, hitting them in their biggest weak spot. The target audience is mainstream users and enthusiasts who want it all, but who still see the merits of saving money where they can. We're going to see how it stacks up against the mighty Ryzen 7 1800X which we tested at launch time, and whether Intel should be worried about losing its grip on this extremely important market segment.

Microsoft 365, a Bundle of Office 365 and Windows 10, Launched for Enterprises

  ets 360 Staff, 11 July 2017

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Microsoft on Monday at its keynote for its partner conference, Microsoft Inspire, announced Microsoft 365, a service that allows customers to purchase the Office 365 productivity suite, Windows 10 and other services in one bundle.
The product announcements, part of the company's Inspire customer conference in Washington, come just days after news that Microsoft plans to lay off thousands of sales reps.
Microsoft is reorganizing to simplify its sales and marketing efforts and put more emphasis on partnerships with services companies such as KPMG
The Redmont giant also unveiled a new service that allows customers to use its cloud technology on their own servers, part of the company's efforts to refocus its product line to compete more effectively with rivals Amazon and Alphabet's Google.
The world's biggest software maker is looking to carve out a niche among customers who cannot or do not want to move all their computing operations to the massive shared data centres that are collectively known as the cloud.
"One of the key differentiations we have with Azure versus our two biggest competitors in the cloud platform space is our ability to support true hybrid solutions," Judson Althoff, Microsoft's executive vice president of worldwide commercial business, told Reuters.
Azure is Microsoft's cloud-computing platform, pegged by most market share studies as second in cloud computing behind Amazon Web Services.
Dell, Lenovo, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise will provide new servers and equipment needed to run the service, Microsoft said. The companies will ship the first systems to customers in September.
Julia White, corporate vice president of Azure, said that the new service, called Azure Stack, is aimed at businesses that want to use Azure but have specific needs for a localized version of the software.
"Azure Stack is an extension of Azure," White said. "It's not a replacement for your legacy private cloud."
White said Azure Stack could be used by companies with operations in remote locations where it can be difficult to get an internet connection, such as oil rigs or cruise ships, or those in regions with regulations that require that data be kept locally."We've seen a lot of pent-up demand from end-user customers as well as third-party providers who are anxious to deploy this solution," said Gartner analyst Ed Anderson.
"I anticipate that this offering will provide a significant boost to Microsoft's overall cloud business."

Interent Connected Smart Mirror from Nuovo

In the current times, everything doubles up to perform more roles than just one. The humble mirror is no different as Nuovo introduces a smarter version of it all. Once connected to the internet and synced with the ‘Nuovo Smart Mirror’ mobile app, this ‘Smart Mirror’ developed by Nuovo can connect you to the world of web and convenience in an innovative manner.

It can keep you updated with notifications from social sites like Facebook and Twitter. You can get the latest news from the leading publications, can also access YouTube videos, and even book cab through Uber. In addition to this, this smart mirror will always keep you on top of your daily schedule with the help of Google Calendar, can keep you updated with the latest decor trends and lets you access the emails. A user can control which app to be displayed on the mirror for easy access by controlling them through the mirror as well as mobile application.

This ‘Smart mirror’ can be used by users through account creation, logins etc. It needs to get installed in the place of choice with a dedicated UPS connected, a wifi connection and (one-time creation) in a ‘Smart Mirror App’. Once the app is downloaded, register yourself by signing up and syncing all the apps by allowing them to access the information.

Applications integrated are:

Facebook: To see what your friends are up to
Twitter: To check what the world is tweeting about
Gmail: To never miss an important mail
Clock, Stopwatch, Alarm: To know time or set alarm
News: To keep a track of what’s happening in the world
YouTube: To watch your favorite videos
Maps: To Navigate through the bustling city life
Uber: To book your cab on the go
To stay updated with the latest decor trends through HelpMeBuild
Calendar updates: To sojourn on schedule