Oh sweet merciful Skyrim.
The next 3DMark will be releasing soon, built to truly test the awesomeness of your so-called “PC gaming rig”. It will be built around Windows 8 (!) and will be useful i just about any device that supports and that uses Windows 8 (like a tablet to a laptop, for example). As the CEO of Futuremark said, ”With Windows 8 gamers will be able to enjoy their games on a wide range of devices from lightweight tablets to heavy-duty desktop rigs. Faced with so much choice it will be hard to work out which devices offer the best value for the money. Fortunately 3DMark for Windows 8 will be our most wide-reaching 3DMark ever, able to accurately measure and compare gaming performance across all devices and graphical feature sets available with Windows 8.”
The new benchmarking software will use real-time analysis to test systems, will work in both Metro and traditional Windows UIs, and will be released sometime in 2012.
If the HP Slate 500 was proof that a Windows 7 tablet won’t work, then it’s the Slate 2 that will show you HP is dedicated to keeping the Slate series alive. It’s the same 8.9-inch tablet 
With the exact same starting price-point of the Macbook Air, the Zenbooks by ASUS are also designed to function and look like the Macbook Air, specifically in weight, thinness, and with speed. The system recovers from sleep in 2 seconds and is .11 to .67-inches in thickness and weighs 2.9 pounds (the 11.6 model weighs a feather-like 2.4) all with a brushed aluminum exterior. Now, for pricing: the first, Core i5-powered, 11.6-inch UX21 with a 128GB SSD will come up at $999, while the 13.3-inch UX31 with a Core i5-2557M processor and the same 128GB SSD drive will reach $1,099, with the only real “bummer” about these laptops being that they do not have backlit keyboards, unlike all the other Macbook Airs, and that the 11.6-inch version has no SD card slot, just like the 11.6-inch Air, whereas the 13-inch models (both the ASUS Zenbook and the Macbook Air) do have one. The new Zenbooks debut in the States tomorrow. Via: 
Straight out of today’s BUILD conference for Microsoft was a developer preview for Windows 8, as well as a Samsung touchscreen tablet that was running it. But let’s cut to the important part: Windows 8 is available for download for anyone, even with low-end specs. You can easily install the .iso as a partition on your hard drive (however it may require a full wipe and install), and get going. The dev preview without developer tools on a 64-bit machine measures in at 3.6GB, which is what I’m downloading now. In the meantime, get downloading and check out the source links for info on Windows 8 and where to download it!
Wouldn’t be cool if Windows 8 booted up in 8 seconds from hibernation? Well, that’s exactly what Microsoft is planing, due to a new form of hibernation for computers — the process of saving the current state on the hard drive, then resuming by performing a full start. Well it turns out that Windows 8 hibernation would pre-load the kernel of the OS, rather than all of your open apps, meaning that boot time from such a small file takes literally no time at all (especially using a solid state drive), so the new boot time from hibernation is 8 seconds. Pretty boss, I know. Video of it in action after the break. Via: 
It’s a new high-powered gaming rig (yay!), this time built by ASUS. The ASUS G74 has two configurations available, both of which contain a quad-core Sandy Bridge Core i7-2630QM CPUs, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560M graphics with 3GB of video memory, 12GB DDR3 RAM (out of 16GB, yikes), dual 750GB speedy 7200RPM drives (!), a 1080p display, Blu-ray player, backlit keyboard and 3 USB 2.0 ports along with one USB 3.0, all of which comes down to $1,745 and is named the G74SX-A1. Not enough and want to spend a bit more? Then there’s also the $1,979 version with a 3D display, dubbed the G74SX-3DE. Either way, the above shot only displays the edges of the laptop, not the full width. Pre-order links are right next to this sentence.
