PCR Tech and IT retail, distribution and vendor news

Europe: Ordered to refund ?130 to customer for unwanted pre-installed Windows and other software

USA: Latest NPD figures show firm sees two-thirds of all sales over $1,000

Body says city has second worst rate of illegal software use in UK

Firm hoping to capture youth market with ultra-cheap SD format device

Pirate's celebrate as Swedish-run bittorrent site breaks into Alexa?s top 100 global websites

The original pirate music portal goes legal and relaunches with Apple?s throne in its sites

The Core 2 Quad range includes both 65nm and 45nm parts, based on the Kentfield and Yorkfield cores respectively. Internally, they're effectively a pair of Core 2 Duo processors built into one chip. As AMD likes to point out, this is less efficient than the Phenom's fully integrated design, as cores on different dies can't communicate directly at the chip's full internal speed. Instead, they have to pass data back and forth via the slower front side bus.

Unfortunately, this doesn't translate into real-world performance: in our benchmarks, the Phenom 9600 tied with a dual-core Athlon 64X2 6000+ costing a third less. Give the applications a few years to catch up with multi-core technology and the Phenom might come into its own, but for now, it's a disappointment.

The new, interactive pressure sensitive display tablet combines a high quality 12.1-inch TFT LCD colour screen with a more affordable sub-?1000 price tag. The slim line dimensions (405 x 270 x 17mm) compare well with the company's Intuos3 A5 wide graphics tablet and allows you to draw directly onto the display, taking away the sometimes disjointed feeling you get when using a more traditional graphics pad.

Featuring two, five-watt units, each with an integrated tweeter and Creative's innovative BasXPort, the T10 presents a gloss black face to the world. Each speaker is adorned with a cloth tag in the style of your favourite pair of Levi's ? a quirky detail giving the impression that someone actually thought about the design of these speakers.

Three days left to register for the UK trade show

Laptops continue domination as Dell cements lead ahead of rivals