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 - New update to Win 8.1 will bring back Start button with all its old functionality - real menu that lets you do things faster, or at least the way you a re used to do them. The forthcoming update goes beyond the return of the Start menu and focuses on mouse and keyboard input, so it will mostly be useful for desktop users. Update to 8.1 will be rolled out on April 8, this is the day when Windows 8 may become what it should have been at launch.

 - AMD Radeon video cards prices are finally started to getting down to MSRP levels. It looks like mining card market is saturated enough and new miners are not so fast as before buying all Radeon inventory available. With prices at MSRP levels AMD is getting more affordable and interesting for gamers, who right now switched to Nvidia because of much better value at the moment.

 - Nvidia 335.23 GeForce driver was released one day before Titanfall release. It promises improved Titanfall performance, optimization for newer video cards, bonus speed in some other games as well. It’s always a good idea to have the most recent certified driver for your video card as it will provide the best free performance boost without any investment. Other system drivers may improve stability and sometimes speed of the system as well.

 - Intel will refresh Haswell CPU lineup in Q2 2014, most likely in May. Expect around 20 new processors including i7 4790, i5 4690, i3 4360, Pentium G4350 along with some low power S parts. At the same time new motherboards based on Z97 and H97 chipsets will be released. Same socket LGA 1150 but with more features, ports, bandwidth and more. Obviously new boards are meant to go with new processors, though we don’t see any obstacles for older boards like Z87 to support new processors with BIOS update.

 - NZXT designed its new case H440 without 5.25” drive bays. It means that you will not be able to install DVD or Blu-Ray in such case. It’s a bold move and many will like it, but are you ready to finally ditch DVD drive? While we barely use it in our systems it still has some utility in it, but then again - it’s easy to add external DVD drive which is only a few $ more expensive than internal ones. Well, eventually it will become a trend and Microsoft with ship Windows OS on flash drives in the future :-)

 - Microsoft is planning to show some details about Windows 9 in April and will release it around a year later. That is a move to distance itself from Windows 8 which is having a hard time selling. Less than 25 million computers have Win 8 installed now and it’s kind of a failure. Windows 9 should be everything that Win 8 is not. That is in part is a better balance between traditional desktop users and touch-interface adopters. 

 - AMD has officially launched new APU series named “Kaveri” and it represents a major architecture improvement. It has new redesigned cores, Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA), enhanced power management and more. Top parts will have 12 cores, 4 of which are CPU (4.0GHz) and 8 are GPU cores. Expect around 30% higher performance per watt compared to previous gen, which is great for laptops and compact systems. Kaveri also brings R7 graphics to the table and we believe time is near when APUs will have easy time running new games on 1080p and decent settings, it all goes that way. Add on top of that more software titles that support GPU computing and it’s a golden deal (think bitcoin mining example).

 - Valve is going to release Family Sharing Plan which allows up to 10 users to share same account with all games in it on different machines. New process requires two-step authentication and will allow to share full game collection across 10 different machines (family, friends, roommates...)

 - Windows XP share has dropped to 10-20% (according to different sources with different numbers. At the same time Windows 8/8.1 goes up above 10% for the first time. Still Windows 7 is the most popular. We see half of our customers prefer Win 7 over 8, even though the latter is the default option. There is not charge for Windows switch between 7/8 in options, so it's just your pure preferences. BTW we still use Win 7 in our office, but we like Win 8 phones.

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