PowerUser.TV recently passed the one year milestone having posted 52 weekly audio episodes.  So after tormenting the eardrums of fans for an entire year, they've decided to move into the world of video.  Now you can see the antics that typically go on when they record a podcast. This week's show talks about tech news such as the IBM PC celebrating its 25th birthday, an "expert" claiming that 40% of all World of Warcraft gamers are addicted to t...

U.S. State Department officials yesterday said that RFID equipped passports will soon begin appearing in the hands of globe-trotting Americans.  The Colorado Passport Agency will be the first passport issuing authority in the country to produce the new documents, but the rest of the agencies nation-wide are expected to ramp up production soon. The passports have come under heavy fire from security and privacy experts over supposed vulnerabilities in the new chips that would allow for eas...

Famed WindowBlinds skinner "Essorant" brings you another exciting set of WindowBlinds skins. This set of five premium WindowBlinds 5-based Visual Styles will give your desktop a smart and polished look and feel. The set includes Khado, Gyre, Caracal, Raven and Jent as well as 5 matching wallpapers. Three brand new premium skins! Caracal Gyre Khado* Two updated images from the "Finesse" skin pack, updated to WindowBlinds v5 &nb...

It seems that the article last week was fairly well received, so now we're back with week two!  It was a pretty lean week so it'll be a bit shorter this time around.  Hopefully as the end of summer creeps up on everyone, skinners will settle in and start making and submitting more content for us to pour over. Now, on to this week's picks... Corky_O (Wizop) A Rainlendar skin, Logika2006_RL by neophil78 "For those who like a well rounded theme experience, t...

Microsoft marches on with it's seemingly endless stream of products bundled under the "Windows Live" brand.  Today, they released their latest tool, a blogging application called Windows Live Writer.  Like Stardock's own BlogNavigator , Live Writer is aimed at being a single application in which you can write a blog, and then automatically publish it to any number of public blog sites such as Windows Live Spaces, LiveJournal , Blogger , WordPress etc.  The tool integrates wit...

Oh come Monday, it'll be alright... come Monday I'll be... serving up another poll!  Last week I tossed out the question of what version of Microsoft Windows you were currently running.  This one wasn't even close.  We received 400 responses exactly to this poll in the week it ran, and all but two of you are running a version of Windows XP, with more of you running Pro than Home Edition.  Just to satisfy your curiosity, here's the exact breakdown: What version of Mic...

Microsoft in recent years has taken a lot of heat from the IT industry over it's perceived lack of serious efforts to make Windows a more secure platform.  Well, in part to answer those critics, and in an attempt to further branch out into the security software market, Microsoft is rolling out a technology called PatchGuard, a piece of code that protects core parts of the Windows against attacks. However, this being Microsoft, it turns out that this new feature does more to hinder secu...

Yes, that's right, another weekly feature item.  Starting to get crowded here on the front page isn't it?  The Pick of the Week series of posts will appear every Monday and will list off the favorite submissions by various members of the WinCustomize moderator team from the previous seven days.  The goal is not necessarily to highlight the absolute best work ever posted to the site, but to show the best of the past week.  This means that lesser known skinners will have a much...

When the GUI Champs '06 were announced late this past August, we made mention of some premium sponsors that would be handing out some of our top competition prizes.  Much was made about how these were some sweet prizes and definitely worth competing for.  We've already announced NVIDIA/EVGA sponsoring the prizes for the Most Original Visual Style and Most Original Icon Set, so that only leaves one prize, and thus one more premium sponsor to reveal. We are extremely happy to anno...

Late last week, the rumors began to fly that Google was thinking about buying Internet video site, YouTube for the princely sum of $1.6 Billion.  Well, the New York Times went and confirmed the rumors on Friday after talking with several people close to the deal.  It is stressed that the deal is in the very early stages at the moment and nothing is definite. Google is just the latest in a parade of companies to visit and chat with YouTube in recent months.  This is just the...

In case you've been waiting to vote on Most Original Wallpaper until the last minute, well, time is running out!  At midnight tonight (Eastern Time) voting will be closed for Most Original Wallpaper.  The next time you'll be able to vote on a Wallpaper event will be in November for the Best Overall event.  So get moving and vote if you haven't already! When Wallpaper voting closes tonight, voting for Most Usable Icon Package will begin.  Currently there are 37 submitted ...

If you mosey on over to the GUI Champs website, you'll see a pretty exciting announcement at the top of the page; our first premier sponsor!  So far we've announced prizes being offered up by Stardock (software, a pile of cash and some XBox 360s), as well as what some of our friends in the community are pitching in ( Microangelo Toolset 6 , DeviantArt 1yr subscriptions).  We made a fair number of veiled references to some mysterious "premium" sponsors but have been pretty quiet ab...

Today, Google Labs released a beta for a new search service targeted at computer programmers; Google Code Search .  This new service will crawl the vast stores of publicly available code (mostly open source) to provide programmers with an easily searchable index of code to help find solutions to various programming tasks. Google expects this new search tool to be mostly used by students trying to learn complex programming languages, while being an occasional resource to more season and ...

The GUI Champs '06 marches on!  Since Monday, you've been voting on Most Usable Wallpaper.  Today, we're shifting gears a bit and begin voting on Most Original wallpaper.  Most Original Wallpaper Usable was all about, well, usability.  The Most Original Wallpaper event doesn't have anything to do with easy of use, icon readability or any of that other fuzzy feel-good sort of stuff.  This event is all about pure "cool".  What is the most outlandish, a...

Another week, another poll!  Last week, you were asked to give your impressions of ObjectBar 2.0.  Some formatting changes to the poll have moved it off the front page for the time being, and that may have impacted our vote numbers, but for those of you who did respond, the results were pretty positive, with only 8 or so of you claiming that the software was responsible for killing your inner child.  126 votes were count this time.  For those interested, as always, here are t...