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Seagate has taken the wraps off a new Xbox accessory that aims to improve load times while simultaneously delivering additional storage capacity. The Seagate Game Drive for Xbox SSD is essentially just that – an external solid state drive designed specifically for Microsoft’s Xbox console. Tucked inside the brushed aluminum enclosure with familiar Xbox green accents is 512GB of flash storage which Seagate says should hold around 15 games and associated downloadable content (with the average game taking up 35-50GB of space). The drive utilizes a single USB cable for both connectivity and power. Seagate says the drive helps gamers get into the action quicker by reducing wait times at welcome screens and enabling quicker transitions between levels. The company didn’t provide any hard numbers to back up the claims but I don’t doubt for a minute that it’s faster than what comes stock in Microsoft’s console. People have been putting solid state drives in...

Google has angered Microsoft by announcing a critical security flaw in Windows that remains unpatched ten days after disclosing it to the Redmond-based company. In its blog post , Google explains that it reported the zero-day vulnerabilities to Adobe and Microsoft on October 21. Adobe issued a critical fix to patch the bug last Friday, but the Windows vulnerability still hasn’t been addressed by Microsoft. Worst of all, Google says it is being actively exploited in the wild. “After 7 days, per our published policy for actively exploited critical vulnerabilities, we are today disclosing the existence of a remaining critical vulnerability in Windows for which no advisory or fix has yet been released,” wrote Google’s Threat Analysis Group.”This vulnerability is particularly serious because we know it is being actively exploited.” The Windows zero-day, which can be triggered via a win32k.sys system call, could allow...

Google has been working hard to keep its ubiquitous Chrome browser as lean and fast as possible. Just last month it shared some upcoming enhancements that will dramatically reduce the amount of RAM used, courtesy of an updated JavaScript V8 engine in Chrome 55. While the latter is still in beta, Google today detailed other optimizations it has been quietly working on, namely implementing Microsoft's Profile Guided Optimization. The latter is a feature of Microsoft’s Visual Studio developer tools that measures how users interact with an application. The most often used functions are then optimized by PGO, sometimes increasing their binary size, and optimizing the memory location of the browser code so that those functions can be kept in the CPU’s fast instruction cache. PGO was implemented first with the Chrome 53 release of 64-bit Chrome, followed by version 54 of 32-bit Chrome. Google claims it’s seen startup times improved by 17%, new tab page load time...