Asus a couple of weeks ago Asus slipped its Disk Unlocker utility under our radar, a piece of software designed to overcome the so-called 2.2TB barrier that, in a nutshell, prevents legacy operating systems from accessing the full storage capacity of hard drives larger than 2048GB.

The way Asus explains it, Disk Unlocker "taps into hidden storage space beyond the nominal 2048GB range, helping you use large hard drives to their maximum potential." The way things currently stand, in order to fully use a storage drive larger than 2.2TB, you need an OS that supports the GUID Partition Table (GPT), which is only supported in 64-bit versions of Windows. To boot from that same drive, things get an order of magnitude more complicated, requiring an UEFI BIOS; 64-bit version of Windows 7, Vista, or Server 2008; non-scented candles; and finely ground albino bat lips.

So where does Disk Unlocker fit into all this? Provided you're rocking an Asus motherboard, the Disk Unlocker utility essentially converts a physical HDD larger than 2048GB into a virtual drive, which can then be recognized in its entirety no matter which version of Windows you're running. And while Asus is a bit vague on this point, the manual appears to state that you can F6 the appropriate drivers during Windows XP installation so that you can boot from the drive as well.

We haven't had a chance to play with it yet, but when we do, you can be sure we'll report back the results.

User Guide (PDF)

For those of you rocking an AMD videocard, the Sunnyvale outfit just released its Catalyst 10.11 suite, though you'll have to head over to the AMD Game! portal to find them (at the time of this writing, the 10.10 drivers were still showing up on AMD's homepage).

The Catalyst 10.11 package purportedly bumps up performance in Battleforge by up to 3 percent when using an ATI Radeon HD 5800 series card in either single or CrossFire configurations and with anti-aliasing disabled, while also improving performance in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Pripyat by up to 5 percent.

AMD also resolved a handful of issues with the latest driver release, such as nixing the desktop line corruption that plagued certain systems after hotplugging the HDCP display.

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Facebook, the world's largest social networking site, just recently celebrated reaching 500 million members, it's been the topic of a docudrama, and continues to make people rich. But according to digital consumer expert Jeffrey Coles, it's also living on borrowed time, Australia's News Online reports.

Cole reckons Facebook has another five years before its users start to migrate elsewhere, just as it happened to MySpace and Bebo.

"The same thing will happen to Facebook, but it's going to take a lot longer," Cole said. "And it's not going to be replaced by one big social networking community but it's going to fragment."

Cole's crystal ball didn't just predict the inevitable demise of Facebook, it also revealed a future in which few newspapers will survive, and that the iPad would reign supreme as the most popular tablet.