Voodoo Extreme weet ons te vertellen dat de Linux versie van Quake3 Test 1.08 neer te laden is, en wel hiero:

www.3dfiles.com/games/quake3arenalinuxtest.shtml (33 megs)

Ik lees bij Thresh's Firingsquad dat Abit nieuwe BIOSsen heeft gereleased voor de dual socket370 BP6 en slot1 BE6. Hier heb je de saus:

Do you own a new Abit BE6 or Abit BP6 motherboard? If so then you may be having difficulties with the Ultra ATA 66 controller and certain types of hard drives (Western Digital, etc.). Abit sent us some brand new beta drivers and BIOSes for these boards, so try them out and those problems should get fixed.

New BE6 BIOS/drivers
New BP6 BIOS/drivers

Syb en zijn Friese vrienden van De Kast zijn ten strijde getrokken tegen het illegaal kopiëren van CD's. De arme jongens zouden namelijk erg veel inkomsten mislopen. Natuurlijk heeft de belachelijk hoge prijs van audio CD's hier helemaal niets mee te maken...

Nederland kopieert waarschijnlijk het meest cd's illegaal; De Friese popgroep De Kast heeft bij staatssecretaris Rick van der Ploeg van Cultuur het illegaal overnemen en verspreiden van cd's aan de kaak gesteld. Een Amerikaane groep propageert op Internet onafhankelijkheid van muziekmaatschappijen.

De cd-omzet in Europa steeg in 1998 met 7 procent, maar in Nederland daalde die met 6 procent. Oorzaak: illegaal overnemen van muziek, zo schrijft het Algemeen Dagblad. De hoge adviesprijs van cd's, 45 gulden, heeft daar volgens de platenhandel niets mee te maken. De handel, verenigd in de NVPI, deed onderzoek: 30 procent van de middelbare scholieren kopieert illegaal en/of verkoopt cd's. Pas bij 20 gulden per muziek-cd zou de meerderheid ophouden met overnemen, zeggen ze althans.

De hoge prijs is het gevolg van veel marketing en overhead. Dat juist de digitalisering en Internet die kosten enorm kunnen doen dalen, komt in de hoofden van de NVPI en de artikelschrijvers nauwelijks op.

Voordat Peter O. pissig wordt omdat ik teveel tekst copy/paste zou ik even richting Planet Multimedia fietsen, want daar staat het complete bericht.

Firingsquad heeft een review gepost van de nieuwe 7200rpm Fireball KA Plus van Quantum:

We ran the benchmarks on the Quantum drive with both UDMA 66 and UDMA 33 modes. The Quantum 66 drive was connected to the UDMA 66 port on the motherboard with the 80-pin IDE cable. The Quantum 33 drive was the same drive connected to the UDMA 33 port with a 40-pin IDE cable. We threw in a Western Digital 5400RPM drive to show the differences between 7200RPM and 5400RPM.

As expected, the Quantum UDMA 66 drive took the Business Disk and High End Disk tests handily. Yes, UDMA-66 does outperform UDMA-33. The differences between the Quantum UDMA 33 and UDMA 66 in the CPU utilization time and Access time are close to negligible. According to the Winbench numbers, the Quantum's access time is actually lower than the advertised 8.5ms. (11.9ms - 4.17ms average rotational latency = 7.73ms)

On a side note, we ran a Winbench test set on the Quantum drive with DMA disabled. The CPU utilization went up to 47.4%, and the Disk WinMark scores were substantially lower (10-30%) than the drive's UDMA 33 scores.

Voor wie valt op het uiterlijk van de Athlon zag ik bij Hardware Extreme een aantal links naar japanse Athlon plaatjes staan:

- http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/akiba/hotline/990813/image/athlon1.jpg
- http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/akiba/hotline/990813/image/athlon2.jpg
- http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/akiba/hotline/990813/image/athlon3.jpg
- http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/akiba/hotline/990813/image/athlon4.jpg
- http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/akiba/hotline/990813/image/athlon5.jpg
- http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/akiba/hotline/990813/image/athlon6.jpg

Gamers Depot heeft een review gepost van de nieuwe Desktop Theatre 5.1 DTTT2500 Digital Speakers van Cambridge Soundworks / Creative. Het systeempje is voorzien van 4x7Watt satellites, een vette 20W subwoofer en een Dolby Digital decoder met 24-bits DAC:

For our listening tests, we used both the standard analog jacks, as well as the Digital input from our Sound Blaster Live. The sound quality for gaming, Mp3's, and CD-Audio, was the best we've heard to date. One of the coolest features on the decoder box is the flexibility it gives you on how you want your source material to sound. On the front you can select between music, movie, "FourPoint", and normal stereo modes. This can bring a whole new level of excitement to normal CD and MP3 listening.

Under games that don't support Dolby, the unit goes into normal "FourPoint" surround mode, which is the normal 4 speaker mode for the Environmental Audio spewing from the SB-Live. And before I get 1000 emails, no I haven't tested these speakers out with the MX300. Even under the 4-channel mode, the games explode with life thanks to the larger-than-life subwoofer pounding its brain out.

The Tech Zone heeft een vergelijking gepost van de twee beste socket370 coolers van dit moment: de GlobalWin FDP32 en Alpha 7HO:

...en de winnaar?

Woooo baby!!! 616Mhz! Now we're talking! However 616Mhz wasn't 100% stable. It would run Windows without many problems but it would lock up after a few loops of Unreal. However the FDP32 was able to run the Celeron at 605Mhz using default voltage. While the Abit BP6 and Alpha 7HO can run this Celeron to 605Mhz it required 2.2V to get it 100% stable. The Global Win was able to do 605Mhz at 2V ON A SLOTKET! Man! I wish this cooler would fit on a BP6. I'm sure it will allow the Celeron 366 to run at 616Mhz with 100% stablibilty. I will try to get a BM6 or ZM6 and try it at a later date.

De FDP32 is overigens te groot om op een BP6 te passen, maar daar hebben onze vrienden van Planet Hardware een oplossing voor.

Bij Sharky Extreme is een review te vinden van een A-Trend i440BX moederplank met onboard een Voodoo3 2000 (16MB) en een Yamaha YMF-740 audio processor. Verder is het moederbordje gezegend met maar liefst 29 FSB instellingen en support voor in totaal 1GB geheugen. Hier heppie een stukje over de overklokbaarheid van de A-Trend ATC6254M.

Thanks to the wide variety of CPU front side bus settings and the integrated Voodoo3 chipset itself, the ATC6254M offers a wide variety of not only CPU overclocking possibilities, but also video accelerator overclocking via registry tweaks of the 3dfx Voodoo3's core/RAM speed.

Since the Voodoo3 2000 is set to operate at a 143MHz speed for both its core and memory, we set out to duplicate the results we've often obtained from several V3-2000 AGP cards, which is 165/165 - 175/175.

After repeated tests, including the addition of a small active fan on the already heatsink-equipped Voodoo3 chip that's mounted on the A-Trend board, we achieved stability at 171/171.

Not bad.

Without the fan, the Voodoo3 tended to operate best at 167/167, which is still some 24MHz faster than its default 143/143 speed.

We also obtained the overclocks we expected on the P3 and Celeron CPUs that we have a good deal of experience with at certain speeds. The ATC6254M was able to hit the speeds as well as other current 440BX mainboards have previously from ASUS, Abit, and AOpen, although the A-Trend board does not allow the CPU's core voltage level to be set manually.

Bij CGO hebben ze een preview online gezet van Grand Theft Auto deel 2. Hier heb je een gedeelte over wat coole nieuwe features, check de preview voor de rest, en wat mooie screenies.

Mayhem is indeed available in plenty, and the player will want to jump back into a life of crime as soon as humanly possible, the faster to facilitate your rise to King of the City. The player will not be constrained to follow any preset path through the game, but rather will choose from a number of possibilities that arise from the dynamic environment. Many of these opportunities involve vehicles; the player could become an illegitimate bus or taxi driver, for instance, by stealing a bus or a cab and charging fares to passengers (bonus points are available for particularly twisted behavior, such as wiping out said busload of passengers). People on the streets offer numerous moneymaking opportunities, either as fodder for muggings, customers for illicit drug deals, or as targets of paid assassinations. As the player reaps rewards in the form of cash, drugs, new vehicles, and notoriety, new opportunities will present themselves in the form of gang allegiances. Various reputable groups such as the Yakuza, the Russian Mafia, and the Hari Krishnas may offer jobs or special favors to the player.

Ik kwam bij Betanews een proggie tegen dat wellicht handig is voor luie sitebouwers die een DHTML menuutje willen bouwen, maar daarvoor niet zelf de code willen tikken:

xFX JumpStart kicked out a new beta of DHTML Menu Builder 1.5. DHTML Menu Builder allows you to easily make pull down menus in DHTML format and integrate them into your HTML, without writing a line of code.

Het proggie kun je hier downloaden.

Okee, het was natuurlijk al langer bekend dat AMD tot het PC133 / DDR SDRAM broederschap behoorde. In tegenstelling tot Rambus DRAM hebben we over DDR SDRAM eigenlijk niet veel gehoord. Techweb heeft een artikeltje met info:

Advanced Micro Devices will lean heavily on PC133 and double-data rate synchronous DRAM to boost the performance of its new Athlon processors, putting Rambus memory on the back burner due to its high initial cost and the comparable performance of SDRAM-based memory, the company said.

"We've been talking about Rambus a long time, and it was looking like it would be the foremost architecture," said Samuel Rogan, AMD's marketing manager for Japan and South Korea. "There will be a time when that will happen, but probably not until the end of 2000 or 2001."

[...] During its presentation on the Athlon processor in Tokyo, AMD showed a slide indicating that 100-MHz DDR SDRAM with a standard64-bit memory bus will provide 1.6 gigabytes per second of bandwidth, equal to a 400-MHz (800-MHz effective) Rambus DRAM running on Rambus' proprietary 16-bit serial bus. DDR SDRAMs with a core frequency of 133 MHz (266-MHz effective) will ratchet up memory bandwidth to 2.1 Gbytes/s, according to the company.

"Rambus boasts higher frequency on data transfers, but because of the narrower pipe they do not get the same data throughput as you do with DDR," Rogan said. "Since DDR has comparable or better performance than a Rambus solution at a better cost, the motherboard guys like it and the DRAM manufacturers don't have to retool."

[...] As for DDR chip sets, AMD's Rogan said he expects the first to be available by early next year. DRAM vendors have been sampling DDR SDRAMs for several years, and are gearing up to make the shift to so-called PC266 DRAMs, which are DDR SDRAMs with a core frequency of 133-MHz that transfer data on both the rising and falling edge of the clock.

Ik kwam bij Overclocker's Workbench deze info tegen over een USB to USB netwerk dingetje, waarmee je eenvoudig een LAN kunt bouwen:

Have you ever thought of using the USB port to replace the conventional laplink cable using Parallel port ? The answer is that you can now do that with this product Magic Toplan of Skywell Taiwan.

With this product, you can connect up to 127 computers through a USB hub. The distance between two machines can be within the range of 10m. It's more suitable for small networks with 20 PCs.

Advantages of this product is that it's very suitable to use with notebooks for fast transfer of files. The speed is almost near to 10Mbps. The setup procedure is also similar to of a network card. Currently it only has drivers for Win95/98, no drivers for NT, Linux and Mac. A test reveals that it only takes 10 sec to transfer a 4Mb MP3 file from two machines running celeron 450 on a BX board with Apollo pro chipset. The speed is much faster than using LL3.

Gamewire heeft een artikeltje gepost over next-generation gaming systems, zoals de Dreamcast, Playstation 2 en natuurlijk onze eigen PC. Dit stukje over de zwaar overhype-te PSX2 is denk ik wel interessant:

Then we have the PSX2. Nothing is really certain about this system, not even the name. The whole thing seems like it was made to divert attention from DreamCast, and I bet Sony is really sweating their boots to push something final out the door. Its initial response was that of awe. With just basically some private shows and some chips slapped together, rumors spread like wild flowers. The specs on this thing are immensely high, and set it up to be 10x more powerful in polygon count then some of today's SGI workstations. Technology that is hardly even out of spec sheets is scheduled to be used on this baby. However the technology is so sophisticated it's hard to imagine Sony getting this thing out the door for less then 500 dollars (Recent rumors say it will cost $300. I'm not saying this can't happen but it is very unlikely), which is still cheap when you look at a SGI Workstation that is priced at a standard of about 10k. A bigger question then price is even if they can provide the hardware to pull this off. The emotion engine is being manufactured by Toshiba and uses a .18-micron. That is very hard to pull off and neither Toshiba nor Sony has done it before (Not even very many companies that do this for a living can say that they have done this before). There is bound to be a lot of problems in developing the amount of chips needed in the time provided. On top of all that Sony has plans to release this thing next year in both Japan and North America. By pure specs alone the PSX2 is going to be a system to watch and speculate about.

De OC goden van HardOCP hebben een review van de Tennmax Detonator online gezet. Dit dingetje is bedoeld om je TNT kaart koud te houden:

The basic construction here is pretty smart as far a building a better heatsink goes. Remember that Tennmax is going the distance to not give you a unit that is gonna bust you out of one or two PCI slots in the name of coolness. The actual measurement is 40mm square by 10mm in height. Pretty dang tiny.

But doesn't a heatsink need lots of surface area to work properly? I am so glad you asked that. Check out the two pictures that show the Detonator from the side. See all the little slots? The fan unit that is actually mounted inside the heatsink and blows air through the slots to carry the heat away from the heatsink and the chipset.

Gamespot heeft een review gepost van de nieuwe Stealth III S540 Xtreme, waarmee Diamond de 'low-budget' Savage4 chipset eindelijk op een beetje redelijke kloksnelheid brengt: 166MHz!

The Savage4's OpenGL drivers have historically been better than its Direct3D drivers, and that trend continues. Q3Test 1.08 16-bit results actually outpaced a 183MHz Voodoo3/3500 - though admittedly the Voodoo3's OpenGL ICD is a work in progress.

Our testing indicates that the sweet spot for this card may be at 800x600. We didn't perform any 16-bit tests at 800x600, but seeing the way the benchmarks dropped off sharply going from 800x600x32 to 1024x768x32 is illuminating. You have to remember that this is a $100 graphics card.

Planet Riva heeft een review van de Maxi Gamer Xentor 32 gepost. De kaart heeft geen bijzondere features, maar is met 175/183Mhz wel extra hoog geklokt. Helemaal okay zit dit niet bij de Xentor32, want in hete systemen draait de kaart volgens Planet Riva niet stabiel:

As mentioned earlier, the RIVA TNT2 Ultra was specified by NVIDIA to run at a core speed of 150 MHz, providing 300 megatexels/second of framerate. At the same time, though, NVIDIA left it up to the various board manufacturers to overclock the core as they wished to get even higher fillrates. Such was the case with Guillemot, who boosted the speed of the Xentor 32 to 175 MHz. Simple math would make the fillrate now 350 megatexels/second, a significant change.

However, extra speed does come at a price. During this review lockups occured all too often, heat being the culprit. In all honestly, the review system is fairly hot as-is, with the UW/SCSI drive and Peltier fan units already adding to the case temperature. That being said, the Xentor 32 is a very stable card when running in a fairly "normal" machine. If your paricular rig is already prone to heat problems, it is this reviewers recommendation that you remove them before purchasing a Xentor 32 card, or any high-performance video board for that matter.

Bij The Tech Zone hebben ze een originele toepassing gevonden voor een ramdrive: zet Q3Test in RAM en je bent 10 seconde eerder in een level dan je mede-fraggers, die vanaf een trage harddisk moeten loaden:

With 256 MB RAM, just use between 80-100 MB of RAM for the RAM drive, and once in Windows, install Quake 3 to the RAM drive and run it from there. Then, you will be the first one in the levels every time. Loading Quake 3 from a RAM drive is a whole new experience. The game loads like right NOW! You'll beat everyone to the level by up to 10 seconds.

Diep verslaafde kwekers surfen richting The Tech Zone voor het complete artikel.

ComputerPros.com heeft een review gepost van de inmiddels welbekende Abit BE6 met onplank UltraATA/66 controller:

Looks like Abit has a solid board here with their BE6. Although I can't say it's the best BX board I've seen but at least Abit understands that there are UDMA 66 drives now available and that users that are buying motherboards right now need that kind of support. I still see Abit as a company that tends to rush things to market too soon ( hence the whole incident w/ the voltage regulators in early batches of BE6) and that it hurts them a little. The board itself, if you take away the UDMA 66 support is a rather plain BX board nowadays. It offers very few FSBs, average temperature monitoring, and it still comes in the old 5/2/1 configuration. The only thing I see the BE6 has going for it is the UDMA 66 and Softmenu. I think if you're buying a new board now it's better to wait for other boards that offer this or just get another BX board and buy a cheap controller card.

Het volk van The Tech Zone heeft een review van de Cambridge Soundworks FPS2000 speakers op het net gezet. Hier heppie een stukje:

The FPS 2000 does not only make your games come to life but the system also makes your cd's have stunning clarity. With a few adjustments to the volume and the balancing of front to rear, you can make the guitars in your cd's seem as if they explode from all area's around you. Dave Mathews - Crush is especially nice. All the instruments come from there own direction, it is as if you are at the concert in the front row. The music will come in from one side and fade out to the other side and then to top it all off, it fades out to behind you. Amazing!

Ars Technica heeft een review gepost van de ATi All-in-Wonder 128. een kaartje dat net zoals de 3dfx V3-3500TV en Elsa Erazor III eXtreme is voorzien van allerlei komische TV Tuner en video-in/out features:

For the hardcore gamer and tweaker, this card is probably a pass. Its distaste for non-orthodox FSB speeds, 16MB of RAM, and good-but-not-great 3D performance lack the luster we've come to expect from dedicated 3D cards.

Then again, for the graphics professional or CAD/3D designer, the ATI All-in-Wonder 128 has no contender in its price range. Its image quality is just short of spectacular, and its OpenGL and Direct3D ratings smoke a Matrox G200 six-ways-to-Sunday (700% faster at OpenGL, 250% faster at D3D). And with ATI's apparent dedication to this chipset (there are currently 7 configurations in their lineup using it), driver updates will likely ease the heavy CPU dependency. You saw testimony above - their recent OpenGL update (specifically directed at Quake 3 Test users, in fact) increases performance by 15% or so. Also, in a freakish move in this market, there are a number of 3rd-party developers offering alternative drivers. How the hell that happened, I don't know, but I like it. ATI, without embarrassment, both links to them and includes information on their support pages. This includes drivers for the BeOS and Linux!

PC Paradox heeft een artikeltje online gezet waarin het halve assortiment van 3DCool.com langs komt fietsen. De geteste produkten zijn een 3DCool Case fan, een 3DCool Double Whammy Celeron Cooler, een 3DCool Ultra Thin Exhauster (harddisk cooler) en een Super Duper Slot Fan. Over de Ultra Thin Exhauster heb je hier een stukje:

As with all HD fans, air flow and size always count. Believe me, the UTE is no slouch in either of these categories. Easily outputting almost double the air of fans twice its size, the UTE has made a class of its own. With a sleek design and excellent output it will do wonders for your HD. The design on the UTE allowed for the fan to rest comfortably either below or above the HD, whisking the hot air away from the HD, and moving the now much cooler air into the case. Installation was a snap despite the lack of a good manual. Remove the HD, place UTE any way you want (depending on where you want air to go) and screw it in. It is as simple as that. My only complaint came that the UTE was quite loud and sounded a lot noisier than a whisper (the advertised sound output). When I contacted 3DCool about this, they said it must have been defective, so I will have to go with them on this.

Check PC Paradox voor de reviews.

Hot Hardware heeft een review gepost van de Voodoo3-3500TV, die - in een desperate poging van 3dfx om de tekortkomingen van de V3 chipset te camoufleren - is voorzien van allerlei leuke video-in en video-out grappen:

The V3-3500TV comes equipped with a Philips Tuner that does a nice job of bringing in the channels and displaying them in a crisp clean window on your desktop. This baby is cable ready and also has an FM Tuner built in for radio as well. The quality is as good as you saw in our review of the STB DesktopTV card. There are also some nice utilities for using your new Audio/Video rig. It all works just as you would expect. Like the proverbial "clicker" you are so comfortable using during those weekend long sporting binges, these tools are very easy to use.

3DHardware.net heeft een vergelijking van 3 goedkope geluidskaartjes in elkaar geklust. Besproken worden de AOpen Audio Phantom, Aureal Vortex Advantage PCI en Shark Multimedia Predator 4D-PCI. Van deze 3 produkten is het Aureal kaartje (een gestripte Vortex 1) waarschijnlijk het meest interessante produkt:

Vortex Advantage PCI This card, as expected, also supports DirectSound hardware accleration which makes it shine in all the new Windows games. The fact that it's also compatible with A3D makes it compatible with the great bulk of games that support this, for positional 3D audio.

The MIDI of this card, although very nice on paper, sounded slightly worse than the two other cards. As it's got the easily widest polyphony this weighs up for the quality though. That's if you ever decide to write a piece for 256 instruments =).

Sony en Nippon Zeon hebben een harddisk in ontwikkeling die is opgebouwd uit plastic schijven. De produktiekosten van dit grapje zouden 30 tot 40% lager zijn dan die van traditionele aluminium schijven. Onderstaande info komt van The Register:

Sony would not confirm the figure, but acknowledged that they would be less expensive to make. A spokesman said that this was because they did not need the same polishing process. He would not comment on a start date for commercial production.

Analysts were not impressed, however, saying that it was not yet clear which of Sony's many proposed technologies would be best. The company is also discussing plastic disks with US based Castlewood Systems, and new aluminium and glass disks with Quantum and Western Digital.

Serieus nieuws bij The Register: uit een onderzoek van Computec Media blijkt dat wij gamers normale homo sapiensen zijn!

Key findings indicated that the typical gamer was a well educated, well paid, socially well-adjusted male who - more than likely - drives a nice car. That's a real one, BTW.

Torsten Oppermann, CEO of Computec commented: "Hardcore gamers are only the smallest part of the market."

The vast majority of those playing computer games - 84 per cent - described themselves as 'casual game players' who do not know how to rocket jump or circle strafe. (Good news for the serious Quakers out there – more frags.) The remaining 16 per cent said that gaming was a serious hobby.

80 per cent of the gamers were between 16 and 34 and nearly half had a college education.

The most popular types of game were strategy, action and sports. Unsurprisingly, educational games finished an unimpressive last place in the popularity stakes.

Silicon Graphics heeft een Linux versie van z'n XFS journaling file system onder de (Open Source) General Public License gereleased. Hier heb je de info van The Register:

SGI yesterday followed up on its promise to wholeheartedly support Linux and the open source community -- it released under the General Public Licence (GPL) those portions of its XFS journaling file system that it owns.

The decision to release XFS under an open source licence was announced last may, but the actual release of the software yesterday was an important signal that SGI is serious about its support for Linux, part of CEO Rick Belluzzo's recovery strategy for the company.

XFS will bring to Linux a file system that not only tracks the location of files within a storage medium but records file access activity and how the location of those files changes over time. That ensures a system's state can be more fully restored after a crash and guards against data corruption in the event of, say, power failure.

That's a significant addition to Linux's feature set, and will give it a significant lead over rival operating systems. So far, the BeOS and OS/2 Warp Server are the only mainstream OSes with a journaled file system.

Een kudde aandeelhouders van Diamond heeft S3 voor de rechter gedaagd, omdat ze niet helemaal gelukkig zijn met de overname van Diamond door S3. Volgens de aandeelhouders wordt het vermogen van Diamond in deze deal onder gewaardeerd:

A gang of shareholders in Diamond Multimedia have sued the company in an attempt to block its takeover by 3D graphics specialist S3.

The shareholders claim S3's $200 million acquistion through a share swap undervalues Diamond's stock. S3 is offering one of its own shares for 1.9 Diamond shares, but the shareholders described that as a "bargain basement" price.

The suit, filed with the Santa Clara County, California Superior Court states: "The intrinsic value of the equity of [Diamond] is materially greater than the consideration proposed." That, they claim, means Diamond's directors have failed their statutory obligation to maximise the value of the shareholders' stock.

Do the shareholders have a point? Arguably not. S3's acquisition proposal was made before Diamond released its most recent financial results, for its second quarter, ended 30 June (the acquisition proposal was made on 22 June). The figures showed the company's revenues had fallen 34 per cent year on year despite an improvement in Diamond's loss.

Fiets richting The Register voor meer info over deze kwestie.

Ik kwam bij Coolinfo deze info tegen over een kever in Explorer 5: die laat je password in de status bar zien als je een file van een ftp site aan het downloaden bent. Zelf gebruik ik gelukkig geen IE, dus hier heb ik mooi geen last van :

BugNet, an online listing of security alerts, is warning Internet Explorer 5 users about a security hole that can lead to their user name and password being exposed when they access an FTP password-protected site.

The flaw reveals the information after users type a password to log on to an FTP site, then double-click on a file to download it, according to BugNet. During the download, the user name and password appear at the bottom of the screen as "ftp://UserNameassword@test.com/filename.txt," where test.com is the FTP site and filename.txt is the file being downloaded.

BugNet proposes that downloading larger files could expose the private information for long periods of time.

KeyLabs, an independent testing facility in Lindon, Utah, confirms the flaw, according to BugNet.

Microsoft says it is not aware of the problem but will look into the report, according to a company representative.

"If this issue does in fact pose a security risk to our customers, we will move quickly to provide them with a solution," the representative says.