Released in June 2009 to a group of beta users, Microsoft Security Essentials is now available for download. The free anti-virus software from the Redmond-based tech giant offers real-time protection for home PCs and helps users to protect their computers from viruses, spyware, and other malicious software. I've tried out the free anti-virus app and I must say that I'm pretty impressed with Security Essentials. It's able to tell me whether my computer is safe from any potential threats that might affect the system in just a few clicks. Besides that, it offers a comprehensive malware protection to guard against dangerous malware. Security Essentials runs quietly and efficiently in the background so that users are free to use their Windows-based PC the way you want—without interruptions or long computer wait times.

It has been 9 years since Google entered China Market officially, and 5 years since Google established Google China. Despite having a brand value of an amazing $66.4 billion, Google.cn still fails to dominate the search engine market in mainland China and faces stiff competition from bitter rival Baidu. According to statistics from comScore in early July, Baidu had become the second largest global search engine, with more than 8 billion searches and 145 million unique visitors in June. In other words, Baidu’s market share in China is nearly 76% to Google China’s 19.8 percent. So what makes Google lose out in the developing country? Here are the 4 reasons why...

The folks at Twitter has just added a small but impressive feature into its real-time search system. When users click on a particular trending topic listed on the sidebar of the page, a short description related to the event or product will be displayed. For example, as I clicked on 'Typhoon Ondoy', Twitter will show a paragraph of text, telling me what 'Typhoon Ondoy' is all about and why is it trending. This is particularly useful as it enables me to find out more about the natural catastrophe in the Philippines, without reading multiple updates posted by users to get an insight of what's happening.

Are you a nerd? You ain't a real nerd unless you built this. Apparently, Brian De Vitis, a Popular Science reader, bought a R2D2 cooler and rigged 8 retro game consoles into it. Now, you can have a robot which you can play nearly every game of yesteryear. What about the monitor?

If you have visited Google today you will notice Google's logo has two L's. Why is Google spelled wrong? Is the questions running in the minds of every internet user who visits Google today. The 2 L's created an excitement with the Google users on why their is 2 L's. This is the first time its ever happened in Google’s life. Many have been guessing why what the 2L's stand for. The truth is they actually are the number 11. This is a part of Google’s 11th birthday.

First of all I'd like to apologise to both the readers of TechXav and my fellow writers for my distinct lack of posts recently ( I haven't been posting anything for around a month or so). I have been fully absorbed in Exams recently (I have my first in two days time) and boy, I do HATE exams. My Social Networking life almost disappeared. ALMOST disappeared. No, not completely. OrSiSo saved my life. OrSiSo stands for Organize, Simplify, Socialise. And I completely agree. I blogged about OrSiSo from a reviewer point of view about two months ago. Now, you get to hear my personal testimonial. Picture this: I'm sitting at my desk, with the computer to my right. Music is playing in the background (I use Real Player). There is a science (Maths, English e.t.c) textbook staring me in the face and I'm bored to tears. Almost literally bored to tears. ALMOST. If an OrSiSo pop-up didn't appear in the next minute.

I'm utterly impressed by this newly-launched application called Readtwit. It's particularly useful for those who use the micro-blogging platform as a source of interesting content in addition to social conversations like sharing your daily lives, rants or ramblings with your friends. Instead of reading your "messy" Twitter timeline filled with links, spam and personal tweets, Readtwit filters your Twitter stream to links only to, resolves link destinations and publishes the content as an RSS feed. As such, you're able to view the full articles on your preferred feed readers such as Google Reader or Bloglines in a clean RSS format, without any URL shorteners or duplicates.

About a month ago I received an invite to Google Wave Developer Beta! In case you haven’t been keeping up on the latest things over at Google here is a brief description of it. Google Wave is a new tool for communication and collaboration on the web, coming later this year to public beta. I have tested Google Wave on and off for a month and the only thing I have to say is for the average user of the web, Google Wave does not effect them and will not help them.