Welcome to the August 2008 TWT newsletter. This month, with the E3 Electronic Entertainment show having just finished, we take a look at some of the coolest new games that you will be able to play on your Windows PC in the near future.

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In this months issue:-

1) What's new at Top-Windows-Tutorials.com?
2) The Most Exciting New Games From E3
3) Tip of the Month - Share Your Music Around Your Home!
4) Free Utility of the Month - Adobe Acrobat Reader 9 and Foxit Reader
5) Still Hate Vista? Wait! Says Microsoft, Have You Even Tried It?

What's new at Top-Windows-Tutorials.com?

Another great month for our readers. We posted several tutorials for the popular free Avast Antivirus, you can find them on our Antivirus tutorials page. Then, we brought you no less than nine useful tutorials and articles for using Windows Media Player 11. You can find these tutorials here. Finally, we updated our hard drive encryption tutorial for the new Truecrypt 6. You can view this tutorial here.

The Most Exciting New Games From E3

The new "E3 Media and Business Summit" was held last month. E3 is a chance for all the video game companies to get together and showcase their new games and gadgets. While Microsoft was a little busy showcasing its new Xbox 360 features, there were several really great looking new games for PC owners. We've picked five titles to tell you about here and hopefully we'll all get the chance to play these great games soon.

Fallout 3 – Explore a post-apocalyptic Washington DC as you hunt for your father across a dangerous and terrifying ruined city. Fallout 3 is a breathtakingly good looking action and role-playing game that is sure to keep players on the edge of their seats. One for the adults only – You can find out more about this game by clicking here.

Empire – Total War – Strategy fans have enjoyed being a Roman general in Rome – Total War, or a Medieval warlord in Medieval – Total War. Now, armchair conquistadors can command vast naval fleets and duke it out over the best trade routes with other European super-powers. Check out the games official website here.

Spore – so called "God" games have been around for a while but Spore takes the concept even further and allows you to design your creatures from the ground up. So if you ever wanted to make a half-man half-monkey hybrid then now you can! In fact the spore creature creator can be downloaded now if you fancy a taste of this intriguing new game.

Left 4 Dead – Another one strictly for the mature gamer. Left 4 Dead is an intense survival horror game where you and several of your friends must fend of hordes of flesh eating zombies. Rumour has it that when you are bored with fighting zombies, you can take control of the zombies yourself, and turn on your friends! You can find out more about this game by visiting the official Left 4 Dead homepage.

Wallace & Gromit's Grand Adventures – One for the family to play together, The lovable plasticine duo of Wallace and Gromit are set to hit PC screens in this grand puzzle solving adventure later this year. You can check out screen shots and a trailer for the game on the official website.

Tip of the Month - Share Your Music Around Your Home!

Do you have more than one PC, games console or other device attached to your broadband connection? If you do, you have your very own home network. Did you know that many devices now support "media sharing" ? Using Windows Media player, you can access your MP3 or video collection on a wide range of devices. Play that favourite tune from your games room while you work in the study, or create your own custom sound-tracks for your favourite Xbox 360 game. To learn more about media sharing, check out our guide to media sharing with Windows Media Player 11.

Free Utility of the Month - Adobe Acrobat Reader 9

In these days of powerful computers and gigabytes of storage space, PDF files are invaluable for archiving documents. Unlike Microsoft word documents, for example, PDF files look almost identical to the paper copies. Many companies now provide their instruction manuals exclusively in PDF format, and utilities like Windows Search 4.0 or Google Desktop Search make finding information in PDF files a breeze. We even showed you how to make your own PDF files with CutePDF writer, in issue 13 of our newsletter.

Windows can't open PDF files without extra software and the most powerful PDF viewing software comes from Adobe, the creators of the format. Adobe Acrobat Reader 9 comes with everything you need to view, search, comment and explore PDF files on your PC. You can download a copy for free by visiting the Acrobat Reader 9 homepage.

Looking for an alternative, more lightweight PDF viewer, perhaps for an older machine? Foxit Reader 2.3 might be just what you are looking for. Weighing in at only 2mb for a full download, Foxit opens PDF files faster than Adobe reader and supports annotations too. We especially like how Foxit Reader allows you to easily add bookmarks to your PDF files, something the official Adobe Acrobat Reader lacks.

To find out more about this software, visit the Foxit PDF Reader homepage. You can install both Foxit Reader and Adobe Acrobat Reader 9 on the same machine if you like.

Still Hate Vista? Wait! Says Microsoft, Have You Even Tried It?

Still not upgraded to Windows Vista? Maybe you'd like to try Windows Mojave instead? Trouble is, Windows Mojave doesn't actually exist. This was a marketing stunt that Microsoft recently performed. They took a bunch of people who were refusing to upgrade to Vista and showed them "Windows Mojave" instead. The crowd then fell in love with this flashy new operating system, only to be told it was actually Windows Vista after all. Go check it out yourself on the Mojave Homepage.

Of course, there are one or two caveats with this little exercise. Firstly, Microsoft presented Vista on a 2GB HP Pavillon laptop PC, a modern laptop PC that has been built from the ground-up as a Vista machine. Most complaints with Vista stem from it being slower, or less compatible on the same hardware as Windows XP was. Secondly, many of the new features of Vista can be replicated on Windows XP if you know how (Check out my Slashdot-featured article Windows XP Revisited - Teaching the Faithful Old Dog Some New Tricks ).

Then again, as Microsoft are always keen to point out, Windows Vista does bring with it some very real benefits over XP, particularly with regard to system security and Vistas excellent search capabilities. If you really cannot make up your mind, there are ways to have both Windows Vista and Windows XP installed on the same machine, though you still require a separate license for each operating system.

That's all for another month. We hope that you enjoyed our newsletter, if you didn't then please let us know why, you can contact us by visiting this page. If you have enjoyed this newsletter, feel free to pass it on to all your friends and family, or better still encourage them to sign up for their own copy! Until next month, keep checking Top-Windows-Tutorials.com and enjoy happy, safe and stress-free computing!