We're willing to bet that more than a few of our readers have participated in a video game beta test before despite the fact that they are sometimes hard to get into. Up until now, you usually had to rely on being selected to participate in those beta programs, but Valve is looking to change that.

Steam has just released a new service called Early Access that makes participating in beta test easier. Instead of filling out form after form, and email after email, Valve's solution is to let game developers simply charge users to be part of the beta. Developers can chose to offer the beta for free through the service or charge users full price for the game, which rolls over to your steam library when officially launched.

As of this posting, the Early Access program has 12 titles including some heavy hitters like: Arma 3 Aplha, Kerbal Space Program and Star Forge Alpha. It is still up in the air if gamers are willing to buy a game at full price months before release just to get access to the beta program, but something tells me that it will be a success.

Our Tweakipedia section has a new post.

If you're running an older laptop that's starting to feel a bit long in the tooth, it may be time to consider doing some upgrades to extend the longevity of the system. Our own Chris Ramseyer, along with most tech gurus, will tell you that upgrading to an SSD is one of the best ways increase the performance of an aging system and breathe new life into it. Previously the process of upgrading a disk could be complicated, but there are now many tools and different ways of upgrading a system to take advantage of a fast new SSD.

In today's guide, we'll show you how to upgrade your aging laptop-or even a new one, as is the one we're using today-to a solid-state drive. We'll also cover upgrading RAM to get the most performance we can from easily upgraded components.

Corsair's current mechanical gaming keyboard, the Vengeance K60, is a great keyboard, but people do like their backlights on their keyboards. Well, Corsair has come to your rescue, unveiling the Vengeance K70 - backlit enabled.

Corsair have made the Vengeance K70 available in both black and silver, but have gone a step further with the backlight color. The silver aluminum K70 comes with blue backlighting, while the anodized black sports deep red backlighting. This will ensure both keyboards not only perform well, but look great while doing so. Each key is then individually backlit, with the added ability of having every key capable of being independently enabled, or disabled.

In typical Corsair fashion, the fun doesn't stop there, as the Vengeance K70 comes with alternate colored, contoured keycaps for the WASD and 1-6 keycaps, allowing for truly personal customization. The Corsair Vengeance K70 will be available in April for a suggested price of $129.99.

Our first look at the Battlefield 4 website is here, which doesn't show much at all unfortunately. What it does tell us is that we can 'unlock the Battlefield 4 art' by having more fans log-in, the team at DICE will reveal 'more,' what exactly we'll see - is anyone's guess.

The website says to come back on March 27, which is when we'll see our first look at gameplay. This is what I'm excited for, hopefully it's not pre-rendered or scripted, and some actual, in-game footage. We can only dream.

If you've wanted to know how it feels to be a world renown overclocker, MSI have officially announced their 2013 MSI Master Overclocking Arena (MOA) is entering its six-year anniversary. MSI are going with a "NO LIMITS" concept, that will "bring out the core spirit of overclocking and help to unveil MOA 2013".

In order to enter, all you have to do is share the "No Limits MSI MOA" video on Facebook, giving you an entry into the draw. There will be two people chosen as winners, who will receive MSI's latest Gaming Series motherboard. Here's what you need to know:

• Only members of the MSI FAN CLUB fans have the right to participate.
• Winners must contact with MSI FAN CLUB before Apr. 15th, 2013 to retrieve the prices, anytime later than the designated date will be disqualified.
• The organizer reserves the right to review the eligibility of participants. Winners will be disqualified and prizes will be recalled if participant takes part in any act of obstructing the fair game principle with malicious computer programs or any other methods or if nonconformance with the activity rules are detected or reported by a third party.

For more detailed information, please visit MSI FAN CLUB page on Facebook.

Our Ask the Experts section has a new question, where we have Gaelan in Australia wanting some help deciding between some Sapphire GPUs.

Q: I'm buying a new system and trying to choose a single GPU for now and upgrade to crossfire later. Between the Sapphire Radeon HD7870 XT Edition, Sapphire Radeon HD 7950 Vapor-X 3GB or a card for a similar price which would you say is the best one.

I know the HD 7970 is better but I don't know if its really worth the extra money. Thanks.

A: You can view the answer to Gaelan's question right here.

Google have an announcement for us all today, with YouTube now seeing one billion monthly users. Using Wolfram Alpha's estimate of the 6.79 billion people on Earth, this would equate to roughly 14.7% of the world using YouTube every month.

The Mountain View-based everything giant has said that YouTube feeds out to nearly one in every two people on the Internet, a staggering number. Google were once criticized over acquiring YouTube in 2006, where they paid $1.65 billion for the video sharing site. I'm sure now, critics have their lips closed, and tears running down their faces. It was only last year that Google saw their first billion-view video, PSY's Gangnam Style.

From the depths of the Atlantic Ocean, significant pieces of Saturn V's rocket engines have been recovered. What makes this a big announcement is the fact they've been there for over 40 years, and recovered thanks to a privately-funded expedition by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

Bezos explained the site of the discovery three miles below the surface, more than 400 miles from Florida's east cost as "an underwater wonderland, an incredible sculpture garden of twisted F-1 engines that tells the story of a fiery and violent end, one that serves testament to the Apollo programme." The Amazon founder announced over a year ago that they had located the engine pieces that took man to the moon in 1969.

After three weeks abord a recovery vessel named 'Seabed Worker', Bezos and his team are on their way back to Cape Canaveral with their pieces of the Saturn V rocket engines. Bezos said in a statement on the expedition website: "We're bringing home enough major components to fashion displays of two flown F-1 engines. Many of the original serial numbers are missing or partially missing, which is going to make mission identification difficult. We might see more during restoration. The objects themselves are gorgeous."

The National Broadband Network will not be rolling out as quickly as previously thought, with the NBN Co announcing a three-month delay in their roll-out targets.

The company in charge of rolling out the NBN has now officially begun scaling back their forecast construction timetable, taking the three-month delay into consideration. They had aimed to reach 341,000 premises by June 30, but we're now looking at the end of September. This means that the NBN Co is only going to get the NBN into around 200,000 or so homes and businesses by June 30.

I'm sure this is going to be the start of more delays, unless the NBN Co and their various partners really nail it from here on out. Give me the NBN already, damn it.

Sixty seconds on the Internet doesn't sound like much, but think of all the millions of users on simultaneously, all doing different things and the numbers add up very quickly. In only 60 seconds, around 640TB of data is transferred around the world.

The data comes from an infographic by chipmaker Intel, who breaks it down into even more interesting numbers. Google is a big part of these numbers, where more than two million searches are conducted every sixty seconds. YouTube pushes out around 1.3 million videos, while at the same time consumes 30 hours worth of uploaded video for public consumption.

Moving onto social networks, Facebook sees around 6 million views, and Twitter enjoys around 100,000 new tweets per minute. E-mail is still a huge number, with 204 million e-mails sent out every minute. Most of these are most likely spam, but they still count as data being transferred. Intel has also made some projections looking into the future, where they expect the number of networked devices to double by 2015.

NVIDIA have begun shipping their GRID Visual Computing Appliance (VCA), where designers, animators and visual production users can purchase for just $24,900. On top of this, there is a $2,400 yearly software license fee.

What do you get for $25,000? 8 GPUs, 16 threads of CPU and 192GB of RAM capable of delivering service up to 8 users, with the 16 GPU model doubling this to 16 simultaneous users. If a studio had a decent amount of designers or artists, this could definitely be an option worth looking into.

Thanks to a new leak, we're taking a look at the new version of the Google Play app. The updated app features a Holo-like user interface, thanks to Droid-Life getting their hands (eyes?) on the new apk file, labeled 4.0.16. It's not ready to hit everyone just yet, but it gives us a sneak peak of what to expect from Google, and I love it.

It gives the Play Store a much needed refresh, bringing the interface into line with other Google services like Google Now. The font is all-new, the icons are bigger, and the colors match the categories displayed on the Google Play website. The app is far from perfect, but Google are quick with these things, so I'm sure we'll see an updated Google Play app this side of Google I/O in June.

Google have officially launched Keep, and if you haven't heard of it before now - like myself - it might actually become a tool you'll use on the daily. Google Keep is a note taking service, available online and through an app for Android.

Keep is aimed at users who need to quickly tap something into their device, where it is saved onto Google Drive. Those of you with Android 4.2.2-based devices get an even better way of taking notes, as there's a lock screen widget available for even quicker and easier access to jotting down notes. There's the trailer above explaining Keep, and if you're interested, check it out on the Play Store for your Android device.

Space enthusiasts get excited: SpaceX's new Merlin rocket engine has been approved for use. Gaining this qualification wasn't easy. The Merlin rocket engine was subjected to a total of 28 tests amounting to 1,970 seconds of total test time. SpaceX has said that this amounts to 10 full missions of use.

The Merlin 1D successfully performed every test throughout this extremely rigorous qualification program. With flight qualification now complete, we look forward to flying the first Merlin 1D engines on Falcon 9's Flight 6 this year.

The Merlin will see its first use launching a weather and communications satellite into low-Earth orbit. After that, Merlin will be used to launch a satellite into geosynchronous orbit. The Merlin engine has been in development for about two years.

Logitech are reiterating the fact that they're committed to PC gaming by unveiling their new Logitech G line of gaming peripherals. This lineup boasts six redesigned mice and keyboard favorites, as well as two brand new headsets. There's a lot to cover, so let's get introduced to Logitech's new products.

Logitech G700s Rechargeable Gaming Mouse - Logitech's G700s mouse is a wireless gaming mouse featuring the report rate of an epically fast wired gaming mouse. Logitech have made the G700s capable of maintaining a consistant report rate, no matter if you're using the mouse over its included 2.4GHz wireless connection, or physically connected through USB. You can switch out from wireless to wired gaming if your battery dies, using a data-over-cable connection thanks to its standard microUSB cable.

There are 13 programmable controls on the G700s, macros and more, which are all controlled and manipulated through Logitech's Gaming Software (LGS). Logitech are slapping a suggested retail price of $99.99 for the G700s mouse.

Just when Apple thought they were out of the woods, a new lockscreen vulnerability has been discovered. Apple released iOS 6.1.3 to fix a previously found lockscreen vulnerability, though it appears to have introduced a new one--or failed to fix one that was present in previous versions.

The bug isn't too difficult to activate, nor is it difficult to protect from. A person needs to simply make a telephone call by using Siri and remove the SIM card at the correct time. The bypass is demonstrated in the above embedded video.

To protect against the bypass until Apple fixes it, you just have to disable voice dial from the Password Lock screen. It's time for Apple to start working on iOS 6.1.4.

As if we didn't already have enough weird info coming from Google Trends, we will now be able to watch the rise and fall of viral videos. Google has added YouTube searches to the data available through Google Trends to allow curious users and journalists to dig through piles of information.

For instance, goats were the top animal searched for this month, beating out the ever-so-cute dogs and cats that are usually on top. Goats are probably on top because of the hilarious videos of goats screaming like humans that have surfaced online. More interesting information is that searches for Rebecca Black peak every Friday.

Users are able to search Trends for different Google services, such as just Images, News, Products, or YouTube. We'll keep our eyes on the trends and see if anything interesting pops up. Oh, some good news: Harlem Shake appears to be on the way out.

Ebay has announced that they are changing its fees in order to become more competitive with Amazon. Some of the fee changes will take place April 16, while others will remain the same until May 1. In the end, most sellers will end up paying lower fees, though this won't be the case for everyone.

Part of the reason Amazon has been so successful is that they don't charge listing fees. "For most of our sellers the complexity of our fees were keeping them from being on eBay and preventing them from having full transparency into their profitability from selling on eBay," Michael Jones, vice president of merchant development, said.

If you only list a few items each year, Ebay is going to offer 50 free listings per month. Ebay will then take 10 percent of the sale price, if the item sells. If you happen to be a higher-volume seller, final value fees will range between 4 percent and 9 percent, depending on the product category.

"There will be some sellers who will pay a little bit more on eBay, but most sellers will be impacted positively by this."

Google suffered a temporary case of dementia earlier today which resulted in Digg being erased from Google's indexes. The deletion of Digg from the index resulted from Google accidentally applying a Webspam filter to the whole site rather than the one link they were trying to disallow.

We're sorry about the inconvenience this morning to people trying to search for Digg. In the process of removing a spammy link on Digg.com, we inadvertently applied the Webspam action to the whole site. We're correcting this, and the fix should be deployed shortly.

It comes at an ironic time. Just a few days ago, Digg's Kevin Rose announced that they would build a replacement for Google's ill-fated Reader. Digg's General Manager Jake Levine added that the accidental removal wasn't too terrible for business:

The good news is that it doesn't really impact us all that much. The vast majority of our traffic is direct (like 90 percent) so it's not a huge deal for us from a business or user perspective.

Samsung has confirmed that they are working on a fix for a flaw that allows bypassing of the lock screen. The bug was posted to the internet today and shows a method for bypassing the lock screen, permanently, if you have enough time to download an app from the Play Store.

The steps to reproduce the bug are below:

1. From the lock screen, hit the emergency call button.
2. Dial a non-existent emergency services number - e.g. 0.
3. Press the green dial icon.
4. Dismiss the error message.
5. Press the phone's back button.
6. The app's screen will be briefly displayed.
7. This is just about long enough to interact with the app.
8. Using this, you can run and interact with any app / widget / settings menu.
9. You can also use this to launch the dialler.
10. From there, you can dial any phone number (one digit at a time) and place a phone call.
11. With Google Play, you can search for apps using the voice interface.
12. You can download apps from the app store which will disable the screen lock.

The bug is only present on Samsung's implementation of Android. It doesn't seem to affect the stock build. In a statement, Samsung said, "We are aware of this issue and will release a fix at the earliest possibility. Samsung considers user privacy and the security of user data its top priority."