Computer Zones

What's the difference between the N120 netbook and the N110? A little more horsepower but a little less battery life.

2009-06-15T19:56:00.000-07:00

Samsung is continuing its run at the netbook market with incremental tweaks to design and function, and that's where the N120, blood brother of the Samsung N110, comes in. You won't find anything revolutionary here, just some nice extras that give you a little more choice.

The first thing you'll notice upon opening the N120 is the mirrorlike reflection from the glossy 10.1-inch panel. While the N120's screen looks great under ideal lighting conditions indoors, you'll have to deal with annoying glare pretty much everywhere else. Cranking up the screen's brightness will mostly compensate for the problem, and once you get accustomed to the glossy finish, you'll find a crisp, good-looking screen.

On our test machine the default color settings were slightly red-shifted, but we easily remedied that with the bundled color-correction software. Once properly balanced, the colors were quite good; videos and still images looked well balanced and natural. Text was sharp too, and the 1024-by-600-pixel resolution is good enough for most computing tasks.

The N120's touchpad is also well made, sporting a virtual scroll bar along the right side to make screen navigation easier. You get only a single rocker button for both left- and right-clicking, however, so if you're used to feeling for a separate button instinctively, the N120 will take some getting used to.

If you've been put off by puny netbook keyboards and you want some extra room, note that the N120's keys are a little larger than those of the N110. To accommodate the bigger keys, the N120 is nearly a half inch wider than its predecessor, a fair trade-off for a bit more typing room. As nice as that is, though, the key layout is still almost as cramped as that of any other netbook.

You get some handy shortcut keys. One launches Samsung Magic Doctor, which can perform a full system diagnosis and restore. The Speed Manager button toggles between silent, normal, and speed mode so that you can adjust performance and battery power conservation. For globetrotters, the N120 even has a euro key.

Overall the N120 has nice fit and finish, sporting trim lines and a logical layout that's very similar to the N110's. Even with a slightly larger chassis, it doesn't have much room for a lot of extras. Still, the external ports--VGA-out, three USB ports, and microphone and headphone jacks--give you pretty much everything you'd want. The RAM slot is also readily accessible after you make a few turns of a Phillips screwdriver, and you can easily remove the battery by using two sliding latches. It's a handsome, functional netbook.

Though the N120 managed to earn generally higher benchmark scores than the N110, it still isn't a barn burner. The boost in performance comes mainly from the upgrade to DDR2 800 RAM. Everything else under the hood is essentially the same: It has a 1.6GHz Intel Atom N270 CPU, a 160GB hard drive, and an Intel 945 video chipset.

On the downside, the N120 uses a less powerful battery than the N110 does, and in testing its battery life was about 40 minutes shorter than that of the N110--even so, the N120's excellent 7 hours, 43 minutes of battery life is nothing short of awesome. In the end, the N120 locked in a total WorldBench 6 score of 35, versus the N110's 36.

The N120 carries a subwoofer for upgraded sound over the N110. While the dedicated low-end speaker does offer a bit of bass, audio distortion and clipping are still problematic, as it is with all but the most advanced portable computers. The built-in speakers are good for basic sound, but the subwoofer doesn't add much to the mix. Just use a good set of headphones, and you'll enjoy quality sound from the N120's sound chip.

Like the N110, the N120 comes with an excellent suite of software that features backup, restore, and network software that's easier to use than XP's interface. A clearly written, organized, and detailed user guide, also loaded onto the hard drive, describes everything from hardware functions to tips for using the included software. Samsung did really well here, and made the user experience much friendlier than most.

Samsung's N120 is a nice alternative to the N110 if you're willing to give up some battery power for a slightly roomier keyboard and small bumps in performance. The good news is that they cost the same ($439), so you won't pay a price for your choice. Whether you'll notice the snappier performance or miss the extra battery life more is up to you. If you want a solid netbook that looks good, works well, and does pretty much anything you ask it to without complaining, the N120 is a worthy choice for anyone seeking an ultracompact travel companion.
Get it : Samsung X360-34G 13.3-Inch Laptop (1.2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo SU9300 Centrino 2 Processor, 3 GB RAM, 120 GB Hard Drive, Vista Business)

HD Video Hits Desktops With Hardware, Software

2009-06-15T19:47:00.000-07:00

LifeSize Communications and Radvision are taking two different routes toward high-definition desktop videoconferencing, both aiming to bring more participants into the virtual room.

The quality of video meetings has taken great strides in the past few years with the advent of room-sized systems that deliver lifelike 1080p (1,080-pixel, progressive-scan) video on large flat screens and strategically placed sound. But rank-and-file employees who can't get to a video room, or get a seat in one, are often left with a lower quality experience if they try to participate from hotel rooms or cubicles.

On Monday, LifeSize introduced desktop software to complement its family of dedicated videoconferencing systems, while Radvision teamed up with Samsung Electronics to introduce a PC monitor that doubles as a high-definition screen for meetings.

The LifeSize Desktop application is designed for use on standard Windows XP and Vista systems, including laptops, particularly for employees who work at home or on the road, said Michael Helmbrecht, director of product management.

Most full-size laptops purchased in the past 18 to 24 months will have the power to run LifeSize Desktop, he said. The software is designed to have a relatively small impact on the processing power of the PC. Tests by LifeSize indicate the application will consume about 40 percent of a typical Intel Core 2 Duo-based system. That makes it possible to run the software alongside regular productivity applications without a major hit to performance, he said.

LifeSize Desktop can decode incoming video from a larger conferencing system at 720p and 30 frames per second. It can encode video of the user at 480p, also at 30 frames per second, to send upstream for viewing on full-size systems or other PCs. Depending on the quality setting that is used, the software can work with an Internet connection of between 128Kb per second (Kbps) and 2Mbps, and a user or administrator can set asymmetric limits on how much bandwidth the application can use upstream and downstream, Helmbrecht said.

The software was designed primarily to meet the demands of LifeSize customers, both large and small enterprises, that want to complement their existing videconferencing systems with something for workers on the road. But it can communicate with any standard videoconferencing system using the SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) standard, Helmbrecht said. LifeSize Desktop will be available in the third quarter, starting at US$199 per seat license, with packs of licenses ranging from one seat to 100 seats.

Radvision and Samsung bypassed the CPU power question altogether, while allowing users to integrate their desktop videconferencing systems with their PCs physically. The VC240 is a 24-inch Samsung high-definition PC monitor with a built-in DSP (digital signal processor) for videoconferencing. The unit also includes a built-in high-definition camera, speakers, and a microphone with echo cancellation.

The VC240 can work as a standard monitor until the user needs to join a videoconference, and then show the meeting either on the full screen or in a window, said Bob Romano, vice president of enterprise marketing at Radvision. Because of the built-in DSP, videoconferences don't drain the PC's processor. Alternatively, the unit can sit on the desk and operate as a standalone platform for video or audio conferencing.

Radvision is a longtime maker of IP (Internet Protocol) videoconferencing products that makes products such as gateways and MCUs (multi-conference units). Cisco Systems resells some Radvision MCUs. The VC240 is fully interoperable with Radvision's Scopia product line, so users can participate in meetings with colleagues in high-end video rooms, he said.

Romano compared the VC240 to standalone desktop videoconferencing units from competitors such as Tandberg and Polycom but said it will come in at just a fraction of the cost. The units should sell for less than $3,000, he said. The product will ship in volume in the third quarter of this year, Romano said.
Informatioan : Kensington 64343 MicroSaver DS Notebook Computer Lock with Keys (PC/Mac)

source : www.pcworld.com

Police say hacker stole phone time from AT&T, others

2009-06-15T19:38:00.000-07:00

IDG News Service - An Italian magistrate has issued an international arrest warrant for a Filipino hacker suspected of causing millions of dollars of losses to telecommunications multinationals, and Italian police have arrested five Pakistani nationals accused of exploiting the hacker's work to defraud the telecom companies, officials in the northern city of Brescia said Friday.

The Filipino hacker allegedly penetrated the IT systems belonging to customers of major telephone companies, including AT&T, to steal access codes for international phone calls that he then sold to the group of Italy-based Pakistanis who ran a network of public phone centers. Police declined to identify the hacker by name, saying only that he was a 27-year-old male living in the Philippines.

The Pakistanis offered cut-price calls to their clients by piggy-backing on the PBXs (private branch exchanges) of commercial companies in the United States, Australia and Europe, Italian officials said. The Filipino hacker allegedly sold the access codes that enabled users to take control of the exchanges at US$100 per code, and the codes were then sold on to other users, they said. Some of the illegal profits were allegedly sent to finance the activities of Islamist extremists in Pakistan and Afghanistan, the officials said.

Police identified Zamir Mohammad, 40, the manager of a phone center in Brescia, as the principal buyer of the Filipino's allegedly illegally acquired access codes. Mohammad was responsible for exploiting the codes and selling them on to other telephone service operators in Italy and Spain, police said. On Friday the U.S. Department of Justice unsealed an indictment charging Mohammad ahmoud Nusier, 40, Paul Michael Kwan, 27, and Nancy Gomez, 24, all currently residing in the Philippines, with unauthorized computer access and wire fraud.

As well as making the arrests, police seized 10 phone centers Friday in northern and central Italy and raided 16 properties belonging to Pakistani and Moroccan nationals suspected of links to the telephone pirates.

The investigation began in May 2007 following a tip-off from the FBI that a group of hackers based in the Philippines had violated the IT security of major international phone companies. The group was allegedly headed by a Jordanian, Nusier Mahmoud, who was arrested at that time, Italian police said.

"Italy's antiterrorism police and the FBI are still investigating the group's activities in Spain and Switzerland," Brescia police spokeswoman Sara Del Rosario said in a telephone interview. During the five years the scam was operating, Mohammad allegedly sent some €400,000 (US$560,000) to an Islamic charity run by Jamal Khalifa, a brother-in-law of al Qaida leader Osama bin Laden, Del Rosario said. Khalifa, who was killed in Madagascar in 2007, was suspected, among other things, of funding the Abu Sayyaf group, an organization of Muslim extremists operating in the Philippines.

Many of the calls from the phone centers were made to conflict hotspots in the Middle East and Asia, Del Rosario said. "The stolen access codes offered the added advantage of anonymity to the callers, in violation of Italy's 2005 antiterrorism law," she said.

The biggest victim of the hackers was AT&T Corp., which estimated its losses to the organization since 2003 amounted to US$56 million, Brescia police said in a prepared statement. Other companies targeted by the group were not identified by name.

(Robert McMillan in San Francisco contributed to this report.)

Information : Linksys WPC300N Wireless-N Notebook Adapter

CES '09: Asus' 512GB SSD Laptop; World First

2009-02-26T18:08:00.000-08:00

by Tuan Nguyen

We had the chance to briefly talk to Asus tonight, prior to CES' full opening in the morning. One thing we learned from Asus is that the company is preparing to launch what it claims is the world's first 512 GB SSD ultra-portable.

The new laptop is dubbed the S121 and is an Atom based ultra-portable. The killer feature though, is clearly the capacity of its 512 GB SSD, which is significantly more than most mainstream SSD drives. Currently, laptops that have SSD options at the time of purchase, range from 60 GB to 128 GB--but 128 GB options are extremely expensive. However, avid users are able to find more affordable options online to upgrade their laptops after the fact.

Asus refused to reveal the manufacturer of the 512 GB SSD that's in the S121, but from what we know, Toshiba is currently the only company that has announced a 512 GB 2.5 inch SSD--which it too claimed, is a world's first.

Although we were excited, we had to ask Asus the price point of the S121. According to Asus, the new unit will be priced at $1649.

With a sweet price point, and monstrous SSD to boot, Asus is helping to push SSD drives mainstream. The key segment for SSDs to penetrate well is the mobility market. With unmatched durability and speed, laptops will embrace SSDs much more quickly than on the desktop. Hybrid SSD and HDD setups will be the mainstay for desktops for several years to come.
More Information news :ASUS Eee PC 4G Surf - Celeron M 353 / 630 MHz ULV - RAM 512 MB - HDD 4 GB SSD - WLAN : 802.11b/g - Linux - 7" Widescreen TFT 800 x 480 ( WVGA )

source : www.tomshardware.com

Asus' Mammoth 18.4" W90 Laptop Now Available

2009-02-26T17:59:00.000-08:00

by Devin Connors

Asus has broken the mold (and the scale) with its new W90 "laptop."

Asus has certainly broken the mold on this one, as the W90 is one of the first Asus machines to sport an 18.4-inch, full HD 1920 x 1200 screen.

Under the hood, the W90 has a X38 chipset, complimented by a 2.8 GHz Core 2 Duo T9600 which sports a 1066 MHz front side bus and six megabytes of cache. This combined with 6 GB of DDR2-800 memory and a 320 GB 7200rpm hard drive make the W90 quite the "mobile" powerhouse. What really stands out on the new offering is the graphics.

Asus includes an ATI 4870 X2 with 1 GB of GDDR5 memory, which is more than enough power for any game currently on the market. The 4870 X2 sports both VGA and HDMI outputs, with the HDMI offering a output for the onboard 7.1 soundcard. Speaking of sound, the W90 includes its own Altec Lansing 5.1 speaker system.

Many other laptop regulars also appear on the W90, including a fingerprint scanner, eSATA, Firewire, audio in/out, a 15-in-1 memory card reader, and four USB ports. For connectivity, it includes Bluetooth, wireless N, and a 2 megapixel camera. To power all this hardware, the W90 also includes a 12-cell battery. With a price tag of $2199.99, you get an above-average bang for your buck when considering what's in the chassis.

While the W90 may be portable, is it really a laptop? With a weight of 11.46 pounds and dimensions of 17.4-inches x 12.91-inches x 2.48-inches, the W90 isn't something you carry around at Starbucks or put on your lap while watching the news. If it wasn't for the backpack included with the laptop at purchase, finding a proper carrying solution for this behemoth would also be a challenge.

How does it compare to already large 17-inch notebooks in the same high performance category? The Toshiba Qosmio X305-Q706, which is large in its own right (16.2-inches x 12.0-inches x 2.5-inches and 9.04 pounds), is dwarfed by the W90, especially in terms of weight. And don't forget, the Q706 is no lightweight, either, with its own Core 2 Duo as well as dual Nvidia 9800GTS graphics cards.

If you know for a fact that your laptop won't be leaving your desk, the W90 is an attractive offer. But if you plan on doing any sort of traveling with it, the W90 is not a practical option, and you should consider a 17-inch option instead.
More information product : ASUS Eee PC 900HA 8.9-Inch Netbook (1.6 GHz Intel ATOM N270 Processor, 1 GB RAM, 160 GB Hard Drive, 10 GB Eee Storage, XP Home) Black

source : www.tomshardware.com

GeForce GTX 295

2009-02-23T18:01:00.000-08:00

You know, it's built for gamers ...

A couple of weeks ago we had the honor of bringing you guys a review on the GeForce GTX 295. And that article proved one thing, it's going to be welcomed into the high-end arena with open arms. It's impressive, it's fast, and heck it even looks good too.

Today however we are re-writing the preview, and will make a fully fledged review of it. For this full review we'll grab a BFG GeForce GTX 295. Everything we could not talk about will be covered and obviously, some additional benchmarks are now included, making this a new review on the GeForce GTX 295 final product.

It does not end there though because today we'll bring you yet another article, GeForce GTX 295 Quad-SLI, heck we just had to give that a try for the sake of it as well. So we took the fastest Core i7 platform money could buy us, made sure we had a 1200 Watt PSU in there and started testing Quad SLI. But again, that's covered in another article though. This one will be all about one single, yet dual-gpu based, GeForce GTX 295 versus it's competition.

And you know what guys? I'm excited as I love the high-end gear and the gaming that goes along with it. Also for this this review, we have received a new final driver, GeForce Forceware 181.20, and I'm happy to report that in several scenarios... it made the games roughly 10% faster than the preview we have shown you. Now though 10% might not sound like a lot, trust me... in the high-end game... it's pretty frickin significant.

Anyway, enough of the introduction, let's have a technical look at the product, look at power consumption, noise levels, temperatures, photos and obviously the performance it'll poop out on your monitor. And sure, we'll overclock it a little as well... You guys ready?

source : www.guru3d.com

GeForce GTX 295

2009-02-23T17:56:00.000-08:00

Today another review on that rather outstanding release based on the recently unleashed NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295. I say outstanding here, as besides the Radeon HD 4870 X2, not once has a dual-GPU product been launched and was received with such great enthusiasm. See, NVIDIA has got the driver right, the performance right and obviously... the price is right as the GTX 295 series is selling at less than 499 USD. And for a product with 480 Shader cores, that is just an awful lot of performance.

Many manufacturers and AIBs therefore are now selling the product, and even in times of financial difficulty, these babies sell like cute little puppies in a pet store. One of the biggest names in the tech industry is ASUSTek computers (ASUS), and they figured... well frock it... and jumped onto that GTX 295 band wagon as well. Armed with nearly 1800 MB of graphics memory and a lot of raw performance, we'll have a look at their offering today. And though the product is 100% reference based, we just had to review this version as well. Heck, we just like to talk about high-end graphics cards you know.

In this review we'll give you the grand overview on what the GeForce GTX 295 entails, we'll look at power consumption, heat, do a nice photo-shoot and obviously dig deep into game performance with the hottest titles currently available anno January 2009.

So without further ado, let me introduce you to the ASUS GeForce GTX 295 (ENGTX295) after which you should head on over to the next page. Come on... you can do it.

source : www.guru3d.com

GeForce 9800 GTX+ 512MB

2009-02-23T17:51:00.000-08:00

It certainly has been a long time since we reviewed a product or two from that NVIDIA AIB called Galaxy Technology. Certainly a somewhat smaller company, but each and every time we review one of their products, there's some sort of revelation going on.

Galaxy is good in brand recognition and most of all they are very stringent in product differentiation. Sure, they hog out standard products into the market as well, but their R&D is always working on something special, something a little out of the ordinary... and I know I've stated that many times, but it's the fun stuff we seek out in graphics cards so much.

Face it, most AIB's purchase their graphics cards, slap a sticker on it, insert a game and sell it. That's the reality for 90% of the current VGA graphics business. And that makes it a little bit of a dull business the past year or two. I feel a nicely designed graphics card is like good cuisine, tickling the senses and getting us excited. So this is where Galaxy technology comes in. Recently they refreshed their products a little and they asked If we'd be interested in reviewing some of them. The first being their new GeForce 9800 GTX+, released months ago, and in the mid-range segment, still one of my favorite cards. The 9800 GTX+ update was released back in July 2008 if memory serves me right, and entailed a newly created SKU with some higher clocks, note the GPU die-size has been shrunk to 55nm (which was 65nm). You guys can probably all remember the standard design right? The big black cooler, 11" PCB... a long but great value card.

Now then... have a look and see what Galaxy technology did with the card... that's something else isn't it? Custom PCB, custom cooling, custom bracket, HDMI output, black DVI+backplate... I sometimes wonder why a small company can consistently push out striking products like that and the bigger AIBs mainly focus on the reference design.

Most certainly this is a product we want to review, this is Guru3D stuff for sure. Over the next few pages we'll have a little chat about their 98000 GTX+ architecture, then dive into a photo-shoot, technology briefing and obviously a gaming test with the hottest gaming titles on the globe, next page please.

source : www.guru3d.com

GeForce GTX 260 SP216 Sonic

2009-02-23T17:44:00.000-08:00

One of the most interesting graphics your money can buy you right now is the GeForce GTX 260 series. These cards are virtually in the high-end segment, yet performance for money wise they are just astounding.

NVIDIA knows this, and as such ever since the release of the original GTX 260, there have been numerous internal updates to this product, to make it faster, more efficient and most of all cheaper. See, the GTX 260 opens up a truckload of performance and features. A couple of weeks ago NVIDIA launched another SKU based off that GTX 260; it was the Core 216 version, carrying an additional 24 shader processors, to give the card a little more bite.

* 192 cores on the GeForce GTX 260
* 216 cores on the GeForce GTX 260 Core 216
* 240 of them on the GeForce GTX 280.

Weeks after that GTX 206 Core 216 release (in December 2008) NVIDIA again changed this SKU a little bit, introducing a cheaper to manufacture 55nm version of the GTX 260 chip.

As a result you can purchase GTX 260 Core 216 version card now for 249 - 299 USD, and if you do a little research, there are often rebates going on, allowing prices of anywhere in-between 229 to 269 USD. Granted, it's still a lot of money to just play games, but I guarantee you the GTX 260 series offers incredible performance and features (next to the Radeon 4870) for the money, especially when you realize these cards were introduced with a 399 USD price tag in the summer of 2008.

After all of these changes in the product roadmap, we really didn't expect NVIDIA's board partners to change a lot about these boards, as they are already great, silent, efficient, and definitely fast. So, two weeks ago a press-release from Palit arrived in my inbox. They are releasing the GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 Sonic edition graphics cards .. and after reading the specification I was like .. OMG could this product get any better?

With the Palit GeForce GTX 260 Sonic SP216 edition, we believe a GTX 260 graphics card can't get any better. Why? Get this; custom board design, 896MB GDDR3 memory, 216 Shader processor version, custom dual-fan cooler, custom higher clock frequencies and due to that cooler, immense overclocking capabilities.

Yea, we just caught your attention didn't we? Have a quick peak at the product, and then head on over to the next page, where we'll startup this in-depth review.

source : www.guru3d.com

HP W2207H

2009-02-20T17:14:00.000-08:00

by Greg Adler
This reasonably priced, full-featured LCD monitor has good physical adjustments and offers great image quality.

The 22-inch w2207h has all the features you could want in a good monitor. It comes through with great image quality, particularly with text, and it provides tilt, pivot, swivel, and height adjustments.

HP incorporated its Brightview glare panel in the w2207h, instead of using the chemically treated antiglare coating that appears on some of the company's other monitors, such as the the HP LP3065 and the the HP LP1965. This makes for a cleaner-looking image, but introduces more reflectivity as well.

The display, which has a native resolution of 1680 by 1050 pixels, comes with two side USB ports, plus HDMI and VGA inputs. HP doesn't bundle an adapter to connect the monitor's HDMI or VGA ports to the DVI connection that most PCs now use, though such adapters are inexpensive and readily available online. ? ? ?

The display sits in a thin (about 1-inch) glossy black bezel with rounded edges. Unfortunately, you can easily smudge the glossy finish with fingerprints when adjusting the display. Though the w2207h doesn't have a headphone jack, it does include a set of built-in speakers. Like most speakers built in to monitors, the HP's are weak in bass, resulting in flat, tinny audio. For soft background music or basic sound effects for games, however, the speakers are adequate.

HP includes MyDisplay software to help you perform simple monitor calibrations, and you can automatically rotate the screen when you pivot it. Overall, if this monitor finds its way into your home or office, you'll most likely be happy with it. Just be prepared to buy a DVI adapter!

source : www.pcworld.com

Samsung 245T

2009-02-20T17:04:00.000-08:00

by Greg Adler
This fully adjustable monitor has many inputs and good image quality--along with a hefty price tag.

Samsung's 245T is a great-looking, thin-bezel monitor that can swivel, tilt, pivot, and be adjusted for height.

he monitor's connectivity options include four USB ports, plus HDMI, VGA, DVI, composite, component, and S-Video ports. The only input missing is a Display Port connection, a linking technology that has gained popularity recently.

Despite the 245T's $649 price tag, you don't get a built-in Webcam or speakers; but the display does have a picture-in-picture option--a great feature to have, in view of all the input choices.

In our PC World Test Center evaluations, the monitor performed well, earning a score of Very Good. Nevertheless, it finished slightly below Samsung's own SyncMaster 2493HM (which has built-in speakers) in overall performance. The 245T's extra video inputs and USB ports (four versus the 2493HM's two) are the main differences between the two monitors. But those extras raise the 245T's price to about $150 more than the 2493HM's.

The 245T is best suited for users who need many connectivity options--because, say, they want to use it for PC work and TV/movie viewing. But the 245T costs about $100 more than Gateway's FHD2400, which has just as many inputs and received the same image-quality score.

source : www.pcworld.com

Samsung Syncmaster 244T

2009-02-20T17:01:00.000-08:00

by Roy Santos
Powerful graphics performance, bundled features, and an attractive design leave this well-balanced wide-screen LCD with few rivals.

Samsung impressed our test jury once again with its SyncMaster 244T. This wide-screen display collected enough performance points to push it to the high end of our Very Good range. It's also cool-looking , with a thin silver bezel. It sold for $1000 on 8/17/2006, an Average price at the time.

On our juried performance tests, text was razor sharp. Common office documents and Web pages were enticingly readable. Indeed, the SyncMaster 244T's scores in this section of our tests made it one of the crispest monitors we've seen to date. Furthermore, it showed impressive graphics reproduction. Consistently bright and vivid reds, yellows, and blues seemingly popped out of the monitor, wowing the judges. Flesh tones in photos of a racially mixed group portrait looked natural, avoiding the oversaturated or washed-out skin colors that some monitors reproduce. A nice balance of brightness and color settings gives the unit strength in many areas. Even in our difficult grayscale test, the LCD showed a wide range of distinguishable dark and light shades.

Video performance was excellent, in line with a monitor of this caliber. In our Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl DVD test scenes, the SyncMaster produced good skin tones. This was most pronounced in scenes that exhibited the main character's darker tan and the rest of the cast's lighter skin tones. The swaths of soldiers' red uniforms looked rich, though we found backgrounds and scenes in the dark slightly noisy. Ghosting is very minimal in action sequences--and more pronounced when the camera pans--but nothing out of the ordinary for LCDs.

Samsung includes a pleasing plethora of physical adjustments to accommodate a variety of users. A button behind the base locks down the monitor, preventing accidental height adjustments, although it also makes such adjustments harder. You have to stand up, push down on top of the bezel, and push the lock button to release it. Only then can you move the screen up and down. This is slightly awkward, especially compared with other monitors that merely slide vertically, like the Dell UltraSharp 2407WFP. The SyncMaster's pivoting--allowing portrait orientation of the wide screen--is a much easier affair, however, and certainly a welcome feature for those who view long vertical documents. The monitor includes software for the pivot feature, letting you rotate the bezel clockwise and then adjusting the orientation of your operating system's desktop to a vertical or portrait mode. The panel also swivels and tilts.

The bottom of the bezel is about 5.5 inches from the desk, one of the highest clearances of 23-to-24-inch monitors we've seen to date and a potential concern for shorter users. Desktop ergonomics prescribe a sitting position where one's eyes are level near the top of the monitor's bezel. The high clearance may push some users to a height where their feet are off the ground while sitting.

On-screen display adjustments are very extensive. In addition to having presets for brightness (what Samsung calls MagicBright), the monitor also gives color presets in the MagicColor Pro section of the on-screen controls. There, you can change hue, saturation, and gamma value, which is normally found in separately installed color correction applications. Among its many inputs, which includes both DVI-D and analog connections, Samsung also offers component, composite, and S-Video inputs to support the 244T's picture-in-picture and picture-by-picture features.

source : www.pcworld.com

Samsung Syncmaster 2493HM

2009-02-20T16:57:00.000-08:00

by Greg Adler

This display brings together good image quality, a multitude of connection options, and top-notch design.

The Samsung SyncMaster 2493HM looks great--and I'm not talking exclusively about the antiglare treatment or the crisp 1920-by-1200-pixel native resolution, which provides very good visual quality. The SyncMaster also sports sleek lines and a thin, glossy black bezel that stays relatively smudge free.

Getting the best picture out of the 2493HM is a breeze thanks to DVI, HDMI, and VGA connectivity. Will you use the two USB ports built into the neck of the base? Maybe not, but their positioning certainly makes for easy access.

On the audio front, the built-in down-firing speakers provide a wide range of sound that doesn't flatten out. You can crank the volume--but the louder it gets, the more distortion you hear. Want to rock in silence? Use the built-in headphone jack. But if you're looking for maximum sound quality, buying a separate set of speakers that has a subwoofer is your best bet.

The on-screen display menu does a superb job of marshaling options and streamlining navigation. You can adjust advanced features such as individual colors or use one of the many preset configurations. The buttons for the OSD menu are touch sensitive; though each button is clearly labeled, it's hard to see what it does, resulting in some usability frustrations.

The only other gripe I have with this display is that the contrast ratio (which clearly isn't 10,000:1, though it claims to be) and response time (5 ms) are engraved in the top right corner of the bezel. So much for subtlety. Samsung obviously put lots of TLC into designing this SyncMaster, but the constant visual reminder of the unit's response time seems tacky.

Still, this is a great monitor at an average price--and that's a winning combination.

source : www.pcworld.com

Dell Ultrasharp 2408WFP

2009-02-20T16:50:00.000-08:00

by Greg Adler

Dell assembles a winning combination of good performance and great specifications including a memory card reader and display port connection.

The Dell UltraSharp 2408WFP is a well-designed, fully adjustable 24-inch monitor whose ports and features may justify its premium price.

Framing the display is a thin black bezel highlighted with silver accents on the top and the bottom. Dell includes video inputs for every possible connection: component, composite, Display Port, DVI (two ports), HDMI, S-Video, and VGA.

The monitor's on-screen display menu is clearly labeled and easy to navigate. Features include picture-in-picture and picture-by-picture, which displays two input sources side-by-side. This model comes with four USB ports--two on the back and two on the left side. Also on the left side, just above the USB ports, is a built-in reader for Compact Flash, MMC, MS, SD, and xD memory cards.

Dell bundles the UltraSharp 2408WFP with a CD containing drivers, a set-up guide, and a users' guide. Hardware extras include four connection cables for Display Port, DVI, USB, and VGA connectivity.

The images produced by this display resulted in a score of Very Good from our PC World lab. The UltraSharp 2408WFP's combination of good performance, input options, adjustability (it tilts, swivels, pivots, and can be adjusted for height), and excellent OSD make it the most full-featured and versatile monitor we've tested.

Regrettably (but understandably) this monitor's high-end performance, myriad features, and input selection come at high price. At about $700, it's one of the most expensive 24-inch displays we've seen.

source : www.pcworld.com

Gateway FHD2400

2009-02-20T16:47:00.000-08:00

by Greg Adler
This full-featured monitor offers loads of input and adjustment options--and for $50 extra, you can get great speakers, too.

Gateway pushes the versatility envelope with its 24-inch FHD2400 monitor. It combines good image quality, a slick design, a great on-screen display menu, and optional speakers that provide fantastic sound.

The FHD2400 has nearly every video input you could want in a 24-inch display: component, composite, DVI, HDMI, S-Video and VGA. The only port lacking is the new, up-and-coming Display Port connection. The on-screen display menu is incredibly well designed and intuitive, and it has the full range of adjustment options. You can control primary colors or use one of the many presets. The ease of navigation through the submenus is refreshing as well.

It's not all about video with this monitor, either; for an extra $50, you can obtain a detachable sound bar that produces amazingly clear sound. The speakers even have great bass, and I couldn't detect any distortion when I cranked up the volume--a rare virtue in built-in monitor speakers.

This display features four USB ports, a headphone jack, and a standard native resolution of 1920 by 1200. It's fully adjustable by tilt, pivot, and height, and a unique swivel permits 360-degree rotation.

Gateway's FHD2400 didn't outperform the competition in image quality, but it found a comfortable spot in the middle of the pack, resulting in a score of Very Good. The display cost about $550 at the time of this review, making it a great choice for anyone in the market for a well-designed, strong-performing 24-inch monitor. You won't be disappointed with this display's range of inputs or its adjustment options.

source : www.pcworld.com

Gateway MD7801u

2009-02-16T21:45:00.000-08:00

by Cisco Cheng

It's slightly misleading to call the Gateway MD7801u ($800 street) the budget version of the MC7803u, as they're both priced under $1,000—inexpensive for media center laptops. Their frames are beautifully designed, their features are ample, and their performance is more than satisfactory. The differences are subtle: The MC7803u has more bells and whistles, like a bigger glass screen, an illuminated keyboard, and a 3D graphics card. The MD7801u justified leaving those things out with a $200 lower price, so either one is a good choice.

Just like the MC7803u, the MD7801u is designed with a nod to automobile styling. The shiny black lid (or burgundy, if you prefer) is accented with a steel strip that runs down the middle—both classic and classy. The Acer Aspire 6930G-6723 and the Sony VAIO VGN-FW198UH have a basic design with unembellished glossy covers. Minor enhancements like illuminated logo and metallic trimmings go a long way in distinguishing a design. The HP HDX16t, for instance, uses an embedded pattern technique, while the Editors' Choice Dell Studio XPS 16 is one part aluminum, one part leather, and two parts lacquered top.

The MD7801u weighs 6.7 pounds, exactly one pound less than the MC7803u. The reason for the MD7801u's relative lightness is twofold: Its 15.6-inch widescreen is smaller than the MC7803u's 16-inch display, and the latter's edge-to-edge glass screen weighs it down, glass being significantly heavier than plastic. Although the MD7801u's screen lacks the clean look of glass, its brightness and size are perfect for multimedia enthusiasts. Its 1,366-by-768 resolution is the same as the MC7803u's and consistent with the 16:9 aspect ratio common in recent consumer HDTVs. If you're willing to spend a lot more money, the HP Pavilion HDX16t has a 1,920-by-1,080 (1080p) option for its screen, and the Dell Studio XPS16 sports an RGB LED widescreen, ideal for professional photographers.

The MD780lu lacks the illuminated keyboard of the MC7803u. This is by no means a deal breaker, but such a board comes in handy on a red-eye flight or in a poorly lit room. The full-size keyboard is very similar to the Dell 16's, in that the keys are packed close together and the grooves between the keys are less discernible than on the HP HDX16t or Acer 6930G. It doesn't have synthetic leather palm rests like the MC7803u, which is trivial. The mouse buttons, however, were a little too resistant for my taste.

In features, the MD7801u actually forgoes flash for substance. Its 500GB hard drive is a great deal at this price point, bigger than the drives of the MC7803u and the Acer 6930G (both 320GB). With the exception of a FireWire port, all the standard features are present, including four USB ports, a 6-in-1 card reader, the latest Intel Wi-Fi 802.11 draft-n chip, and ExpressCard slot. An HDMI port is hard to find on an $800 laptop these days, but the MD7801u sports one.

The MD7801u and MC7803u's processors are very similar in that they use last year's technologies. They cost less than the ones found on the Dell 16 and HP HDX16t; on the other hand, they don't perform as well. The 2.0-GHz, Intel Core 2 Duo T6400 processor in the MD7801u is significantly faster than the MC7803u's 2-GHz T5800 CPU and is more than adequate for the average user. When paired with 4GB of memory, it can tackle tasks from basic word processing to advanced video editing and image rendering. What it doesn't have is a discrete graphics card for hard-core games and 3D-intensive applications; the MD7801u uses Intel's integrated platform.

The MD7801u's performance scores were more impressive than those of the Acer 6930G and the MC7803u, specifically on the video-encoding, CineBench R10, and Photoshop CS4 tests. Its CineBench score beat the MC7803u's by a whopping 65 percent, and it was ahead on video encoding by 37 percent. The Acer 6930G is basically using the same components as the MC7803u's, but it managed to deliver better results, though it still trailed the MD7801u, by 6 percent video encoding and 3 percent on CineBench. I suspect the software load on the MC7803u might have caused the anomalies, but kudos to the MD7801u for outperforming the other two at this price point; the scores show that it is a good system for video editing.

3D performance is another story, as the MC7803u's ATI graphics card is better equipped to tackle games like Crysis and World in Conflict. The MD7801u's Intel integrated chipset is better suited to games like World of Warcraft and Internet-based games.

The downside of the MC7803u's 3D performance is that its ATI chipset and its higher thermal envelope hurt battery life. Its score on our MobileMark 2007 testing was 2 hours 47 minutes, fully 1.5 hours less than the UD7801u's 4:17.

The Gateway MD7801u removed some of the extras that made the MC7803u so attractive, including the illuminated keyboard, the glass screen, and a discrete graphics card. But in return you get a better processor and a bigger hard drive. The differences between them are minor; they're both excellent buys, and your decision may come down to how much you're willing to pay.

source : www.pcmag.com

Microsoft denies it profits from Vista-to-XP downgrades

2009-02-16T21:35:00.000-08:00

Lawsuit names 100 'John Doe' defendants who 'aided and abetted' Microsoft

By Gregg Keizer

Microsoft Corp. has denied that it makes money when users "downgrade" Windows Vista to the older XP, as a lawsuit filed last week alleges.

The lawsuit, submitted to a Seattle federal court last Wednesday, stems from the $59.25 fee that a California woman was charged in mid-2008 when she bought a Lenovo laptop and downgraded from Vista to XP.

"Microsoft does not charge or receive any additional royalty if a customer exercises those [downgrade] rights," said Microsoft spokesman David Bowermaster in an e-mail late last week. "Some customers may choose or need to obtain media or installation services from third parties to install the downgrade version."

In fact, it's computer makers, not Microsoft per se, who charge users the additional fees for downgrading a new PC from Vista to XP at the factory. Dell Inc., for example, adds an extra $20 to the price to downgrade a PC.

Microsoft, however, may profit from the way it structures downgrade rights. Only buyers of PCs with pre-installed editions of Vista Business and Vista Ultimate can downgrade, and then only to Windows XP Professional. All three editions are higher-priced versions of their respective lines, a fact that the lawsuit mentioned in passing.

"Customers have been forced to purchase the most expensive version of [Windows XP] in order to 'downgrade' from the Windows Vista operating system," the complaint read.

That was the cause of some confusion last year, when Dell Inc. was accused of gouging customers by charging $150 to downgrade a new computer to XP. Dell, however, countered that although it did charge $20 to install XP on the machine, as well as to cover the cost of the additional media, the bulk -- $120 of the $150 -- was the price of upgrading the PC from the standard Home Premium to the more expensive Business edition.

Microsoft does not offer downgrade rights with its Vista Home Premium, the most popular of Vista's editions.

"Microsoft mandates that customers who want to downgrade to XP must purchase the license to Vista Business or Vista Ultimate," said Dell spokesman David Frink last December. "[That's] typically about a $130 premium, though some retail outlets charge more."

"Downgrade" describes the Windows licensing rights that Microsoft gives users, who are allowed under some circumstances to replace newer versions of Windows with an older edition without having to pay for another license. The practice became popular last year when users, unhappy with Vista's performance on the new PCs they bought, instead sought ways to run the leaner XP.

The lawsuit, filed by Los Angeles resident Emma Alvarado, charged Microsoft with multiple violations of Washington state's unfair business practices and consumer protection laws through its policy of barring computer makers from continuing to offer XP on new PCs after Vista's early-2007 launch. She claimed Microsoft's practice resulted in customers paying more for XP than they otherwise would. "They have been forced to pay substantially more to acquire the Windows XP operating system than they would have to pay in a competitive marketplace," the suit said.

Alvarado also named 100 "John Doe" co-defendants. "[They] are the persons, firms and corporations who have participated with Microsoft in the wrongdoings complained of and performed acts and made statements in furtherance thereof," the lawsuit read. "The Doe Defendants acts as co-conspirators and aided and abetted, or participated with, Microsoft in the commission of wrongful acts."

Bowermaster claimed that Microsoft had no downgrade program as such. "Microsoft does not have a downgrade program. It does offer downgrade rights as part of some Windows Vista licenses, including Windows Vista Business purchased through the OEM channel." That, however, belies the fact that Microsoft has regularly offered downgrade rights to users. When it released Windows XP in 2001, it allowed people who had XP licenses to downgrade to Windows 2000, Windows NT 4.0 or Windows 98, according to Gartner analyst Michael Silver.

Alvarado is seeking compensatory damages and wants the case declared a class-action suit.

source : www.computerworld.com

Apricorn Aegis Vault

2009-02-07T16:46:00.000-08:00

Apricorn's Aegis Vault encrypted hard drive sports a convenient built-in USB cable.

Recently we looked at eight different encrypted portable drives, and Apricorn's Aegis Vault landed in the middle, in fourth place.

Take the company's Aegis Bio (our second-place choice) and remove its fingerprint reader, and you have the Aegis Vault ($260 for 500GB). The two models are virtually identical, but in this case you must submit a password to unlock the drive.

In many respects the Aegis Vault is a decent, slightly pricier duplicate of Seagate's Maxtor BlackArmor (our Best Buy pick) and its basic features, but with a convenient built-in USB cable.
More information product : 320GB Password Protected 128BIT Aes Hardware Encrypted

source : www.pcworld.com

Data Locker 250GB Pro AES Edition

2009-02-07T16:37:00.000-08:00

The touch-screen controls on the Data Locker Pro encrypted drive look like a gimmick, but they make common tasks far easier.

In our recent look at eight encrypted portable drives, we considered several models that require Windows for log-in, setup, and maintenance. If you want to use an encrypted drive on several computers with different OSs, you need a way to enter a password through something other than Windows software. That's where the Data Locker Pro AES ($340 for 320GB) and its touch-screen LCD come in.

The Data Locker gives you a numeric keypad for entering a six-digit passcode that lets the drive mount in an operating system. You can also use the LCD screen to change the passcode, dismount the drive, toggle the encryption on or off, or wipe the drive clean. One annoyance, however, is the loud beeping that it emits when you press the screen (and you can't turn the sound off).

The Data Locker's relatively high price factors in the cost of the additional hardware, but the touch screen is definitely slick, and this drive is worth considering if you need to move sensitive data between machines.

source : www.pcworld.com

LaCie D2 Safe

2009-02-07T16:34:00.000-08:00

The solid, relatively inexpensive d2 Safe is one of the few encrypted hard drives suitable for both Macs and PCs.

The LaCie d2 Safe ($350 for 1TB) was third among eight encrypted portable drives that we recently looked at.

This hefty drive features a fingerprint reader and can connect to your computer over FireWire 400 and 800 in addition to USB 2.0. I found LaCie's software setup more time-consuming than some others, but it has an obvious benefit: LaCie's built-in fingerprint software allows you to plug the drive into either a Mac OS system or a Windows box and to work in the encrypted partition. The drive also features the sturdiest housing I've seen, plus a Kensington lock port so you can secure it to a desk.

source : www.pcworld.com

Lenovo USB 2.0 Portable Hard Drive

2009-02-07T16:26:00.000-08:00

Lenovo's cool, capable, and encrypted data-sharing device will appeal to business users and techies alike.

Recently we tested eight encrypted portable drives, all of which are capable of keeping your data private. Some, however, are dependent on a Windows tool for log-in and setup.

In contrast, Lenovo's cryptodrive ($220 for 320GB)--like the Data Locker Pro AES Edition, which we also considered--takes advantage of a numeric keypad on the drive housing, so it can work with multiple operating systems. Interestingly, this drive's housing more closely resembles a burglar-alarm panel. Pressing and holding numerical combinations allows you to change the password or modify other settings, without having to run software. This model produces no sound when you press a key, which is better than the obnoxiously loud Data Locker--but unlike that competing product, it offers no visual feedback that you have pressed a key, either.

The drive demands a lot of power to do its thing, so the box includes a second cable that you're supposed to plug into a second, free USB port and then feed into the drive's power port.

source : www.pcworld.com

Maxtor Blackarmor External 320GB Hard Drive

2009-02-07T16:22:00.000-08:00

The BlackArmor encrypted hard drive is tops for its intuitive out-of-the-box experience, good utilities bundle, and reasonable price.

The Seagate Maxtor BlackArmor ($135 for 320GB) is a marvel of simplicity. It's the first external hard drive with full-disk encryption--the encryption chip resides on the hard drive's circuitry. According to Seagate, all of the data is encrypted on the drive, so even if someone removes the drive from the housing and takes away the chip set, the data is inaccessible. When you first attach the BlackArmor to a Windows PC, the drive loads a read-only partition with the setup software. Initializing the drive and setting a password takes only a minute, after which the drive loads the encrypted partition and Windows shows it as a drive letter. Thereafter, every time you plug in the drive, the autorun settings will ask you to enter the password.

The BlackArmor also features a Secure Erase option (which overwrites data areas of the drive with zeroes), as well as a backup utility.

In our recent look at encrypted portable drives, we chose this model as our Best Buy for its value--it offers one of the best cost-per-gigabyte rates we've seen--as well as for its simplicity and its full-disk-encryption security.

source : www.pcworld.com

IGP GA-MA790GP-DS4H Motherboard

2009-02-02T19:03:00.000-08:00

- GIGABYTE Announces Ultimate IGP GA-MA790GP-DS4H Motherboard -
- Featuring DDR3 Side Port Memory and Outstanding Overclocking Performance

Taipei, Taiwan, August 6, 2008 – GIGABYTE UNITED INC., a leading manufacturer of motherboards and graphics cards today announce the launch of the GIGABYTE GA-MA790GP-DS4H, further cementing GIGABYTE’s leadership position for the AMD AM2+ platform by enabling a new generation of motherboards which push the boundaries of integrated graphics performance and overclocking potential.

Based on the newly released AMD 790GX chipset with onboard ATI Radeon™ HD 3300 graphics core, the GIGABYTE GA-MA790GP-DS4H features 128MB of onboard DDR3 1333MHz SidePort Memory, allowing dedicated memory access for the integrated graphics for an added boost of up to 10~15% in graphics performance. In combination with the SidePort Memory, the onboard graphics is able to be overclocked above 1000MHz, allowing users to maximize their graphics performance and achieve 3DMARK06 scores of 2800+* and beyond.

In addition to supporting DirectX 10, Shader Model 4.0 and OpenGL2.0 3D gaming technology through its ATI Radeon™ HD 3300 IGP, the GIGABYTE GA-MA790GP-DS4H provides a PCI-E 2.0 x16 to support the ground breaking ATI Hybrid Graphics technology, allowing users to combine the power of their integrated ATI Radeon® HD 3300 graphics core by adding an additional discrete graphics card. Also, it provides an additional PCI-E 2.0 x16 graphics interface to support ATI CrossfireX™ technology, running x8 and x8 bandwidth, for enhanced productivity and gaming performance.

source : http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/News/Motherboard/News_List.aspx?NewsID=1407

X58 Series Motherboards

2009-02-02T19:01:00.000-08:00

- GIGABYTE Unwraps Latest X58 Series Motherboards for the Intel® Core i7 Processors -
-- The Next Leap in Computing Evolution is Here

Taipei, Taiwan, October 31, 2008 – GIGABYTE, a leading manufacturer of motherboards and graphics cards today is pleased to announce their upcoming high performance X58 Series motherboards, the GA-EX58-EXTREME and GA-EX58-UD5 designed from the ground up to unleash the awesome power of Intel’s new Core i7 processors. Equipped with a host of new features including the new QPI interface, 3 channel DDR3 support, 3 Way SLI™ and CrossFireX™ support, Ultra Durable 3 technology and the industry’s most extensive range of overclocking features, the GIGABYTE X58 Series is bringing excitement back into the high performance motherboard industry.

The GIGABYTE X58 Series was designed specifically to take advantage of the raw power of the next generation Intel® Core i7 processors and the Intel® X58 Express chipset, whose new evolution in computing architecture is able to deliver an amazing performance break through from past processor generations. Replacing the Front Side Bus is the new Quick Path Interconnect, or QPI, whose 25.6 GB/sec transfer rate (double the bandwidth of the 1600MHz FSB) eliminates the communication bottleneck between the processor and chipset.

The Intel® Core i7 processors also feature an integrated memory controller inside the processor die and support 192bit 3-channel DDR3 memory that delivers a 50% memory bandwidth enhancement and lower memory latency for incredibly fast memory access. Additionally, the GIGABYTE X58 Series features Intel® Turbo Boost Technology, which is able to power down idle processor cores and dynamically reroute the power to the active cores for significant performance boosts, and at the same time, maintain greater energy efficiency.

For more information about the GIGABYTE X58 Series motherboards, please visit: http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Products/Motherboard/Default.aspx

Radeon™ HD 4800

2009-02-02T18:53:00.000-08:00

-- GIGABYTE Unveils the Power of HD with Radeon™ HD 4800 Series Graphics Accelerators --The next generation GDDR 5 memory inside for cinematic gaming experience

Taipei, Taiwan, June 25, 2008 –GIGABYTE UNITED INC., a leading manufacturer of motherboards and graphics cards today is pleased to announce their latest GV-R4800 series graphics cards. The GV-R487-512H-B and GV-R485-512H-B are built on the highly anticipated ATI Radeon™ HD 4800 Series GPU ─ which utilizes second generation 55nm manufacturing process and GDDR 5 video memory architecture. It delivers best-in-class performance with new clock speed and break-through efficiency power management for tomorrow’s demanding applications. Additionally, the GIGABYTE GV-R487-512H-B and GV-R485-512H-B feature a wide range of the latest graphics technologies, including TeraScale graphics engine, CrossFireX™, UVD 2 and PowerPlay™, to prepare gamers for bandwidth-hungry games, incredible HD fidelity and 3D applications.

GIGABYTE GV-R487-512H-B and GV-R485-512H-B come equipped with ATI's latest TeraScale graphics engine, combining 1 teraFLOPS of GPU compute power, 800 stream processors and next generation GDDR5 memory to increase the physical gaming interaction for a more dynamic and realistic experience. In addition, with enhanced anti-aliasing (AA) and anisotropic filtering, the GV-R475-512H-B and GV-R485-512H-B create striking graphics with unparalleled realism so you can max out the settings of the most demanding next generation games or revitalize your favorite titles. Also, the GIGABYTE GV-R4800 series are provided with DirectX 10.1 graphics capabilities to support Shader Model 4.1 for life-like realism 3D gaming effects.

Benefiting from Avivo™ HD video and display technology, the GV-R487-512H-B and GV-R485-512H-B fully support even most processing-intensive content for HDTV and HD video enthusiasts, universal connectivity to TVs and displays, and HDMI with 7.1 digital surround audio. Take full advantage of Blu-ray functionality with dual-stream, picture in picture (PIP) capabilities and one-cable HDMI™ connectivity solution to high definition home theaters.

For more details of GIGABYTE GV-R487-512H-B and GV-R485-512H-B, please visit the GIGABYTE VGA website: http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Products/VGA/Default.aspx

Radeon™ HD 4870 X2 Graphics Card

2009-02-02T18:51:00.000-08:00

-- GIGABYTE Presents the Power of Graphics Supercomputing with Radeon™ HD 4870 X2 Graphics Card --
-- Redefining HD Gaming for Extreme Gamers --

Taipei, Taiwan, August 12, 2008 – GIGABYTE UNITED INC., a leading manufacturer of motherboards and graphics cards today is pleased to launch their latest GV-R4870 X2 graphics card. The GV-R487X2-2GH-B is built on the highly anticipated ATI RadeonTM HD 4870 X2 GPU ─ which utilizes second generation 55nm manufacturing process and GDDR5 with dual 256-bit video memory architecture. It delivers blazing frame rates with supercomputing graphics power for tomorrow's demanding applications. In addition, the GIGABYTE GV-R487X2-2GH-B features a wide range of the latest graphics technologies, including Dual TeraScale graphics engine, dual mode ATI CrossFireX™, UVD 2 and PowerPlay™, to offer supreme scalability so gamers can take their games to new heights.

The GIGABYTE GV-R487X2-2GH-B features ATI's latest Dual TeraScale graphics engine, boasting its 2.4 teraFLOPS of GPU computing power with 1600 stream processors and nearly two billion transistors. With incredible 2GB GDDR5 memory, the GV-R487X2-2GH-B is equipped with nearly two times the memory bandwidth of the previous generation, delivering true physics gaming interaction for a more dynamic and realistic experience. In combination with 24x custom filter anti-aliasing (CFAA) and high performance anisotropic filtering, the GV-R487X2-2GH-B is able to create true-to-life graphics for everything from grass to facial features so you can max out the settings of the most demanding next generation games or revitalize your favorite titles. Also, the GIGABYTE GV-R487X2-2GH-B graphics card provides DirectX 10.1 graphics capabilities to support Shader Model 4.1 for life-like realism and stunning 3D gaming effects.

Benefiting from Avivo™ HD video and display technology, the GV-R487X2-2GH-B fully supports UVD 2 for decoding processing-intensive content for 1080p HDTV and HD video with additional support for dynamic contrast and enhanced DVD upscaling. The GIGABYTE GV-R487X2-2GH-B also provides advanced connectivity to TVs and displays with HDMI with 7.1 digital surround audio support. Delivering the ultimate solution for high definition home theaters, the GV-R487X2-2GH-B is able to take full advantage of Blu-ray functionality with dual-stream, picture in picture (PIP) capabilities and one-cable HDMI™ connectivity.

To help reduce PC power consumption, the GIGABYTE GV-R487X2-2GH-B is equipped with ATI PowerPlay™ technology, maximizing performance per watt by delivering the highest level high performance when needed and conserving power when the demand on the GPU is low. GIGABYTE graphics products are also 100% RoHS compliant, from manufacturing to on the store shelves, GIGABYTE provides greener computing solutions with better power efficiency.

For more details of the GIGABYTE GV-R487X2-2GH-B, please visit the GIGABYTE VGA website at:
http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Products/VGA/Default.aspx

Radeon™ HD 4600

2009-02-02T18:49:00.000-08:00

-- GIGABYTE Unleashes Next-Gen Mainstream GPU Powered by Radeon™ HD 4600 Series Graphics Accelerators --
-- Featuring native HDMI port for incredible visual fidelity --

Taipei, Taiwan, September 10, 2008 – GIGABYTE UNITED INC., a leading manufacturer of motherboards and graphics cards today is pleased to launch their latest mainstream Radeon™ HD 4600 series graphics cards. The GIGABYTE GV-R467D3-512I and GV-R465OC-512I are built on the highly anticipated ATI Radeon™ HD 4670 and 4650 GPUs ─ respectively utilizing GDDR3 and GDDR2 video memory architecture and are able to deliver best-in-class performance with new clock speeds and provide break-through power efficiency management for tomorrow’s demanding applications. In addition to supporting a wide range of the latest graphics technologies including dual mode CrossFireX™, Microsoft® DirectX® 10.1, PCI Express 2.0 and UVD 2, the GIGABYTE GV-R4600 series are also equipped with the industry-leading GIGABYTE unique features including Ultra Durable 2 technology, GamerHUD™ Lite performance tuner and native HDMI port for HD gaming and Blu-ray movie playback

The Radeon™ HD 4600 series GPUs feature the same engine architecture as the award-winning ATI Radeon™ HD 4800 series, allowing the GV-R467D3-512I and GV-R465OC-512I to reach up to 3 times the performance of previous generation GPUs. Additionally, the powerful Radeon™ HD 4600 GPUs incorporate 320 stream processing units, delivering enough processing power to tackle the most demanding HD games and providing the highest levels of sophisticated anisotropic filtering (AF) and anti-aliasing (AA) to truly bring HD games to life. The GIGABYTE GV-R4600 series also feature DirectX® 10.1 graphics capabilities with support for Shader Model 4.1, delivering the most life-like 3D gaming effects.

Benefiting from Avivo™ HD video and display technology, the GV-R467D3-512I and GV-R465OC-512I fully support UVD 2 for decoding processing-intensive content for digital output at all resolutions up to 1080p and integrated AMD Xilleon™ HDTV encoder for high quality analog TV output. The GIGABYTE GV-R4600 Series also provide real one-cable HDMI™ connectivity to TVs and displays with HDMI with up to 2 channel 48 kHz stereo or 7.1 AC3, enabling a plug-and-play cable-less audio solution. With the ability to take full advantage of Blu-ray functionality with dual-stream, picture in picture (PIP) capabilities, dynamic contrast and enhanced DVD upscaling, the GV-R467D3-512I and GV-R465OC-512I provide the ultimate high definition solution for home theater systems.

For more details of GIGABYTE GV-R467D3-512I and GV-R465OC-512I, please visit the GIGABYTE VGA website: http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Products/VGA/Default.aspx

Radeon™ HD 4600

2009-02-02T18:47:00.000-08:00

-- GIGABYTE Unleashes Next-Gen Mainstream GPU Powered by Radeon™ HD 4600 Series Graphics Accelerators --
-- Featuring native HDMI port for incredible visual fidelity --

Taipei, Taiwan, September 10, 2008 – GIGABYTE UNITED INC., a leading manufacturer of motherboards and graphics cards today is pleased to launch their latest mainstream Radeon™ HD 4600 series graphics cards. The GIGABYTE GV-R467D3-512I and GV-R465OC-512I are built on the highly anticipated ATI Radeon™ HD 4670 and 4650 GPUs ─ respectively utilizing GDDR3 and GDDR2 video memory architecture and are able to deliver best-in-class performance with new clock speeds and provide break-through power efficiency management for tomorrow’s demanding applications. In addition to supporting a wide range of the latest graphics technologies including dual mode CrossFireX™, Microsoft® DirectX® 10.1, PCI Express 2.0 and UVD 2, the GIGABYTE GV-R4600 series are also equipped with the industry-leading GIGABYTE unique features including Ultra Durable 2 technology, GamerHUD™ Lite performance tuner and native HDMI port for HD gaming and Blu-ray movie playback.

The Radeon™ HD 4600 series GPUs feature the same engine architecture as the award-winning ATI Radeon™ HD 4800 series, allowing the GV-R467D3-512I and GV-R465OC-512I to reach up to 3 times the performance of previous generation GPUs. Additionally, the powerful Radeon™ HD 4600 GPUs incorporate 320 stream processing units, delivering enough processing power to tackle the most demanding HD games and providing the highest levels of sophisticated anisotropic filtering (AF) and anti-aliasing (AA) to truly bring HD games to life. The GIGABYTE GV-R4600 series also feature DirectX® 10.1 graphics capabilities with support for Shader Model 4.1, delivering the most life-like 3D gaming effects.

Benefiting from Avivo™ HD video and display technology, the GV-R467D3-512I and GV-R465OC-512I fully support UVD 2 for decoding processing-intensive content for digital output at all resolutions up to 1080p and integrated AMD Xilleon™ HDTV encoder for high quality analog TV output. The GIGABYTE GV-R4600 Series also provide real one-cable HDMI™ connectivity to TVs and displays with HDMI with up to 2 channel 48 kHz stereo or 7.1 AC3, enabling a plug-and-play cable-less audio solution. With the ability to take full advantage of Blu-ray functionality with dual-stream, picture in picture (PIP) capabilities, dynamic contrast and enhanced DVD upscaling, the GV-R467D3-512I and GV-R465OC-512I provide the ultimate high definition solution for home theater systems.

For more details of GIGABYTE GV-R467D3-512I and GV-R465OC-512I, please visit the GIGABYTE VGA website: http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Products/VGA/Default.aspx

Radeon™ HD 4850 Graphics

2009-02-02T18:44:00.000-08:00

-- GIGABYTE Launches 3 Proprietary Designed Radeon™ HD 4850 Graphics Accelerators with Ultra Durable 2 Technology --
-- 3 unique designs delivering the ultimate in HD performance: Fan Cooled, Passive Cooled and OC version --

Taipei, Taiwan, September 11, 2008 – GIGABYTE UNITED INC., a leading manufacturer of motherboards and graphics cards today announced their latest in-house designed GIGABYTE GV-R4850 series graphics cards featuring GIGABYTE’s own Ultra Durable 2 Technology.

Built on the highly anticipated ATI Radeon™ HD 4850 GPU which utilizes second generation 55nm manufacturing process and GDDR 5 video memory architecture, the GIGABYTE GV-R4850 series VGA cards deliver best-in-class performance with higher clock speeds and provide break-through power efficiency management for tomorrow’s demanding applications. In addition to featuring a wide range of the latest graphics technologies including TeraScale graphics engine and CrossFireX™, the GIGABYTE GV-R4850 series are also equipped with the industry-leading GIGABYTE unique features including Ultra Durable 2 technology, GamerHUD™ tweaking utility and Multi-Core™ cooling design, setting a new standard for HD gaming performance.

In order to satisfy the individual needs of gamers, power users and home theater enthusiasts alike, the GIGABYTE GV-R4850 series VGA cards offer 3 unique designs: the GV-R485ZL-512H featuring the Zalman VF830 fan, the passive cooled GV-R485MC-1GH featuring GIGABYTE’s Multi-Core™ cooling design with 3 cooling points instead of the traditional single node connecting the heat pipes to the fins for better performance especially during heavy loading and the GV-R485OC-1GH featuring a 12% core overclock to 700MHz (originally clocked at 625MHz) for the ultimate 3D rendering performance. The GIGABYTE GV-R4850 series are also equipped with GIGABYTE’s Ultra Durable 2 technology, featuring the latest high quality, highly efficient components designed to keep temperatures low and maximize total performance.

The GIGABYTE GV-R4850 series come equipped with ATI's latest graphics technologies including the TeraScale graphics engine, combining 1 teraFLOPS of GPU compute power, 800 stream processors to increase physical gaming interaction for a more dynamic and realistic experience. With enhanced anti-aliasing (AA) and anisotropic filtering, the GIGABYTE GV-R4850 series are able to provide striking graphics quality with unparalleled realism, allowing users to max out the settings of the most demanding next generation games or revitalize favorite titles. The GIGABYTE GV-R4850 series also feature DirectX® 10.1 graphics capabilities with support for Shader Model 4.1, delivering the most life-like 3D gaming effects.

Benefiting from Avivo™ HD video and display technology, the GIGABYTE GV-R487-512H-B and GV-R485-512H-B fully support even most processing-intensive content for HDTV and HD video enthusiasts, universal connectivity to TVs and displays and HDMI with 7.1 digital surround audio. The GIGABYTE GV-R4850 series also allows users to take full advantage of Blu-ray functionality with dual-stream, picture in picture (PIP) capabilities and one-cable HDMI™ connectivity for a cinema quality experience at home.

For more details of GIGABYTE GV-R485ZL-512H, GV-R485MC-1GH and GV-R485OC-1GH, please visit the GIGABYTE VGA website: http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Products/VGA/Default.aspx

GeForce® GTX 260

2009-02-02T18:36:00.000-08:00

-- GIGABYTE Unveils Next Generation GeForce® GTX 260 OC Graphics Accelerator --
-- Setting New Records for Extreme Gaming Performance --

Taipei Taiwan, Sep. 16, 2008 - GIGABYTE UNITED INC., a leading manufacturer of motherboards and graphics cards, today launched their next generation graphic accelerators, the GIGABYTE GV-N26OC-896H-B, equipped with NVIDIA's latest GeForce® GTX 260 OC graphics processor. Delivering a 5-10% performance boost over the previous GeForce® GTX 260, the GeForce® GTX 260 OC with its 216 stream processors and 448bit, 896 GB GDDR3 memory provides a sophisticated level of 3D game rendering to take your game play to the next level. Supporting HDCP (High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection) and Full HD to 1,080P, the GIGABYTE GV-N26OC-896H-B also provides the highest quality, High-Definition video for the ultimate home theater experience.

Supporting NVIDIA’s PhysX™ Technology, the GIGABYTE GV-N26OC-896H-B enables a totally new class of physical gaming interaction for a more dynamic and realistic experience with the NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 260 OC. In addition to providing a completely unique gaming experience, it also compliant with CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) Technology, unlocking the power of the processor core of the GeForce GTX 260 OC to accelerate the most demanding system tasks such as video transcoding for an up to 7x performance enhancement over traditional CPUs.

The GIGABYTE GV-N26OC-896H-B also feature NVIDIA's latest advanced Lumenex™ Engine Technology, delivering stunning image quality and floating point accuracy at ultra-fast frame rates. The latest 16x Anti-aliasing Technology provides lightning fast, high-quality anti-aliasing up to 16x sample rates, which helps to eliminate jagged edges. 128-bit floating point High Dynamic Range (HDR) Lighting supports twice the precision of prior generations for incredibly realistic lighting effects with support for anti-aliasing.

Integrated with industry leading 3-way NVIDIA SLI Technology, the GV-N26OC-896H-B offers amazing performance scaling by implementing 3-way AFR (Alternate Frame Rendering) for the world's fastest gaming solution under Windows Vista with solid, state-of-the-art drivers. With DirectX® 10 support and adopting the latest Unified Shader architecture with full support for Shader Model 4.0, the GIGABYTE GV-N26OC-896H-B is able to deliver the most realistic gaming effects and lets users take full advantage of all the advanced features Microsoft® Windows Vista Premium, including the full Aero Interface.

The GIGABYTE GV-N26OC-896H-B is equipped with NVIDIA® PureVideo™ technology and supports Dual Dual-Link DVI, transforming your home theater into the latest highest quality, High-Definition cinema. Whether playing your favorite game at max settings, or watching the latest Blu-ray DVD movie, the GIGABYTE GV-N26OC-896H-B has the power to immerse you in the experience.

For more details about the GIGABYTE GV-N26OC-896H-B, please visit the GIGABYTE VGA website at: http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Products/VGA/Default.aspx

Transcend Launches Triple Channel DDR3-1333 Memory Kits

2009-02-02T18:33:00.000-08:00

Transcend Information Inc. (Transcend ), one of the world's leading memory module manufacturers, is proud to release its DDR3-1333 triple channel memory kits for use with Intel Core i7 processors and Intel X58 Express Chipset motherboards. Core i7, Intel's latest high-performance processor, features an integrated memory controller that introduces three channels of DDR3 memory that provide lower latency and higher memory bandwidth for amazing performance for data-intensive applications. Transcend's triple channel kits are designed specifically for the new platform, and offer an optimized combination of low voltage (1.5V), generous speed, and enhanced latency (9-9-9-24) to deliver ideal performance and compatibility with next-generation PCs.

Available in two different capacities of 3GB (1GBx3) and 6GB (2GBx3), Transcend's DDR3-1333 triple channel memory kits' three identically matched DDR3 modules are carefully matched for use in triple-channel configuration, which together provide memory bandwidth of up to 32GB/sec. To ensure extra-stability and signal integrity, all DDR3 modules use robust PCBs that fully comply with JEDEC standards. Each chip is selected with the strictest quality and performance standards and is manufactured using small Fine-Pitch Ball Grid Array (FBGA) packages with extra contacts to assure better thermal dissipation, electrical efficiency and reliable computing quality.

Transcend memory modules are built to the highest specifications with the finest chips and materials available, and undergo rigorous testing to ensure they provide the best performance possible. All Transcend memory modules come with a lifetime warranty and the support of a global service network. Recognized worldwide for their reliable high quality, outstanding performance, excellent compatibility, and stable operation, Transcend memory modules are the obvious choice of discerning power users.

source : www.tbreak.com

Samsung Electronics Widens Its Lead in the Monitor Market

2009-02-02T18:30:00.000-08:00

Despite the global economic slowdown, Samsung Electronics, a global leader in the world’s LCD monitor market, widened its lead over its rivals. LCD monitors now account for about 95% of the world’s monitor market.   

According to market research institute IDC, Samsung achieved a share of 16.0% in unit sales in the world’s LCD monitor market in the third quarter of this year, keeping the top spot for five straight quarters starting from the third quarter of 2007.   
Samsung sold off 6.298 million LCD monitors in the third quarter, setting a new quarterly sales record. The previous record was set in the third quarter of 2007 when Samsung sold 6.283 million units.

  Samsung widened its lead over the No. 2 player by 2.0% points from 0.3% points thanks to the rising popularity of the T Series along with aggressive marketing activities to promote the sales of a series of brand-new models, including the dual webcam monitor.   

For the third quarter of this year, Samsung commanded a share of 16% in sales volume terms, with its competitors maintaining shares of 14.0%, 11.9%, 10.2%, and 8.9%.   

In unit sales, Samsung maintained the top spot with a share of 17.2%, with its competitors maintaining shares of 14.0%, 12.9%, 10.0% and 7.5%.

  Backed by strong growth in the LCD monitor business, Samsung has maintained the top spot in the world’s monitor market for nine straight quarters starting from the third quarter of 2006 in unit sales and seven straight quarters from the first quarter of 2007 in revenue terms.   

Samsung achieved a share of 16.1% in unit sales in the world’s monitor market in the third quarter of 2008, with competitors at 13.5%, 11.6%, 10.8% and 8.7%. In revenue, Samsung gained a share of 17.2%, with competitors at 13.7%, 12.8%, 10.4% and 7.4%.

source : www.tbreak.com

Gigabyte GTX295-Golden Systems Launches Gigabyte GTX295

2009-02-02T18:28:00.000-08:00

Golden Systems Electronics (GSE) today announced the launch of GIGABYTE GV-N295-18I-B in the Middle East region. The new GIGABYTE GV-N295-18I-B supports NVIDIA's latest dual graphics processors-GTX295 and features 896MB GDDR3 memory and 480 stream processors to enable gamers to enjoy unrivaled graphics performance. Additionally, the GV-N295-18I-B is equipped with the latest NVIDIA SLI®, NVIDIA PureVideo® HD, NVIDIA PhysX™, NVIDIA CUDA™ technology and Microsoft DirectX 10. Output interfaces support Dual-Link DVI, D-Sub, and HDMI with HDCP. The GIGABYTE GV-N295-18I-B gives gamers extremely high resolutions.

“The new GIGABYTE GV-N295-18I-B is an absolute delight for gamers offering realistic gaming experience with the very high resolutions. The latest graphics accelerator provides unrivaled graphics performance using NVIDIA’s latest dual graphics processors-GTX295. We are confident the new GIGABYTE GV-N295-18I-B will be well received in the region,” says Iman Mozaffari, Product Manager– Golden Systems Electronics.

High Gaming Resolution
GIGABYTE GV-N295-18I-B with NVIDIA PhysX technology provides a new class of physical gaming interaction for a more realistic gaming experience. Via NVIDIA PhysX technology, gamers are able to experience realistic 3D game effects such as complex characters and explosion. NVIDIA CUDA technology further enables the GPU’s processor cores to accelerate the most demanding system tasks delivering incredible performance improvements over traditional CPUs. Integrated with unique NVIDIA SLI® Technology, GIGABYTE GV-N295-18I-B is able to offer amazing performance scaling for the world’s fastest gaming solution under Windows Vista with solid, state-of-the-art drivers.

Delicate Image
GIGABYTE GV-N295-18I-B integrated with NVIDIA PureVideo® HD technology enables gamers to enjoy ultimate HD Movie experience on a PC with HDCP image protection. GIGABYTE GV-N295-18I-B supports the latest video output interfaces, including Dual Dual-Link DVI and HDMI, for the highest dual 2560X1600 screen resolution. With this design, you do not have to worry about handling tomorrow’s output interface applications.

GIGABYTE GV-N295-18I-B dual GPU processor high-end graphics accelerator is equipped with full functions providing high performance processing speed and delicate 3D images. This card provides you an unrivaled graphics experience and is your best choice

For more details of GIGABYTE GV-N295-18I-B, please visit the GIGABYTE VGA website: http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Products/VGA/Default.aspx

source : www.tbreak.com

GIGABYTE Introduces Latest AMD Ultra Durable 3 Classic Motherboard Technology

2009-02-02T18:26:00.000-08:00

Taipei, Taiwan, January 09, 2009 – GIGABYTE Technologies INC., a leading manufacturer of motherboards and graphics cards today is pleased to introduce their revolutionary Ultra Durable 3 Classic technology, featuring ounces of copper for both the Power and Ground layers to a dramatically lower system temperature, improved energy efficiency and enhanced stability for overclocking on a wide range of current AMD motherboards.

GIGABYTE once again leads the motherboard industry for the highest quality, most innovative motherboard design with the launch of their latest Ultra Durable 3 Classic technology. Equipped on the latest GIGABYTE AMD chipset-based solutions including the AMD 790GX, 790X, 780G and 770, GIGABYTE Ultra Durable 3 Classic motherboards feature double the amount of copper for the Power and Ground layers of the PCB. Most traditional motherboard designs utilize a single ounce of copper for each layer, whereas GIGABYTE’s ultra Durable 3 motherboards feature 2 ounces per layer.

Benefits of 2 oz Copper design
Doubling the amount of copper provides a more effective thermal cooling solution by delivering a more efficient spreading of heat from critical areas of the motherboard such as the CPU power zone throughout the entire PCB. In fact, GIGABYTE Ultra Durable 3 Classic motherboards are able to deliver up to 50°C cooler working temperatures than traditional motherboards.

In addition, doubling the amount of copper lowers the PCB impedance by 50%. Impedance is a measure of how much the circuit impedes the flow of current. The less the flow of current is impeded, the less amount of energy is wasted. For GIGABYTE Ultra Durable 3 Classic motherboards, this means total PCB electrical waste is reduced by 50%, which also means less heat is generated. 2 ounces of copper also provides improved signal quality and lower EMI (Electro Magnetic Interference) providing better system stability and allowing for greater margins for overclocking.

50,000 Hour Japanese Solid Capacitors
GIGABYTE Ultra Durable 3 Classic motherboards are equipped with solid capacitors developed by leading Japanese manufacturers. With an average lifespan of 50,000 hours, these solid capacitors provide the stability, reliability and longevity essential to meet the meet the power needs of high-end processors and other components running today’s most demanding applications and games.

Native DDR2 1200+ Memory Support
Delivering native support for DDR2 memory up to 1200+MHz, GIGABYTE Ultra Durable 3 Classic motherboards allow users to take advantage of higher memory performance to run consumption to run the even the most memory intensive applications such as high-definition video and 3D visualization with ease.

Easy Energy Saver
GIGABYTE now makes it even easier for users to take advantage of power savings with the new GIGABYTE Easy Energy Saver. Featuring an advanced proprietary software design, GIGABYTE Easy Energy Saver is able to dynamically adjust CPU power depending on workload, delivering just the right amount of power needed for the task.

Patented Dual Hardware BIOS Protection
GIGABYTE DualBIOS™ feature two physical BIOS ROMS mounted onto the motherboard. One chip acts as your "Main" BIOS, or the BIOS your system primarily uses during boot up. The second chip acts as a "Backup" BIOS and has the factory default BIOS version on it. If your "Main" BIOS happens to fail or stops functioning, the "Backup" will automatically take over on your next system boot with little or no down time.

AMD® AM3/AM2+ 45nm Processor Support
GIGABYTE Ultra Durable 3 Classic motherboards also deliver an easy upgrade path for users wanting to take advantage of AMD’s latest 45nm process technology enhancements including higher core clocks with greater energy efficiency over past generations, integrated DDR2/DDR3 memory controller (DDR3 memory support for AM3 processors and AM3 designed motherboards only), HyperTransport 3.0 and C1E enhanced power savings.

For additional information on the GIGABYTE Ultra Durable 3 Classic motherboards, please visit the GIGABYTE website at:
http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Products/Motherboard/Default.aspx

source : www.tbreak.com

GIGABYTE Introduces Latest AMD Ultra Durable 3 Classic Motherboard Technology

2009-02-02T18:24:00.000-08:00

Dell could join Acer in unveiling smart phone

2009-01-31T18:20:00.000-08:00

Rumors of Dell entry grow on eve of GSMA Mobile World Congress
By Matt Hamblen

January 30, 2009 (Computerworld) When Dell Inc. stopped selling the Axim PDA in 2007, several industry observers predicted that the PC and server maker would eventually move on to sell smart phones.

The rumors that Dell would enter the smart phone business have persisted since then and have even gained heat with the approach of the GSMA Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next month, historically a popular venue for vendors to unveil new mobile phones.

For example, Acer Inc. has confirmed online that it plans to launch new smart phones at the show. Acer officials have not commented on the plan beyond the statement posted on the company's exhibitor page on the Mobile World Congress Web site.

Several analysts have looked for Dell to enter the smart phone business because of its background in handhelds and because of its 2007 hiring of Ron Garriques, who had been the head of phone development at Motorola Inc.

Garriques was hired to head up all consumer product development at Dell, and had to sign a noncompete agreement that would prevent him from working on any phone until February 2009, noted Kevin Burden, an analyst at ABI Research Inc. in New York. "That deadline for Garriques is fast approaching," Burden said in an interview. "We all knew Dell would get into smart phones at some point."

But Burden said that Dell could go all the way to the brink of announcing a smart phone and then pull back if the economics are not right. The same thing happened with the Axim PDA, he noted, citing the firm's decision to postpone its launch from 2000 until 2002. Burden said he had first-hand knowledge of that decision, having worked as a consultant to many manufacturers, including Dell, at the time.

"Dell has never been first to market with anything," Burden noted. "They sit back and look to see when the market has sustainable volumes and squeeze ... to get prices down."

Andy Kitson, an analyst and blogger at Juniper Research Ltd., said Dell might balk at the cost of designing and developing a smart phone. The Wall Street Journal reported, based on information gathered from unnamed sources, that Dell has already created two smart phone prototypes running the Windows Mobile and Android operating systems.

Independent wireless and telecom analyst Jeffrey Kagan said Acer's announced plans and the rumors of Dell's entry into the smart phone market come at a good time. "The market is lousy compared to great times, but for smart phones, the market is still decent," he said.

Burden said that successful forays into the smart phone business against the likes of Apple Inc. with the iPhone and Research In Motion Ltd., maker of various BlackBerry devices, would depend in large part on which carriers end up selling the devices in the U.S. When asked which carriers are likely to sell Dell or Acer smart phones, Burden said "who knows? Selling mobile phones is lot different than selling PCs directly as Dell has done, and the only effective way is through a mobile agreement with an operator to get good volumes of sales."

But Burden agreed with Kagan that smart phones are one of the few products expected to grow in sales in 2009, meaning manufacturers of all types of computers and handsets will try to sell them. He noted that ABI projects that smart phones will make up 17% of mobile device sales in 2009, up from 14% last year. The total number of mobile devices sold in 2009 will be 2.5% less than last year, ABI added.

source : www.computerworld.com

Microsoft charges ex-employee with spying

2009-01-31T18:19:00.000-08:00

Claims suspect stole company information to aid his patent infringement suit against Microsoft
By Nancy Gohring

January 30, 2009 (IDG News Service) Microsoft Corp. has filed a lawsuit against a former employee, charging him with taking a job at the software company in order to steal information that would be helpful in his patent infringement case against the company.

When Miki Mullor applied for a job at Microsoft in 2005, he said that he had been an employee of a company called Ancora that had gone out of business when in fact the company was still running and Mullor was its CEO, Microsoft alleges in the suit.

Once employed by the software giant, he downloaded confidential documents unrelated to his job about technology that Microsoft offers to computer makers, according to the suit, filed in the King County Superior Court in Washington. The technology lets end users forgo the Windows operating system activation process on PCs that come preloaded with the Windows software.

Then in June of last year, while Mullor was still employed at Microsoft, Ancora filed a suit accusing Microsoft of infringing on a patent related to the technology.

Ancora's lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, is against Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Toshiba, but because the technology in question was provided by Microsoft, the PC makers have asked the software maker to defend them against the claims.

Microsoft also alleges that Mullor ran programs on his laptop in an effort to wipe any evidence that would show he had downloaded the files. The software giant was able to detect which programs he ran and was able to recover some of the documents that he downloaded, according to the suit.

Also, Microsoft said it has e-mail evidence that in 2004, before Mullor applied for a job at the software company, he was already planning to file the patent infringement suit.

Microsoft contends that Mullor committed breach of contract for failing to disclose his continued involvement in Ancora, stole confidential documents and failed to disclose his intentions regarding the patent infringement suit. The company also believes that it is entitled to a royalty free license for Ancora's patent in part because Mullor didn't tell Microsoft that he knew of the patent even while he knew that Microsoft was still developing its own similar technology.

The company also accused him of fraud, misappropriation of trade secrets and unjust enrichment.

Mullor is listed as chairman and founder of Ancora on its Web site, which as of midday on the West Coast appeared to be offline. His biography included his time working for Microsoft and said that he once served in the Israeli Military Intelligence and has a law degree from an Israeli university.

Mullor did not respond to a voice mail request for comment about Microsoft's suit.

source : www.computerworld.com

Can Your IT Department Read Your Offline Gmail?

2009-01-31T18:17:00.000-08:00

by Kyle Monson

We've been waiting for some sort of offline functionality to come to Gmail ever since Google Gears was released—it seems like the feature for which Gears was invented in the first place. And now that offline Gmail is here (and seems to work well, according to Lance Ulanoff), I have but one concern about it: Is it safe to use on a work PC?

Offline Gmail works by archiving and storing your Gmail messages locally on your machine. I'm guessing you use your freemail account the same way everyone does—for the e-mail that you don't really want stored on your corporate servers or sitting in your corporate inbox. If that's the case, storing an archive of those message on your work PC might not seem like such a great idea.

The archive is buried fairly deep in your C:\ Documents and Settings file tree. If you're using Firefox, the archive is stored here: C:\Documents and Settings\\Local Settings\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\74d61f9f.Default User\Google Gears for Firefox\mail.google.com. For Chrome, your messages are kept here: C:\Documents and Settings\\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Plugin Data\Google Gears\mail.google.com.

That's right, there's a different archive for each browser you use Offline Gmail with (I couldn't get Offline Gmail to archive my messages with IE8).

Naturally, every company has different I.T. policies in place, and varying levels of employee privacy. In the case of Offline Gmail, it would be extremely difficult for your I.T. department to read your archived e-mail as of right now.

The archived messages are stored in a proprietary database file type called "COM-GOOGLEMAIL#DATABASE" or "GOOGLEMAIL#DATABASE". I'm guessing your I.T. department doesn't have a tool to access the data inside the file, or the free time to build one (though such a tool may someday exist).

So your private e-mail is almost certainly private on your work PC, at least for the time being. Still, our Security Watch Contributing Editor Larry Seltzer advises taking the safe route, telling me that you have to "assume you have no privacy from your company."

"If you put it on your work machine you should assume they can and will [be able to access it]," he said. "And they should be able to. It's their computer."

Rajen Sheth, the senior product manager for Google Apps, told me that while there aren't any tools that can open the proprietary file format, the files will act just like any other files on your work PC.

"Basically, it'd be like any other file on your desktop," he said. "If your I.T. department encrypts your disc, it'd be encrypted as well."

If you're worried, Sheth suggests enabling it for your home PC and not for your work system (though it seems the work system is the one you really want offline access for, assuming it's the one you'll be traveling with and carrying on planes).

Worrywarts will also be happy to learn that Offline Gmail data isn't as sticky as some other Google Gears data. For instance, when you clear your private data in Chrome, it doesn't necessarily get deleted from Google Gears, as Security Watch recently pointed out. Sheth assured me that this isn't the case with Offline Gmail data—any time the offline feature is disabled, the archive is deleted from your machine.

Originally posted to AppScout.

source : www.pcmag.com

3G Networks: Not as Fast as You'd Expect

2009-01-31T18:11:00.000-08:00

Matt Hamblen, Computerworld
Saturday, January 31, 2009 3:02 PM PST

The 3G networks of all four major U.S. wireless carriers deliver slower speeds than customers expect, according to Gartner Inc., which said it has received the most complaints about AT&T's network.

The Gartner findings, summarized in a recent report by analyst Phillip Redman, point to many factors behind the less-than-satisfactory speeds.

The research firm urged companies and consumers to be realistic in their expectations and read the fine print of their agreements with carriers, and it urged companies to test products before investing in them. "Most providers market speeds as high as 1.8Mbit/sec. on their 3G networks, [but] the fine print doesn't guarantee such speeds," the report said.

The Gartner report focused on AT&T Inc., Verizon Wireless, Sprint Nextel Corp. and T-Mobile USA, noting that all of them market their 3G wireless speeds as "broadband" which is generally defined as data transfer speeds that are faster than 1.5Mbit/sec. for downloads and at least 250Kbit/sec. for uploads.

But the actual mobile network averages are "generally between 300Kbit/sec and 700Kbit/sec lower" than expected for both uplink and downlink speeds for many reasons, Gartner said. It noted that carriers "don't guarantee these speeds, but advertise they can provide 'up to' advertised speeds."

Only some laptop cards support the highest speeds promoted by carriers, Redman said. And network speeds can be half as fast as marketed when a users are moving around, such as while traveling in a car, compared to when they're stationary.

Redman singled out the iPhone 3G, sold exclusively by AT&T, saying it won't support downloads faster than 1.4Gbit/sec., while some laptop cards get 1.7Mbit/sec. "Companies shouldn't expect the fastest network speeds on the iPhone 3G," Redman said in the report.

In comparison, Redman said the BlackBerry Bold "supports faster speeds," though he did not detail how much faster they are.

All of the big carriers defended their marketing of 3G speeds and the way they deliver on their promises, but AT&T took special exception to the Gartner report and attacked Gartner's methodology.

"We deliver to customers on speeds," said AT&T spokesman Mark Siegel in an interview. Redman based his conclusions about AT&T, he added, "on anecdotal feedback from only 30 customers to fashion some sweeping generalizations about us in particular."

Siegel argued that Redman should have tested the new BlackBerry Storm, which offers a full touch screen, as a comparison to the iPhone -- not the BlackBerry Bold. Redman refused, Siegel said.

Redman did not say how many complaints Gartner received, but defended the company's research methods as the best in the industry.

Jeffrey Nelson, a spokesman for Verizon, said 3G speeds are "exactly as promised," and noted that business customers and consumers adopting laptop cards are using the faster speeds for music and video. "I guess the proof is in the customer usage numbers," Nelson said. "Data usage has increased to more than 26% of overall Verizon Wireless revenue, with more than half of that nonmessaging data."

He said the advertised rate is the same as a consumer promise, Nelson said, which is described on the Verizon Wireless Web site as a "typical" download speed of 600Kbit/sec to 1.4Mbit/sec, with uploads of 500Kbit/sec. to 800Kbit/sec. for a laptop card.

Jeffrey Kagan, an independent analyst, said that while business clients of Gartner might be getting complaints about 3G speeds, the issue is not as a compelling for the overwhelming number of consumers who use faster networks for video and music and quicker Web browsing.

Most wireless customers have no idea what speed they are getting or what the 3G network is supposed to provide, and they're generally impressed with faster speeds than the speeds networks provided two years ago. "Users want to see continual improvement," he said. "Forget all the labels and numbers."

Kagan and Redman both noted that speeds are affected by many factors, including the number of users on a cell tower at a given time, the local geography, any interference from nearby buildings and variations between the devices they use.

source : www.pcworld.com

Next Up for Windows 7: A Release Candidate

2009-01-31T18:08:00.000-08:00

by Chloe Albanesius

The next Windows 7 update will be the release candidate, Microsoft announced Friday.

"The next milestone for the development of Windows 7 is the Release Candidate or 'RC,'" Steven Sinofsky, senior vice president for the Windows and Windows Live Engineering Group, wrote in a blog post. "Right now, every day we are researching issues [with the beta release], resolving them, and making sure those resolutions did not cause regressions (in performance, behavior, compatibility, or reliability)."

"The path to Release Candidate is all about getting the product to a known and shippable state both from an internal and external (Beta usage and partner ecosystem readiness) standpoint," he wrote.

That path does not yet include a release date.

"When is the Release Candidate and RTM? The answer is forthcoming," Sinofsky wrote. "We are currently evaluating the feedback and telemetry and working to develop a robust schedule that gets us the right level of quality in a predictable manner. Believe me, we know many people want to know more specifics."

The team is "taking a quality-based approach to completing the product and won't be driven by imposed deadlines," he said.

So what's happening now?

"A very significant portion of our effort from Beta to RC is focused on exclusively on quality and performance," Sinofsky wrote. "We want to fix bugs experienced by customers in real usage as well as our broad base of test suites and automation."

At its peak, the Windows 7 team was getting "send feedback" notes from users every 15 seconds. The team got some "feedback where we thought something was straight forward or would work fine, but in practice needed some tuning and refinement," he wrote. "Over the next weeks we'll be blogging about some of these specific changes to the product."

By the time the release candidate is ready, there will be very little fine-tuning from a coding perspective, Sinofsky wrote. "The ship [will be] on the launch pad and all the tools ... put away in the toolbox to be used only in case of the most critical issues."

source : www.pcmag.com

Microsoft warns that Vista, XP upgrade blockers set to expire

2009-01-31T18:03:00.000-08:00

Kills Windows XP SP3 blocker after just 10 months
By Gregg Keizer

January 30, 2009 (Computerworld) Microsoft Corp. is warning customers that tools for blocking automatic upgrades to the newest service packs of Windows Vista and Windows XP will expire in the coming months.

In a note on a company blog aimed at enterprise IT professionals, Microsoft said the Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) blocking tool expires on April 28, while the one for XP SP3 expires May 19.

The tools, which were released in December 2007, prevent service packs from reaching PCs via Windows Update, Microsoft's default update service, and are primarily used by corporations that have not yet tested or approved the newest upgrades.

Microsoft's policy is to let users block service packs for up to 12 months after general availability. That, however, doesn't necessarily mean users can block upgrades for a full year after the company has flipped the switch on automatic downloads.

The April 28 expiration date for the Vista SP1 blocking tool, for example, is almost exactly a year after April 23, 2008, when Microsoft triggered automatic upgrades. But it will give Windows XP users just over 10 months of blocking when it kills that operating system's tool in May; Microsoft began automatically upgrading Windows XP to SP3 in early July 2008.

The blocking tools, which are still available on Microsoft's site for downloading, are composed of an executable, a script and a group policy template.

Microsoft regularly issues such tools when it rolls out major updates to its operating system software and to its Internet Explorer (IE) browser. Earlier this month, for instance, it posted a tool to bar IE8, which just launched in release candidate form, from PCs.

The Vista/XP tool kit that is available now will continue to block Vista SP2 installations for approximately a year after that service pack is released. According to recent reports, Vista SP2 is expected in final form sometime before mid-May.

source : www.computerworld.com

Gears of War bug not SafeDisc DRM's first

2009-01-31T18:01:00.000-08:00

Legitimate owners of the PC version of the popular game were blocked starting Thursday
By Eric Lai

January 30, 2009 (Computerworld) The antipiracy technology that locked out players of the popular Gears of War game on Thursday was also implicated in a 2007 bug that allowed hackers to take control of Windows PCs.

In November 2007, Microsoft Corp. revealed that copies of Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 were being exploited because of a bug in SafeDisc's digital rights management (DRM) technology, which is meant to guard against illegal copying.

Legitimate owners of the PC version of Gears of War, a third-person shooter and sci-fi game, were blocked starting Thursday, according to numerous reports.

Blocked players would either have to re-install the game or set the date of their PC back to Wednesday, Jan. 28 or earlier.

Gears is developed by Epic Games and published by Microsoft Game Studios. The maker of SafeDisc's DRM is San Francisco-based TryMedia Systems Inc.

Formerly owned by licensing software maker, Macrovision Inc., TryMedia was sold to RealNetworks Inc. in February 2008.

The customer support section for Gears of Wars players at TryMedia's Web site did not have any information on the bug.

Representatives at RealNetworks did not return a request for comment. But Epic said on its user forums that it is working on a fix with Microsoft.

SafeDisc's DRM was popular for almost a decade, though it has been supplanted in the past year by Sony Corp.'s SecuROM.

Last fall, players of the widely anticipated Spore video game complained so vigorously about the burdens imposed by the SecuROM DRM that EA eventually removed it.

Pirated owners of Gears, ironically, were not affected since SafeDisc's DRM had been disabled.

Both incidents give ammunition to DRM critics, who argue that DRM is ineffective and actually hurts paying users more, said Michael Arrington, an analyst at Acacia Research Group.

"When it becomes such a nuisance to users, you can bet that pirates will circumvent it," Arrington said.

While game developers typically have no love for DRM because of the fear of embarrassing incidents such as with Gears or Spore, publishers still insist upon it, said Arrington. And despite the rise of subscription-based online gaming, publishers won't make games free or dump DRM anytime soon, he said.

source : www.computerworld.com

Beware Revived Valentine's Day Virus

2009-01-31T17:52:00.000-08:00

Gregg Keizer, Computerworld
Saturday, January 31, 2009 4:15 PM PST
Spam trumpeting the power of love is nothing more than an old trick dressed up in new clothes, more evidence that the backers of the Waledec bot Trojan are the same bunch that hammered users in 2007 with Storm, security companies are warning.

Multiple security vendors, including MX Logic Inc., Trend Micro Inc., and Panda Security, have issued alerts about new Valentine's Day-themed spam campaigns that try to dupe users into installing the Waledec bot.

Subject lines for the spam, said Sam Masiello , vice president of information security at MX Logic, are "short and sweet," and include "Me and You," "In Your Arms" and "With all my love." From the spam, users who browse to the embedded link reach a site with a dozen hearts, any one of which download an executable file when clicked.

Masiello first noted the campaign last Thursday, but other researchers, including those at Trend Micro and Panda, picked up on the trend Monday. Both Masiello and Florabel Baetiong, an anti-spam research engineer with Trend, noted the similarity between the recent infection attempt and Valentine's Day scams launched last year by hackers controlling Storm, another bot Trojan that has since fallen into disuse, possibly because the crew responsible surrendered to heavy pressure by security experts .

"Clearly the old Storm folks are working as hard as they can to build up their new botnet, and are following the old tried-and-true methods of centering their social engineering tactics around holiday themes," said Masiello in a post to the MX Logic blog .

"But it still impresses me that tactics like this continue to work and be so effective, despite how many times it gets recycled," Masiello said in an interview today.

Storm used Valentine's Day spam in both 2007 and 2008 to hijack PCs.

Most researchers have come around to the idea that Waledec is, in fact, the new Storm. Joe Stewart , an expert on botnets -- Storm, in particular -- was confident that the group that backed Storm essentially re-wrote its code to come up with Waledec. "If it's not the same people, they would have had to study Storm intensively to match the functionality," Stewart said in an interview recently. "It's so similar that it's unlikely to be a different group."

Waledec has been busy of late. The malware first began infecting systems just before Christmas , when it used phony holiday greetings and e-cards as bait, another Storm tactic during 2008. Last week, it surfaced again, this time hitchhiking on a spam run that claimed then President-elect Barack Obama would not take the oath of office on Jan. 20.

Although the Waledec botnet remains relatively small -- Stewart put it at just 10,000 machines -- it's growing at "an alarming rate," according to MessageLabs Ltd. In a report on botnets the e-mail security company released Monday (download PDF) , MessageLabs speculated that the botnet owners are "focusing on growing and developing this new botnet, rather than sending spam through it at this stage."

Masiello said that messages designed to plant Waledec were running at a volume of about 4,000-5,000 per hour, down from approximately 12,000 an hour last Friday, and had been holding steady for the last 48 hours. "I'd agree with MessageLabs," said Masiello on Tuesday. "It does look like they are in the process of building up the botnet." MX Logic has not seen any evidence that the Waledec botnet is, in turn, sending spam of its own.

Several botnets that were heavily disrupted by the takedown of McColo Corp., a California-based hosting company, are in the same condition, Masiello added. After suffering losses when McColo -- which had hosted command-and-control servers for several botnets, particular one dubbed "Srizbi" and other called "Rustock" -- was yanked off the Internet, they have spent the last several months adding new PCs to their collection.

source : www.pcworld.com

AMD set to release DDR3-capable chips ahead of schedule

2009-01-31T17:43:00.000-08:00

A leaked roadmap suggests the new Phenom II and triple-core processors are coming
By Agam Shah

January 30, 2009 (IDG News Service) Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) will soon introduce processors that are capable of supporting DDR3 memory, earlier than the company had anticipated.

The company in the next few weeks will launch new processors targeted at desktops that will include DDR3-capable memory controllers, said John Taylor, an AMD spokesman.

Taylor declined comment on specific processors being launched, though a leaked road map suggests the launch of new Phenom II and triple-core processors.

The support for DDR3 memory comes earlier than anticipated. Late last year the company said it aimed to add DDR3-capable Phenom II processors by the middle of 2009, but could push that up depending on factors including pricing of the memory.

Compared to current DDR2-capable processors, the new DDR3-capable chips will allow information from the memory to be communicated to a CPU faster, which translates to better PC performance. To run DDR3-capable processors, the company will introduce the AM3 socket for motherboards.

"The people who want the latest and greatest will want to use DDR3 memory," Taylor said.

AMD's decision to switch to DDR3 memory is to make CPUs faster so it can effectively compete with Intel in the high-end PC and server markets, said Dean McCarron, president of Mercury Research, a market analysis firm.

"When we make changes in PC architecture, it is because it's either faster or cheaper," said McCarron. For AMD, the decision was technical rather than financial, but the enhanced competitiveness could yield a financial benefit to AMD in the long run, McCarron said.

Intel's Core i7 processor for gaming systems, launched in November, already supports DDR3 memory. Intel is also adding DDR3 support to chips for portable products like laptops.

However, given AMD's inherent price advantage compared to Intel's products, price-sensitive buyers may initially oppose the high prices of DDR3 memory modules, McCarron said. As of early January, a 1GB DDR3 memory module running at 1333MHz was priced at $35, versus $12 to $14 per unit for a 1GB DDR2 unit.

"This is completely normal for technology. As the volume ramps [DDR3 memory prices] will come down," McCarron said.

Motherboard companies like Asus have already announced AM3-compatible motherboards, setting the stage for AMD to launch its new DDR3-capable processors, which could include new Phenom II processors. The new CPUs will include a DDR2- and DDR3-capable memory controller, allowing it to work with older motherboards with DDR2 memory.

AMD earlier this year launched new quad-core Phenom II processors, which the company called its "highest-performing" CPUs to date. Aimed at high-end desktop PCs, the chips ran at speeds of up to 3GHz and included 8MB of cache.

However, the Phenom II chips are capable of even faster clock speeds under certain circumstances. For example, the processors have been overclocked to run at speeds of up to 6.5GHz on liquid-cooled systems and up to 4GHz on air-cooled systems.

AMD remains on track to transition to DDR3 memory support for servers with the Maranello platform in 2010, Taylor said. The Maranello platform includes the six-core Sao Paulo and 12-core Magny-Cours chips.

source : www.computerworld.com

Remaking Microsoft: Break Up The Company

2009-01-31T17:37:00.000-08:00

Microsoft needs a makeover from top to bottom.
By John Foley
InformationWeek
January 31, 2009 12:01 AM (From the February 2, 2009 issue)

Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) needs a makeover, and not one of those cosmetic restructurings where the org chart changes but the company stays the same.

For evidence that its business is broken, look no further than its financial results for the quarter ended Dec. 31 and the fact that the company's stock hit a 52-week low. Microsoft revealed that its client business declined 8% and that sales of Office to consumers plummeted 23%. Microsoft is laying off employees and cutting costs, and it has stopped offering guidance to financial analysts. In other words, Microsoft isn't sure what the hell to expect next.

The economy is partly to blame, of course, but Microsoft's problems are much more deeply rooted. It's a proprietary software company in an open Web services world, and its laudable effort to reorient itself around "software plus services" is taking too long.

What might Microsoft do to remake itself? It could spin off MSN, its entertainment division, or its ERP business to create more nimble, independent companies. Back in June 2000, when U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson ordered Microsoft to be split up to stem anticompetitive business practices, it was considered a strong-arm move that the Department of Justice ultimately rejected.

This time, Microsoft's breakup should be voluntary, aimed at shedding bureaucracy (the company's administrative expenses were $5.1 billion in fiscal 2008), unburdening internal developers from the expectation that everything they create be gunked up with hooks to other Microsoft products, and get better products to market faster.

Microsoft has kept its $60 billion ship intact as a way of encouraging synergies across product lines, but that strategy may have reached the point of diminishing returns. Windows PC users want iPods, iPhones, and BlackBerrys, too, not all Microsoft technology all of the time.

Microsoft also needs to do a better job of capitalizing on its huge investment in R&D--$8.2 billion last year--by finding new ways to expose the innovations coming out of Microsoft Research and getting its patented technologies into the hands of entrepreneurs. The Windows ecosystem spends too much time in Microsoft's slipstream.

A decline in venture capital funding makes this a tough time for startups to forge ahead with bold ideas. Microsoft should consider creating its own VC arm and funding startups directly.

Breaking up the company, throwing open research, and pumping money into boot-strapped ventures will require unblinking leadership. Microsoft has a strong mix of veteran top executives and fresh blood, including Stephen Elop, president of its Business Division, and Qi Lu, president of Online Services. But the questions of who will succeed Steve Ballmer as CEO, and when, hang out there. As part of its overhaul, Microsoft must provide an answer.

Illustration by Sek Leung

source : www.informationweek.com

Microsoft, HP, eBay to weigh in on US privacy laws

2009-01-31T17:08:00.000-08:00

The move could lead to a standard federal breach-notification law
By Robert McMillan

January 31, 2009 (IDG News Service) A group of U.S. companies, led by technology giants Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard and eBay, is set to outline recommendations for new federal data-privacy legislation that could make life easier for consumers and lead to a standard federal breach-notification law.

The recommendations, which were developed by a group of industry players called the Consumer Privacy Legislative Forum, are set to be released at an upcoming privacy conference six weeks from now, according to Peter Cullen, Microsoft's chief privacy officer.

The companies have been working for the past three years to encourage the adoption of federal consumer data-privacy laws and to answer the question of what federal legislation should look like, Cullen said in an interview. Other forum members include Google, Oracle, Procter & Gamble and Eli Lilly.

One idea is that laws should make it easier for consumers to understand what they're getting into when they share their personal data with Web sites, Cullen said. "The whole focus on consent really puts an unfair burden on the consumer," he said. "My mom doesn't know what an IP address is."

The recommendations will cover rules around data use and the ability of consumers to correct inaccurate data. And they will cover data breach notification, which is now covered by a patchwork of state laws.

Simplifying breach-notification laws by creating a single federal standard is important, Cullen said Wednesday while speaking at a discussion of privacy policy in San Francisco. "It's not that there is no privacy law. There's actually too much privacy law," he said. "If you think about data-breach notification laws just as an example, there are 38 state laws, many of them very different."

"We need to think about much more of a framework approach."

Congress has passed some laws covering consumer data privacy, such as the 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), but existing laws do not comprehensively cover consumer privacy in general.

Bills have been proposed, but they have all died in committee or on the House floor, said Ari Schwartz, chief operating officer with the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), a public policy advocacy group.

Schwartz said he expects new legislation to be put forward again this year. Whether it will pass is another question. "By the end of this year we'll be able to determine whether this Congress can deal with it," he said. "There's a lot going on right now because of the economy, but there are members who have said they want to see privacy legislation."

Although CDT was a charter member of the Consumer Privacy Legislative Forum, the group dropped out about six months after its creation when members decided to focus on working with industry rather than public interest groups, Schwartz said. The split was amicable, he said.

"They're people that are clearly committed to legislation," he said. "A lot of them put their necks out to support it at a time when it would not be as popular as it would be right now."

One academic who follows the topic said it's significant that the industry has agreed in principle that there should be some sort of baseline privacy law.

"That's interesting, because prior to 2006 these groups were pumping money into the libertarian machine, and now the tune is a bit different and more open to different options," Chris Hoofnagle, director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology's information privacy programs, said via e-mail.

source : www.computerworld.com

Palit Launches GeForce GTX285 with NVIDIA PhysX and CUDA

2009-01-21T19:33:00.000-08:00

Graphic Cards | Just Announced

Manila, Philippines -- Palit Microsystems announces the Palit GeForce GTX285. Armed with NVIDIA PhysX and NVIDIA CUDA technology, the GeForce GTX285 is ready to enable a total new class of physical gaming interaction!

The Palit GeForce GTX285 features a core speed of 648MHz and 2.5GHz on its 1GB of GDDR3 memory with a 512bit interface. It supports the latest NVIDIA PhysX technology providing real-time physics simulations in leading edge PC and console games. With up to 50% more performance than prior generation GPUs, GeForce GTX 285’s GPUs tear through complex DirectX 10 environments and cinematic effects at blazing frame rates in extreme HD resolution!

Palit’s GeForce GTX285 also supports NVIDIA CUDA technology, unlocking the power of the GPU’s processing cores to accelerate the most demanding system tasks (such as video transcoding) to deliver up to 20x the performance over traditional CPUs.

The Palit GeForce GTX285 graphics card with NVIDIA CUDA technology not only provides a world-class gaming experience, it also delivers Graphics Plus. Experience jaw-dropping NVIDIA PhysX gaming effects, stereoscopic 3D, and lightning fast video and image processing all accelerated by the GPU!

source : www.hardwarezone.com

GIGABYTE Announces GeForce 7800 GT VGA Card

2009-01-21T19:17:00.000-08:00

Graphic Cards | Just Announced

Taipei, Taiwan 11th August 2005 – GIGABYTE launched the GV-NX78T256V-B, yet another high definition next generation GIGABYTE Gaming VGA solution based on the NVIDIA GeForce 7800GT graphics processor. Following close on the heels of several remarkable VGA card innovations from GIGABYTE, such as the proprietary 3D1 series of dual GPU cards, innovative fanless thermal designs that use Silent-pipe cooling technology and the famous GIGABYTE Turbo Force performance tuner, the new GV-NX78T256V-B introduces an incredible 20 pixel pipeline in what is arguably the industry’s powerful and technically advanced graphics accelerator card. The new high-end VGA card from GIGABYTE also supports a host of industry wide technological advancements such as Microsoft DirectX 9.0C and OpenGL 2.0, and is fully compatible with 64-bit operating systems.

The NVIDIA GeForce 7800GT GPU featured on the new GV-NX78T256V-B boasts NVIDIA’s top-three mainstream architectures, the Power of 3, which comprise Shader Model 3.0, HDR (High dynamic-range), and SLI technology. The GeForce 7 series is fitted out a fourth generation graphics engine that streamlines the creation of complex visual effects through features such as the CineFX 4.0 engine that allows developers to create unique 3D game features and effects in both game animation and high-definition video; moreover, the specialized engine possesses full support for Microsoft DirectX 9.0 Shader Model 3.0, that provides infinite program command length creating photorealistic scenes and environments in games. Additionally, the video accelerator card also supports HDR (High dynamic-range) rendering technology, which takes advantage of subtle light, texture, and color intricacies to creative incredibly realistic environments by representing color and intensity values with higher levels of precision. Naturally, NVIDIA SLI technology is featured on the GV-NX78T256V-B, which delivers powerful, elegant and super-rich graphics for games and other graphics-intensive applications. What’s more, for discerning PC gamers, the GV-NX78T256V-B incorporates Intellisample™ 4.0 that delivers Transparency Supersampling technology to improves the quality of finely detailed environments that may otherwise be aliased and blocky when rendered by traditional means.

In addition to NVIDIA’s industry leading 3D gaming technologies, the GV-NX78T256V-B also incorporates PureVideo technology that ensures support for new video formats, while its motion estimation engine (MEE) allows the card to record and play video files simultaneously without interrupting system performance. An added value the GV-NX78T256V-B provides is its high-definition MPEG-2 and WMV HD hardware accelerator that take on much of the heavy lifting during playback of Hi-Def video. Other video playback enhancements include a unique color correction mechanism that will help to create a home theater from a PC.

The GV-NX78T256V-B is equipped with video in and out (VIVO), HDTV, DVI-I, D-SUB output, and comes bundled with an impressive range of software, including Cyberlink PowerDirector 3.0 ME, PowerDVD 6.0, Spell Force, and Xpand Rally. The GV-NX78T256V-B is expected to be available on the shelf in end of June. For more details, please visit the official GIGABYTE VGA website: http://tw.giga-byte.com/VGA.

Acer Announces New Ergonomic Monitors for Business

2009-01-21T19:10:00.000-08:00

by Kathy Yakal

Acer has announced the introduction of two new models in its Business Series (B Series) monitor line for professionals. The new Acer B Series monitors - B233HU bmidhz and B273HU bmidhz - feature a stylish ergonomic design and state-of-the-art features, making them perfect for the office.

The new 23-inch and 27-inch Acer B Series monitors feature a stylish dark grey bezel with a sturdy, black base. Control buttons on the front panel allow easy and intuitive use, while enhancing the monitors' sleek looks.

Both new monitors feature flexible height adjustment, tilt and swivel, to optimize the best viewing angles. Users can tilt the monitors 15 degrees up or 5 degrees down, swivel 35 degrees to the right and left, and adjust the height up to 11 cm. These new viewing angles are not only great for a single user, but excellent for multiple people viewing content on the monitors, such as presentations or videos.

The new displays boast a 16:9 aspect ratio and a 2048x1152 resolution, providing excellent high-definition picture quality and the ability to multitask. The ultra-high 2048x1152 resolution allows the monitors to display two pages at the same time, presenting twice the length of a web page on a 1024x768 resolution monitor. The 16:9 aspect ratio allows professionals to view high-definition digital content without the image distortion that arises from incompatible aspect ratios.

Acer's newest displays are available through authorized resellers and online retailers. The B233HU bmidhz display is available for an MSRP of $289 and the B273HU bmidhz display is available for an MSRP of $409.

Originally posted at the PCMag @Work blog.

source : www.pcmag.com

Update: EU hits Microsoft with new antitrust charges

2009-01-17T16:26:00.000-08:00

Regulators object to Microsoft's bundling of IE with Windows
By Gregg Keizer

January 16, 2009 (Computerworld) Microsoft Corp. confirmed today that European Union regulators have formally accused the company of breaking antitrust laws by including the company's Internet Explorer (IE) browser with the Windows operating system.

"Yesterday, Microsoft received a Statement of Objections from the Directorate General for Competition of the European Commission," the company said in a statement on Friday. "The Statement of Objections expresses the Commission's preliminary view that the inclusion of Internet Explorer in Windows since 1996 has violated European competition law."

According to Microsoft, the EU claimed that "other browsers are foreclosed from competing because Windows includes Internet Explorer."

The Norwegian browser maker that first filed a complaint with about Internet Explorer applauded the EU's move. "We commend the Commission for taking the next step towards restoring competition in a market that Microsoft has strangled for more than a decade," said Jon von Tetzchner, the CEO of Opera Software ASA. "[This] demonstrates that the Commission is serious about getting Microsoft to start competing on the merits in the browser market and letting consumers have a real choice of browsers."

In December 2007, Norwegian browser maker Opera Software ASA filed a complaint with the EU that argued Microsoft stifled competition by bundling IE with Windows, and that the U.S. developer hindered interoperability by not following accepted Web standards.

In its December 2007 complaint to the EU, Opera argued that Microsoft stifled competition by bundling IE with Windows, and that the U.S. developer hindered interoperability by not following accepted Web standards.

At the time, the Competition Commission said it would "study this complaint carefully." Later, when it announced an official investigation, it credited Opera's complaint for jump-starting its action.

Several months earlier, the EU's second-highest court had ruled against Microsoft's appeal of a landmark 2004 antitrust ruling, and reaffirmed record-setting fines. Within a month, Microsoft caved on all counts, saying it would not appeal further and would slash licensing prices for Windows protocols.

Closing that case, however, did not mean that the EU would back off. In February 2008, after the EU levied a final $1.3 billion fine on Microsoft for the 2004 violations, Neelie Kroes, the head of the Competition Commission, warned Microsoft that it faced further action. "This is about the 2004 decision only," Kroes said in 2007, talking about the latest fine, "and not about any of Microsoft's other actions."

Investigations announced a month before, including one based on Opera's complaint about IE, would continue, she said. "There are lessons I hope Microsoft will learn," she added at the time.

The EU is also investigating a complaint that involves Microsoft's Office suite. That complaint was filed by the European Committee for Interoperable Systems, a trade group whose members include many of Microsoft's rivals, including Adobe Systems Inc., IBM, Oracle Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc., and deals with Office 2007's native file format, Open XML.

Today, Microsoft said it is "committed to conducting our business in full compliance with European law," phrasing that it has used in the past when responding to EU antitrust actions. It said it would respond to the charges within the next two months, as it is allowed by law, and left open the door to requesting a hearing, as is its right.

The EU Completion Commission was not available for comment Friday.

source : www.computerworld.com

AMD to Cut 1,100 Jobs

2009-01-17T16:22:00.000-08:00

by Reuters

NEW YORK - Advanced Micro Devices Inc said on Friday it would take a $622 million charge related to its ATI acquisition, and cut 1,100 jobs and reduce salaries.

AMD, which trails Intel Corp in computer chips and was criticized for overpaying for its $5.4 billion 2006 purchase of graphics chip maker ATI, also announced the impairment of another $62 million of intangible assets in a document filed with regulators on Friday.

The $622 million impairment charge comes after an $800 million impairment charge for ATI recorded in the company's June quarter.

As part of its cost cuts it said Chairman Hector Ruiz and Chief Executive Dirk Meyer will temporarily take 20 percent salary cuts, while U.S. and Canadian executives at the level of vice president and higher will take 15 percent cuts.

North American employees who are not eligible for overtime pay will take 10 percent cuts, while overtime-eligible employees will see their pay reduced by 5 percent. It is also implementing voluntary pay reduction measures for employees outside North America.

In addition, AMD is suspending matching company contributions to 401(k) employee retirement plans.

It said the job cuts will reduce its product company workforce, excluding foundry workers, by 9 percent and will come from attrition, divesting its handheld business, and the elimination of another 900 positions.

In an emailed statement, AMD did not say how much money it expects to save from the actions.

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source : www.pcmag.com

What your computer's drive will look like in 5 years

2009-01-17T16:12:00.000-08:00

Hard disk drives may soon be replaced by solid-state disk (SSD) drives
By Lucas Mearian

January 16, 2009 (Computerworld) As solid-state disk (SSD) technology closes in on hard disk drive (HDD) capacity and price, experts say it may not be long before spinning disks are a thing of the past and a computer's storage resides in flash memory on the motherboard.

By making the drive part of a system's core architecture -- instead of a peripheral device -- data I/O performance could initially double, quadruple or more, according to Jim McGregor, chief technology strategist at market research firm In-Stat.

"Instead of using a SATA interface, let's break that and instead of making it look like a disk drive, let's make it look like part of the memory hierarchy," McGregor said. "Obviously, if you break down that interface, you get more performance."

Currently, Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) is the bus used to transfer data between a computer and storage devices, be it HDDs or SSDs in a 1.8-in., 2.5-in. or 3.5-in. disk drive form factor. SSD manufacturers have been fitting SSDs into a hard disk drive case to fit it into existing computer architectures.

Within three years, McGregor said SSDs with 256GB capacity -- already on the market -- will be close to the same price as hard drives. (A 256GB SSD for the new 17-in. MacBook Pro from Apple is a $900 build-to-order option, for instance. A 250GB HDD goes for about a tenth that price.) That will signal to manufacturers that it's time to consider an interface change. And, while SSDs will be lagging behind the 500GB to 1TB capacities of hard disk drives for some time to come, McGregor argues that users don't need that much storage anyway.

"We've already seen this trend in the netbook space, and we will see it more in the notebook platform. Storage will begin to look more like a memory module than a hard drive," said Dean Klein, vice president of Micron Corp.'s SSD group. "There's a move afoot to make it more like a card-edge connector, so the SSD would not have the cost of a mechanical connector. It would just have gold-plated fingers on the edge: No enclosure, just the circuit board."

Disk drive vendors are doubling the capacity of drives every 12 to 18 months, but In-Stat's data indicates that the average storage requirements of users increase in a more linear way. And, while HD video can drive a huge swing in storage requirements, the advent of online libraries and storage services tend to even out the trends, McGregor said.

According to In-Stat, SSD prices have been dropping 60% year over year. Currently, the price of consumer-grade SSD costs from $2 to $3.45 per gigabyte, with hard drives going for about 38 cents per gigabyte, according to Gartner Inc. and iSuppli Corp.

"Two years ago, SSDs cost $17.50 per gigabyte, so it's obvious that consumer NAND flash memory will soon be a true contender to hard disk drives -- it's just not there yet," Gartner analyst Joseph Unsworth said. "I think you need to get to 128GB for around $200, and that's going to happen around 2010. Also, the industry needs to effectively communicate why consumers or enterprise users should pay more for less storage."

Klein argued that using an SSD in its native state, as NAND chips on a board without an enclosure, will reduce cost, weight, power use and space.

In January last year, IBM launched the Lenovo ThinkPad X300, the industry's first mainstream notebook designed not to take a hard drive, but a 64GB SSD. Dell followed IBM with its all-SSD Latitude D420 ultra-mobile and D620 ATG semi-rugged notebooks.

"Moving forward people will design the entire notebook around SSD. You could spread SSD out over the mother board. So moving forward there will be a lot of custom notebooks with custom SSDs," said Brian Beard, marketing manager for Samsung's flash memory group.

Samsung, which sells laptops, not only manufactures and sells HDDs, but it's own line of SSD as well as selling flash memory to other vendors to resell.

Beard expects SSD penetration in the laptop market will only reach 30% by 2012, but he also believes around the same time HDD and SDD will reach price parity.

Within the next year, Micron expects to bring to market a high-end SSD that could achieve 1GB/sec. throughput by using a PCIe interface rather than traditional SATA or SAS. The transfer speed is four times that offered by Intel's newest, enterprise-class SSD, the X25-E.

In a video on Micron's blog site, Joe Jeddeloh, director of the vendor's Advanced Storage Technology Center, demonstrated the technology using a two-processor, eight-core Intel Xeon PC and a card with two SSDs and 16 flash channels. A blurry readout showed the SSD reaching 800MB/sec. throughput, with Jeddeloh claiming that it "will be hitting a bandwidth of 1GB/sec. and at least 200,000 IOPS," or I/O operations per second.

The card was directly connected to a PCI Express (PCIe) slot, bypassing SATA or Serial Attached SCSI interfaces. While PCIe has the same throughput as SATA II -- 3Gbit/sec. -- PCIe offers more channels.

Using file transfers ranging from 2KB to 2MB, Jeddeloh demonstrated 150,000 to 160,000 random reads per second in the video. "That's what flash can do when it's managed correctly," he said.

While Micron's SSD technology is aimed at high-end applications that would run on Fibre Channel SANs, such as transactional databases or streaming video, Klein said consumer-grade computers using SSDs directly connected to a PCIe bus with four lanes (x4 slots) could soon achieve similar results.

Physical PCIe slots may contain from one to 32 lanes of data. Currently, PCIe Generation 1 offers 250MB/sec. throughput per lane. The second generation of PCIe is expected out next year and will offer twice the throughput, or 500MB/sec. per lane. While SATA 3.0, expected out this year, also doubles throughput, it only offers one lane.

"Each lane of that x4 PCIe is as fast as a SATA 3.0's 6Gbit/sec. bus," Klein said. "So I can be four times as fast on that one slot as an SSD could be on a SATA 3.0 connection. That's really the direction things are going."

source : www.computerworld.com

WiMAX 20/20 Launches WiROI 2.0 Business Case Tool

2009-01-17T15:56:00.000-08:00

By Rajani Baburajan
TMCnet Contributing Editor
WiMAX 20/20 announced the launch of its upgraded WiROI Business Case Tool.

First launched last year, WiROI Business Case Tool was the first to provide network operators and equipment manufacturers with a comprehensive analysis of the capital and operational expenses for deploying aWiMAX ( News - Alert) network. The tool helps them to develop comprehensive business cases, understand their financial requirements, and build a detailed 10-year income statement to gain funding from demanding financiers, the company said.

Equipment manufacturers also use WiROI as a marketing tool to show the tangible financial value-added benefits of using their equipment in an operator's deployment plans.

According to WiMAX 20/20, WiROI Business Case Tool has been upgraded incorporating an expanded dashboard-style Graphical User Interface (GUI), side-by-side vendor and technology comparison capabilities and enhancements, and the ability to model services such as voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), video on demand (VOD) andIPTV ( News - Alert).

WiROI 2.0 Business Case Tool accepts a wide range of market data, technical parameters, and financial and service planning inputs that can be tailored to a particular geography. It can be used in all types of WiMAX deployments: both developing and developed markets, in small and large multi-city deployments, for rural, urban, and combination networks.

WiROI Tool allows operators to customize the model for their own particular market deployment, services strategy, and financial constraints. It can produce real-time sensitivity analysis based on certain input parameters for a particular deployment.

The new tool allows operators to do side-by-side comparisons of up to five vendors in the access and core network, providing in depth analysis of the capital expense requirements. It can simulate a WiMAX network deployment and operation using a variety of service plans and produces a detailed 10-year income statement, financial output graphs, and key financial metrics.

The dashboard-style GUI incorporates animated selectors, sliders and buttons, allowing the user to vary key input parameters and visualize the output immediately in a variety of animated financial output charts. Using these features, network operators and equipment manufacturers can quickly visualize and understand the critical issues that could affect their deployment or development plans.

Other important features of WiROI 2.0 tool include the ability to estimate the number of cell sites and various options for selecting a WiMAX network infrastructure required to support specific coverage and capacity requirements.

Since its launch, WiROI Tool has been used in more than 25 WiMAX deployments on five continents. The tool has proved its flexibility to accurately model a variety of deployment plans and service offerings.

According to Randall Schwartz, principal at WiMAX 20/20, the new tool, with its enhanced features such as the new GUI with improved analysis features and its ability to model advanced services, enhances the operator’s ability to analyze their business and show the full financial potential of their deployment plan.

"The challenge of securing financing in the current environment requires operators to use a tool like WiROI to build a bankable business case and get funded," said Schwartz.

Magnus Johansson, director of Broadband of Digicel (News - Alert) in Jamaica, said, "With WiROI, we've gained confidence in the financial outputs and operational modeling of our planned WiMAX networks and have analyzed various deployment scenarios with ease."

"We find the sensitivity analysis capability of the WiROI Tool particularly unique and useful," said Berge Ayvazian (News - Alert), chief strategy officer at the Yankee Group. "The WiROI Tool offers the ability to accurately model a WiMAX network and allows the user to visualize the financial impact of a variety of parameters and should be viewed as an invaluable tool to anyone deploying or designing a WiMAX network."

Telecommunications equipment vendor Redline Communications (News - Alert) has found WiROI as an effective tool to clearly demonstrate the potential return on investment for various WiMAX deployment scenarios. Kevin Suitor, VP of Marketing at Redline Communications, said the WiROI Tool helped them to model a Redline-based access network and compare it with a traditional implementation, enabling them to articulate the benefits of their technology to their customers as well as channel partners.

source : 4g-wirelessevolution.tmcnet.com

Europe charges Microsoft with abuse of monopoly again

2009-01-17T15:52:00.000-08:00

By Paul Meller

January 17, 2009 (IDG News Service) Microsoft was formally charged with monopoly abuse by Europe's top antitrust authority, the European Commission, over the way it bundles the Internet Explorer browser with Windows.

The move follows an unsuccessful attempt by U.S. authorities nine years ago to strip Internet Explorer (IE) of its unfair advantage over competing browsers. European authorities were more successful in their prosecution of Microsoft over similar antitrust offenses five years ago, fining the company over €1.6 billion and ordering it to change the way it does business.

he Commission's charges were delivered to Microsoft's headquarters in Redmond, Washington, last Thursday in the form of a formal statement of objections. The company is studying the charges and will respond within the next two months, as is usual in European antitrust cases, it said.

The new charges are the first of many anticipated against the company in the wake of a failed court appeal by Microsoft last year against the original European antitrust ruling.

The latest statement of objections follows a relatively short investigation, one year long, sparked by a complaint from Opera Software, a Norwegian browser developer.

Opera CEO Jon von Tetzchner welcomed the Commission's decision to press charges. "It's clear they are taking this very seriously," he said in a phone interview on Saturday.

However, he still doesn't know if the Commission pursued both aspects of his company's complaint against Microsoft: In addition to complaining about the bundling of IE into Windows, Opera also pointed out that the software giant was undermining open software standards on the Internet.

"Its a problem for companies like ours if Microsoft doesn't support the open standards we all apply, because many Web sites are designed to work with IE, which means our browsers won't always work out of the box," he said.

IE is still the most widely used internet browser, although its market share dipped below 70 percent globally in 2008, according to Web analytics company Net Applications. In December, Opera's share was around 0.71 percent.

Von Tetzchner said he hopes the Commission doesn't apply the same remedy it did in its last ruling, when it ordered Microsoft to offer a second version of Windows alongside the regular version of the software, but without a bundled copy of Windows Media Player .

Microsoft complied with the ruling but no one bought the unbundled version, which was sold for the same price as the version with Windows Media Player included.

"That's not really what we are looking for as a remedy for the bundling of IE," von Tetzchner said, adding: "The only way to give users a genuine choice is to strip out IE from Windows and either replace it with a rival browser or offer users a list of browsers to choose from."

The latest antitrust charges against Microsoft almost certainly won't be the last.

At the same time it opened the investigation into the bundling of IE, the Commission also opened a separate probe to see whether Microsoft withholds information from companies that want to make products compatible with its Microsoft Office productivity suite.

It is also looking for interoperability problems with Windows server products and Microsoft's .Net software framework, following a complaint by the European Committee for Interoperable Systems (ECIS), a trade group representing companies including IBM, Sun Microsystems, Oracle, Red Hat and Opera.

This separate probe is ongoing, said Jonathan Todd, a spokesman for the Commission.

ECIS said Microsoft deliberately withholds interoperability information in order to put rival software companies at a disadvantage; and bases its complaint on the part of the earlier European antitrust ruling that found Microsoft guilty of withholding interoperability information about its Windows server operating system.

"There was a fear that the Commission might be moving on to other battles, having won a resounding victory over Microsoft already," said Thomas Vinje, legal counsel for ECIS, citing other powerful technology companies such as Intel that are the subject of escalating antitrust battles in Europe.

But the fact that the Commission is pushing ahead with the IE case "makes me more optimistic it will press charges in the interoperability case," he said.

The real fight with Microsoft is only just beginning, though. The remedies the Commission demanded in the first antitrust case against Microsoft were largely ineffectual, especially on the bundling side. The true value of that case lies in its power of precedence and can only really be appreciated by lawyers and judges, Vinje said.

The cases that follow, including the IE charges, the interoperability case and possibly others, will be much more significant for consumers and competitors than that first antitrust ruling.

On the bundling side, the Commission is unlikely to make the same mistake it made the first time, and will most likely demand that IE is stripped out of Windows entirely, instead of calling for two versions of the operating system as it did before.

Meanwhile, if the Commission presses charges in the new interoperability case championed by ECIS it could break down the biggest barriers preventing open source operating systems such as Linux from competing with Microsoft on personal computer desktops.

source : www.computerworld.com

Twitter as a news tool: A case study

2009-01-17T15:48:00.000-08:00

by Mathew on August 16, 2008 ·

Examples continue to emerge of Twitter being used as a journalistic tool. And not just the “hey, there’s an earthquake” or “hey, my house is on fire” kind of tool, but an integral part of the reporting process. One of the more recent ones comes from the Chicago Tribune, which quite smartly has an official Twitter account that someone in the newsroom monitors. As Poynter Online describes it, people started noticing crowds in Daley Center, and overheard staff from offices there talking about some kind of danger, so they posted something on Twitter.

Eventually, someone contacted “Colonel Tribune” — the Trib’s official Twitter persona — to let them know, and whoever monitors the Twitter account let the news desk know, at which point the traditional reporting process took over. The paper then reported the results of its reporting (a bomb threat) on Twitter, and users re-posted it, spreading the story farther and faster than it might otherwise have gone.

It’s not like it was a huge story, but as Mike Masnick at Techdirt notes, the way it unfolded is an excellent example of how Twitter can be incorporated into the news process — and of how the feedback loop that is created when that happens can benefit traditional media. Another recent example, although somewhat different in execution, was the Brian Stelter story about getting around NBC’s Olympic blockages, which started on Twitter and wound up on the front page.

source : www.mathewingram.com

AMD Plans Graphics Supercomputer

2009-01-11T19:04:00.000-08:00

January 9, 2009 - By Reuters

LAS VEGAS, Jan 8 (Reuters) - U.S. chip maker Advanced Micro Devices Inc, facing a slump in demand for personal computers, is hoping the old adage that entertainment is recession proof will prove true this year.

At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Thursday, AMD Chief Executive Dirk Meyer showed off new technology for advanced computer graphics in video games and films, in what the company called the convergence of the "cinematic and the interactive."

Meyer said AMD's new chips will help blur the lines between games and films, helping them look much more life-like.

He also announced plans to develop, along with software company OTOY, what he called the "fastest graphics supercomputer" in the world in the second half of 2009. The supercomputer could help film studios make movies more interactive and gaming companies increase realism, Meyer added.

But the upbeat tone of his presentation was at odds with the half-empty Las Vegas Hilton Theater and the chip industry's somber mood.

Just a day earlier, AMD's chief rival Intel Corp (INTC.O), the world's largest chip maker, stunned the market with its second revenue warning on the fourth quarter, saying demand for personal computers was even worse than it feared. Intel and AMD make nearly all the microprocessors for the world's 1 billion PCs.

Meyer said the consumer electronics industry is in the middle of a "sea change" and called the current economic situation "challenging," "volatile" and "unprecedented."

"Optimism has been a little more difficult to achieve these days," he said.

AMD laid off 600 workers in its most recent quarter from a total workforce of about 15,500 as the sector started to contract.

The company has posted losses for eight consecutive quarters, in part due to delays in rolling out new chips that resulted in AMD falling behind Intel technologically.

But AMD is hiving off its manufacturing plants into a joint venture with Abu Dhabi to cut costs and get a cash injection, and its last quarterly results were better than Wall Street had expected thanks to a new graphics chip.

In difficult times, Meyer said AMD can set itself apart because it is the only chipmaker that can deliver both x86 and graphics chips, which is the key to its Fusion chip platforms.

Fusion is AMD's name for technology that merges a graphics processing unit and central processing unit on a single chip. The effort springs from AMD's $5.4 billion purchase of graphics chipmaker ATI Technologies in 2006.

Meyer was joined on stage by executives from PC makers Hewlett-Packard Co and Dell Inc, video game publisher Electronic Arts Inc, and Lucasfilm movie company as they demonstrated new products based on Fusion.

Earlier this week, AMD's much-anticipated chip, the Athlon Neo, made its debut in HP's Pavilion dv2 ultra-portable notebook. Meyer said it will target consumers looking for something between a high-end notebook and a stripped down netbook. The dv2 will start at $699.

AMD also used CES to unveil its Dragon platform, which combines its new Phenom processor with an ATI Radeon graphics chip. Dell's XPS 625 desktop uses the technology.

Shares of AMD closed up 3.01 percent at $2.74 after falling on Wednesday due to the Intel warning. The stock remains far below its year-ago levels of around $8.

source : www.extremetech.com

Hands On with the Intel Convertible Classmate PC

2009-01-09T20:21:00.000-08:00

by Cisco Cheng

LAS VEGAS—At CES 2009, Intel took the wraps off of its convertible Classmate PC, a tablet targeted at students from kindergarten through 12th grade.

The original Classmate PC reference design was sold in bulk, primarily to international countries that were willing to deploy a thousand of these at a time. With this new version, Intel has partnered up with three OEMs in the United States: CTL, a Portland-based company, will brand it as 2GoPC, M&A will brand it as the Companion PC, and Equus Computer System will have a product as well. This new student tablet is available immediately online, with prices starting at $499. If you're not a student, this netbook is not for you.

Intel added a new swivel, resistive touch screen to the convertible platform, and updated the innards with the Atom platform. The keyboard is small, roughly an 84-percent one, and Intel admitted that it was designed with the slender fingers of a student in mind. Meanwhile, the MSI Wind and the HP Mini 1000 boast 92% keyboards.

Though the new Classmate PC is technically a netbook, it will not compete in that space.

For one thing, it's considerably more expensive than netbooks like the Wind, the Acer Aspire One, and the Lenovo Ideapad S10. CTL's 2GoPC sells for $549, which is a considerable premium to pay for a student netbook with tablet capabilities. The reference unit weighs 3.2 pounds with the 6-cell battery (up to 5 hours, claims CTL); a 4-cell option brings the weight to 2.9 pounds, although CTL is not planning to sell one.

A nifty handle is part of a sleeve that is securely attached to the unit, so students can easily pick it up and go. The 8.9-inch touchscreen is not digitized, but it does come with a stylus, which can be used, along with your fingers, to navigate the screen. The latter method works, although I had to press firmly with my fingertips and drag them. The stylus is comfortable enough so that a student can use it for the course of a day. The unit has a built-in accelerometer as well, so that rotating the unit itself will automatically adjust the orientation.

The new Classmate PC's features are like the original: modest, at best. The new model comes with two USB ports, VGA-Out, and an Ethernet port. The built-in Wi-Fi chip supports 802.11abg and 802.11n wireless. The Classmate's storage has improved since its predecessor, though it will still be offering 2-GB to 16-GB SSD drives, for price-sensitive markets, and rotating drive of between 40 GB and 120 GB, for optimal capacity.

The original Classmate PC used an Intel Celeron M processor; the new convertible tablet moves to the Intel Atom platform, specifically the 1.6-GHz N270 processor and GMA 950 graphics. The tablet will use the XP Home or Professional operating system, with memory configurations expandable to 1 GB. Intel does not plan to support Windows Vista at this point, which is arguably a better environment for tablet users.

As a single unit, the Intel Convertible Classmate PC is overpriced. But in bulk, prices can significantly drop. This is not something that's tailored to adults, as the keyboard is severely undersized and features are limited. (We'd suggest the eeePC T101H, an adult-friendly convertible.) For kids, however, Intel developed an entire ecosystem of collaboration software for them and their teachers. And because of that, there is a market for it.

source : www.pcmag.com

OpenOffice 3.0

2009-01-09T19:54:00.000-08:00

This free office suite packages an impressive set of editing tools inside a foolproof interface

by Dana Wollman on December 1, 2008

Despite the adage “You get what you pay for,” free doesn’t necessarily equal bad, and OpenOffice 3.0 makes the latest case. This open-source productivity suite lets you create and edit documents, presentations, spreadsheets, databases, and drawings, and even reads Microsoft Office 2007 files. If you can deal with its limited (nay, nonexistent) sharing functionality, this suite offers everything a student or road warrior could want.

Installation and Speed

Although OpenOffice is free, you’ll be prompted to make a donation when you download the install file. Downloading the 142MB file to our desktop using an Ethernet connection took 19 minutes and 1 second, and installation took 5 minutes and 54 seconds to install, a rather long wait.

With the previous version of OpenOffice, we were displeased by how slow the Java-based program was in daily use. In our hands-on experience with the current iteration, however, the different components (e.g., Writer, Draw, Impress) took a second to launch on an Intel Centrino 2–powered HP Pavilion dv5t. The program took about a second to open blank documents.

Simple Interface, Made to Customize

OpenOffice has most of the features you’d expect in a desktop office suite, and in contrast to Office 2007’s icon-packed Ribbon interface, which new users often find intimidating, they’re presented here in a foolproof UI. The task-oriented opening screen has icons for creating text documents, presentations, spreadsheets, drawing, formulas, and databases. There are also icons for choosing templates or opening documents that have already been created. In the lower right corner are smaller icons which let us add features and templates from Openoffice.org.

As with Office 2007, you can customize menus. You can choose which icons to display, as well as their order, and even decide which items appear under hierarchical menus, such as File, and rearrange their sequence. This is a level of customization not available in Microsoft Office.

More important, OpenOffice allows you to switch among the document, spreadsheet, and presentation programs within a single interface. Clicking File > New brings up a fly-away menu showing the different documents you can create. So, if you’re in the word processor, you can click New > Spreadsheet, whereas if you were working in Microsoft Word you’d have to launch Excel to begin working on a spreadsheet. Across most of the applications—documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and drawings—users can export their work as PDFs.

Word Processing

For anyone who has ever used Microsoft Office 2003, OpenOffice’s document creation interface is a cinch to master. Blank documents (or spreadsheets or presentations) sit atop a dark gray background. The hierarchical menus—including File, Edit, View, Insert, Format, Table, Tools, Window, and Help—will look familiar, as will the two rows of icons underneath it, representing common functions, such as spell check. When you roll over an icon with your cursor you’ll see a label explaining what it does.

When it comes to formatting text, OpenOffice has more options than its free online counterparts (Google Docs and Acrobat.com), including more text and background colors, and the ability to program macros and insert movies, sound, and objects, such as charts, into the copy. Best of all: it reads Office 2007 files, so if your colleagues send you DOCX files, you can open and edit them in OpenOffice.

Spreadsheets

OpenOffice’s simple two-row kitchen sink of icons is particularly handy with spreadsheets: it highlights the features and shortcuts you’re likely to use most, including sorting in ascending or descending order and adjusting the number of decimal places. Like Excel 2007, the formula bar autocompletes (so, if you type “=a”, Average will appear as a choice).

The one instance in which you might miss Excel is in OpenOffice’s lack of formatting options. For instance, there aren’t as many color or customization options when creating charts, whereas the Microsoft Office Suite, including Excel, offers Quick Style, from which users can apply a plethora of different color themes to charts or a whole document.

Presentations

When you first launch Impress, OpenOffice’s version of PowerPoint, you can either open a template (of which there are few), open an existing document, or walk through an on-screen wizard. This optional wizard, which prompts you to choose backgrounds and slide transitions, can be intimidating to users who don’t know precisely how they want their presentation to look.

A right-hand panel lets you choose master pages, layouts, table designs, custom animations, and slide transitions. At a glance you can select, say, a vertical bar graph with a title on top. As with PowerPoint, users can also insert pictures, movies, and sounds.

Although these features are helpful, OpenOffice doesn’t have any prepackaged templates; just these à la carte one-click edits, as well as a slew of backgrounds. To add templates, you’ll have to go to OpenOffice’s main screen and click the icon to add more templates; you’ll be brought to a Web site, which has more than nine pages worth of apps but only three pages of templates.

Sharing—or Lack Thereof

In an age where Acrobat.com, Google Docs, and Zoho Docs all allow users to collaborate on documents online, OpenOffice’s biggest weakness is that it has too few sharing options. Even Microsoft Office lets users publish their documents directly to blogs and shared workspaces and store presentations and slides in a Slide library.

Just as OpenOffice allows users to download additional templates and features, it requires them to add collaborative functionality through third-party apps (such as 03spaces.com, which is free for individual users). That’s not so bad, but given the trend toward collaboration in productivity software—and given that OpenOffice itself is an open-source project—we wish these tools were baked in.

Verdict

With the exception of online collaboration, a feature OpenOffice doesn’t natively offer, this free productivity suite gets the job done. There’s no doubt that its robust feature package not only matches its pricey competitors, but it also trounces other free options, particularly Web-based services such as Google Apps and Acrobat.com. While business users might want to keep Office as their primary tool for its integration with Exchange Server, OpenOffice will do just fine for students—not to mention road warriors who don’t have a Microsoft Office license to spare.

source : www.laptopmag.com

Intel's Barrett Announces 'Small Things' Charity Challenge

2009-01-09T19:44:00.000-08:00

by Chloe Albanesius

LAS VEGAS – Intel on Friday announced the launch of the Small Things Challenge, a one-year charity program intended to facilitate donations to Kiva.org and Save the Children.

"What we're doing is in fact coming up with a challenge for you – something called the Small Things Challenge – one step at a time," Intel chairman Craig Barrett said during his Consumers Electronics Show (CES) keynote.

Intel set up a Web site for the group at SmallThingsChallenge.com.

"What we're going to do is focus on … the Save the Children group and Kiva.org, education and economic development," Barrett said. "My company Intel will donate a nickel for ever click that happens, within limits."

People can contribute to the Small Things Challenge in three ways: donate to Save the Children's Rewrite the Future program, which helps children in war-torn countries receive an education; provide a micro-loan through Kiva.org, which helps entrepreneurs in developing countries get their businesses off the ground; or encourage friends and family to donate.

Send an e-mail encouraging someone to donate and for every person who clicks on the "we'll donate 5 cents for you" button on the Web site, Intel will donate another 5 cents, up to $300,000 in 2009. The funds will be split between Save the Children and Kiva.org.

There is no minimum donation necessary for Save the Children, but Kiva.org requires a minimum of $25.

The challenge is currently scheduled to run until December 31, 2009.

Musicians Adam Levine of Maroon 5 and Adam Duritz of Counting Crows joined Barrett onstage at his keynote to issue their support for the challenge.

"I think we feel it's our responsibility to [contribute]," said Levine. "We've been blessed with a lot of success and the least we can do is give back in any way we possibly can."

Kiva.org is "able to connect lenders to entrepreneurs in developing countries so a food vendor can open a shop, or a water carrier can purchase a new cart, which means more jobs in the village, which means more economic growth for their community," Levine said. "And they're not looking for a handout. They're looking for a way to better their lives, and you can help."

Levine helped Intel create a video explaining the Small Things Challenge, which will be featured on the site and YouTube, Barrett said.

"Each of these organizations … finds ways to empower and encourage people to step forward and take their place in a world that has always told them it has no room and no place for them," Duritz said. "We disagree. Through education the boundaries of our lives are shattered."

The bulk of Barrett's keynote was spent highlighting technology education and healthcare initiatives in which he and Intel have been involved.

Save the Children will soon be distributing Intel's Classmate PCs to 10 schools in Bangladesh, a program that will eventually expand to include 300 schools in the area, said Caroline Miles, chief operating office of Save the Children.

Barrett also highlighted a second-generation, portable device from OQO that Barrett said can help doctors remotely connect to patients' medical records from the field.

The $999 touchscreen OQO model 2+ runs the 1.86GHz Intel Atom processor, has 2GB of RAM, and 3G connectivity capabilities.

Barrett also showcased an upcoming game from Warner Bros. Interactive Games intended to teach young people about HIV/AIDS. It has been deployed in three test sites in Nairobi, Kenya and lets five kids play at once.

source : www.pcmag.com

Microsoft Delays Windows 7 Beta Due to Traffic

2009-01-09T19:29:00.000-08:00

by Mark Hachman

Microsoft has delayed the Windows 7 public beta, due to traffic issues on the Microsoft Web site, according to a Friday afternoon post on the Windows Team blog.

"Due to very heavy traffic we're seeing as a result of interest in the Windows 7 Beta, we are adding some additional infrastructure support to the Microsoft.com properties before we post the public beta," Microsoft's Brandon LeBlanc wrote. "We want to ensure customers have the best possible experience when downloading the beta."

As of 4:55 PM, the main Windows 7 page was not showing a link to the beta. The TechNet page was also reporting that the beta had been delayed: "Thanks for your interest in the Windows 7 Beta," the site reads. "The volume has been phenomenal -- we're in the process of adding more servers to handle the demand. We're sorry for the delay and we'll re-post the Beta as soon as we can ensure a quality download experience.

It's for reasons like these that the BitTorrent protocol was invented. Why not let your customers share the bandwidth burden, Microsoft?

Originally posted on AppScout.

source : www.pcmag.com

BenQ Joybook Lite U101

2009-01-09T19:23:00.000-08:00

The Joybook Lite has a compact and unique chassis, but this netbook's battery life and keyboard don't stand up to its peers.

by Joanna Stern on December 30, 2008

Editors' Note: The BenQ Joybook Lite we reviewed was imported from Taiwan. BenQ says that if the system were to be offered in the U.S. it would retail for around $499 (we paid the equivalent of $550). If the BenQ Joybook Lite U101 becomes available in the U.S., we will update this review.

When just about every 10-inch mini-notebook features the same processor, RAM, and operating system, competitors have to find some way of differentiating themselves. BenQ, the latest entrant into this crowded market, hopes to do so by adding a little visual flair. While the BenQ Joybook Lite U101 has the run-of-the-mill netbook specs, including an Intel Atom processor, 1.5GB of RAM, and Windows XP Home, spicing up the system is an interesting, artistic lid design and a 10-inch, 16:9 aspect ratio display (the first on a netbook to date). However, its cramped keyboard and short battery life will be a deal breaker for some.

A Unique Design

You can't blame BenQ for feeling that netbooks were starting to look all too similar, and it strives to ensure you won't forget the U101. The lid of this system has an emoticon design: Small light blue symbols (reminiscent of the Wingdings font) are printed on the blue (also available in white, black, and pink) glossy lid.

Upon close inspection, the diagonal pattern repeatedly spells out Joybook Lite. The artistic lid is undoubtedly unique and bound to attract some consumers, but others may be put off by its attention-grabbing pattern and prefer something more along the lines of the HP Mini 1000's subtle Imprint finish. According to BenQ, the cover has also undergone a special molding process to protect it from wear and tear.

The size and weight of the Joybook Lite is standard fare for a 10-inch system. At 10.2 x 7.4 x 1.3 inches and 2.6 pounds, it weighs the same as the Lenovo S10 and MSI Wind. While not as compact as the HP Mini 1000, it is shorter and narrower than both the MSI Wind and Samsung NC10. With a travel weight of 3.2 pounds with its AC adapter, the system felt almost nonexistent when we tossed it (inside the included neoprene sleeve) into a shoulder bag.

Three USB ports, VGA, Ethernet, headphone, and a microphone jack surround the Joybook Lite, and a 4-in-1 card reader is on the right side.

Quick Specs Full Specs :
CPU: 1.6-GHz Intel Atom N270
OS: Windows XP Home
RAM/Expandable: 1.5/2GB
Hard Drive Size/Speed: 160GB/5,400 rpm
Display/Resolution: 10.1 inches/1024 x 576
Price as Reviewed: $499

source : www.laptopmag.com

HP Elitebook 2530P

2009-01-07T10:45:00.000-08:00

Dec 25, 2008 by Carla Thornton, PC World

Pricey but worth it, the HP EliteBook 2530P lives up to its name, offering extras not ordinarily found on an ultraportable laptop.

There's so much to like about the HP EliteBook 2530P that it's hard to know where to start genuflecting. This little black and silver beauty meets all the basic expectations--great performance, full set of connections--and then piles on nifty extras such as two sets of pointing devices and a keyboard light. It's by no means cheap at $2499, but if you want your laptop to mean business (in this case Windows Vista Business), HP has a fairly desirable ultraportable for you.

Equipped with a 1.86-GHz Core 2 Duo SL9400 CPU and 3GB of RAM, the EliteBook notched a reasonably speedy WorldBench 6 score of 89. And don't forget the 80GB solid-state drive--it's skimpy capacity-wise and it's the main contributor to the machine's high price, but it also deserves some of the credit for the laptop's speed. (Want to save some bucks? 120GB and 160GB SATA hard drives are also options.)

The standard ultraportable disclaimer also applies here: This system can't play 3D games, because the video memory is integrated and the squeaky speakers sound pretty awful. Also, the EliteBook carries a standard DVD writer, not a Blu-ray high-definition drive. Otherwise, however, this little laptop should be able to handle just about any type of business or entertainment application. How does it compare with other ultraportables currently on the scene? Well, it outperforms and outspecs the HP Voodoo Envy 133 in just about every way except sex appeal. It solidly outperforms the Samsung X360 (an SSD-based notebook that scored a 64 in WorldBench 6) and lags a little behind Sony's pricey VAIO VGN-Z598U (which earned a 96).

The EliteBook comes with a big power pack that extends the back of the unit by about half an inch. The design isn't overly clunky, however, and the battery lasted a good, long time in our tests: 12 minutes shy of 7 hours. Most impressive, it outlasted most other laptops, save for the Samsung X360 and the Lenovo ThinkPad X200.

It even has an external power gauge, especially convenient for checking battery life when the unit is turned off. Just 3.8 pounds, the EliteBook would be perfect for stuffing in a briefcase or backpack and then working offsite all day, without needing to lug along the power adapter. And the 12.1-inch, 1280-by-800-pixel, wide-aspect screen is glossy and bright but not annoyingly reflective--one of the benefits of using a backlit LED panel.

The keyboard is a cut above. The stroke is short and hard, but the layout is elegant and includes two pointing devices, not only a touchpad but an eraserhead embedded among the keys. The eraserhead tip is wide and concave, with tactile nubs that make getting the hang of maneuvering the pointer easy. Each pointing device has its own dedicated set of mouse buttons, both exceptionally comfortable thanks to a soft rubberized finish. Need to get work done in a dark room or on a plane? Pressing a small black button at the top of the screen pops out a nearby keyboard light, an LED mounted in a tiny hood that shines a pale white glow on the keys.

The standard laptop connections are well covered. The EliteBook has Bluetooth and Wi-Fi wireless capabilities, gigabit ethernet, an ExpressCard/54 slot, a separate SD Card slot, and a Firewire port, not to mention both modem and network jacks. Hate remembering a bunch of passwords? A fingerprint reader is provided in the lower-right quadrant of the wrist rest. You can communicate face-to-face with the built-in 2-megapixel Webcam, too. Though the machine has only two USB ports, one is powered. (If you need more, HP's $109 docking station for the EliteBook provides four USB ports.) The unit even has a plastic sheath on the bottom for slipping in a business card to quickly identify you as the owner.

One thing that isn't standard: This corporate raider can take a beating. While we can't vouch for dunking it in a fish tank or dropping it in the desert, it does look like it can handle a desk-to-floor drop--and maybe a splash from a small latte.

We do have one design complaint worth mentioning, however. The futuristic touch-sensitive membranes that a lot of laptops now incorporate as quick-launch panels have been a mixed bag, and the EliteBook's is no exception. It was responsive to taps and included an on/off for the touchpad, which is always nice, but the volume gauge needed recalibrating. It didn't always respond, even to repeated swipes.

But, really, the lack of an easy way to control volume is not much of a drawback on an ultraportable. In all other ways the EliteBook lives up to its name. If you have the money, it has all the panache you could want in a light, fast, and easy-to-use portable.

source : www.pcworld.com

HP Mini 2140

2009-01-07T10:40:00.000-08:00

Jan 6, 2009 by Darren Gladstone, PC World

The HP Mini 2140 netbook improves on the earlier Mini 2133, but it retains its predecessor's awkwardly positioned mouse buttons.

The HP Mini 2140, the latest entry in Hewlett-Packard's 2100 series of netbooks, is what the company's Mini 1000 aspires to be when it grows up. But it carries a grown-up price as well: $529 for our test unit's midlevel configuration.

Like the Mini 1000, the Mini 2140 has a fairly large keyboard (92% the size of a full-size QWERTY keyboard) with wide, flat buttons. The mouse configuration remains the same, too: The right and left mouse buttons flank the mousing surface instead of sitting below it, which makes navigating and editing documents more difficult. But at least the mouse buttons on the 2140 are rubberized and rise above the surface, improving the mouse's manageability.

The 2140 has a few other things in common with the Mini 1000--and with the rest of the netbook market. The base-level, $499 version of the 2140 comes with Intel's Atom 1.6-GHz processor, 1GB of RAM, a 160GB hard drive (which spins at 5400 rpm), a three-cell battery, and Windows XP. For an extra $30, you can bump up the configuration (as we did) to include a six-cell battery, or you can cough up the maximum $629 asking price for a three-cell unit that has 2GB of memory and a 7200-rpm, 160GB hard drive. Even then, the Mini 2140 is smaller and less expensive than the Asus N10Jc.

We're still waiting for final results of the PC World Test Center's performance and battery life tests; when those numbers are available, we'll update the story and assign the netbook an overall PCW Rating. HP suggests that the Mini 2140 will last 4 hours with the three-cell battery and just over 8 hours with the six-cell unit.

In my informal hands-on testing of the 2140, the 10.1-inch backlit LED display stood out. Colorful and crisp, this screen has a native resolution of 1024 by-576 pixels. (An optional high-definition 1366-by-768-pixel display will be available in February.) Like the display on the Mini 1000, the one on the Mini 2140 carries glossy coating that makes it a little tougher--but not impossible--to view outdoors.

The unit's rugged frame and aluminum lid make it a little on the meaty side. It weighs 2.6 pounds with the three-cell battery in place, compared to the Mini 1000's 2.25 pounds; but the Mini 2140's remain notably svelte, at 1.05 by 10.3 by 6.5 inches. The metal alloy hinges are recessed, for durability. And both the spill-resistant keyboard and the 3D DriveGuard that parks the hard-drive head during a sudden movement (such as a drop on the airport floor) enhance this model's ruggedness for the road.

The 2140 supports 802.11n, and Bluetooth 2.0 is optional. HP claims that the netbook can recharge up to 90 percent of capacity in about 90 minutes. And for the $629 flavor of the 2140, you can get "Genuine Windows Vista with downgrade to Genuine Windows XP Professional custom installed." Don't go looking for more software, though: You're just getting the basics here. If Windows isn't your thing, you can request FreeDOS or SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 with your unit.

Even though it's a business-class machine, the Mini 2140 puts on a reasonable audio show. Its speakers, parked in the hinge between the display and the keyboard, performs on the same scale as the Mini 1000 (it sounds a bit tinny, but good enough to fill an office or hotel room).

The only major downer involves a limited capacity to accommodate external devices. The machine has a few handy ports such as an SDHC flash card reader, VGA-out, an ethernet jack and two USB ports. But the USB ports are located on either side of the device, creating a potential problem if you want to plug in an external hard drive that requires a spare USB port to power the device. This issue isn't unique to the 2140, but it is something to keep in mind if you're a big-time data jockey.

HP has assembled a compelling package that could go toe-to-toe with the Asus N10Jc. But like Asus's heavyweight netbook, the Mini 2140 in its premium configuration bears a price tag that approaches what you'd expect to find on a good all-purpose machine like the Sony VGN-NR485 ($800).

source : www.pcworld.com

Apple Laptops Extend Their Lead in Reliability

2009-01-07T10:35:00.000-08:00

Jeff Bertolucci, PC World
Jan 7, 2009 5:20 am

In our annual survey of the most reliable laptops, Apple leads, HP bleeds, and Lenovo significantly recedes.

Apple's ratings for reliability and service, though stellar among laptop manufacturers, fell slightly from last year's results. Survey participants again rated the MacBook maker better than average in six of nine categories--by far the best showing achieved by any notebook vendor--but they also reported a higher-than-average incidence of problems with failed components.

Acer, Dell, and Sony did well overall, too, though not at Apple's level. Acer and Sony laptops earned praise for their reliability, and readers reported that Dell did a better job of resolving customer problems in 2008 than in previous years. Dell's efforts to reduce hold times for phone support seem to be paying off as well: The company's score on this measure rose to average from worse than average. On the other hand, Dell needs to do a better job of replacing failed parts, according to our readers.

Lenovo, which last year challenged Apple for the top spot, posed less of a challenge this year. Its only high mark came in overall reliability; last year it earned five better-than-average grades, mostly for aspects of its service.

At the other end of the spectrum, HP repeated last year's dismal last-place finish with six subpar marks, plus another one for its Compaq brand. In fact, HP's 2008 grades are even worse than its 2007 marks, which included two ahead-of-the-pack scores for reliable components. The good news this year? Well, HP says that it has been working to shorten phone-support hold times--and our readers noticed the difference. The world's biggest PC vendor rose to average from worse than average in that area.

Another interesting survey finding: One-third of our respondents reported experiencing one or more significant hardware or software problems with their laptops. Desktops caused just as many headaches, but other peripherals--except printers--were much more dependable.

source : www.pcworld.com

SecuriKey Enlists in Boot Camp

2009-01-07T10:30:00.000-08:00

Philip Michaels, Macworld.com
Tuesday, January 06, 2009 7:40 AM PST

If you're a mobile Mac user who frets about the chance that someone might swipe your laptop and make off with all the important data stored in side, there's at least one option open for consideration: look into investing in GT SecuriKey's SecuriKey Professional Edition for the Mac. The hardware-software combo serves as a kind of key for your laptop--install the software and insert a USB key into the port on your Mac to make it run. No key? Then, no one can access your data, with or without a password.

Ah, but what happens if you're a mobile Mac user who not only frets about the possibility of laptop theft but also uses Leopard's built-in Boot Camp feature to run Windows on your MacBook? That USB key would lock up your Mac data, but anything on the Windows partition would be fair game for a laptop thief.

GT SecuriKey has you covered there, too. On Monday, the company released the SecuriKey Pro Boot Camp Bundle. The new security offering features SecuriKey software for both Mac OS X and Windows and two software licenses. Like other SecuriKey products, the Boot Camp Bundle comes with two USB keys--one of them's a spare key in case you lose the first one. But a single USB key unlocks both the OS X and Windows partitions on your laptop.

"It leverages everything good about the MacBook, regardless of which platform you're using," GT SecuriKey Bennett Griffin said.

The SecuriKey Pro Boot Camp Bundle supports both XP and Vista partitions (and works with OS X 10.5, obviously). It costs $180.

source : www.pcworld.com

Digital Gangster Takes Credit for Twitter Hacks

2009-01-07T10:23:00.000-08:00

Ian Paul, PC World
Jan 6, 2009 11:56 pm

Members of the online forum Digital Gangster may have been behind yesterday's Twitter hack. On Monday, hackers gained access to, and posted messages from, 33 Twitter accounts including those of Bill O'Reilly, Britney Spear and CNN's Rick Sanchez.

According to this thread, a hacker named GMZ gained access to Twitter login information and then posted a different thread--that has since been removed--calling on other DG members to email him for credentials to individual accounts. At least another four members then claim to have been part of yesterday's Twitter hack.

The hack included several prank posts from Twitter users such as Fox News, Facebook and president-elect Barack Obama. The strange thing about some of these messages is that they included affiliate links--a common marketing program that pays the creator of the link for driving traffic to another Web site such as Amazon--according to reports. That may make finding the culprits easier as the affiliate programs in question should have a virtual paper trail leading back to the payee.

While DG members are taking credit for this exploit, it's important to remember that it may be all talk. Hacker forums often contain inane threads where members make things up or simply "trash talk" with their online buddies. For example, a user named Craig claims to have had access to Barack Obama's Twitter account. It seems unlikely that a hacker would admit this online knowing that federal investigators would have to get involved with anything involving the president-elect.

That being said, the DG forum members seem to be the most likely culprits at the moment. Considering how quickly authorities were able to track down the Palin e-mail hacker, we should have more to report on the Twitter pranksters soon.

source : www.pcworld.com

The Five Most Dangerous Security Myths: Myth #2

2009-01-07T10:21:00.000-08:00

Erik Larkin
Jan 7, 2009 1:42 am

Sure, the Web is today's Wild West, with digital guns blazing and no sheriff in sight. But as long as you use a good antivirus program, you're completely safe, right?

Wrong. A good security program will help a good deal, but no program can catch everything. Antivirus companies are locked into a constant battle with the bad guys, who put all their effort into staying one step ahead of antivirus detection with a flood of new techniques and programs. Security software can often deflect those threats. But sometimes, the bad guys get the upper hand.

Antivirus apps have to scramble most when faced with highly customized 'targeted attacks.' Crooks put a good deal more time into crafting these attacks, with smooth social engineering (ie. con job techniques) to fool the recipient into opening an e-mail attachment, for instance, and careful prep work to ensure the payload can evade antivirus protection. These targeted attacks aren't common, but they represent a major challenge to security apps.

And then you have the vast numbers of non-targeted, run-of-the-mill malware. The bad guys spew out ridiculous numbers of variants, sometimes on the fly, to try and stay ahead of antivirus signatures. Security companies have an easier time squaring off against this technique with proactive protections that don't require a full signature, and also (for some) with new features that can send signatures of suspicious files to online servers with larger, and more up-to-date, signature databases than can be stored on your PC. But this flood also represents a challenge to antivirus.

So don't let your guard down just because you have a good antivirus app installed. You still need a layered defense, where the most important layer consists of knowing the threats--and dispelling the five most dangerous myths.

source : www.pcworld.com

The Five Most Dangerous Security Myths: Myth #3

2009-01-07T10:18:00.000-08:00

Erik Larkin
Jan 7, 2009 1:50 am

When the Web was young and blink tags abounded, it wasn't hard to avoid the bad stuff online. You could generally tell by looking at a site if it was unsavory or even dangerous, and if you were careful with your surfing and your e-mail, you could generally have gone without antivirus.

Not anymore. These days crooks like nothing more than to find a security flaw in a benign but vulnerable site and use the flaw to insert hidden attack code. Once in place, that hidden snippet will scan for security flaws on your PC any time you view the page. If it finds one, it will attempt a "drive-by-download," which surreptitiously downloads and installs malware onto your computer.

Sites large and small, from personal pages to big-name company sites, have been hacked in this way. You won't notice anything out of place if you view a hacked page, though if you know what to look for you might recognize an inserted 'iframe' if you view the page's source code.

The same theme holds for e-mail as well. Your trained eye can likely spot the majority of e-mail attacks, and you may even get a good chuckle out of some of the clumsy grammar and spelling. But not every attack e-mail is easy to spot. The targeted attacks mentioned for myth #2 in particular are difficult to catch, and even net-cast-wide blasts can often use good social engineering hooks.

This iron man myth needs to go the way of those godawful blink tags for two reasons: First, so you'll know to keep your PC secure so that if you're unlucky enough to happen across a hacked site, or accidentally open that well-crafted e-mail, the drive-by-download or e-mail payload won't snare you. Second, if you run your own site, you'll know to keep an eye on it to make sure it hasn't been hacked to attack your visitors. In particular, make sure you keep blogs and any other Web application up-to-date.

If you read the previous security myth-buster, you know antivirus by itself isn't enough. And now, you know that your good sense, while critical, isn't enough either. So sayonara, myth three.

source : www.pcworld.com

CheckFree Warns 5 Million Customers After Hack

2009-01-07T10:13:00.000-08:00

Robert McMillan, IDG News Service
Tuesday, January 06, 2009 5:40 PM PST

CheckFree and some of the banks that use its electronic bill payment service are notifying more than 5 million customers after criminals took control of several of the company's Internet domains and redirected customer traffic to a malicious Web site hosted in the Ukraine.

The Dec. 2 attack was widely publicized shortly after it occurred, but in a notice filed with the New Hampshire Attorney General, CheckFree disclosed that it was warning many more customers than previously thought.

That's because CheckFree is not only notifying users of its own CheckFree.com Web site of the breach, it is also working with banks to contact people who tried to pay bills from banks that use the CheckFree bill payment service.

"The 5 million people who were notified about the CheckFree redirection were a combination of two groups," said Melanie Tolley, vice president of communications with CheckFree's parent company, Fiserv, in an prepared statement. "1.) those who we were able to identify who had attempted to pay bills from our client's bill pay sites and minus those who actually completed sessions on our site; and 2.) anyone enrolled in mycheckfree.com."

Tolley wouldn't say what banks were affected by the hack, but the majority of these five million customers were CheckFree's own users, she said. In total, about 42 million customers access CheckFree's bill payment site, she said.

Customers who went to CheckFree's Web sites between 12:35 a.m. and 10:10 a.m. on the morning of the attack were redirected to a Ukrainian Web server that used malicious software to try and install a password-stealing program on the victim's computer.

The criminals were able to take control of several CheckFree Web domains after logging into the company's Internet domain registrar, Network Solutions, and changing the CheckFree DNS (Domain Name System) settings. This same technique was used by hackers one year ago, to take control of Comcast's Web site. It is not clear how the attackers were able to get CheckFree's Network Solutions password, but some security experts believe that CheckFree may have fallen prey to a phishing attack.

Looking at typical Web site traffic patterns, Fiserv guesses that about 160,000 consumers were exposed to the Ukrainian attack site, but not all of these customers would have been infected. For the attack to work, the victim would have to be a PC user without antivirus software who was also using an out-of-date-version of Adobe Acrobat. Because of these conditions, Fiserv believes that "a very small number" of people were affected, Tolley said.

However, because the company lost control of its Web domains, it doesn't know exactly who was hit. And so it must warn a much larger number of customers.

It could have been much worse. CheckFree processes bill payments for more than half of the banking institutions in the U.S., according to Gartner analyst Avivah Litan.

Although larger banks typically do not do this, some smaller banks simply turn their online bill payment services over to CheckFree, she said. "If they turn it over to CheckFree, chances are all those users were redirected to the CheckFree domain, but it was branded as the bank's domain."

CheckFree has deals to provide electronic bill payment services to banks such as Wachovia and Bank of America. It is not clear whether or not these banks were affected by the attack.

This kind of incident could also happen with fund transfer services, which are also frequently outsourced, Litan said. "Bank security is only a strong as its weakest link and the weakest links in banking are online payment and fund transfer [services]," Litan said.

source : www.pcworld.com

Data Breaches Rose Sharply in 2008, Says Study

2009-01-07T10:07:00.000-08:00

Jeremy Kirk, IDG News Service
Wednesday, January 07, 2009 4:40 AM PST

More than 35 million data records were breached in 2008 in the U.S., a figure that underscores continuing difficulties in securing information, according to the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC).

The majority of the lost data was neither encrypted nor protected by a password, according to the ITRC's report.

It documents 656 breaches in 2008 from a range of well-known U.S. companies and government entities, compared to 446 breaches in 2007, a 47 percent increase. Information about the breaches was collected by tracking media reports and the disclosures companies are required to make by law.

Data breach notification laws vary by state. Some companies do not reveal the number of data records that have been affected, which means the actual number of data breaches is likely much more than 35 million.

"More companies are revealing that they have had a data breach, either due to laws or public pressure," the ITRC wrote on its Web site. "Our sense is that two things are happening -- the criminal population is stealing more data from companies and that we are hearing more about the breaches."

The data breaches came from a variety of mishaps, including theft of laptops, hacking, employees improperly handling data, accidental disclosure and problems with subcontractors.

BNY Mellon Shareowner Services, an investment bank based in New Jersey, reported the highest number of breached records: 12.5 million. A box of computer tapes containing names, Social Security and account numbers was lost in February 2008. A lock on the truck transporting the tapes was broken, and the truck had been left unattended, according to news reports. The tapes were not encrypted.

The business community had the most breaches, comprising more than a third of the 656 breaches, ITRC said. Government and military organizations came in at 16.8 percent, the second-highest tally. However, that's an improvement over 2006, when that sector comprised nearly 30 percent of all reported data breaches, the center said.

Some 15.7 percent of all breaches were attributed to insider theft, a figure that more than doubled between 2007 and 2008, ITRC said.

source : www.pcworld.com

Microsoft applauds Chinese counterfeit software prison sentences

2009-01-07T02:57:00.000-08:00

Author:Antony Savvas
Posted:11:59 05 Jan 2009
Topics:Software Piracy | Software Companies

Microsoft has applauded the Chinese government for clamping down on software pirates with prison sentences.

A court in Shenzhen, southern China, has handed down sentences to 11 ringleaders of what was described as the world's largest software counterfeiting syndicate.

The sentences, ranging from 1.5 to 6.5 years, include the longest sentences handed down for this type of crime in China's history.

Based in the southern China province of Guangdong, members of the syndicate were arrested by Chinese authorities in July 2007, following an international investigation led by China's Public Security Bureau (PSB) and the FBI. Microsoft and hundreds of Microsoft customers and partners also provided information which assisted in the investigation.

The 11 accused were part of a criminal syndicate responsible for manufacturing and distributing an estimated $2bn-worth of high-quality counterfeit Microsoft software.

The counterfeit software, found in 36 countries and on five continents, contained fake versions of 19 of Microsoft's most popular products and was produced in at least 11 languages.

"Microsoft greatly appreciates the work of China's PSB and the FBI in taking strong enforcement action against this global software counterfeiting syndicate," said David Finn, associate general counsel for Worldwide Anti-Piracy and Anti-Counterfeiting at Microsoft.

Fengming Liu, vice-president of Microsoft Greater China Region, said, "Software piracy negatively impacts local economic growth, stifling innovation, taking business opportunity away from legitimate resale channels and putting consumers and partners at risk. Enforcement of intellectual property rights is critical to fostering an environment of innovation and fair competition."

Microsoft launched the Genuine Software Initiative in 2006, and since then it has intensified its efforts to protect customers and channel partners from the risks of counterfeit software through an increased focus on education, engineering and enforcement.

source : www.computerweekly.com

Security risk in Windows 7 pirates

2009-01-07T02:51:00.000-08:00

Author:Warwick Ashford
Posted:12:01 05 Jan 2009
Topics:Security | Operating Systems

Installing leaked copies of Microsoft's Windows 7 operating system is highly risky.

Pirate versions of an early build of Microsoft's latest operating system are available on file-sharing networks.

Windows 7 is under final developer testing ahead of an expected commercial release later this month.

But security firm Fortify Software says there is no way of knowing whether or not hackers have tampered with the 2.44Gbyte file.

Anyone downloading and installing the operating system could find their PC generating malware, denial of service attacks and spam, said Fortify.

It is highly unlikely that any IT security application will protect users from internally coded malware in the operating system, said Rob Rachwald, director product marketing at Fortify.
"Fall-out from using an unofficial version of the new operating system could be quite severe," he said.

Windows 7, which is based on the code in Windows Vista, offers built in support for touch-sensitive displays.

In addition, Microsoft has extended its Bitlocker encryption technology to support portable storage devices.

Microsoft said users will also be able to connect securely to Windows Server 2008 networks without the need for a VPN.

source : www.computerweekly.com

Secure operating systems

2009-01-07T02:46:00.000-08:00

Main article: Secure operating systems

One use of the term computer security refers to technology to implement a secure operating system. Much of this technology is based on science developed in the 1980s and used to produce what may be some of the most impenetrable operating systems ever. Though still valid, the technology is in limited use today, primarily because it imposes some changes to system management and also because it is not widely understood. Such ultra-strong secure operating systems are based on operating system kernel technology that can guarantee that certain security policies are absolutely enforced in an operating environment. An example of such a Computer security policy is the Bell-LaPadula model. The strategy is based on a coupling of special microprocessor hardware features, often involving the memory management unit, to a special correctly implemented operating system kernel. This forms the foundation for a secure operating system which, if certain critical parts are designed and implemented correctly, can ensure the absolute impossibility of penetration by hostile elements. This capability is enabled because the configuration not only imposes a security policy, but in theory completely protects itself from corruption. Ordinary operating systems, on the other hand, lack the features that assure this maximal level of security. The design methodology to produce such secure systems is precise, deterministic and logical.

Systems designed with such methodology represent the state of the art of computer security although products using such security are not widely known. In sharp contrast to most kinds of software, they meet specifications with verifiable certainty comparable to specifications for size, weight and power. Secure operating systems designed this way are used primarily to protect national security information, military secrets, and the data of international financial institutions. These are very powerful security tools and very few secure operating systems have been certified at the highest level (Orange Book A-1) to operate over the range of "Top Secret" to "unclassified" (including Honeywell SCOMP, USAF SACDIN, NSA Blacker and Boeing MLS LAN.) The assurance of security depends not only on the soundness of the design strategy, but also on the assurance of correctness of the implementation, and therefore there are degrees of security strength defined for COMPUSEC. The Common Criteria quantifies security strength of products in terms of two components, security functionality and assurance level (such as EAL levels), and these are specified in a Protection Profile for requirements and a Security Target for product descriptions. None of these ultra-high assurance secure general purpose operating systems have been produced for decades or certified under the Common Criteria.

In USA parlance, the term High Assurance usually suggests the system has the right security functions that are implemented robustly enough to protect DoD and DoE classified information. Medium assurance suggests it can protect less valuable information, such as income tax information. Secure operating systems designed to meet medium robustness levels of security functionality and assurance have seen wider use within both government and commercial markets. Medium robust systems may provide the same security functions as high assurance secure operating systems but do so at a lower assurance level (such as Common Criteria levels EAL4 or EAL5). Lower levels mean we can be less certain that the security functions are implemented flawlessly, and therefore less dependable. These systems are found in use on web servers, guards, database servers, and management hosts and are used not only to protect the data stored on these systems but also to provide a high level of protection for network connections and routing services.
source : en.wikipedia.org

Computer security

2009-01-07T02:45:00.000-08:00

Computer security is a branch of technology known as information security as applied to computers. The objective of computer security varies and can include protection of information from theft or corruption, or the preservation of availability, as defined in the security policy.

Computer security imposes requirements on computers that are different from most system requirements because they often take the form of constraints on what computers are not supposed to do. This makes computer security particularly challenging because it is hard enough just to make computer programs do everything they are designed to do correctly. Furthermore, negative requirements are deceptively complicated to satisfy and require exhaustive testing to verify, which is impractical for most computer programs. Computer security provides a technical strategy to convert negative requirements to positive enforceable rules. For this reason, computer security is often more technical and mathematical than some computer science fields.[citation needed]

Typical approaches to improving computer security (in approximate order of strength) can include the following:

* Physically limit access to computers to only those who will not compromise security.
* Hardware mechanisms that impose rules on computer programs, thus avoiding depending on computer programs for computer security.
* Operating system mechanisms that impose rules on programs to avoid trusting computer programs.
* Programming strategies to make computer programs dependable and resist subversion.

source : en.wikipedia.org

Windows 7 May Add Spice to CES

2009-01-05T19:44:00.000-08:00

Agam Shah, IDG News Service
Monday, December 29, 2008 6:20 PM PST

Software could overshadow gadgets at the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show, with Microsoft expected to shed light on its upcoming Windows 7 OS.

The financial meltdown may also be lingering topic as tech vendors gather to flaunt products at the show in Las Vegas, hoping to show enough glitter and sparkle to bring them better fortunes in the new year. Attendees will pour over the latest technologies, including OLED (organic light-emitting diode) TVs, netbooks, smartphones, media players, and other entertainment devices.

Audiences may miss the show's perennial star, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, who gave his final CES speech earlier this year. Instead, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer will kick off the event with a keynote address on Jan. 7. He's expected to give a peek at Microsoft's Windows 7 OS, which many hope will be zippier and less resource hungry than Windows Vista.

Microsoft expects to make "significant" Windows 7 announcements, including a possible release of Windows 7 beta software. A "sneak peek" at future Microsoft Office software may also be offered.

A look at Microsoft's future software could add pep to what otherwise might turn out to be a subdued show. Attendance at CES 2009 is expected to drop as consumers and technology vendors cut spending amid the economic crisis. Hotels, which in previous years were often packed months before the show, have been offering discounted rates to fill rooms.

The Consumer Electronics Association insists that pre-registration has been strong and says it's too early to call it a quiet show. Organizers expect 130,000 attendees, said CEA spokeswoman Tara Dunion.

However, that would still be a significant drop from 144,000 attendees at CES 2007.

The prospect of a reduced audience hasn't fazed companies like Intel, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Dell from showing products in or around the show. Overall, 2,700 companies will be present at various locations, including the Las Vegas Convention Center and surrounding resorts and hotels.

A standout at CES could be netbooks, small laptops used for basic applications such as Web surfing and e-mail. Intel defined the category with its Atom processor, which was then solidified by the success of Asus' Eee PC. The show could see an evolution of netbooks, with features like touch screens attracting interest. Asus will likely show a touch-screen netbook, and Intel is showing off its Convertible Classmate, a netbook with a touch screen that swivels.

Via's elusive Nano processor may also make an appearance. Rumor has it that Samsung will show its NC20 laptop based on a Nano processor.

Some of Intel's competitors, meanwhile, may try to redefine how people think of netbooks by pushing more advanced capabilities. Advanced Micro Devices and Nvidia may talk more about boosting graphics on netbooks. Freescale and Qualcomm could demonstrate netbooks with more communication-savvy chips.

Mundane laptops will also get a makeover. Expect plenty of buzz around a new Sony Vaio laptop, which the company says is "revolutionary" and will change the way users think about the products. It remains unclear if the tiny laptop is a netbook or a full-featured ultraportable. For power users, Lenovo is expected to show the ThinkPad W700DS laptop with two screens -- a first in laptops -- for people who want to perform multiple tasks at the same time.

Rounding off mobility will be smartphones with new operating systems, touchscreens and 3G connectivity. Many mobile phone companies are expected to adopt Google's Android platform, including Samsung, which may show an Android phone at CES.

Struggling smartphone maker Palm is holding a big event to announce its new Linux-based OS code-named Nova, along with new devices. The company hopes to use CES as a springboard to regain prominence in the smart phone market, where it has been eclipsed by Research In Motion and Apple.

Like past CES shows, televisions will grab the imagination of visitors as vendors fight to remain the centerpiece for home entertainment. CES 2008 saw the emergence of OLED screens with prototypes from Sony and Samsung, and CES 2009 could see further progress. In May, Sony CEO Howard Stringer said a 27-inch OLED TV would be coming, which could launch at the show.

Samsung showed a 40-inch OLED high-definition TV prototype in October, and larger screens may be on tap.

Given TV's ease of use, some may prefer these devices for Internet access in the future. With that in mind, some companies are working to merge the Internet and TV. Silicon Image will show its Allio high-definition LCD TV with a built-in PC so users can simultaneously use the TV and Internet through a split screen.

Intel will show prototype products for running mini-applications to complement TV viewing with information from the Internet. For example, widgets will allow TV watchers to talk to friends in real time or buy products advertised on TV from online stores.

The Internet also continues to shape how entertainment is delivered. Streaming media will battle Blu-ray DVD as the way to deliver entertainment and movies to end users. Having conquered HD DVD, Blu-ray still has a hurdle to pass with most players priced above US$150, so expect prices to drop at CES.

Some kinks also need to be worked out to better stream media between entertainment devices, and expect to see some improvements at the show. Tzero will demonstrate devices for wireless HDMI (high-definition multimedia interface) multimedia streaming between devices using ultrawideband (UWB) wireless technology. Tzero's technology enables uninterrupted wireless delivery of high-definition video and surround sound at a rate of 480Mbps over 20 meters, the company claims.

Users may also see progress in data transfers between PCs and devices like digital cameras with improvements in the USB 3.0 specification.

Overall, many other gadgets will be on display to enjoy over the show's four days. CES may end up being more relaxing and intimate with the floors less crowded.

source : www.pcworld.com

ATTO Introduces New RAID Products

2009-01-05T19:42:00.000-08:00

Peter Cohen, Macworld.com
Monday, January 05, 2009 12:30 PM PST

ATTO Technology on Monday announced new products aimed at Mac users who need higher-end RAID and storage peripherals. The new products will be demonstrated at booth 1543 during the show.

The FastStream SC 8500 is an 8Gb Fibre Channel host interface that provides RAID 0, 1, 4, 5, 6, 10, 50 and 60 protection. It features four 8Gb Fibre Channel host interfaces and can support up to 128 3Gb SAS or SATA drives or up to 8 - 16 drive "JBOD" (Just a Bunch of Disks) enclosure.

The ExpressSAS R380 is a host-based RAID system that provides 1.3GB/s performance, designed for post-production editing and creative content applications.

source : www.pcworld.com

Blu-ray Dominates Christmas Sales

2009-01-05T19:27:00.000-08:00

Scott Nichols, PC World
Jan 6, 2009 12:56 am

Back before Thanksgiving I predicted that Blu-ray sales would suffer during the holiday season due to the high cost of both the player and HDTVs combined with the current economic recession, among other reasons. But after seeing the report from the British Video Association declaring Blu-ray sales have risen almost 400 percent for the 2008 holiday season over the same period of time last year, it is clear that I was wrong.

Across the whole holiday season 3.7 million Blu-ray units were sold in Britain, and that doesn't include sales of Sony's Playstation 3 console, which also plays Blu-ray movies. A large contributing factor to the rise in Blu-ray sales was the release of the movies The Dark Knight and Mama Mia on Blu-ray. The Dark Knight sold almost 300,000 copies in its first few weeks, becoming the fastest selling Blu-ray title to date. Mama Mia was no slouch either selling 5.1 million copies by year-end.

Of course, all of these sales are from the British market, so we will have to wait for U.S. sales numbers to see if the trend carried over here. But given the U.K. sales numbers, it is hard to predict anything other than similarly high sales here.

I still hold onto my claim that streaming video will overtake Blu-ray at some point. Streaming video is being brought even closer to the mass-market with the announcement that LG will be releasing a broadband HDTV which can stream video from Netflix without the need for a set-top box. But the recent sales numbers for Blu-ray this holiday season show that the HD format still has a lot of life in it. The shift to streaming video is still coming, it's just a long, long way off.

source : www.pcworld.com

Windows 7 surprise: DivX built in

2009-01-05T19:21:00.000-08:00

James Bannan 03 November 2008, 8:51 AM

No more trawling the web for the latest media codecs. Windows 7 comes ready to play all your favourite "downloaded" videos.

One of the new features announced at the recent Windows 7 Reviewer’s Workshop in LA is that Windows 7 will natively support a number of popular media formats, so that users don’t have to worry about finding, installing and downloading third-party codecs.
This is an evolution in media support which is similar to the inclusion of native MPEG-2 playback in Windows Vista, providing the DVD playback functionality which was missing in Windows XP.

It's an interesting change by Microsoft, which, in the past, has doggedly clung to the hope that Windows Media Video will end up as the prevailing video format for the internet. It appears to have finally conceded that the vast majority of people are watching downloaded stuff in DivX or Xvid -- possibly a realisation driven by the enormous amount of telemetry data it has collected from users of Vista that it never had access to through XP. It has stopped short of bundling Adobe Flash support into Windows, though, as it develops its own Silverlight technology.

Windows 7 will also support H.264 video and AAC audio. The support for AAC will be welcome news for people with music and video that has been encoded in Apple iTunes, as Windows 7 will be able to play all iTunes media through Windows Media Player.Unfortunately, this won't apply to media that has been purchased from Apple's iTunes store, because Windows 7 can't decode the Apple FairPlay DRM, which Apple refuses to license to anyone else.

The ability to play back these additional formats has implications for new Windows 7 services like libraries and networked media player support, as Windows 7 users can index and search across their iTunes media without needing to use iTunes as the default player, and can send a wider variety of media content to a centralized location.

A more subtle user benefit is that by not having to download third-party codec bundles (which is convenient in itself), users can minimise the inevitable build-up of unverified software running on their systems. Most major codecs are freely available, but you often need to install multiple disparate packages to get the widest possible support for digital media -- or run an 'all in one' CODEC installer which may also come bundled with hidden malware inside. Additionally, these CODEC packages can interfere with other, and the codecs are not necessarily optimised to run efficiently.

By bundling a wide variety of media formats into Windows 7, Microsoft has created an operating environment which negates the need for third-party codecs and should therefore run more stably and reliably. It also brings blanket support for the most popular online media formats, providing an environment in which users can start playing their favourite content immediately.

source : apcmag.com

VeriSign addresses SSL certificate flaw

2009-01-05T19:07:00.000-08:00

Written by Phil Muncaster
vnunet.com, 05 Jan 2009

VeriSign has moved to address a flaw in its Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certification technology, which could have allowed hackers to create false certificates.

SSL certificates are one of the most common ways for firms to prove that their web sites are secure and authentic. By creating false certificates, hackers could deter online shoppers and possibly undermine consumer faith in e-commerce.

The so-called 'collision attack' flaw, first published by researchers at the Chaos Communication Congress last week, was aimed at the MD5 hashing algorithm of certificates issued by the RapidSSL authority, according to VeriSign.

"This presentation showed how to combine MD5 collision attacks with some other clever bits of hacking to create a false certificate," Tim Callan, VeriSign's vice president of SSL product marketing, said in a blog posting.

"We have discontinued using MD5 when we issue RapidSSL certificates, and we've confirmed that all other SSL certificates we sell are not vulnerable to this attack."

VeriSign has now transitioned to the SHA-1 algorithm on new RapidSSL brand certificates, and said that it will replace MD5 certificates for existing customers free of charge.

Callan added that the company aims to discontinue MD5 in "all end entity certificates" by the end of this month.

Matthew Tyler, director of consultancy firm Evolution Security Systems, explained that the MD5 flaw highlights why certificate authorities must "keep up to speed" with the latest security threats.

"As computing power increases there is a need to keep algorithms in pace with this change. MD5 was created over 18 years ago and had issues even before it went live in 1996 over 12 years ago," he said.

"MD5 is an old and debunked hashing algorithm and should have been phased out by the slightly more secure SHA-1/2, with SHA-3 due for 2012."

Extended Validation SSL Certificates, which VeriSign has been promoting vigorously since their launch in late 2006, are not affected by the flaw.

source : www.vnunet.com

Lenovo Brings Wii Functionality to PCs (PC World)

2009-01-05T18:59:00.000-08:00

Posted on Mon Jan 5, 2009 12:30AM EST

Taking a page from Nintendo's Wii gaming console, Lenovo on Monday announced an all-in-one PC with a remote control that doubles as a motion-based gaming controller.

Like the iMac, the all-in-one IdeaCentre A600 combines a monitor and CPU in a thin system. It will be on display at the Consumer Electronics Show from January 8 to 11 in Las Vegas.

Its wireless remote control is similar to Nintendo Wii's Wii Remote, which allows users to interact with a video game by waving or pointing the game controller. Using motion-sensing technology, the Wii Remote becomes a racket when swinging during a tennis game, or a weapon when playing a fighting game.

Lenovo's gadget mimics the Wii's approach.

"We have an example of a bowling game [where] you can wave the remote and that actually controls your game," said Ninis Samuel, director of marketing strategy and programs.

The company is bundling some motion-based games with the PC to use with the remote-based gaming controller. Titles of the games weren't immediately available.

Lenovo is trying to capitalize on the trend of entertainment options merging into the PC. Few are able to play motion-based games, which could make this motion-based game controller a pioneer.

In addition to controlling TV functions and video recordings on the PC, the remote control can also be used as an air mouse that moves the mouse pointer when waved. It has some advantages over a conventional mouse -- it can function without being on a surface and be used at a distance -- when sitting on a couch, for example.

If the air mouse wasn't enough, the remote also works as a VOIP (voice over Internet protocol) handset. "If you have telephony software on your PC like Windows Live or Skype, you can use your remote to make those phone calls because it essentially can act as a phone," Samuel said.

The IdeaCentre A600 starts at a price of US$999. The desktop has a 21.5-inch screen that supports 1920 by 1280-pixel resolution for high-definition video playback. It runs on Intel Pentium Dual Core or Core 2 Duo mobile processors, supports up to 4GB of RAM and up to 1TB of storage. It includes Wi-Fi wireless networking and runs on the Windows Vista OS.

Options include the remote control, Blu-ray DVD player, a TV tuner and a Advanced Micro Devices' ATI graphics card. The desktop will be available worldwide by the beginning of March.

The desktop is part of a new portfolio of entertainment PCs that Lenovo plans to show at CES. The company is also rolling out a new laptop line, the IdeaPad Y series, which is targeted at mainstream users looking to create and view multimedia content. Lenovo has added features that can make watching movies an easier and enjoyable experience.

For example, the laptops have the "OneKey" feature, in which pressing one button "optimizes" the experience of watching movies by enhancing the sound and visuals, according to the company.

Another feature includes ambient light sensors that adjusts screen brightness based on the user's surroundings. "[It] uses a sensor on the actual lid of the laptop that senses whether or not you are in a darker or lighter room. Then it adjusts the brightness and the graphics to your environment," Samuel said. The feature is available only in the IdeaPad Y650 laptop, which has a 16-inch screen.

The IdeaPad Y series laptops come with screens ranging from 14 to 16 inches, run on Intel Core 2 Duo processors and include Windows Vista. The weight of the laptops ranges from 4.6 pounds (2.09 kilograms) to 6 pounds. The laptops will become available worldwide by the beginning of March, Lenovo said. Pricing was not immediately available.

source : tech.yahoo.com

Review: Windows 7 Beta

2009-01-05T18:38:00.000-08:00

posted by Thom Holwerda on Sun 4th Jan 2009 21:47 UTC

Reviewing the first beta of an important release like Windows 7 is never an easy job to do. A confouding factor is that many people have already made up their mind about Windows 7; not because they have tried it, but because it's a Microsoft product, and therefore it sucks. At OSNews we try to judge products by their own merits, not by the parent company that created it. Read on for a set of impressions regarding the Windows 7 beta.

Hardware
* Intel Pentium 4 2.8Ghz with HyperThreading
* 2GB DDR RAM
* NVIDIA GeForce 6200 128MB RAM
* IDE 125GB HDD
* CMI-8738 sound chip

Introduction
Two years ago, Microsoft released Windows Vista, as the successor to Windows XP, the much-maligned, but in the end quite popular operating system. Windows Vista wasn't a very pleasant operating system to use early on its lifetime. It was slow, full of bugs, and had various software and hardware compatibility issues. To make matters worse, Microsoft decided to offer 239472398 different versions, with ever such descriptive names. The cheaper versions had features removed on a seemingly arbitrary basis, and the full monty version was far too expensive for most people.

Under the landslide of problems, it was easy to miss the immense changes Microsoft had made to Windows' inner workings. Vista delivered a completely new network stack, a shiny new audio stack, a new graphics subsystem, system-wide search, a vast list of security features, and many, many other improvements. So many, in fact, that it became painfully obvious that Microsoft had bitten off more than it could chew.

However, as time went on, Microsoft worked hard to improve Vista. The Redmond software giant delivered performance improvements, bug fixes, and fixed all sorts of little niggles. In addition, they tweaked the hated (but very successful) User Account Control to show less prompts, which made the first few days after a new Vista installation a little less clickety-clickety. Many people concluded that Vista was an infrastructure release, on which Microsoft would build future versions of Windows. Vista was the cut-off point, the sour apple they had to bite through in order to modernise the Windows platform.

Details regarding Vista's successor soon emerged, but they were few and far in between. The new Windows chief, Sinofsky, kept a very tight lid on what information came out of Redmond regarding the next Windows release, having learned from the Vista debacle where the company promised more than it could deliver. No more promises, no more disappointments. The few details that did make it out made it clear that Microsoft wasn't planning yet another massive restructuring of Windows: Windows 7, as it would be called, would build on top of Vista, and offer various refinements all across the board.

Since then, the Engineering 7 weblog has kept us up to date on Windows 7's development, and offered various insights into why certain decisions were made during its development. The first public demonstrations of Windows 7 were met with fairly positive reviews all over the technology media, and the enthusiast crowd was eager to get their hands on the first Windows beta.

And now it's here.

Table of contents

1. Introduction
2. Setup; Applications
3. Libraries & Explorer; Taskbar
4. HomeGroup; Misc; Performance; Conclusion

source : www.osnews.com

Android-Based Netbooks in 2010?

2009-01-05T18:33:00.000-08:00

posted by Thom Holwerda on Fri 2nd Jan 2009 22:06 UTC

Netbooks run either Windows or Linux, and both are readily available in shops all over the world. The Linux variants chosen by several netbook manufacturers are usually derived from desktop distributions, and obviously, Windows is a desktop operating system as well. However, netbooks have small displays, and both Windows and GNOME/KDE and some of their applications aren't always suited well for such an environment. Enter Android, Google's Linux-based phone operating system. It is suggested that Android-based netbooks will appear on the market in 2010, maybe even sooner.

The hard work seems to be mostly done. As a new year's present, the boys and girls from VentureBeat ported Google's Android to an Asus EEE PC 1000H - although recompiled might be a better description, since they didn't have to do much actual porting. Google's Dima Zavin claimed he had ported Android to the Asus EEE PC 701, and as it turns out, the 1000H didn't pose much trouble. Linux support for the EEE line is obviously pretty good, so the drivers were readily available as well. The 1000H is almost entirely supported, including graphics, wireless, and sound.

Android seems to be pretty well prepared for devices with larger screens than phones, as the operating system and its user interface adapted itself seamlessly to the larger dimensions. VentureBeat found out that Android has two product categories in its code: phones and mobile internet devices (MIDs). The default webkit browser and the music player worked just fine on the 1000H.

It is not exactly surprising that it took little effort to port Android to the EEE; after all, it's "just" a Linux distribution aimed at phones, and Linux' hardware support and open source nature allow for easy porting. It obviously helps that the EEE line is very well supported already by Linux.

However, it remains to be seen if Android on a netbook makes sense. The operating system is first and foremost aimed at phones, and this means that concessions have most likely been made in the interface to better accommodate smaller screen sizes. The same probably goes for various applications written for Android. This means that if Google is serious about pursuing the netbook market with Android, developers will have to make sure their applications work well not only on phones, but also on devices with larger screens.

In the end, I think it takes less effort to retrofit, say, Ubuntu or OpenSUSE on a netbook than to stretch Android to run on them. Various netbook-specific variants of popular Linux distributions are readily available, so why put time, money, and effort into Android?

source : www.osnews.com

A Look at newLISP

2009-01-05T18:30:00.000-08:00

posted by Alexandru Lazar on Mon 5th Jan 2009 19:13 UTC

In the age of dynamic languages and closures, most of you have probably heard of a mighty dragon called Lisp (which stands for LISt Processing), whose fans look almost with despise at other languages rediscovering it. Invented half a century ago, Lisp went on to become a de facto standard in the world of AI research, and has stood behind a handful of very neat inventions in the 1980s. Nevertheless, the long AI winter and the drift of technology towards other paradigms have almost lead to forgetting Lisp alltogether; IT has only recently started to rediscover parts of what made Lisp so cool back then.

NewLisp is a Lisp dialect which tries to build a modern platform based on the Lisp heritage, in order to answer modern computing needs a lot better than other dialects do. According to its developers, newLisp is a Lisp-like, general-purpose scripting language. The official description is somewhat misleading though, because it implies newLisp is a kind of Bash with more parenthesis than code -- which, as it turns out, it is not. newLisp can competently handle application programming, statistical computation and web development, so it's actually closer to Python and Ruby than it is to command.com.

For those of you who are not familiar with Lisp, the entire story in a hundred words of more can be boiled down to a very expressive, dynamic, extensible language which can be used in a functional manner if you carry a picture of Haskell Curry in your pocket. Most Lisp programmers cite its powerful meta-programming features, its expressiveness and very concise style as being Lisp's greatest features. From this description, it would seem that almost everybody would want to use Lisp, which is in fact true. What is also true is that very few people use Lisp though, and for a handful of otherwise fair reasons, some of which we will discuss immediately.

Those readers who are familiar with Lisp are cautioned that, given our favorite programming tool's extreme popularity, this article is aimed at a very wide audience. As a consequence, some explanations are not exact or complete, but are nevertheless comprehensible for people who haven't used Lisp before. It's a small price to pay when you're famous.

A tale of more Lisps: from Common LISP to Scheme and newLISP

The first thing I mentioned about newLisp is that it's a Lisp dialect. As you may have guessed if you did not already know, Lisp is actually the name given to an entire family of languages (which can be equally well characterized by the description above). However, even today, most people refer to ANSI Common LISP when they talk about Lisp. ANSI Common LISP is, as its name implies, a standardized version agreed upon in the 1980s. Several implementations are available today, of which SBCL, GNU Common LISP, CMUCL, Clozure, Allegro Common Lisp and LispWorks are only a few of the more commonly used.

ANSI Common Lisp is an extremely powerful language. Its standard includes not only the kitchen sink, but very detailed provisions about the entire civil infrastructure of a small town. ANSI CL also includes a remarkably portable API, which is unsurprising given that it was designed in the days when there must have been fifty ways to leave your lover and equally many platforms to write your letter of adieu on. However, some of its features are really anachronic, and the large number of features makes the documentation very cumbersome to work with. To this date, the main reference is a document called Hyperspec, which is a very detailed and complete specification; while being thorough and reliable, the Hyperspec is also famous for being extremely cluttered and for making it very hard to actually find anything, partly due to its nature, partly due to the sheer size of the CommonLisp standard.

By contrast, newLisp is very lean and quite minimal. It does away with many of the implementation details in Common Lisp, in favor of a simpler subset that can be used to compensate for any features that are missing out of the box. In this respect, newLISP feels a lot more like a language from the 21st century, even without being as complete as Common LISP.

newLISP also sports a couple of significant differences, both in terms of syntax-related details and in terms of architecture. In fact, there are several notable language-related differences which bring newLISP much closer to Scheme than Common LISP. However, even in comparison to Scheme, the dominating aspect of newLISP is simplification. Just one example: newLISP replaces the various equality operators in Common LISP and Scheme with a single one. Therefore, you no longer need to remember the difference between equal, eql, eq, equalp, =, string=, string-equal, char= and char-eq -- which is really how things should be.

source : www.osnews.com

Windows 7 Outperforms XP, Vista

2009-01-05T18:26:00.000-08:00

posted by Thom Holwerda on Sat 3rd Jan 2009 12:58 UTC

Even though the EULA accompanying the beta build of Windows 7 prohibits the publication of benchmark results (good luck enforcing that one, Redmond), everybody and their dog will still compare the Windows 7 beta to Vista and Windows XP. Adrian Kingsley-Hughes is one of those benchmarking the beta, and according to his results, the Windows 7 beta beats both Vista and XP in just about every scenario.

Instead of running Crysis or benchmark suites, Kingsley-Hughes decided to go a different route and perform 23 common tasks on each of the three Windows versions (all 32bit), and then simply mark the winner, the runner-up, and number three. He performed the same 23 tests on these Windows versions on two different machines: an AMD Phenom 9700 2.4GHz system fitted with an ATI Radeon 3850 and 4GB of RAM, and an Intel Pentium Dual Core E2200 2.2GHz fitted with an NVIDIA GeForce 8400 GS and 1GB of RAM. While I personally don't have a system nearly as fast as either of those, they are hardly top-of-the-line configurations.

The results are telling. On the AMD machine, the Windows 7 beta beat both XP and Vista SP1 on 21 out of the 23 tests. The results were the same for the Intel box: 21 out of 23 tests went to Windows 7. While Windows 7 tripped on the installation of Office 2007 and DVD burning on the AMD box, it tripped over two file moving operations on the Intel machine.

There are, as always, issues with these tests and the data they produced. First of all, there are no absolute figures for any of the 23 tests; we don't know if Windows 7 beat its predecessors by a huge margin, or only by a barely statistically significant one. In addition, I found the tests to be a little vague, as the author doesn't supply the files he used for his tests - in other words, we can't reproduce his exact steps.

Despite these obvious deficiencies, these results confirm the general feeling you're getting from those who have already tested Windows 7: it seems like Microsoft is delivering on its promise to make Windows 7 no more resource demanding than Windows Vista - in fact, it seems to have overshot its goal by making Windows 7 perform better than its illustrious predecessor, which is nothing short of a miracle in Windows land.

Remember, though, that your mileage may vary.

source : www.osnews.com

CoolMax CUQ-1200B Modular 1200W Power Supply Unit

2009-01-04T01:17:00.000-08:00

Written by Olin Coles

CoolMax CUQ-1200B

Whether you're a hardcore gamer with a set SLi or CrossFire video cards or a hardware enthusiast with several hard disks and an overclocked quad-core processor, the power draw your computer created can quickly add up to an outrageous electric bill. With so many systems now consuming 600W or more of continuous power, consumers are beginning to find ways to conserve energy and save their money. CoolMax has joined the 80-PLUS revolution by offering their Green Power CUQ-1200B modular power supply unit, and Benchmark Reviews inspects their claims as we load-test this unit for AC power ripple and DC voltage regulation.

I can remember almost a year ago when 1.0 kilowatt power supply units first hit the market. Around that same time, people were testing their SLi and CrossFire setups, and with rumor of Quad-SLi later becoming a reality it seemed like everyone would be using this much power into the future. Looking back, I am thankful the motherboard manufacturers essentially killed this idea, since it really seems ridiculous to need four video cards for anything. But for those who live and die by the virtual sword (gamers), there are cost-friendly solutions such as the CoolMax CUQ-1200B Modular 1200W Power Supply Unit.

Certainly by now we can all agree that the power supply unit is the single most important part of any computer. Regardless of the system or purpose there is a given rule: whether it is a simple workstation with integrated components or an advanced gaming system with newest technology available, everything requires power to operate. As anyone who has suffered the failure of a low-end power supply will tell you: not all power supply units (PSU's) are created equal, and looks really don't mean a thing.

Although I believe only the most hardcore gamers would ever call upon this much power to feed their energy-thirsty team of video cards, that doesn't stop manufacturers from giving others the opportunity for expansion if it were ever necessary. Today it is our mission here at Benchmark Reviews to pick-apart the mighty CoolMax CUQ-1200B Modular 1200W Power Supply Unit. With more connections and power than any modern computer could consume, we will do our best to offer perspective on the DC voltage regulation and AC current ripple.

Next generation platforms and high performance graphics cards are essential to modern gamers and hardware enthusiasts, just as much as the new software designed to use them. Complete with six PCI-Express cables (four 6-pin and two 8-pin) and nine serial ATA connectors, the CoolMax CUQ-1200B is built to provide sufficient output to power demanding GPU teams and quad-core system setups. With a maximum 12V output of 900W over four rails to provide uniform distribution of power, the CUQ-1200B is very capable of driving today's highest-end systems. With these features, this unit will have no problem accommodating the needs of bleeding-edge technology for years to come.

Benchmark Reviews has seen some major changes within the power supply industry over the past year. Even in such a limited purpose industry, somehow fads manage to come into existence. At one point, the number of rails a PSU offered was key to media hype. At another point, you could see everyone pushing for the highest watts in their new product. I can't forget how modular power supplies, with the assortment of cables and interfaces, also shared some time in the limelight.

The latest trend seemed to be 80-Plus efficiency, but since most PSU's are at least this efficient the label has lost meaning. And then without any warning, it was as if every company manufacturing power supply units suddenly decided that they could win the battle for industry dominance by combining all of the above features, and add a nice paint job or mirror finish for good measure. The new generation of power supplies has begun to amp up the competition for placement in your computer case. Antec’s EarthWatts series was among the first to cause a stir in the PSU industry by emphasizing efficient power delivery over the multi-rail hype over two years ago. But now 80% or better efficiency is very common.

Somehow, the industry is shifting back to square one. The CoolMax CUQ-1200B Modular 1200W Power Supply Unit offers convenient modular cabling and more power over fewer rails.

source : benchmarkreviews.com

Emerson unveils AC/DC power supply

2009-01-04T01:14:00.000-08:00

Edited by the Electronicstalk editorial team Dec 24, 2008

Emerson Network Power has added the Intelligent VS (iVS) AC/DC power supply to its line of fully configurable modular power supplies.

Capable of delivering up to 4,920W of high-density output (12W/in3), the iVS is a fully programmable and intelligent high-power standard power supply.

Emerson Network Power's iVS power supplies are specifically designed for industrial, military and medical instrumentation applications that require high power, reliability and maximum flexibility.

Fully modular in design, iVS power supplies use digitally configurable single- and dual- output power supply modules available in six power ratings.

Spanning 210W to 1,500W, they support 24 different output choices ranging from 2V to 60V, to allow a wide choice of power configurations.

All modules are fully interoperable with existing Emerson configurable platforms, and can be quickly configured to match exact application requirements, enabling greater precision and energy efficiency.

source : www.electronicstalk.com

To maximise control flexibility, microcontrollers integrated into the case and modules are paired with Emerson Network Power's highly intuitive I2C GUI-based control software.

The software enables designers to configure and reconfigure voltages and current limits, and inhibit or enable settings for individual power supplies, while allowing them to conveniently export their final configuration specs for mass application.

It offers OEMs and end users powerful real-time voltage, current and temperature monitoring, to provide at-a-glance performance confirmation for the entire power supply, including the case and all its constituent modules.

All iVS power supplies feature field-upgradable firmware, which extends product lifecycles and offers developers flexibility and interoperability.

They are rigorously industrialised to ensure high reliability in demanding applications, and are rated for performance at temperatures ranging from -40 to 70C.

They are also pre-certified for a wide range of safety specifications - including UL, CSA, VDE, CE and CB certifications - to ensure rapid, cost-effective power provision off-the- shelf.

Windows 7 beta 1 performance - How does the OS compare to Vista and XP?

2009-01-04T01:05:00.000-08:00

How does Windows 7 beta 1 compare to Vista and XP in terms of performance? That’s a question that’s been hitting my inbox regularly over the past few weeks. Let’s see if we can’t answer it!

Important note: Before I go any further I feel I need to make a point, and make it clear. The build I’m testing of Windows 7 (build 6.1.7000.0.081212-1400) is a beta build, and as a rule beta builds are usually more geared towards stability than performance. That said, the performance of this build should give us a clue as to how the OS is coming along.

Rather than publish a series of benchmark results for the three operating systems (something which Microsoft frowns upon for beta builds, not to mention the fact that the final numbers only really matter for the release candidate and RTM builds), I’ve decided to put Windows 7, Vista and XP head-to-head in a series of real-world tests to find out which OS comes out top.

The tests

There are 23 tests in all, most of which are self explanatory:

1. Install OS - Time it takes to install the OS
2. Boot up - Average boot time to usable desktop
3. Shut down - Average shut down time
4. Move 100MB files - Move 100MB of JPEG files from one hard drive to another
5. Move 2.5GB files - Move 2.5GB of mixed size files (ranging from 1MB to 100MB)
from one hard drive to another
6. Network transfer 100MB files - Move 100MB of JPEG files from test machine to
NAS device
7. Network transfer 2.5GB files - Move 2.5GB of mixed size files (ranging from 1MB
to 100MB) from test machine to NAS device
8. Move 100MB files under load - Move 100MB of JPEG files from one hard drive to
another while ripping DVD to .ISO file
9. Move 2.5GB files under load - Move 2.5GB of mixed size files (ranging from 1MB
to 100MB) from one hard drive to another while ripping DVD to .ISO file
10. Network transfer 100MB files under load - Move 100MB of JPEG files from test
machine to NAS device while ripping DVD to .ISO file
11. Network transfer 2.5GB files under load - Move 2.5GB of mixed size files
(ranging from 1MB to 100MB) from test machine to NAS device while ripping DVD
to .ISO file
12. Compress 100MB files - Using built-in ZIP compression
13. Compress 1GB files - Using built-in ZIP compression
14. Extract 100MB files - Using built-in ZIP compression
15. Extract 1GB files - Using built-in ZIP compression
16. Install Office 2007 - Ultimate version, from DVD
17. Open 10 page Word doc - Text only
18. Open 100 page Word doc - Text and images only
19. Open simple Excel doc - Basic formatting
20. Open complex Excel doc - Including formula and charts
21. Burn DVD - Win 7 beta 1 .ISO to disc using CDBurnerXP
22. Open 10 page PDF - Text only, using latest Adobe Reader 8
23. Open 100 page PDF - Text and images, using latest Adobe Reader 8

These series of tests will pitch Windows 7 build 7000 32-bit against Windows Vista SP1 32-bit and Windows XP SP3 32-bit. The scoring for each of the tests is simple. The winning OS scores 1, the runner up 2 and the loser scores a 3. The scores are added up and the OS with the lowest score at the end wins.

source : blogs.zdnet.com

Hiper HPU-5K880 and HPU-5B680 Type R Mk II PSU's

2009-01-04T01:02:00.000-08:00

HPU-5K880 & HPU-5B680

Fresh from our review of the HPU-4M880/HPU-4M630 Type M Series, Hiper returns with an all new concept for power supply units. By combining the passive cooling of an open-grill chassis design with a set of integrated High-Speed USB ports, Hiper introduces their Type R Mk-II power supplies in 680W and 880W versions. Benchmark Reviews reveals the innovative HPU-5K880 & HPU-5B680 PSU's with our set of power regulation tests.

Next generation platforms and high performance graphics cards are essential to modern gamers and hardware enthusiasts, just as much as the new software designed to use them. Hiper has been providing performance systems with stable power for quite some time, and with a new focus on efficiency they can offer a penny-wise solution for everyone. The newly revised Type R Mk-II power supply series delivers 660W in the HPU-5B680 model and 880W in the HPU-5K880. The entire Type R Mk-II series is built to provide excellent performance and efficient power to demanding GPU teams and quad-core systems while being stable and long-lasting to accommodate the needs of bleeding-edge technology for years to come.

Regardless of the system or purpose there is a given rule: whether it is a simple workstation with integrated components or an advanced gaming system with newest technology available, everything requires power to operate. With this in mind, we should all be able to agree that the power supply unit is the single most important part of any computer. As anyone who has suffered the failure of a low-end power supply will tell you: not all power supply units (PSU's) are created equal, and looks really don't mean a thing.

While most of the mundane workstations found on top of office desks would do well with almost any PSU because of their minimal power consumption, anyone utilizing one of Intel or AMD's latest line of processors with a modern graphics card will have no choice but to upgrade. Although I believe only the most hardcore gamers would ever call 880W of power to feed their energy-thirsty team of video cards, that doesn't stop Hiper from giving others the opportunity for expansion if it were ever necessary. High Performance Group (Hiper) builds several power supply units, and today our mission here at Benchmark Reviews is to pick-apart their newly revamped Type R series of PSU's. Available in both 680W (HPU-5B680) and 880W (HPU-5K880), we will do our best to offer perspective on the DC voltage regulation and AC current ripple.

The latest trends include 80-PLUS efficiency ratings, but since most manufacturers submit their own stated specifications to Ecos for certification the lack of regulated official testing has caused the badge has lose meaning. Not that efficiency isn't still important, but manufacturers have tried to attract buyers with several features. Without any warning, it was as if every company manufacturing power supply units suddenly decided that they could win the battle for industry dominance by combining all of the above features, and add a nice paint job or mirror finish for good measure. The new generation of power supplies has begun to amp up the competition for placement in your computer case. Antec’s EarthWatts series was among the first to cause a stir in the PSU industry by emphasizing efficient power delivery over the multi-rail hype over two years ago. But now 80% or better efficiency is very common.

Benchmark Reviews has seen some major changes within the power supply industry over the past year. Even in such a limited purpose industry, somehow fads manage to come into existence. At one point, the number of rails a PSU offered was key to media hype. At another point, you could see everyone pushing for the highest watts in their new product. I can't forget how modular power supplies, with the assortment of cables and interfaces, also shared some time in the limelight.

Somehow, the industry is shifting back to square one. Both Hiper products we are reviewing (HPU-5K880 880W & HPU-5B680 680W) do not offer modular cable groups, and other manufacturers are following this model. The primary complaint is the failure rate of such modular connections and units, which has caused manufacturers to receive higher returns for non-faulty products due to cable and connection issues.

source : benchmarkreviews.com

Microsoft has applied for a patent on metered, pay-as-you-go computing.

2009-01-04T01:00:00.000-08:00

By David Meyer ZDNet.co.uk

US patent application number 20080319910, published on Christmas Day 2008, details Microsoft's vision of a situation where a "standard model" of PC is given away or heavily subsidized by someone in the supply chain. The end user then pays to use the computer, with charges based on both the length of usage time and the performance levels utilized, along with a "one-time charge".

Microsoft notes in the application that the end user could end up paying more for the computer, compared with the one-off cost entailed in the existing PC business model, but argues the user would benefit by having a PC with an extended "useful life".

"A computer with scalable performance level components and selectable software and service options has a user interface that allows individual performance levels to be selected," reads the patent application's abstract.

"The scalable performance level components may include a processor, memory, graphics controller, etc. Software and services may include word processing, email, browsing, database access, etc. To support a pay-per-use business model, each selectable item may have a cost associated with it, allowing a user to pay for the services actually selected and that presumably correspond to the task or tasks being performed," the abstract continues.

Integral to Microsoft's vision is a security module, embedded in the PC, that would effectively lock the PC to a certain supplier.

"The metering agents and specific elements of the security module… allow an underwriter in the supply chain to confidently supply a computer at little or no upfront cost to a user or business, aware that their investment is protected and that the scalable performance capabilities generate revenue commensurate with actual performance level settings and usage," the application reads.

'A more granular approach'
According to the application, the issue with the existing PC business model is that it "requires more or less a one chance at the consumer kind of mentality, where elasticity curves are based on the pressure to maximize profits on a one-time-sale, one-shot-at-the-consumer mentality".

Microsoft's proposed model, on the other hand, could "allow a more granular approach to hardware and software sales", the application states, adding that the user "may be able to select a level of performance related to processor, memory, graphics power, etc that is driven not by a lifetime maximum requirement but rather by the need of the moment".

"When the need is browsing, a low level of performance may be used and, when network-based interactive gaming is the need of the moment, the highest available performance may be made available to the user," the document reads. "Because the user only pays for the performance level of the moment, the user may see no reason to not acquire a device with a high degree of functionality, in terms of both hardware and software, and experiment with a usage level that suits different performance requirements."

By way of example, the application posits a situation involving three "bundles" of applications and performance: office, gaming and browsing.

"The office bundle may include word-processing and spreadsheet applications, medium graphics performance and two of three processor cores," the document reads. "The gaming bundle may include no productivity applications but may include 3D graphics support and three of three processor cores. The browsing bundle may include no productivity applications, medium graphics performance and high-speed network interface."

"Charging for the various bundles may be by bundle and by duration. For example, the office bundle may be $1.00 [68 pence] per hour, the gaming bundle may be $1.25 per hour and the browsing bundle may be $0.80 per hour. The usage charges may be abstracted to 'units/hour' to make currency conversions simpler. Alternatively, a bundle may incur a one-time charge that is operable until changed or for a fixed-usage period," the document reads.

Microsoft's patent application does acknowledge that a per-use model of computing would probably increase the cost of ownership over the PC's lifetime. The company argues in its application, however, that "the payments can be deferred and the user can extend the useful life of the computer beyond that of the one-time purchase machine".

The document suggests that "both users and suppliers benefit from this new business model" because "the user is able to migrate the performance level of the computer as needs change over time, while the supplier can develop a revenue stream business that may actually have higher value than the one-time purchase model currently practiced".

"Rather than suffering through less-than-adequate performance for a significant portion of the life of a computer, a user can increase performance level over time, at a slight premium of payments," the application reads. "When the performance level finally reaches its maximum and still better performance is required, then the user may upgrade to a new computer, running at a relatively low performance level, probably with little or no change in the cost of use."

source : news.zdnet.comn

Kingwin Mach 1 ABT-800MA1S 800W Modular PSU

2009-01-04T00:53:00.000-08:00

Kingwin ABT-800MA1S PSU

Kingwin has recently decided to join the ranks of other companies which have branched their product line into the power supply unit industry. More know for their very effective HDT Heatpipe Direct Touch coolers, Kingwin is also insistent that their PSU line be just as beneficial to the hardware enthusiast. Overclockers and gamers will most likely enjoy the impressive nickel-finished appearance, while system builders and casual users will appreciate the quality build into this power supply. Benchmark Review load tests the Kingwin Mach 1 ABT-800MA1S 800W Modular PSU for AC power ripple and DC voltage regulation.

Next generation platforms and high performance graphics cards are essential to modern gamers and hardware enthusiasts, just as much as the new software designed to use on them. While most of the mundane workstations found on top of office desks would do well with almost any PSU because of their minimal power consumption, anyone utilizing one of Intel or AMD's latest line of processors with a modern graphics card will have no choice but to upgrade. Although I believe only the most hardcore gamers would ever call 800W of power to feed their energy-thirsty team of video cards, that doesn't stop Kingwin from giving others the opportunity for expansion if it were ever necessary.

Regardless of the system or purpose there is a given rule: whether it is a simple workstation with integrated components or an advanced gaming system with newest technology available, everything requires power to operate. With this in mind, we should all be able to agree that the power supply unit is the single most important part of any computer. As anyone who has suffered the failure of a low-end power supply will tell you: not all power supply units (PSU's) are created equal, and looks really don't mean a thing.

The latest trends include 80-PLUS efficiency ratings, but since most manufacturers submit their own stated specifications to Ecos for certification the lack of regulated official testing has caused the badge has lose meaning. Not that efficiency isn't still important, but manufacturers have tried to attract buyers with several features. Without any warning, it was as if every company manufacturing power supply units suddenly decided that they could win the battle for industry dominance by combining all of the above features, and add a nice paint job or mirror finish for good measure. The new generation of power supplies has begun to amp up the competition for placement in your computer case. Antec’s EarthWatts series was among the first to cause a stir in the PSU industry by emphasizing efficient power delivery over the multi-rail hype over two years ago. But now 80% or better efficiency is very common.

Benchmark Reviews has seen some major changes within the power supply industry over the past year. Even in such a limited purpose industry, somehow fads manage to come into existence. At one point, the number of rails a PSU offered was key to media hype. At another point, you could see everyone pushing for the highest watts in their new product. I can't forget how modular power supplies, with the assortment of cables and interfaces, also shared some time in the limelight.

Somehow, the industry is shifting back to square one. Both Hiper products we are reviewing (HPU-5K880 880W & HPU-5B680 680W) do not offer modular cable groups, and other manufacturers are following this model. The primary complaint is the failure rate of such modular connections and units, which has caused manufacturers to receive higher returns for non-faulty products due to cable and connection issues.

source : benchmarkreviews.com

Honeywell Altura MLX 42-inch 1080p 10-bit HDTV

2009-01-04T00:51:00.000-08:00

Honeywell Altura MLX HDTV

Not all televisions are created equally, and yet most consumers are in the dark when it comes to knowing the difference. However, for those smart shoppers who keep in touch with technology, Honeywell offers a treat for home theater enthusiasts. The Altura MLX series delivers a 1080p resolution at the double-rate 120Hz display speed. The Honeywell MT-HWJCT42B2AB offers 42" of full high-definition LCD viewing with a 10-bit color gamut far superior to most all other LCD panels. Benchmark Reviews tests the performance and quality of this HDTV in this article.

Don't let anyone lead you believe that High Definition Televisions are the future... a more correct statement is that HDTV's have already been around for a few years and are the here and now. Unfortunately, not everyone is up to speed, and some are going to be very surprised by the changes in store only a few months away. You see, by the time this article is published there will be exactly 90-days remaining until D-Day hits and the transition to an all-digital terrestrial broadcast begins. In past articles Benchmark Reviews gave you specific instructions on how to survive this digital transition, which offered a guide on how to smartly buy your first HDTV. However, in this article we test one of the better alternatives for step-up consumers who want to enjoy full high-definition content without falling into the money pit.

Now that analog televisions are finally a page in the history books (with or without a transition looming), consumers almost have no real choice in the matter except to get onboard the digital revolution. It would make good sense to know what you should be shopping for. Just as it is with computers, the difference between buying obsolete from cutting edge has nothing to do with looks. There are a few very basic items that should be considered a "given" in HDTV technology, and these are the basic rules I mentioned in our how-to guide.

source : benchmarkreviews.com

VIA Nano CPU - Codename Isaiah

2009-01-04T00:47:00.000-08:00

VIA Nano CPU - Codename Isaiah

VIA Technologies Inc. started shipping its current family of x86 processors in early 2000. Seven major versions-culminating in the VIA C7 processor-have shipped through the end of 2007. While compatible with the x86 instruction-set architecture, the internal architecture of these processors is very different from other x86 processor designs. This unique internal architecture yields processors that are significantly smaller (lower cost) and use significantly less power than other x86 processors from AMD and Intel.

While the current VIA C7 processors are a perfect fit for many users and applications, a new architecture was needed to keep pace with the rapid introduction of new functions and improved performance from Intel. Accordingly, over the last four years, VIA made a major investment in its U.S.-based processor design subsidiary-Centaur Technology Inc.-to develop a completely new x86 processor architecture. The result is a new architecture, codenamed the VIA Isaiah Architecture, that complements current VIA products by offering significantly more function and performance within the same low-power envelope.

On the 29th of May 2008 VIA announced the Nano CPU, a processor built from Isaiah architecture. Building on the market-leading energy efficiency of their existing VIA C7 processor family, the VIA Nano processor family offers as much as four times the performance within the same power range to extend VIA's performance per watt leadership, while identical pin compatibility with VIA C7 processors will ensure a smooth transition for OEMs and motherboard vendors, and provides them with an easy upgrade path for current system or board designs.

VIA's 'nano' association also extends to VIA's signature silicon and platform design characteristics of power efficiency and form factor size reduction, as demonstrated by VIA's ultra compact Nano-ITX boards and the nanoBGA2 processor packaging used for the current VIA C7 processor family and the first generation of VIA Nano processors.

source : benchmarkreviews.com

NVIDIA Tegra 650 Mobile Processor

2009-01-04T00:44:00.000-08:00

NVIDIA Tegra Processor

NVIDIA has done very well for itself over the past decade. While most of the world can recognize the chip-maker for its popular GeForce product line, very few might realize that this green-machine also has focus outside of the graphics card industry. Like any company that has mastered its craft, NVIDIA set out to develop a competitive processor design that would change the face of mobile computing. Earlier this year NVIDIA announced that they were ready to product the APX 2500 application processor for a new line of handheld mobile Internet devices, but then very little actually materialized. Back with what might be considered a re-launch, NVIDIA launches the Tegra 650 and 600 mobile processors.

A few weeks ago at the NVIDIA Editors Day 2008, Benchmark Reviews was fortunate enough to meet with NVIDIA's mobile products staff and witness the Tegra processor in action. Using the APX 2500 processor in a mobile Internet device, we were able to see how a Smart Phone or portable media player could not only display full 720p content on its screen (or external display via HDMI interface), but is could also encode the very same media.

"Creating Tegra was a massive challenge. Our vision was to create a platform that will enable the 2nd personal computer revolution - which will be mobile centric, with devices that last days on a single charge, and yet has the web, high definition media, and computing experiences we've come to expect from our PC," said Jen-Hsun Huang, president and CEO at NVIDIA. "Shrinking down a 50 watt PC architecture will not create the discontinuity this industry needs. The culmination of nearly 1,000 man years of engineering, Tegra is a completely ground-up computer-on-a-chip architecture that consumes 100 times less power. Mobile internet and computing devices built with Tegra are going to be magical."

NVIDIA is building their mobile product offerings around the Windows Mobile 7 Operating System, which can offer a host of mobile compute applications to take full advantage of the Tegra 650 Mobile Processor. While the Tegra Processor is capable, you won't find any 3D video games running on a Tegra handheld device, which might disturb the ultra-conservative 2 Watts of power consumption.

source : benchmarkreviews.com

Intel Core i7 CPU & DX58SO X58 Platform

2009-01-04T00:41:00.000-08:00

Intel Core i7 CPU

For the last several months the hottest topic on just about every venue for computer product information has been the forthcoming release of the new Intel Core i7, the first series of processors in the new Nehalem product line. There's not been a day out of that time frame that some prognosticator has not forecasted when we would see this product on the store shelves. Why so much fervor and hype? Well that's very simple, the Core i7 processors are reputed to literally smoke the current Core 2 Quad 45nm processors which literally rule high-end computing. Talk about getting an enthusiast's adrenaline flowing!

Fast forward to Sunday, November 2, 2008, which by the way happens to be today and also very special date in time both for all computer enthusiasts and also for us at Benchmark Reviews. At 9:00 PM PST we're finally able to put all the hype, myths and rumors to rest as the embargo on product information on the forthcoming release of the Intel Core i7 processor series has officially been lifted. Notice I used that word again, "forthcoming" and not that doesn't mean tomorrow this product will be available on the shelves of your favorite distributor on Monday morning. What it does mean is that because is that the sheer magnitude of launching an entirely new product line of this scope is a daunting task to the very least. Intel and their partners have chosen to phase in the launch meaning you should see it available for purchase sometime later in November.

Rather than allowing consumers to continue speculating about just what this new product line has to offer Intel has chosen to take the high road and has sent pre-release samples of the entire Core i7 system to selected review sites. It was then the job of these sites to garner as much information regarding this product line as possible in a relatively short time span and pass it on to our readers.

DX58SO Smackover X58 Platform

We at Benchmark Reviews consider ourselves extremely fortunate to have been chosen by Intel as one of those review sites to showcase the Core i7 prior to its official launch. Once chosen our dilemma was how to best convey the myriad of information we ascertained to our readers. Obviously the best plan would be to release one all encompassing review of the entire product line. Because of time constraints this plan was impossible. After much deliberation we decided our best recourse was to present a series of reviews on this product line. In today's segment we will cover an overview of the technological aspects of the Core i7 processor series and the X58 motherboard that supports it. We'll test all three of the processors using a succinct series of benchmarks run a stock processor speeds and draw the necessary conclusions from their results. What else is left you might ask? Believe me when I say that's only scratching the surface. In future reviews we'll concentrate on individual product components and expound in much greater detail on that product's performance capabilities including overclocking.

source : benchmarkreviews.com

Intel Core i7-965 Extreme Edition Processor

2009-01-04T00:38:00.000-08:00

Intel Core i7-965XE CPU

On November 3, Benchmark Reviews had the pleasure of publishing our first in a series of articles and reviews covering Intel's newest processor series, the Core i7. As we alluded to in that article the time frame from receiving our review kit to publishing the finished product was only a matter of days, so something had to give. We opted to stick with the basics and present a general overview of the entire product. As a result we had to omit many of the extras we would have normally included in a feature article of this type. Since the release of that article we have had a number of our readers request future articles in our series that deal more with with the specifics of each processor. The same group was somewhat adamant that we showcase both performance tuning and the overclocking capabilities of each product.

Fear not my enthusiast brethren, in our second publication we will be covering all that you asked for and more as we review the Intel Core i7-965 Extreme Edition (XE). We have now had sufficient time to spend with Core i7 series and our knowledge base on these processors and their supporting components has grown exponentially. This review is pretty much strictly Intel, meaning the motherboard, and the vast majority of the rest of the components we used in our testing are Intel's own. The BIOS on the motherboard is still considered a pre-release version. What I'm getting at here is don't hold the results we present today as being the "Holy Grail" of this processor's capability. It usually holds true with any new product release of this magnitude that it will take two to three months of BIOS and driver maturity after the release to get a complete picture of product's complete performance profile.

In our first article, Intel Core i7 CPU & DX58SO X58 Platform we covered most of the available information regarding both the Nehalem Technology and the architecture used with the Intel Core i7 Processor family. We will therefore not repeat that discussion, instead; our goal today is to spend most of our energy concentrating on those features and performance aspects of the Intel Core i7-965XE model BX80601965 that have led it and its other i7 kin to be dubbed "The Fastest Processor on the Planet" by Intel.

source : benchmarkreviews.com

Intel Core i7-920 Processor BX80601920

2009-01-04T00:35:00.000-08:00

Intel Core i7-920

On November 3, Benchmark Reviews had the pleasure of publishing our first in a series of articles and reviews covering Intel's newest processor series, the Core i7. As we alluded to in that article the time frame from receiving our review kit to publishing the finished product was only a matter of days, so something had to give. We opted to stick with the basics and present a general overview of the entire product. As a result we had to omit many of the extras we would have normally included in a feature article of this type. Since the release of that article we have had a number of our readers request future articles in our series that deal more with with the specifics of each processor. The same group was somewhat adamant that we showcase both performance tuning and the overclocking capabilities of each product.

Today we are releasing the third review in our Core i7 series which focuses on the features and performance of the Intel Core i7-920. The Core i7-920 is considered to be the processor for the mainstream consumer primarily because of its price to performance ratio. The i7-920 doesn't have the unlocked multipliers that its more mature sibling does, but it is still a quite capable chip with its 2.66 GHz factory clock. We intend to share all of our findings and hope after reading this review you will have a much better understanding of the Core i7 family in general and the i7-920 in specific. We also plan to go into as complete of a discussion as possible on everything you can do to enhance capabilities this processor brings to the table. Unfortunately we don't have a QX9770, Intel's previous "King of the Hill", to compare the i7-920 to; but we should note that in all the test results we've seen the i7-920 outperforms the QX9770 in all processor dependant tasks. So the only true competition for the i7-920 are the other members of the Core i7 family which we will be testing for comparison purposes.

In our first article, Intel Core i7 CPU & DX58SO X58 Platform we covered most of the available information regarding both the Nehalem Technology and the architecture used with the Intel Core i7 Processor family. We will therefore not repeat that discussion, instead; our goal today is to spend most of our energy concentrating on those features and performance aspects of the Intel Core i7-920 (model BX80601920) that have led it and its other i7 kin to be dubbed "The Fastest Processor on the Planet" by Intel.

source : benchmarkreviews.com

Corsair PC3-14400 DDR3 1800MHz 2GB RAM Kit

2009-01-01T17:54:00.000-08:00

Corsair TWIN3X2048-1800C7DF G

Optimized for the latest Intel DDR3 chipset, primarily the P35, X38, and the upcoming P45/X48 chipsets, the Corsair Dominator PC3-14400 DDR3 1800MHz 2GB RAM Kit TWIN3X2048-1800C7DF G is among the best possible performance solutions presently available to the consumer market. The TWIN3X2048-1800C7DF G DDR3 kit is the highest performance offering from Corsair, and is aimed at ultra-enthusiasts.

By using Dual-path Heat Xchange (DHX) Corsair has designed their TWIN3X2048-1800C7DF G PC3-1800 kit to offer performance enthusiasts the best possible overclocking results. This solution is expected to be adopted by ultra enthusiast choosing to build DDR3 systems, looking for maximum overclock headroom and reliability from their memory modules.

Benchmark Reviews is approaching the conclusion to our High-Speed DDR3 Overclocking and Review Series, which has featured over one dozen different DDR3 kits. Many of the kits we have tested so far have achieved extremely uncommon overclock speeds, while other kits impress us with their combination of performance and value. So far, we have reviewed two of the three worlds fastest DDR3 kits: Patriot PDC32G1866LLK PC3-15000 DDR3 1866MHz and Super Talent PC3-14400 DDR3 1800MHz W1800UX2GP. Today we are especially pleased to test the Corsair Dominator PC3-14400 DDR3 1800MHz 2GB RAM Kit TWIN3X2048-1800C7DF G. You might say that we have saved the best for last, because this kit is amazing!

While the Patriot PDC32G1866LLK kit may presently hold the title for the fastest DDR3 module produced, there are several others that overclock to nearly the same speed... or faster. Because of the very limited quantities and slowly growing demand, the prices are almost as high as the speeds; which makes it difficult to recommend the kit that is best for any particular need. Even when I approach a term like "best", not even an experienced analyst like me can tell you which DDR3 product is "the best kit" because at this early stage the concept of "best" takes on a relative meaning. But in terms of fastest ... well, it looks like Benchmark Reviews should have no problem helping you with that dilemma.

Many of the readers will probably not consider DDR3 an important part of the hardware market just yet, and in a few ways I can agree with them. It's expensive, and it's not going to change their system from a 2 to a 10. But I think that this argument only exists if you have missed the point: DDR3 is a more efficient replacement over DDR2 in many different ways, but high-speed DDR3 is intended for overclockers and enthusiasts almost exclusively. In a year from now, expect to have DDR3 pressed into your new motherboard. However for today, the demand behind DDR3 and its high-speed variants is best met by the growing number of hardware enthusiasts which push their equipment well past the stock settings.

All of this is great news for the overclocker, the hardcore gamer, and the hardware enthusiast; which has been the case every time high-end system memory parts arrive on the market. It wasn't all that long ago we all had SDRAM with 1 and 1.5CL timings, and then DDR arrived with CL3. Nobody complained then, so I'm not sure why they are starting now. It was the exact same story when DDR2 arrived to replace DDR; which nearly doubled the timings. So from a technical standpoint we should appreciate that the timings have only gradually increased with the clock speed, because history has proven this to be difficult.

source : benchmarkreviews.com

Kingston KHX13000D3LLK2/2G PC3-13000 DDR3 1625MHz

2009-01-01T17:52:00.001-08:00

Kingston PC3-13000 DDR3

Since JEDEC is about to finalize 1600MHz as a standard DDR3 speed, many kits which were once considered High-Speed will now be relegated to standard speed parts. Perhaps a clairvoyant vision helped with the decision, because Kingston's KHX13000D3LLK2/2G PC3-13000 CL7 DDR3 RAM kit stays ahead of the curve at 1625MHz.

System memory (RAM) manufacturers are in a tough position these days. Everybody wants the latest technology, which runs faster and operates more efficiently, but nobody wants the price tag that comes with it. Because DDR2 fabrication assembly plants are nearing obsolescence, the equipment depreciation has caused DDR2 prices to drop below the actual cost of production. This is bad news for the manufacturer, while conversely it means great savings to the consumer. So while manufacturers try to squeeze the last drops of revenue out of DDR2, along comes DDR3.

Many of the readers will probably not consider DDR3 an important part of the hardware market just yet, and in a very few ways I can agree with them. It's expensive, and it's not going to change their system from a 2 to a 10. Nevertheless, I think that this argument only exists if you have missed the point: DDR3 is a more efficient replacement over DDR2 in many different ways, and high-speed DDR3 (presently anything over 1333MHz) is intended for overclockers and enthusiasts almost exclusively. In a year from now, expect to have DDR3 pressed into your new motherboard. However for today, the demand behind DDR3 and its high-speed variants is best met by the growing number of hardware enthusiasts which push their equipment well past the stock settings.

Benchmark Reviews continues our DDR3 Review Series, and today we focus on the system builder and enthusiast user. Many of the kits we have tested so far have helped achieve extremely uncommon overclock speeds right out of the box, and even though some of the kits aren't trying to set new speed records they still manage to impress us with their combination of performance and value. In this review we offer a product that is both affordable and performance orientated as the Kingston PC3-13000 CL7 1625MHz DDR3 KHX13000D3LLK2/2G kit is tested.

All of this is great news for the overclocker, the hardcore gamer, and the hardware enthusiast; which has been the case every time high-end system memory parts arrive to the market. It wasn't all that long ago we all had SDRAM with 1 and 1.5CL timings, and then DDR arrived with CL3. Nobody complained then, so I'm not sure why they are starting now. It was the exact same story when DDR2 arrived to replace DDR; which nearly doubled the timings. So from a technical standpoint we should appreciate that the timings have only gradually increased with the clock speed, because history has proven this to be difficult.

The Patriot DDR3 1866MHz kit we reviewed not long ago presently holds the record for fastest DDR3 module produced, and the Corsair DDR3 1800MHz kit overclocked to 1900MHz which is simply incredible. But to no surprise the price for this product alone is nearly enough to build a nice computer system. It is for this very reason that system builders have been slow to build off of the DDR3 platform: everything looks expensive. Well, with the Kingston KHX13000D3LLK2/2G kit that doesn't have to be the case.

source : benchmarkreviews.com