Hardware
Holiday gadget review
Shopping for Christmas starts earlier every year. PC World already has a selection of gadgets to look at:
When it comes to gadgets and gear, smaller is better, high fashion is in vogue, and affordability will be king this holiday buying season. That’s the message from tech firms that showed off their holiday wares at [...]
Report shows RAM reliability less than expected
Google has a lot of computers, thousands and thousands of them. That puts the company in a position to gather a lot of information about the reliability of computer components and periodically Google releases some of its data. For example, some of the best information about hard drive failure rates came from a study [...]
Now that’s a computer
How do you like these specs? 16,000 six-core 2.6-GHz processors, 129 terabytes of memory, and a quadrillion calculations per second. That’s the Cray supercomputer managed by the University of Tennessee for the National Institute for Computational Sciences, which is now the world’s most powerful academic computer.
Via ScienceDaily.
Future mice
Microsoft is a big seller of computer mice and recently the company previewed some new concepts for the mouse interface. Gizmodo shows some of the ideas. You can see a video there along with some pictures of futuristic mice. The main technology theme seems to be using touch and gesture instead of clicks:
The name of [...]
Turning on PCs instantly
One of the drags in Windows systems is the length of time it takes to get a machine booted up and running. This is not inherent in PCs; Linux systems generally boot much faster, for example. Various technologies for near-instant bootup have been around for quite a while but the Windows hegemony has always been [...]
Tablet buzz
There has been a lot of speculation going around about a tablet PC offering from both Apple and Microsoft. Tablet PCs are not new; a few examples have been around for years. Although they have never been popular up to now, advances in hardware have now made it possible to have more desirable features. This [...]
Will touch be the new PC Interface?
Using touch to interface with a computer is an old idea but has not been seen much in standard desktop PCs. Specialized systems in businesses and devices like the iPod use touch but it’s keyboard and mouse for most home PCs. However, Windows 7 is coming with enhanced touch features and some are saying that [...]
Throwing cold water on Microsoft tablet PC
At Computerworld, Mike Elgan says he has major doubts about the existence of the supposed Microsoft tablet PC mentioned on Wednesday. In fact, he gets pretty hot about it:
Here’s an idea. Let’s make the effort to separate fantasy from reality, and inject the same measure of skepticism and realism in consumer technology that we do [...]
Four-screen laptop
Using two screens while working with a PC is not uncommon but Intel has demonstrated a four-screen laptop. Tom’s Hardware reports:
One of the more interesting ideas from Intel is the multi-screen laptop. While making a laptop with more than one display isn’t a new concept (Lenovo’s W700 or the gScreen), integrating four into one is [...]
Microsoft’s tablet PC
With portability being in high demand these days, everybody’s been speculating about whether Apple was going to come out with a tablet version of the Mac. No concrete word on that front but it seems that Microsoft wants to get in the game also. Gizmodo has gotten hold of information about a Microsoft project called [...]
802.11n wireless standard finally approved
The faster, more long-range wireless standard 802.11n has been around for years and many home routers now use it. However, the standard has not had official approval until now. The IEEE has finally given formal approval. InfoWorld reports:
The IEEE has finally approved the 802.11n high-throughput wireless LAN standard.
There’s been no public announcement yet by IEEE. [...]