For a company that’s lost a lot of profit over the past year, Intel is not one to back down from trying new products and marketing them heavily. Just recently, they released two versions of its Xeon processors for servers, and already companies have started to bundle them with stand-alone packages. In an attempt to get back what it’s lost, they’ve continued the momentum by announcing two new brands of processors.
First, a new brand of processors for storage products and embedded applications, coded-named Jasper Forest. Not a lot of information has been shown thus far about the products, but it will come in single-, dual-, and quad-core flavors. According to Owen Fletcher, “The input/output hub on Jasper Forest has been integrated right onto the chip,” something that hasn’t been tried with previous processors of this type.
Second, a new version of the popular Atom microprocessor line for mobile devices and netbooks, this time with 2 GHz speed. While it’s definitely the edge that Netbooks are going to need if they want to attract more sales in the upcoming year, having a 2 GHz Atom inside a Palm Pilot or Blackberry would make it a lot more efficient than the majority of the processors built for these devices. Equally awesome, the entire line of Atom products will support Windows 7 right out of the box, great news for those who want to plunge right in to the new OS when it gets released.
The overall news is pretty vague, but it’s a good sign that Intel’s not ready to lay low and wait for the tide to clear before making more products.
There are two new $250 graphics cards out on the market, one from Nvidia, the other from AMD. While they both have their ups and downs, there’s almost always a way to get an older card to do what you want, albeit risky. I’m talking about overclocking, or forcing the part to work harder than intended, your computer. There’s the real way: getting into your BIOS and figuring out what speeds you need or can handle, but there’s also a lazier way that just gets the job done right, using a freeware product.
The kind I’m going to dive into is RivaTuner, which I use for my Nvidia GeForce 9600 GT. It’s a very simple program that lets you set up your speed right inside Windows. It may not be as powerful or useful as actually digging into your BIOS, but it will definitely get the job done for most of us. Using the product, I was able to overclock the 9600 GT by over 10%, as well as my DDR2 RAM. This is more than enough to get that extra kick of quality, making my time spent a lot more enjoyable.
The key is to figure out how high you’ll be able to go before your card can’t take it anymore and crashes. Slowly increase the clock speeds of your graphics card and memory, by checking with the same game. I knew I was in trouble when green bars started showing up unexpectedly and crashed the game, but your system may end up doing all sorts of things when it’s begging for mercy. Just bring it down a notch, and you’ll notice a far superior product. After you find a speed you’re comfortable with, have Windows launch the program at start-up, just so that you don’t have to worry about opening it every time you want to play a game.
Note that every card has its limits, and eventually you will need to upgrade if you plan to keep playing newer games. This will make the wait to cross that bridge much longer.
We’ve got a double-shot of netbook action today! For starters, long-time computer maker Hewlett-Packard announced that it may end up choosing Google Android, a Linux-based operating system that’s currently being used for mobile devices, for its upcoming lineup of netbooks. The article by CNet seems to site licensing costs by Microsoft as the driving force for the decision, not to mention that putting a sub-$200 console in today’s market would be an incredibly wise move to make, as analysts predict that 2009, and the next few years, will become a record-breaking time in netbook sales.
Given Google’s track record of quality products left open to the public, it’s not surprising that HP will likely make a deal with them in order to save money from purchasing Windows 7, or even left-over licenses from Vista. Plus, given Google’s great name in the IT world, it makes it a much more attractive Linux-based platform than a freeware-OS like Ubuntu would. Expect other companies to jump on this bandwagon in the coming months, or Microsoft to come up with a great idea to counteract them.
Next up, Tom’s Hardware caught a glimpse of Dell’s soon-to-be released netbook, capable of 720p output, or 1366×768 resolution, on a sleek widescreen that still utilizes the minimalistic attitude that netbooks offer. They do mention the caveat of a measly maximum 1 gig of RAM, which doesn’t seem to fit well with the idea of high definition video and gaming. One can’t help but wonder if the Mini 10’s widescreen and output defeats the purpose of the netbook: a cheap computer that’s super portable and does the bare essentials.
These are both huge steps in the new platform, the potential is really coming alive for these products in the near future. Being able to do more with less has always been an attractive selling point, and with all sorts of companies jumping on board, there’s simply going to be no stopping them any time soon.
File this one under Gloating. A few weeks ago, we reported the rumor that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 would be the final stop in the series, and given the reception of the just-released web browser, those suspicions just might be true.
PC World was reporting (using a tracker by Net Applications) that the new IE8 has failed to bring a significant amount of users from different browsers. In fact, they’ve lost some of their market share, which now stands at around 67% of the Internet, compared to almost 75% a year ago. Now, this isn’t an “abandon ship!” call, as 67% is obviously still the majority, but consider this: FireFox’s audience has grown almost 5% in that same time frame, with Apple’s Safari gaining a small audience from IE as well.
What does this mean? It means that IE8 was unable to innovate against the new market and bring some of the FireFox faithful onto their side. With Apple’s growing audience, Safari will be a surefire gain in the coming years. Google, obviously being Google, will definitely see a growth in their browser usage when enough word gets out about it. All of the aforementioned companies have spent significant resources upgrading their platform, making it more user-friendly while adding a bunch of neat features. What has Microsoft done?
Obviously Microsoft will still own a very significant portion of the Internet browser share for as long as people own Windows operating systems, since the vast majority of users won’t mind some of the differences between IE8 and one of the competitors, but the question remains: just how long will that last until Mozilla finally takes most of the market share, and then what will Google accomplish later on?
Almost three months after Intel started Beta support of Windows 7, and not too long after Nvidia updated its GPUs as well, their big rival has finally stepped up and released a driver that gives the support of its library of GPUs to the new OS today. AMD’s Radeon collection will now work with Windows 7’s beta as well as DirectX 10.1, and should keep their aim set on updating their line of processors somewhere down the line.
It’s interesting to note that since AMD has been steadily losing some much-needed ground to both Intel and Nvidia over the past few years, they wouldn’t begin supporting the new OS much sooner. This isn’t a whole lot to be concerned over, since it’s still in beta and doesn’t have a confirmed release date yet (but is rumored to be out sometime this year), but it would make sense on both the business scale and their consumers’ confidence that they would have all the pieces worked out for its line of products to avoid what happened back when Vista was released.
All in all, good show. Another company signs up and is willing to back up Microsoft in its new platform. As long as we’re not going to see another bombshell like last time, we’ll be satisfied with how this OS turns out.
Xandros Presto seems like a really neat idea: being able to get on your computer to do a few simple tasks without waiting for Windows to boot is a smart time saver for people on the go. But in reality, that’s all it accomplishes in its Open Beta. The 483 MB download and quick installation basically attaches itself to your motherboard, and works just like putting a second operating system onto your hard drive, allowing you whether to boot Presto or Windows when you start your computer. This is a similar approach enjoyed by Mac owners who prefer Windows operating systems, only a with much less space and a whole lot faster.
I was impressed by the fact that it booted relatively quickly. My computer (2.66 Intel Core 2 Duo, 4 Gigs DDR2 RAM) boots Vista from turning the computer on to letting me get to work in 53 seconds, which is not terrible considering…that it’s Vista. Presto was able to embarass the boot speed by booting in 27 seconds, almost half of what it takes to get Vista going. And with the bare bones approach: Firefox, Skype, the ability to chat using any other IM service, and being able to pull up existing files using Open Office, I was able to get started on whatever I wanted to right away. So for people on the go with laptops and netbooks, Presto gets my recommendation.
Desktop users may want to avoid it, however. A 26 second difference isn’t going to be huge for a lot of people, and Presto doesn’t pick up on most devices. So your camera, iPod, even your wireless connection, are compeltely out of the picture when using Presto. Putting drivers in conjunction with Presto seems to be a big hassle as well, since there won’t be much of a market for developers to have their products work with a small-scale developer like Xandros. It’s easy to tell that Presto is built from the ground-up using Linux, cutting as many corners as possible to achieve a fast bood speed. The convenience is no match for actually being able to do things on your desktop.
Another thing that bugged me was how ugly the interface looked. There wasn’t nothing but a stoic grey background, accompanied with a few buttons on the left side of the screen that was stretched out because of my widescreen monitor.
Xandros 4.1 doesn’t look that bad, why can’t Presto look a little more like that? Widescreen support would be nice, but the target audience seems to be those with laptops and netbooks, the latter which doesn’t offer any widescreen format for the sake of its compactness.
I honestly don’t see any desktop users picking up the full product, but there should be plenty of gold to mine with the laptop and netbook crowd. The Open Beta will at least look at getting some of the bugs out of the way for the April 13 launch, hopefully Xandros will work on getting it to work with wireless connections and devices more efficiently. The product will retail for $19.99.
Anybody who owns a gadget in today’s world faces frequent issues with electricity, especially those of us with environmental concerns. Apple’s new MacBook, though an expensive endeavour, has a new lithium ion battery that can be recharged fully over a thousand times in the battery’s lifetime. But a lot of other companies are starting to see the amount of money and PR that can be earned by going green.
Byoungwoo Kang and Gerbrand Ceder of MIT have a different story. While going green is a solid goal, convenience has its place in the business world, and charging up products sometimes takes a while. MIT, meanwhile, thinks that they could recharge the next generation of batteries mere seconds. In a story by Nature.com, the researchers found that the compound used in today’s lithium-ion batteries has a natural “crystal tunnel expressway” that, when tweaked to support the speed in which the electricity travels through, would likewise up the charge rate.
Still, it’s not unreasonable to question how much power these new batteries will be able to hold. Rechargable batteries have been closing the gap in recent years to their nonrechargeable cousins in terms of how long they can go, and since the new technology hasn’t been tested on a wide-scale, it’s unclear whether or not they’ll be able to support the devices of tomorrow.
However, that wide-scale experiment may come sooner than we think. Given the social push and the world’s governments ideologies shifting to a more reasonably environmentally friendly power gird, portable electronics may be one of the first things on the list to take advantage of the speedy recharge times. Though for more practical purposes, being able to charge up a car in ten minutes could be the pushing point for enough people to ditch the gasoline-powered vehicles and go with an electric car. But honestly, who wouldn’t like to charge up their laptop in under a minute? There’s a great market for this kind of thing, whoever jumps onto it first will no doubt see the public torrenting in their direction.
A lot of people noticed something when they downloaded Internet Explorer 7–released five years after IE6 and the death of its main competitor: Netscape–it looks a lot like Firefox! There’s a good reason why they took a few pages out of Mozilla’s playbook, the third-party Internet browser had surpassed IE6’s (and IE7 with its upgrade to 2.0 and buried it in the ground with 3.0) power, reliability, and sheer amount of user add-ons available over the scant allotment of what Microsoft offered to upgrade it. So with IE8 in development for Windows 7, there’s a chance Microsoft can come back to be relevant in the market, right?
Maybe not. A week ago, Microsoft announced that users can turn off certain system aspects in Windows 7, including, but not limited to: Windows Media Player, Microsoft Office, and Internet Explorer 8. Perhaps they have come to realize that in this day and age, independent makers of commonly-used programs are beginning to surpass those of the paid content found automatically on packaged operating systems. Open Office is a huge example of how to do freeware right, because who in their right mind will pay $150 for the current Office offerings when one can get a freeware version that can read the same files and do virtually the same thing for no cost?
Microsoft seems to be looking the direction of its increasing amount of competitors (this, by the way, is a must read), and with Google having entered the game with Chrome, a lot of companies are wondering if the search engine giant will become the next internet browser giant. In a page taken right out of the classic flash animation, Epic 2015, we see that the company’s growth, innovation, and accessibility are starting to take a real toll on its competitors, with no end in sight. While Apple’s Safari has grown more powerful thanks to the push of Apple’s desktops and notebooks, and Opera slowly becoming a more popular choice among independents, it’s tough for Microsoft to find its niche in the internet browsing market, other than inexperienced users (whose numbers are drastically dwindling).
The current rumor goes that IE8 will be made with WebKit, which was used for the core development of Safari and Chrome. Other than a few security features made famous by Windows Vista, Microsoft doesn’t have a lot of extra ground in this market. The icing on the cake may very well be the option to turn off IE8 in Windows 7, possibly showing Microsoft’s intention that there is little to be made from the market, where resources could be used to make the new OS more efficient, creatue new intellectual properties, or add ground-breaking features to existing ones. Because, let’s face it, there isn’t much to be made from something that’s available for free. With the market getting cluttered with superior products at no risk, spending too much to feebly compete is absurd.
If there’s one thing Microsoft knows how to do, it’s making money. They would be very wise to stop production of newer versions after IE8, keep a development team to make security and efficiency upgrades to the web browser, and focus more of their manpower on beating Google, Mozilla, and Apple, in the innovation game.
Just announced a few days ago, operating systems maker Xandros announced a new program that will allow users to get onto the Internet through Mozilla Firefox, instant message through Skype, and do other basic programs before Windows will even boot. The product is called Presto, and will be available for $19.99 on April 13, along with a free open beta that will be available on March 16 by signing up on their website.
A little digging around the Presto website and the Internet shows that Presto looks almost exactly like the Xandros operating system (by the way, Xandros company, I’m not sure it’s great PR to name your product after yourself in this business), only with most of the features taken out.
Having not heard of the Xandros OS prior to this, it didn’t take me long to find that it’s not exactly the answer to Windows Vista, but it’s a fairly uncomplicated Linux-based OS that is compatible with most Windows applications. But what the Xandros company claims about Presto could be a game changer.
Like installing Windows on an Mac, Presto will prompt you when you turn on your computer if you would like to run Presto or Windows. Apparently choosing Presto is a lot quicker than Windows in this case, as the site claims that one should be able to get online within seconds of turning on their PC using Firefox, access files through Open Office, and use other Linux-based applications through their free online “store.” But there isn’t enough proof in the pudding, a simple YouTube video should have the Internet talking more about this, but nobody outside the Xandros company has had real hands-on experience with it.
The product is aimed toward laptop and netbook users, but those with desktops can still get in on the action. It’s clearly not intended to be the replacement for any other operating system–since most of the corners look to be cut out with its Linux-application only approach–but rather as a “I just need to get on for three seconds to check out the website” approach for people on the go. We’ll find out more on March 16 when the open beta rolls out.
Regardless of how you feel about Vista, nobody can deny the amount of time and effort that GPU maker Nvidia has put into the operating system, often yielding superb results in an otherwise resource-hogging environment. The great news is that they plan to expand their support of Windows platforms through Windows 7, Ars reports. Along with Intel and a handful of other hardware makers eager to get a jump start on the competition within the next year, Nvidia has provided Driver updates for the Windows 7 beta (complete with 32-bit and 64-bit flavors, although in this stage of the game most of us should definitely be opting for the 64-bit option if the computer can power it).
While Ars still claims that Nvidia had a lot of issues regarding Vista…who in the beginning stages of the operating system didn’t? It started off as a buggy mess than hogged resources, and is now really being held back for the latter. The company has grown leaps and bounds since 2007: releasing new GPUs, adding support for the older ones to let them catch up, and updating all of their products with reliable drivers that have allowed them to expand in an amazingly frustrated market. No doubt their early support of Windows 7 will give top competitor AMD a run for their money.
With the new Windows still impressing everybody with its beta, it’s a wonder that companies still haven’t jumped on this train yet.
For a company that’s lost a lot of profit over the past year, Intel is not one to back down from trying new products and marketing them heavily. Just recently, they released two versions of its Xeon processors for servers, and already companies have started to bundle them with stand-alone packages. In an attempt to get back what it’s lost, they’ve continued the momentum by announcing two new brands of processors.
We’ve got a double-shot of netbook action today! For starters, long-time computer maker 
PC World was reporting (using 
Almost three months after 
Anybody who owns a gadget in today’s world faces frequent issues with electricity, especially those of us with environmental concerns. Apple’s new MacBook, though an 
Regardless of how you feel about Vista, nobody can deny the amount of time and effort that GPU maker Nvidia has put into the operating system, often yielding superb results in an otherwise resource-hogging environment. 