Archive for the ‘Laptops’ Category

The rumors and gossip surrounding this topic are starting to get a little thick. But hopefully we can take the words of HP’s Chief Technology Office Phil McKinney stating that HP funding the development of a rival operating system to Vista “makes no sense”. Especially when their goal has been “innovating on top of Vista.”.

But the confusion comes from the fact that BusinessWeek has reported that there are people within HP who are “exploring the possibility of building a mass-market operating system.”. The rumors also state that the OS would be based around Linux, but much easier for the average user to grasp.

Guess we’ll have to wait and see.

Looking for a large yet affordable laptop hard drive? Well if you missed out on the Samsung SpinPoint M6, you’ll be happy to hear that Western Digital has started shipping their own 9.5 mm x 2.5 inch 500GB laptop drive. They’re coming out and bulk and coming out fast under the name WD Scorpio Blue. These bad boys have an 8MB cache, runs through SATA 3Gbps transfer with 12 ms access, and is considered to be one of the quietest 2.5 inch 5,400 rpm hard drives on the market.

The 500GB model will be available shortly for the price of $220. You can currently get the 400GB version for $190.

With the Dell Inspiron Mini 9 already having shipped, it comes as a bit of a confusion as to why Tesco is selling a moderately unrecognizable Dell laptop for £299. The image shown beow is clearly the Inspiron Mini 9, but it’s labeled as an Inspiron Z530. What’s more confusing then that is the fact that there is currently no 12 inch Atom based laptop model available by Dell under any product model. Plus, there’s nothing listed anywhere about the Z530.

These specs do match up directly with the unreleased 12.1 inch E Slim offered by Dell. You’re looking at a 1.6GHz Atom processor, 2.6lb weight, 12 in WXGA 1,366 x 768 resolution display, 40GB hard drive, and Ubuntu Linux.

I guess we’ll have to wait until October 6th to find out more!

We would hate to get your hopes up and dash them away, but there’s always something that’s worth chancing it. Rumor has it that this Friday, September 5th, will be the official launch date of the Dell Inspiron 910.

The Inspiron 910 is Dell’s first step into the netbook market and it’s definitely causing some waves. There unfortunately is no pricing information available, even for this rumor, so we’ll have to wait and see what they’re looking to get for this nice looking machine. The Inspiron 910 is expected to take a lot bigger share of the netbook market then other competitors to the Eee PC due to it’s branding, but only time will tell how true that statement is.

It’s finally arrived! The MSI Wind U90 has finally made its way onto the store shelves. The Linux version of the ever popular MSI has been highly anticipated since the announcement of the system awhile back, but has been evading us until just recently. The Wind U90 will be running SUSE Linux exclusively, however there will be an XP version of it in the near future.

This new model MSI Wind will be available by the end of September or beginning of October and will go for a shiny 339 Euro’s. Unfortunately no word has been given yet on a stateside release date nor have we heard anymore on the upgrade to the 6 cell battery MSI has been promising.

Samsung has had a chance to release a pretty nifty laptop that they call the X360. The issue with this laptop is, unfortunately revolves around a claim that it’s actually lighter than the Macbook Air. This isn’t exactly true.

While the X360 is very slim (.66 inches at it’s thinnest, 1.2 inches at it’s fattest) and light weight (2.8lbs) it doesn’t beat out the air for the title it holds. Nor does it look that great in manilla. But it is still a great laptop.

The X360 has a 13.3 inch screen running at a max resolution of 1280 x 800, Centrino 2 ULV processor,1-4GB RAM, 64GB/128GB SSD or 120GB HDD, and integrated X4500 graphics. There’s no optical drive, but you do have plenty of accessibility with it’s 7 in 1 card reader, three USB ports, PCI ExpressCard/34, HDMI and VGA output, Ethernet port, and a docking port. And for connections we’ve got WiFi, Bluetooth 2.0+ EDR, and even a 1.3 megapixel camera.

You’ll be able to enjoy this bad boy for about 6 hours with its standard battery, so definitely consider this before your net laptop purchase.

Intel has been passing around the Atom name on a few of their different processors over the past several months. There have been two Atom processors as of late: the Centrino Atom (known in-house as the Menlow chipset) and the Atom (known as either the Silverthorn or Diamondville chipset).

What does this mean for you? Well besides sounding like a fool to the 4 people who know what’s up in the entire world, nothing. The Centrino Atom, used in MIDs and UMPCs is now nameless while the Atom itself gets to keep the name. As Intel figures out exactly what they’re looking to do name wise for the formerly mentioned Centrino Atom, we’ll keep you posted.

Prices of Solid State Disks (SSD) are dropping like crazy recently. Don’t believe me? Check out what Dell has started offering:

Their XPS line-up has been well known for having versatility all around. But being able to buy a 128GB SSD for the XPS M1330 and M1530 laptops for just $450 is quite the price cut.

While this is nowhere near as good as the type-o we saw reducing the price of the upgraded SSD to $80 less than the regular system, it’s a step in the right direction for the format that everyone is craving to get in larger quantities.

The drives are direct from Samsung too, so that’s got to same something for the quality.

Got several Macbooks or iBooks? Perhaps you run an underground Apple triage center? Either way, if you’re in need of rapidly charging multiple Apple laptop batteries at any given time, then perhaps you should check out the Oncore Power’s 6 bay charging station.

This bad boy charges 3 out of the 6 slots at a time, leaving you the ability to fill the other slots or just make is slightly easer for you to snag a battery as you need it. The base model will run you $395 but there are other models that come with additional batteries just in case you only have 1 or 2 yet feel drawn to this gadget.

If third party Apple repairs actually existed successfully, this would be an Apple IT must.

More information has finally been revealed regarding the Fujitsu LifeBook U2010 netbook! Following in line with the recent popularity of the netbook craze, Fujitsu has incorporated the convertible aspects of their LifeBook line into a much smaller size. The system offers some high quality specs for a netbook, spouting a 1.6GHz Atom CPU, 5.6in WXGA displayer, 64GB SSD, 8 hour battery life, and a 1.3 megapixel webcam.

While there still is no word on when the device will hit the streets, the 5 color options for the Fujitsu LifeBook U2010 have been revealed: Ocean Black, Pink Gold, Cool Silver, Fuschia Red, and Luminous Blue.