Over the past few months we have had quite a few looks at the various flavours of the Asus Eee PC. But now, because of the fantastic success of the Eee, copycat netbooks are coming out of the woodwork in an attempt to grab a slice of the action. Action is definitely the the right word as well, you only have to look at the most popular laptops on PriceGrabber  to see that,  the majority are Eee PC’s or other netbooks. Anyway it is definitely time to look at the growing competition. We started by looking at the Acer Aspire One a week ago and today I thought we should have a look at the MSI Wind.

MSI Wind

Due to its 10″ screen this netbook is a direct competitor to the Asus Eee PC 1000 and the price is also in the right ballpark (with the 80GB black version being about ₤30 cheaper).  The screen is the now fairly standard 1024 x 600-pixel resolution found on the more recent netbooks but the bigger size giving a better feel.  The bigger size also allows a near full size keyboard which should please people who feel cramped on the smaller notebooks.

Under the bonnet

In terms of specifications the MSI Wind is pretty similar to all the other netbooks on the market. It sports an Intel Atom processor,  1GB of RAM, WiFi,  a card reader, a 1.3 MP webcam, microphone and 3 USB ports.  However the Wind does come with either a 80GB or 120GB standard hard drive (no SSD here).  The 120 GB option is by far the biggest drive available in a netbook. There is a choice of batteries and a number of reviews have reporting good battery life with the 6 cell version.

Good looks

The MSI Wind is one of, if not the best, looking netbooks out there and that combined with the 10″ form factor, which in my opinion is the better size for a netbook, means that it a very serious contender for anyone wanting to take part in the netbook revolution.

Following on from the claim by Dell that some models in its new Latitude range can be configured to provide a 19 hour on battery life, comes HP’s announcement that its new HP EliteBook 6930p can be configured to deliver “all-day computing”.  Well of course hardware vendors in the computing world are always making big claims for their products, but what is the real story behind these claims?

With the Dell Latitude you need to have opt for a 9 cell battery instead of the standard 6 cell battery and purchase a 12 cell slice. This slice is a separate “slice” of laptop that fits beneath the laptop effectively giving you over three times the normal battery capacity.  Well it is a similar story with the HP in that you have to purchase a 12 cell ultra-capacity battery.

The story is slightly different though in that HP are providing optional energy efficient components, rather than massive battery power, as part of the mix which have to be selected to meet the all day computing goal. The technologies include solid-state hard drives (SSD) and LED displays. The SSD drives can reduce energy requirements by around 7% (and are also significantly faster and much less likely to fail) while the LED displays will also increase battery life substantially. To get HP’s claimed performance you have to choose these optional components which will obviously have a significant upward impact on the final cost.

However both of these components I expect to see become much more common in laptops in the near future, so I am giving the kudos points to HP.  The new HP Elitebook will be available from next month, however the Dell Latitude E6400 is now available through PriceGrabber.

Last week after a fair amount of expectant hype Apple announced an updated iPod range with new versions across every model. The biggest changes where reserved for the new Nano which got a new shape, a whole range of colours and some neat new features courtesy of the accelerometer previously only seen in the iPhone and iPod Touch. The Nano is also now apparently much more eco-friendly with Apple claiming it is now “very recyclable”.

IPod Touch

The second generation iPod Touch was also announced and if you read this blog on a regular basis you will know I believe the iPhone and iPod Touch to be a computing platform and the closest we have come yet to reaching convergence of phone/computer/media player/games machine into one unit.  This release is more of an evolution rather than a revolution with some fairly minor updates. The iTouch is now thinner, has been given a built in speaker and boasts new separate volume control buttons on the side. The volume controls are an important addition as on the older version if an applications available on the App store didn’t provide a “soft” control you had no way to control the output volume.

WiFi and App Store

The thing that in my mind though that really makes this platform more attractive is the combination of best in class WiFi Internet access and the ever increasing offerings, from games to small business applications, that are available from the App Store.  Of course these are available on the old model as well, so there is probably nothing new that would require an upgrade from an old version. But the fact that new version is being sold cheaper then the old suggests that there will be some good reductions on the older models of the iPod Touch over the next month or so.

In the last post we looked at a simple rule that you can use when buying a hard drive for your computer. In this post I am going to look at some of the more technical details to be considered when buying a hard drive.

Interface type

First thing to know is that in the home PC world there is basically two types of hard drive interfaces that we need to be concerned with, SCSI and ATA. The ATA standard has also recently been separated further into Parallel ATA (PATA) and Serial ATA (SATA) with SATA being the interface being used by the majority of recent drives.  SCSI is more often used in professional systems that demand fast and stable data access and is probably overkill for a home system. I would suggest going for a  hard drive that uses a SATA interface which is supported by the majority of the newer drives on the market. However you do need to make sure your motherboard has the necessary controllers  (Most modern motherboards will).

Capacity

The other things to think about are disk capacity and speed. As most people know the capacity of a hard drive is usually measured in Gigabytes although soon it may be Terabytes!  As we mentioned in the last post the size of the drive you need will be determined by what you want to do with your computer but as a rule of thumb you should buy the biggest drive you can afford. I would recommend at least a 500 GB or 750 GB drive.
Speed and Cache

A disk’s data access speed is a function of the rotation speed of the disk inside the hard drive and the amount of memory cache included with the drive. The rotation speed is measured in RPMs  (Rotations per Minute). The faster the drive rotates, the more quickly data can be written to and read from, the hard drive.  I would generally recommend buying a 7200 RPM drive. A drive’s memory cache helps to speed up the accessing of the information on the drive and the more of it the better. Drives with a higher capacity will have often have 32 MB or more of cache which would be my recommendation.

A good choice might be the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 - Hard drive which is  a 750 GB, 7200 RPM drive with a 32 MB cache.

Continuing our series of posts on the subject of building your own PC lets have a look at buying a hard disk drive. The disk drive is the all important central storage area for your PC. It is the persistent memory in which all your personal data resides when the computer is turned off and from where it can be retrieved when next using the computer.

Choosing a disk drive

Just like for other key components choosing the right hard disk drive for your home build computer depends to a large extent on how you want to use your computer. Over the years the capacity the capacity of disk drives has increased dramatically from Megabytes to Terabytes. A good thing too as we care now producing a huge amount of personal content, in the form of music, image, video files and the increasing disk requirements of some modern games.  If you are someone who is into digital photography or video in a big way then you are going to need big amounts of storage, however if your computer is a more business computer used largely for storing letters, documents and email etc. then your requirements are significantly less.

Apply the sweet spot rule

However the simple rule to apply when purchasing a drive is too buy the largest capacity drive that you can afford. Even if you are the business user I mentioned above you will undoubtedly need more capacity than you initially think.  Similar to when we looked at CPU’s there is a often a sweet spot of value that sits below the premium you would pay for the top of the range products. The value sweet spot is generally the third or fourth tier down from that top of the range model, assuming of course it is using the more modern Serial ATA (SATA) drive interface. A example might be the Samsung SpinPoint HD753LJ F1 750GB drive.

In an upcoming post we are going to look at some of the more technical differences and aspects, such as SATA, that you may want to consider when choosing a drive.

We have talked at length about both the original Asus Eee Pc and its more recent updates and I thought it would be interesting to look at one of the competitors that it has spawned.  Acer have made a nice entry to the netbook market with the release of the Acer Aspire One A110L Notebook.

Specifications

The Aspire one seemingly similar to the latest Asus Eee 901 in a number of ways, not least the operating system and its size.  Specifications include the Intel Atom processor,  512Mb of RAM and an 8 GB SSD. The Aspire has a 9″ screen with a back lit LCD that delivers a nice 1024×600 resolution.  Other features similar to the Eee are the built in webcam, 802.11b/g WiFi capability, USB ports and SD card readers. The Aspire is about 2cm wider than the Eee which is used to provide a slightly bigger keyboard which may well be enough to please those that find the Eee keyboard too small. All in a package that weighs less than a kilo and has pretty smart looks as well.

Linux

Acer like Asus have opted initially for a Linux operating system, although there is a Windows XP version with a 80GB standard hard drive in the works. Acer have included the Linpus Lite version of Linux rather than the customised version of Xandros used on the Eee, but this provides a very similar “simple” interface that makes it easy to find what you need.

Overall the Acer Aspire One A110L Notebook is an excellent addition to the netbook genre and at these prices is excellent value for money.  Have you bought an Acer Aspire One? Are you happy with it?

Well the big news in the computing world recently is that Google have announced a new web browser which is available as a beta download from their website.  Google’s surprise new web browser is called Google Chrome and is according to Google built from scratch to meet the demands of todays Internet.

Re use and open source

Actually built from scratch is not entirely accurate as it reuses a number of existing open source technologies, including Apple’s WebKit and Mozilla’s Firefox. In fact the new browser is also going to be open source,  but why a new browser? Well as Google’s blog explains:

We realized that the web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser. What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that’s what we set out to build.

So what are the new things that have resulted from this complete rethink?  Well probably the main thing is that it allows for a multi-threaded approach which will allows each tab to run as a separate process. This will mean it is more memory efficient, should make it more stable and limits any problem to a specific tab only and not the whole browser.  The same split by tab approach is applied to security as well.

So one big question is of course why a new browser? Why not just continue or build on its current support for Firefox? Well presumably Google will optimise their new browser to work well with Gmail and Google Docs and their other web based products and they felt that the rewrite was needed to deliver this.

Of course browsers mean computers so I thought I would finish this post by pointing out the Sony VAIO VGN-AR71M Notebook a featured laptop on PriceGrabber at present.

Everyone has heard about wireless networking and a significant proportion of homes and business are now using wireless networks. The value provided by these networks in terms of flexibility has been enormous but imagine if you are were also able to provide power without having to worry about power cables all over the place?  It would be another step change in usability and flexibility.

Intel amongst others have been doing a fair amount of research and development work recently exploring the possibility of developing wireless power delivered using something called magnetic induction. Using magnetic fields driven by a transmitting resonator an object would have a receiving resonator which is tuned to efficiently absorb energy at is natural frequency from the magnetic field.  Intel have demonstrated the technology powering light bulbs at  a distance of a few feet, the next steps are to make the resonators smaller suitable for being used in things like laptops. Obviously there is a long way to go but there is definitely hope for a wireless powered world as well as the network.

Well we can’t do wireless power yet. But what is available is wired and wireless networks through the power cables which in certain situations and buildings can be an effective way of ensuring an effective network throughout the building.  The Netgear WGXB102 Wall-Plugged Wireless Range Extender allows you to use the power wiring in your home to provide a second access point in a room that might be on the edge of your current wireless network.  I am thinking of trying this in Dubai where the concrete walls and floors mean that our wireless network is weak in certain rooms.

Well to be in tune with the times I thought a back to school type of post might be in order.  I don’t know about your kids but mine seem to go through school bags on an almost monthly basis.  I don’t know how they do it. It may have something to do with always carrying a seemingly massive amount of books around and having the straps as loose as possible so that the bag is very low on their backs.  The bags invariably seem to rip where the carrying straps meet the bag itself.

There would seem to be two approaches to replacing the bags. Firstly to buy a bag (that the kids are willing to wear) as cheaply as possible  on the grounds that the bag is not going to last long anyway. Or secondly to look for a bag which may cost more, but is built to a high enough level of quality that it will survive a lot longer. Having tried both approaches in the recent past we seem to have had fairly inconclusive results, so we lean towards the cheaper bags but look for strength where it matters.

As my two older children are now regularly taking their laptops to school, this means extra weight and a need for padding while still having room for school books. We have started to look around for bags that meet our requirements. One that caught my eye was the HP Sport Backpack which has good reviews and seems to big enough for school books as well.

Do you have the same problems with the longevity of your computer bags?

In recent posts we have talked a lot about Asus and some of the things that it is doing with the Eee PC and its Express Gate instant on technology.  Another vendor that I believe is doing some interesting things is HP.  HP innovation however seems to be more focused on touch technology, the sort of thing that has been in the news a lot over the past year because of the iPhone platform and Microsoft’s Surface technology. This is an area which I think is going to be come increasingly important especially with Microsoft’s next release of Windows slated to include touch and multi-touch integration.

New all-in-one PC

HP  have recently released an update of its iQ range of all-in-one PC’s with the release in the UK of the HP iQ500 which unlike the majority of its competitors features a touchscreen and HP’s TouchSmart application to take advantage of it.  The new version is an improvement in both looks and specification over the current HP iQ790 PC,  with quite stunning good looks that would good on any desk.  While, as you would expect for an all-in-one, the technical specifications will mean it is not the fastest, but perfectly adequate.

Touch capability

Like the current HP iQ790 PC, the iQ500 provides  its touch capabilities from a set of LED’s that are positioned around the screen detecting  the movement of one’s fingers. HP includes its own touch user interface called TouchSmart which can be used instead of the standard Vista interface and helps the efficiency of using the technology.   Touch capability is still in its early days and is still very gimmicky but HP have moved things forward with this computer.

However using a vertical screen is not very ergonomic, requiring the user to hold up their arms the whole time.  I think we are perhaps going to see more of this technology used with horizontal screens on something like a tablet PC.

As the iQ500 has now been released I expect some good deals on the HP iQ790 PC