Now, wait a minute, and say that again, please. Could it be that three NVIDIA graphics processors are powering one of Toshiba’s portable computer systems? If so, this is happening at a time when most desktop computer systems are basically powered by a single graphics processor, while the majority of portable PCs are featured with integrated graphics. This should be interesting, at least if you are one of those late-night LAN party gamers looking for the very best in terms of computing experience.
Toshiba is known for offering some of the most interesting portable computer systems on the market but, this time, the company appears to have really outdone itself, with a bit of help from the Santa Clara, California-based green team. Read the rest of this entry »
Windows has a number of diagnostic and system monitoring tools built in but this one, called System Explorer puts everything you need to know about your computer, and what’s it doing now, and in the past, into one very convenient and easy to use package. Here’s just a taster of what it can do. You can view information about running processes, startups, Explorer, IE Add-ons, uninstallers, drivers, services, connections and open files. You can check which programs and files were opened, and when, take snapshots of your Registry and later compare them if something has gone wrong to see what’s changed. It uses fewer resources than the Windows utilities and there’s even a portable version that you can run from a pen drive. Try it, get to know it and one day it could save you a lot of time and trouble if your PC throws a wobbly…
I have lost count of the number of wood-cased PCs I’ve seen over the years, one or two even made it into production, so it’s not exactly a new idea, but the spin Asus have put on its new Bamboo Series notebook is quite novel. It says it ‘redefines green computing’, exactly what that means is a bit of a mystery, but Asus is trumping its green credentials, claiming that the machine’s Super Hybrid Engine technology extends battery life by between 35 and 70% — compared with similar notebooks. The bamboo capping and panels have a tensile strength that rivals some metals and it grows really quickly, so it’s easily sustainable material. Read the rest of this entry »
Microsoft has been busy showing journalists some interesting bits of Windows 7, which you can expect to see on a new PC near you sometime in 2010 or 11, probably… Anyway, the OS still very much in its early stages of development is now being made available to developers to tinker with. Most of the new features have been heavily trailed so there’s no big surprises but the Touch screen stuff does look very impressive. It’s all very Minority Report, with lots of finger wiggling and hand movements, making things whizz around the screen, and pictures twist, tumble, enlarge and reduce, the only thing it doesn’t do is clean off the sticky finger marks afterwards… Read the rest of this entry »
apricot
Those of you who have been around computers for a few years may well remember the Fruit Wars of the early 1980s, indeed one of the very first home computers I wrote about was the Tangerine, back in the late 1970’s. In fact it was little more than a very large printed circuit board, smothered in logic chips, and you had to add your own keyboard and light bulbs, but it was a start… Anyway, soon afterwards we had more useable machines from the likes of Apple, and Apricot, not to mention quite a few lemons, though to be fair I don’t remember anyone actually using that name. But the rest, as they say is history, with only one fruity PC maker managing to survive.
Anyway, this preamble is by way of reintroducing the Apricot brand, last owned by Mitsubishi though by the late 1990s it had all but disappeared. Read the rest of this entry »
Now, wait a minute, and say that again, please. Could it be that three NVIDIA graphics processors are powering one of Toshiba’s portable computer systems? If so, this is happening at a time when most desktop computer systems are basically powered by a single graphics processor, while the majority of portable PCs are featured with integrated graphics. This should be interesting, at least if you are one of those late-night LAN party gamers looking for the very best in terms of computing experience.
