ASUS make it Eee-sy with the Eee PC Thu, Feb 28. 2008
Play, relax, and entertain on the go with the ASUS Eee PC.
Today I'm talking about the Eee PCPC701 - a smart little Linux-based laptop.
Eee PC the flexible friend
Speaking of students, it's shock-proof design. Best not to through it at the teacher, but it's a tough little box and it'll take aknock or two more than your average low cost laptop.
The little laptop is powered by an Intel Ulta Low Voltage Celeron M Processor, which gives it a respectable battery life. It's quoted as "900MHz capable", in other words they don't ship at top speed but you could clock it by visiting BIOS.
The Eee PC features built-in wireless networking, sound and a media reader for Secure Digital (SD) and MultiMedia Card (MMC). Shockingly , your new best friend also has a built-in webcam and 2 year warranty.
New best friend - have you lost it?
Well, take a look. The ASUS Eee PC is very compact, just 7" and weighs less than 1 kg allowing you to be truly mobile. Bumps and shocks are no longer issues. And like a dog, it's dependable - it uses a solid - state disk for unparalleled shock protection and reliability. Eee PC will not fetch your paper, but BBC News looks pretty good even at 7".
Easy on the pocket - Priced at £186 and £219 inc VAT the Eee PC is one of the lowest priced notebooks on the market. The cheap little laptop is:
These laptops sold out in the US over Christmas, now the early adopters over here are picking them up.
I love it. I like Linux, but I'm no expert and it works for me. If you want a business laptop replacement it's not for you because it's a Linux box and you probably find it difficult to stay compatible with a Windows-based office using MS Office suite. If you're looking for a multimedia or gaming machine it's not for you because it's only got a 4Gb hard drive.
But if you have schoolkids, want to take note in lectures, work in IT or want a faithful companion for browsing the web you've just found it.
Got your Asus Eee PC for just £218 here and join the consumer revolution!
Today I'm talking about the Eee PCPC701 - a smart little Linux-based laptop.
Linux! Arghh!You say... but give it a shot. It's cheap as chips and easy to use, opening up a brave new world with easy Web access on the go. This smart little box is great for web browsing, checking email and social networking. You can even make calls with skype or instant messenger. The Eee pc is also great for students and schoolkids, with pres-installed features a host of tools to facilitate student homework.
Eee PC the flexible friend
Eee it's a PC
The little laptop is powered by an Intel Ulta Low Voltage Celeron M Processor, which gives it a respectable battery life. It's quoted as "900MHz capable", in other words they don't ship at top speed but you could clock it by visiting BIOS.
The Eee PC features built-in wireless networking, sound and a media reader for Secure Digital (SD) and MultiMedia Card (MMC). Shockingly , your new best friend also has a built-in webcam and 2 year warranty.
New best friend - have you lost it?
Well, take a look. The ASUS Eee PC is very compact, just 7" and weighs less than 1 kg allowing you to be truly mobile. Bumps and shocks are no longer issues. And like a dog, it's dependable - it uses a solid - state disk for unparalleled shock protection and reliability. Eee PC will not fetch your paper, but BBC News looks pretty good even at 7".
Fact: The new ASUS Eee PC actually weighs less than a Harry Potter novel!
Easy on the pocket - Priced at £186 and £219 inc VAT the Eee PC is one of the lowest priced notebooks on the market. The cheap little laptop is:
- Easy to use - The new ASUS Quick launcher & one click intuitive user-friendly interface
- Easy to carry - Weighs less than 1kg and it comes with a free carry case.
- Easy on the pocket
- Intel Mobile processor
- 512MB RAM / 4GB Hard disk space - this is DDR2 RAM so it's fast!
- SD(HC)card reader
- 802.11 b/g wireless connectivity
- Integrated Webcam
- 2 Year Collect and Return warranty
These laptops sold out in the US over Christmas, now the early adopters over here are picking them up.
I love it. I like Linux, but I'm no expert and it works for me. If you want a business laptop replacement it's not for you because it's a Linux box and you probably find it difficult to stay compatible with a Windows-based office using MS Office suite. If you're looking for a multimedia or gaming machine it's not for you because it's only got a 4Gb hard drive.
But if you have schoolkids, want to take note in lectures, work in IT or want a faithful companion for browsing the web you've just found it.
Got your Asus Eee PC for just £218 here and join the consumer revolution!
All salute HP for adopting solid state drives in laptops Thu, Sep 20. 2007
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will offer solid-state drives (SSDs) in all of its professional series notebooks, according to Dan Forlenza, vice president of HP's business notebooks.
SSDs offer several advantages over traditional hard disks, being lighter, quieter, less power-hungry and more robust because they contain no moving parts. Most of all, solid state drives are FAST. That is VERY FAST. Why is this?
Today's hard drives are advanced and theirin lies the problem. They are complex and can (as we all know) go wrong. This is because they use old electromechanical and magnetic technology. Inside a hard drive a disk (or plate) spins round by a servo motor and data is read from the magnetic tracks on the disk by a head. Sound familiar? Yes, this is how the almost extinct floppy drives of yesteryear worked.
Over time, the capacity of hard drives has increased (120 - 300Gb is standard and 500Gb - 1Tb is not uncommon now). At the same time, the rate at which data can be transferred to and from the drives has increased. After many years of slow advances with parallel ATA, data can now can be read from disks extremely quickly using the serial (SATA) standard(s). These higher transfer rates make is easier and quicker to load large files such as audio or video. But they are still not great for work such as editing or for running lots of applications at the same time on your computer (multitasking). This is because the read head has to be continuously repositioned to read data from different areas of the hard drive and moving between these can take a long time (in computer terms). Lost? Read on...
To put this in perspective, your computer (the microprocessor) only has to wait for a few microseconds (= millionths of a second) to read data from your memory (the RAM). To read some data from the hard drive typically takes milliseconds (= thousandths of a second) because a motor has to spin a physical disk round to get to the location where it can read data from the disk. The "seek time" is one technical term that relates to this delay, which is caused my the intertia of moving around mechanical parts (as opposed to "solid state" meaning nothing moves). SCSI drives used in servers and multimedia machines have been faster for some time, one reason for this is that they have a faster interface with the computer but the other reason is that they are designed to spin round faster than old IDE drives. That's why a 7,200 rpm drive beats a 5,400 rpm drive - it finds the data you want more quickly.
Finally! I hear you moan. Solid State Drive (SSD). Well, you could just call them "giant memorysticks". I have been waiting for decades (I know, it's pathetic) for these drives because I'm fed up waiting around for 1000 times longer than I have to and I am fed up of the death rattle from a dying electro-mechanical hard drive. Whilst it is not pointless spending your hard earned cash on DDR memory, dual core processors and the rest in an effort to increase performance - you are "wasting away" the dynamic performance of the system by plugging the kit into a "chug-chug" electro-mechanical drive!
This makes them an ideal upgrade for notebook manufacturers, but until recently they have been prohibitively expensive.
A 64GB NAND flash drive will be an optional upgrade for the Compaq 2510p and 2710p series, available in the UK from November. The exact price of the upgrade has not been released, although US reports suggest it could cost as much as £500.
In the meanwhile, Dell are offering solid state drives with laptops. For example, a 30Gb solid state drive is optional with the very affordable but high performance XPS M1130 or you can get a 32Gb SSD drive to plug straight into you current laptop for £446.68. Yes, they are still expensive but they are at least getting cheaper... this drive was £524 last time I looked.
SSDs offer several advantages over traditional hard disks, being lighter, quieter, less power-hungry and more robust because they contain no moving parts. Most of all, solid state drives are FAST. That is VERY FAST. Why is this?
Today's hard drives are advanced and theirin lies the problem. They are complex and can (as we all know) go wrong. This is because they use old electromechanical and magnetic technology. Inside a hard drive a disk (or plate) spins round by a servo motor and data is read from the magnetic tracks on the disk by a head. Sound familiar? Yes, this is how the almost extinct floppy drives of yesteryear worked.
HP to fit SSD drives
To put this in perspective, your computer (the microprocessor) only has to wait for a few microseconds (= millionths of a second) to read data from your memory (the RAM). To read some data from the hard drive typically takes milliseconds (= thousandths of a second) because a motor has to spin a physical disk round to get to the location where it can read data from the disk. The "seek time" is one technical term that relates to this delay, which is caused my the intertia of moving around mechanical parts (as opposed to "solid state" meaning nothing moves). SCSI drives used in servers and multimedia machines have been faster for some time, one reason for this is that they have a faster interface with the computer but the other reason is that they are designed to spin round faster than old IDE drives. That's why a 7,200 rpm drive beats a 5,400 rpm drive - it finds the data you want more quickly.
Finally! I hear you moan. Solid State Drive (SSD). Well, you could just call them "giant memorysticks". I have been waiting for decades (I know, it's pathetic) for these drives because I'm fed up waiting around for 1000 times longer than I have to and I am fed up of the death rattle from a dying electro-mechanical hard drive. Whilst it is not pointless spending your hard earned cash on DDR memory, dual core processors and the rest in an effort to increase performance - you are "wasting away" the dynamic performance of the system by plugging the kit into a "chug-chug" electro-mechanical drive!
This makes them an ideal upgrade for notebook manufacturers, but until recently they have been prohibitively expensive.
A 64GB NAND flash drive will be an optional upgrade for the Compaq 2510p and 2710p series, available in the UK from November. The exact price of the upgrade has not been released, although US reports suggest it could cost as much as £500.
In the meanwhile, Dell are offering solid state drives with laptops. For example, a 30Gb solid state drive is optional with the very affordable but high performance XPS M1130 or you can get a 32Gb SSD drive to plug straight into you current laptop for £446.68. Yes, they are still expensive but they are at least getting cheaper... this drive was £524 last time I looked.
