More than fifty million netbooks have been sold since the phenomenon's beginnings in late 2007, and of those, only a small fraction run Windows 7. With cheap licenses available in family...
New initiative aims to usher in era of DIY laptops
A Shuttle initiative geared at saving small laptop OEMs from extinction by banding them together with increased interchangeability of parts may one day allow users to build their own laptops as they...
Old computers rejuvenated with SSD upgrades
SSDs are usually used in expensive computers like the Ars God Box and the MacBook Air, but SSD vendor RunCore's CES display points out that they can revitalize older computers as well. Several older computers were demoed sporting shiny new SSDs and running Windows 7 like champions. And maybe, some time...
Netbook vendors go all-out to stand out in 2010
The netbook has been an amazing success story over the last two years, and one notable element of that story is the extent to which the individual devices have been driven primarily...
12 hour battery life in a high-end laptop? Asus says yes
An ASUS laptop quietly on display at CES packed two GPUs, a high-end NVIDIA GeForce 310, and a humble Intel GMA... and intelligently switched, second-by-second, between them. The UL80JT can also re-clock its Intel Core i7 CPU on a second-by-second basis. The result of all this micromanagement: miraculous 12-hour battery life...
SDXC, CFAST dearth confirms end of camera megapixel race
CES is full of new standards. The USB 3.0 section is hawking high-speed demos from a good dozen hard disk companies including Lacie and Seagate, half a dozen add-in-board vendors, and a cable extender or two. SATA 6.0Gbps is on display at at least one motherboard vendor. 3D, Wireless HD, and...
RCX4 Star Stryker is an X-Wing by any other name
I was lured in the same way as everyone else. The tiny Asian man at his tiny, underfurnished booth was showing off a flying X-wing toy. To draw spectators, he'd deftly fly the toy to another booth, hold it there for a second, and fly it back to his booth along...
Samsung Moblin netbook snappy, still has Windows Key
Samsung had a large number of netbooks on display at CES, running all kinds of OSes, and based on different hardware. There were models running Windows XP and Windows 7, but the most display space and the most attention from both Samsung and the press went to another alternative: Moblin. The...
Smartbooks tout battery life, features, but lack polish
A number of smartbooks are floating around CES, and after spending much of the day looking at them, talking about them, and using them, several things are clear. Vendors are eager...
When less is more: the basics of physicalization
The word "physicalization" is ten months old. This January, Rackable Systems launched a strange line of servers which defied all the conventional wisdom of server design by disaggregating larger servers...
