Hardware Archive

El Reg has a write-up on the amazingly beautiful and hopelessly impractical Honeywell Kitchen Computer. We've covered this bizarre piece of computing history before on OSNews, in my list of the ten most beautiful computers. For those that have no idea what I'm talking about, read on for more details. Trust me, you want to know.

Netbooks are still all the rage these days, but according to Intel, this is going to change soon. The company has stated that they first thought that netbooks, who are almost exclusively powered by Intel chips, would be for emerging markets, but as it turns out, they are especially popular in Europe and North America. Intel claims that while these devices are "fine for an hour", they are not something for day to day use. And AMD? They are ignoring the market altogether.

Last month we covered an article titled, "MSI: Wind Doing Well, Linux Version Not So Much" which revealed that Linux MSI Wind netbooks saw a return rate upto four times higher than the Windows equivalent. But in a recent interview with the CEO of Asus he revealed that Linux and Window versions of Asus Eee PC have similar return rates. He also described the plans for 2009 and talked about some changes to come in the Operating System for the netbooks.

What's after electrical charges and electricity in computer storage? Lasers and excitons. Theorists from the John Hopkins University have drafted a theory that uses low-power lasers and crystalline insulators to store data. In the theory, lasers would excite electrons in a crystalline-like lattice in order to record data; the atoms would vibrate at a certain frequency to indicate the type of bit. A side effect of using lasers and insulators is reduced heat output. The heat is reduced because the atoms do not exchanging electrons as current computer components do. The EE Times has a more detailed write up as well as WebIndia, TopNews.in, Eureka Alert, and Small Times.

Unveiled on Monday by the USB Implementers Forum, the USB 3.0 spec can theoretically support data-transfer speeds of up to 4.8Gbps - 10 times the speed provided by USB 2.0. The new standard, also known as SuperSpeed USB, is also expected to be more power-efficient than its predecessor. "SuperSpeed USB is the next advancement in ubiquitous technology," Jeff Ravencraft, the president of the USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF), the industry group that promotes USB technology, said in a statement on Monday. "Today's consumers are using rich media and large digital files that need to be easily and quickly transferred from PCs to devices and vice versa. SuperSpeed USB meets the needs of everyone, from the tech-savvy executive to the average home user."

It's no secret that SSDs suffer from performance penalties when it comes to small random writes. Even though more modern SSD try to solve some of these issues hardware-wise, software can also play a major role. Instead of resorting to things like delaying all writes until shutdown and storing them in RAM, SanDisk claims it has a better option. At WinHEC yesterday, the company introduced its Extreme FFS, which it claims will improve write performance on SSDs by a factor of 100.

Geeks.com, known for their cheap laptops, sent us the Acer Aspire One for a review. Thom wrote a review of the popular laptop recently, but here's my take on it. Update: After this review went up, and within two hours, I installed Ubuntu 8.10 (time is 4:10 AM here, couldn't sleep until I had Ubuntu in there). Using this very nice tutorial, I have everything up and running.

Netbooks use various types of processors, but most of them are built around Intel's Atom processor and architecture. There are more exotic options, such as the Chinese Longsoon processor, but those are quite rare and hard to come by - and certainly not as powerful. Apparently, another contender is preparing to enter the netbook processor market. Say hello to ARM.

The netbook craze is currently in full swing, with these small laptops being advertised everywhere (at least here in The Netherlands); in fact, you can already get netbooks with 3G from the mobile phone carriers at severely reduced prices (but with a one or two year contract, of course). Netbooks are also welcomed by the Linux community as the break they've been waiting for: many netbooks are available with Linux pre-installed. One of the more successful (and powerful) netbooks out there is MSI's Wind, which is also sold under different brand and model names by other companies. In an interview with LaptopMag, MSI's Director of US Sales Andy Tung, however, has some bad news for those that believe the netbook will be the foot in the door that the Linux desktop has been waiting for.

Our friends at Geeks.com, known for their cheap laptops offers, sent in one of the most popular netbooks around: the Asus Eee PC. The model is the 701 4G, with 512 MB RAM, and Windows XP in it. Read through for a review of the product.

It this post Geek.com offers a walkthrough of the building of a powerful, yet affordable workstation. Each of the parts was carefully chosen and the build was extensively detailed. There were some problems, but those were worked around and the end result was an impressive 64-bit workhorse.

When China launched its first microprocessor, the Godson 1 in 2002, it wasn't much of a competitor to what Intel and AMD had to offer. The 64bit Godson 2, released in 2005, still didn't worry the Western chip makers, but the chip did start to pop up here and there outside of China. Expect to see a lot more of them in the coming years, as the Godson 3 promises to be a chip that can compete head on with the big ones: quad-core, eight core version in the pipeline, and 200 extra instructions aiding in x86 compatibility.

"Me and Bobby Powers have spent a few hours smoothing out the process of getting fully-featured Linux desktops to boot on the XO laptop. On the whole, OLPC developers have been pretty good at getting code upstream, so only a few fixups are needed to get things operational on the XO." On a slightly (stretching it here) related note, here is a detailed guide on installing and optimising Ubuntu on the Acer Aspire One that we reviewed last week. I replaced the default Linpus installation with Ubuntu using this guide, and I must say that I am quite pleased.

There's a new hype going on in the world of computing. I used to call them 'tiny laptops', but somewhere along the way, Intel's marketing got at me and now I call them netbooks. Every self-respecting manufacturer has a netbook product line, or is about to introduce one (Apple?), so I figured I would take a look at what all the fuss is about: I bought a netbook.