Hardware Archive

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.

As some of you may have noticed, I'm slightly obsessed with my Aspire One netbook, and actually, with netbooks in general. They are great little devices, more powerful than you'd give them credit for upon first encounter. And, but that might just be me, netbooks are what laptops should have been from day one: truly portable. El Reg has put together a buyer's guide for today's netbooks, and while the guide is generally spot-on with its assessments, it does present some odd choices here and there. Read on for some of my own thoughts grown out of experience.

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.

The Eee Box is the latest addition to the Eee family, and this article takes a closer look at setting up and using the Eee Box. "Unless you've had your head in the sand for the past several months, you've probably heard of Asus' line of Eee PC laptops - low-cost, ultra-portable laptops with solid-state hard disk drives. Over the past several months, the Eee PC has evolved. Newer laptop models come with Linux as well as Windows XP Home, standard hard disk drives, and even the new Intel Atom processor. Now, we have a desktop version of the Eee PC - the Eee Box. Here, I will detail the unpacking and initial setup of an Eee Box unit using text and images."

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.

Embedded designer Paul Thomas is showcasing a tiny, open-sourced computer at LinuxWorld in San Francisco this week. Would-be Linuxstamp enthusiasts can obtain pre-built boards for the hefty sum of $120 directly from Thomas, or they can download the design for free and build it themselves.

"The recent release of Intel's Centrino 2 platform means a refresh of notebooks from every manufacturer. Lenovo took this chance to not only update the internals of their ThinkPads, but also to make changes to their naming conventions and release a few new models, including the addition of the ThinkPad X200 to the venerable X series." The X200 brings along a widescreen display (the X was the ThinkPad's last standard aspect ratio series), the Centrino 2 platform with 45nm processor, and an SSD option. The notebook is a bit wider than before but still has that ThinkPad keyboard and with the right battery it will last up to 9 hours."

While using an AMD Barcelona server to create a portable benchmarking kit, InfoWorld's Tom Yager discovered something unexpected: "I could incur variances in some benchmark tests ranging from 10 to 60 percent through combined manipulation of the server's BIOS settings, BIOS version, compiler flags, and OS release." Yager put this matter to AMD's performance engineers and was told he was seeing an effect widely known among CPU engineers, but seldom communicated to IT - that the performance envelope of a CPU is cast in silicon, but is sculpted in software. "Long before you lay hands on a server," Yager writes, "BIOS and OS engineers have reshaped its finely tuned logic in code, sometimes with the real intent of making it faster sometimes to homogenize the server to flatten its performance relative to Intel's."

People have been saying for some time that operating systems will eventually just become windows to the "cloud" (essentially browsers) and everyone will just use web applications, but now a company called CherryPal is really doing it. Plus, the CherryPal uses only 2 Watts of power.

Gustav Duarte has written a three part article about the computer boot up process. The series starts with the Motherboard Chipsets and the Memory Map of an Intel computer and then he covers the processes that take place from the BIOS initialization to the boot loader. The final part is the coverage of the Kernel Boot Process.

Decrying stasis in the laptop industry, InfoWorld's Tom Yager and crew have designed their ideal laptop for 2009 given the components are available currently. The project was subjected to the same limitations manufacturers face when whiteboarding a new notebook and introduced only those components that would increase end-user productivity manyfold. The resulting AMD Puma-based WorldBook Ether and WorldBook Meteor include an 'Embedded Smartphone' system-in-system ARM microcontroller, flash-memory overlay for fast boot, and ATI/AMD Hybrid Graphics for power-saving switched mode.

Quantum computers could become a reality very soon, opening up some fantastic possibilities -- including tele-portation, says Richard Gray.

The first laptops to make use of the SpursEngine, a multimedia co-processor derived from the Cell chip that powers the PlayStation 3, will go on sale in Japan in July. Toshiba will launch its Qosmio G50 and F40 machines with the chip, which contains four of the "Synergistic Processing Elements" from the Cell Broadband Engine processor. The Cell chip used in the PlayStation 3 has eight of the SPE cores plus a Power PC main processor. The SPE cores perform the heavy number-crunching that makes the console's graphics so stunning. The SpursEngine SE1000 will work in much the same way in the laptops. The operating system will run on an Intel Core 2 Duo chip and the SpursEngine will be called on to handle processor-intensive tasks, such as processing of high-definition video. This arrangement means the laptop should be capable of some tricks that haven't been seen on machines until now.

As we all know by now, the Asus Eee PC has been a massive success for Asus. While that's really nice for the men and women working at Asus, us operating system enthusiasts like the device for another reason: it came pre-loaded with something else than Windows, which creates awareness of alternatives among the public, which in turn helps to diversify the operating system marketplace - something we all want. While the new Eee PC can be pre-loaded with Windows, the Linux version is still there. El Reg takes a look at the Linux version of the new Eee PC 901.