Hardware Archive

"Can you imagine a computer history museum that has to be packed up and put away each winter and then unpacked each summer, and which has three potbellied pigs as its mascot? I can, because I've just visited the DigiBarn, a wonderful trip down silicon memory lane that's nestled into a 19th-century farmhouse deep in the Santa Cruz mountains, about 90 minutes south of San Francisco."

"Unless you are a big fan of small form-factor computing, you probably haven't been tracking the development of VIA's Pico-ITX motherboards. This form-factor was announced at this year's Consumer Electronics Show, but it has been almost impossible to get your hands on an ITX motherboard and the official U.S. release has yet to happen. A few samples have made their way to reviewers and developers, but because of their rarity coverage has been sparse."

"Lenovo, the world's No. 3 PC maker, said on Monday it would start selling laptop computers preloaded with Linux software from Novell instead of Microsoft's Windows operating system." Ars Technica has more on the announcement. "ThinkPad customers will soon have a new configuration option, as Lenovo and Novell have announced that the popular laptops will begin shipping with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 (SLED) preinstalled. Although the ThinkPad has been certified for Linux for some time, this marks the first time Lenovo will ship a laptop with Linux preinstalled - while providing both hardware and OS support." Lenovo is the third big name to sell consumer computers with Linux installed (after Dell and Acer).

Acer is planning to sell Linux-based PCs to the UK market, the company told ZDNet.co.uk. On Thursday Acer contacted ZDNet.co.uk with the following statement: "At this moment in time Acer UK does not have a PC available with Linux pre-loaded, but we are looking at introducing one in the future." This appears to represent a reversal of Acer's previous statements on the matter, which suggested that the manufacturer had no plans to sell PCs here with a pre-installed open-source operating system.

Mark Shuttleworth has announced that Dell will expand its Linux offerings. "What's been announced to date is not the full extent of what we will see over the next couple of weeks and months," Shuttleworth said an interview late on Wednesday. "There are additional offerings in the pipeline," he said. Shuttleworth founded Canonical to provide support for Ubuntu Linux. A Dell spokeswoman, Anne Camden, declined comment, saying the company does not discuss products in the pipeline.

"This article briefly goes over six mini systems that you don't have to build yourself. They are an ideal platform for a project or for a silent system for simple tasks like checking your email. The intention was to find systems that are small, Linux-ready, and customizable, but price was factored in as well."

Five years after the concept was first proposed, the so-called USD 100 laptop is poised to go into mass production. Hardware suppliers have been given the green light to ramp-up production of all of the components needed to build millions of the low-cost machines.

El Reg reviews the HP Touchsmart IQ770 computer, a sort of all-in-one computer with a touchscreen. "Either you're excited by the prospect of an all-in-one PC with a touchscreen or you're not. Judging by our experiences, adults will be thoroughly confused by the split personality of the HP, shocked by the enormous weight and unimpressed by the price - a pound less than GBP 1300. But the kids are gonna love it."

Dell has taken the unusual step - for a PC vendor of its size - of toning down its sales pitch for Microsoft's Vista operating system and warning businesses of the migration challenges that lie ahead for them. The step is particularly unusual because one of the issues the hardware vendor is warning business about is the extra hardware they will need to buy.

Though we rely on them as a mainstay of modern computing, hard drives are really a mixed bag: part storage blessing and part performance albatross. The ongoing digital media revolution could never have gotten off the ground without plentiful, cheap storage, but even so, modern operating systems and programs are typically designed to rely on the hard drive as little as possible. Hard drive access times haven't kept pace with processor clockspeed increases, so computers increasingly employ sophisticated caching mechanisms (e.g. Intel's Turbo Memory tech) to minimize the need for a hard drive-based transfer. Now, researchers at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands believe they've taken the first step towards solving some of the speed problems of a traditional magnet-based hard drive system.

"One of the biggest news stories out of this year's Computex wasn't of a new chipset, GPU, or graphics card, but rather of the announcement of the ASUS Eee PC, a small, slim, and light portable computer that is priced at USD 199. Introduced by Jonney Shih, Chariman and CEO of ASUS at Intel's keynote address the first day of the show, the Eee PC has already made headlines world wide. Not only have we had the chance to actually use the ASUS Eee PC, we can also confirm some important new specifications of the notebook."

"At the Research@Intel day last week, Intel had a huge array of technologies and active research initiatives on display for press and analysts. As I toured the company's Santa Clara offices, I was able to piece together a few major themes and directions by stepping back and looking at the places where Intel is currently focusing its forward-looking research. In my next few articles, starting with this one, I'll take an in-depth look at each of these themes and at what it tells us about where computing is headed in the next decade."

Sun Microsystems on revealed the Constellation System, a high-performance computing platform that could hit a peak performance of 2 petaflops while HP and Microsoft gang up to give High-Performance computers a mass appeal by making it easier to deploy, support and manage. Customers can 'realistically expect to have a 64-node cluster deployed and running within two hours', HP said in a statement.

"The Series 5 pocket computer from Psion was launched 10 years ago this week. It was a remarkable achievement: entirely new silicon, a new operating system, middleware stack and applications were developed from scratch in just over two years. This was the last time anyone undertook such a daunting task: it may be the last time anyone ever tries, either."