Posts tagged promises

ViBox Boss-X review

259 days
by in firewire Cards

You could never argue in a sane world that £1,800 is anything but a lot of money. However, when a lot of top-end, pre-built gaming PCs can be way over the £2,000 mark, a gaming rig that promises a no-compromises gaming experience for £1,800 suddenly looks a lot more like reasonable value.

The Boss-X is certainly an imposing machine on paper, and it’s equally impressive in the flesh thanks to the huge cooler Master HAF X chassis in which it is enclosed. The ‘HAF’ in the name stands for High Air Flow, and as you’d expect, a lot of the space inside the chassis is dedicated to maximising the air flow to keep the components as cool as possible.

This design is helped along by four large (yet surprisingly quiet) fans, with plenty of space for additional ones. a dedicated air duct pipes cooling air to the graphics card as well. This is great for those who want to get their grubby little overclocking mitts on the technology here.

It’s also handy because Vibox has kindly overclocked the Intel Core i7-3770K to 4.50GHz. a Corsair Hydro H80 Water cooler keeps the processor cool and quiet, though the chassis fans mean a little background noise remains.

This is clearly a no-holds barred gaming system, sporting a glowing red LED fan at the front of the chassis and a large Perspex window at the side to show off the impressive hardware within. The front panel boasts a pair of USB 3.0 ports, along with eSata, FireWire and two USB 2.0 ports, plus the obligatory microphone and headphone connectors.

Va-va-voom box

When you’re looking to plonk near £2,000 down on a gaming rig, you want to be sure it has the necessary graphical grunt. The Vibox Boss-X comes with a single Palit GeForce GTX 680 2GB, so no SLI goodness here, but perhaps that’s the sacrifice you make for keeping the asking price below two grand.

Still, it’s certainly no slouch when it comes to gaming, with the GTX 680 remaining a great single-card GPU. Of course, this isn’t as future-proof as some of the high-end systems we’ve seen, but the roomy chassis does mean there’s plenty of scope to add extra components when the time comes to upgrade.

Benchmarks

CPU rendering performanceCinebench 11.5: Index: Higher is betterVibox Boss-X: 8.81Chillblast Fusion Mamba: 9.48

DirectX 11 tessellation performanceHeaven 2.5: Frames per second: Higher is betterVibox Boss-X: 30.9Chillblast Fusion Mamba: 31.2

DirectX gaming performanceShogun 2: Frames per second: Higher is betterVibox Boss-X: 63Chillblast Fusion Mamba: 66

Read the full Chillblast Fusion Mamba review

You’ll be safe to put your wallet away for a good while yet, though. Windows 7 Home Premium is housed on a speedy Corsair 240GB Force 3 SSD. In the AS SSD benchmark, the drive hit 505.44MB/s sequential read and 306.76MB/s sequential write speeds.

Booting up from cold got us into Windows in a sprightly 30.5 seconds. Windows 8’s love affair with UEFI means we should see even faster bootup times with the new operating system, and Vibox is offering an upgrade to Windows 8 for just £15 for any PC bought since may.

The 240GB SSD is great for installing your most used apps and games to take advantage of the solid state’s extra speed, while a 2TB HDD offers more than enough space for everything else.

A look back; Oh, Emmy

283 days
by in graphics Video Cards

Everett was Dr. Joe Gannon, a ruggedly handsome, down-to-business surgeon on “Medical Center,” one of the first in a long line of medical dramas to find success on TV.

I watched both as a kid. Who didn’t? Back then there were a handful of options and just about any hit was “appointment television,” seen by just about everyone who owned a set. Today, there are so many shows on so many channels, you could watch TV for a week and never see a single show that the guy sitting in the cubicle next to you has seen.

Everett was 75, Hemsley 74.

The new and final season of “Damages” is up and running on DirectTV’s Audience channel and, as expected, it’s another dramatic gem.

It’s also graphic — with nudity and strong expletives not deleted. I found that blue nature a bit jarring for some reason, probably because I’ve been premium channel-free since “The Sopranos” signed off for good on HBO. That’s meant fairly tidy fare, though some cable shows do their best to push the blue envelope.

Nevertheless, “Damages” promises to go out big.

Glenn Close, not surprisingly, was nominated last week for an Emmy Award for her lead role as a tough-as-nails lawyer on “Damages.”

It’s a deserving nod. the show should have been nominated, as well. It’s too bad this amazingly crafted show is available only to a limited audience — until the DVD comes out.

Speaking of blue language and Emmy Awards-not-in-the-cards, I had some admittedly nasty words after the nominations were announced last week.

Neither Timothy Olyphant nor his critically acclaimed FX show “Justified” garnered Emmy nods this year. the Modesto-bred actor was nominated last year for best dramatic actor.

The snub was obnoxious and unfounded, but not especially surprising. That’s because the dramatic actor field was heavy this year, thanks in part to a return of AMC’s “Breaking Bad.”

“Bad” was not eligible because of timing last year, so neither was its much-awarded lead actor, Bryan Cranston, who has been repeatedly nominated for his role as a chemistry teacher turned meth king.

Add to that a handful of other repeat nominees such as Michael C. Hall for “Dexter,” Jon Hamm for “Mad Men” and Steve Buscemi for “Boardwalk Empire” and there wasn’t room for the hometown guy. (Also nominated: Damian Lewis, “Homeland,” and Hugh Bonneville, “Downton Abby.”)

Full discloser: I’ve never seen “Boardwalk Empire,” “Dexter,” “Homeland” or “Downton Abby,” so I can’t compare Olyphant’s work to the actors nominated for those shows. I do know, being an avid viewer of both “Bad” and “Mad,” that Cranston and Hamm deserve their nods.

Still, it was disappointing that Olyphant’s name was missing, and that of the series itself. Personally, I’d pick “Justified” over “Breaking Bad” and have it neck and neck with “Mad Men” among my favorite shows.

Then again, I’m biased, given my hopeless hometown-cheerleader bent — which brings me to happier Emmy news: Hilmar native Dot Marie Jones was nominated again this year for her guest role on “Glee” and casting director Robert Ulrich saw his company nominated again for “American Horror story.” (Ulrich won last year for casting “Glee.”)

That’s great stuff. And, for Olyphant, there’s always next year.

Reach Scene editor Pat Clark at .

The Four Hundred–IBM Puffs Up New Public, Private SmartCloud Releases

347 days
by in windows Nt

IBM Puffs up new Public, Private SmartCloud Releases

Published: June 4, 2012

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Just like any other product, public and private clouds have to change and evolve to get more relevant and to keep pace with the competition. IBM has made a lot of promises with its SmartCloud private cloud infrastructure, which you install in your data center to create virtual cloudy server and storage slices, and its SmartCloud Enterprise and Enterprise+ clouds, which big Blue launched a little more than a year ago and said it would flesh out a bit more.

With a bunch of announcements just before the Memorial Day holiday here in the United States, IBM is making good on a bunch of those promises, revving up the software it has created for private clouds and getting its high-end public cloud offering out the door based on X86 and Power systems iron and promising to get a mainframe-based cloud out the door before the end of the year.

The SmartCloud Entry V2.3, which started shipping on may 25 and which was previously known as Starter Kit for Cloud on Power, is a similar stack of virtual infrastructure software that IBM rolled up and is placing on its PureSystem modular servers. SmartCloud Entry V2.3 for Power debuts in announcement letter 212-251, and it builds on the PowerVM hypervisor for Power Systems servers and Systems Director VMControl to virtualize AIX and Linux logical partition images and to orchestrate their deployment and running.

SmartCloud Entry has basic metering capability so you can implement pay-per-use for CPU, memory, and disk capacity on the Power machines. the metering software, which is at the heart of all cloudy software stacks, has REST APIs and file exchange mechanisms so they can be programmatically controlled and linked to other third-party tools like trouble ticketing systems. IBM doesn’t say much about how this SmartCloud Entry private cloud controller is coded, but does say that it has packaged it up with a Java runtime environment so presumably the back-end parts of it are all written in Java. if has a self-service portal for end users to requisition virtual machines and software images to run on top of them and the administration tools to start, halt, restart, and migration VMs. the Systems Director software with the VMControl module allows for physical and virtual server images to be managed from the same console and also helps admins create “golden images” of software stacks to be deployed on PowerVM LPARs.

IBM charges for SmartCloud Entry, which goes by the product number 5765-SKC in the IBM catalog, on a per-core basis plus Software Maintenance. Assuming the prices are the same even though the name has changed and the release has been revved, you can see the prices here. On a small machine, you are talking about $80 per core, with a medium machine costing $200 per core and a large machine costing $400 per core.

IBM put out a statement of direction back in announcement letter 211-312 in November 2011 when V2.2 came out saying that it would eventually let SmartCloud Entry manage IBM i images, but as far as I can tell this has not happened yet with V2.3. But you can bet that IBM is working on it now that live partition mobility is shipping with IBM i 7.1 Technology Refresh 4.

IBM has also juiced its SmartCloud Entry for system x software stack to make private clouds on its X86-based iron to the V2.3 level in announcement letter 212-206. this stack includes Systems Director Standard Edition V6.3 for X86 servers, Systems Director Storage Control V4.2.1, and Tivoli Provisioning Manager for Images V7.1.1.6. IBM has updated this stack to support VMware’s latest ESXi 5.0 hypervisor and related vSphere 5.0 hypervisor management tools. It also adds support for VMware’s live migration of running virtual machines through the vCenter console and the Distributed Resource Scheduler add-on, which allows vCenter to shut down and fire up servers as needed and to consolidate the workloads on as few physical servers as possible to keep them meeting their service levels. the SmartCloud Entry V2.3 software runs on any IBM BladeCenter or system x server and is priced based on a per-system basis for the machines under management (not per core). It has the product number 5641-SK1, and I can’t find the price for it anywhere obvious.

Presumably, IBM has figured out that it has plenty of hybrid shops that will want to mix Power and X86 iron and that the SmartCloud Entry tools should do that and all at consistent pricing.

Now Addressing John Q Public Cloud

SmartCloud is also the brand that IBM has slapped onto its public cloud, which is a set of X86 and Power systems that are run using its SmartCloud tools on behalf of customers like any other hoster trying to break into the cloud big-time to compete against industry juggernaut Amazon Web Services, which sells compute, storage, and networking infrastructure by the time and capacity slice and which also peddles load balancing, data munching, database, and other services under a utility pricing model.

IBM has just goosed its two public clouds, SmartCloud Enterprise and SmartCloud Enterprise+, to the V2.1 level.

SmartCloud Enterprise V2.1 is an X86-only public cloud that uses Red Hat’s KVM hypervisor to virtualize the underlying systems. the problem with cloud announcements, just like other services announcements, is that vendors don’t give out a lot of details, so when IBM says it has upgraded the KVM hypervisor underlying SmartCloud Enterprise, we don’t know where it was or where it went to. But what I can tell you is that IBM says the upgraded KVM has better scalability in terms of the number and size of VMs it can manage on a host and that the performance of those VMs is also better.

IBM already supported the running of Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 operating systems on this entry public cloud as well as Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 and 5.5 and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 (either 32-bit or 64-bit versions) on top of KVM on its cloud, and with the V2.1 update, IBM is adding on the latest RHEL 5.8 and 6.2 updates.

The other big change is that IBM is boosting the service level agreement (SLA) on SmartCloud Enterprise from a 99.5 percent to a 99.9 percent uptime guarantee. (Well, IBM has to pay you back if it doesn’t meet the SLA, which is not the same thing as guaranteeing the SLA. But this is how people talk about SLAs, no matter how inaccurate they are being with the language.) that drops the downtime from around 48 hours per year to a little shy of nine hours. (If IBM wanted to impress me, it would give a 99.999 percent guarantee, which would mean no more than 5 minutes of downtime per year for virty server slices.)

Like other cloudy infrastructure providers, IBM is charging by the hour for virtual slices of CPU, memory, storage, and networking capacity; you can see the full price list at this link. Between now and June 11, you can play around with slices for free, which you can learn all about here. IBM offers slices that range from a “copper” configuration with one 1.2 GHz virtual CPU, 2 GB of virtual memory, and 60 GB of local storage for the virtual machine to a high of 16 virtual CPUs (basically, a full X86 machine), 16 GB of virtual memory, and 2 TB of disk space. you can also buy persistent block storage ranging from 60 GB to 10 TB and object storage that comes with either 99.9 or 99.99 percent uptime guarantees.

The SmartCloud Enterprise+ hybrid Power-X86 cloud that IBM was promising to deliver last April is now available in North America and Europe. big Blue plans to roll it out in other data centers in other geographical regions in the third quarter of this year. SmartCloud Enterprise+ puts VMware’s ESXi hypervisor on the X86 servers and PowerVM on the Power Systems machines and dices and slices the capacity while offering a sliding scale of availability on the virtual capacity. the higher the uptime, the more you pay, but good luck trying to figure out how much.

When SmartCloud Enterprise+ went into preview last November, IBM had a blanket 99.9 percent uptime SLA, just as it is now offering on the more rudimentary and X86-only SmartCloud Enterprise. the uptime is not all that impressive at the bronze level, with 98.5 percent uptime. That’s about what a standalone Windows NT 4.0 server could deliver at the end of the 1990s. That’s five and a half days of possible downtime per year, and that is certainly not acceptable for any customer-facing application. the silver level of SmartCloud Enterprise+ boosts that to 99.5 percent uptime, gold gets you to 99.7 percent (that’s a little more than a day of downtime) and platinum gets you to that 99.9 percent SLA. the silver SLA lets your VM move within a physical server cluster to help make that uptime commitment, and the gold level does automatic VM restarting when something crashes. the platinum level makes sure your VMs and disk files are replicated on two distinct disk arrays.

The Power portions of the SmartCloud Enterprise+ public cloud you can small configurations that range from one virtual CPU, 2 GB of virtual memory, and 64 GB of disk for the OS and software stack to a big ole slice that has 16 virtual CPUs (basically a quarter of a fully loaded two-socket box with Power7 chips and threading turned on or a whole machine if threading is turned off), 32 GB of virty memory, and 512 GB of local disk. At the moment the Power slices can run only AIX 6.1, which is probably the most popular recent release of IBM’s Unix. It is not clear when AIX 7.1 or Linux will be supported, or IBM i 6.1 or 7.1 for that matter. But as I have said a zillion times before, there’s no way IBM i should not be an option of the SmartCloud Enterprise+ public cloud.

This is particularly true given the fact that IBM announced that it would be putting system z mainframe slices on the SmartCloud Enterprise+ public cloud. system z mainframes will be added to the public cloud for customers in the United States and the United Kingdom later in 2012; IBM has not said when it will be available globally, but you can bet that the financial services companies located in new York and London are driving this requirement if it is not just a marketing stunt. (I don’t think it is, by the way. And I can’t wait to see what SLA these system z slices have. I will bet Ginni Rometty’s last dollar that it will have five nines of availability, just as a matter of principle and despite the fact that you could make a Power or X86 cloud five nines available if you wanted.) the mainframe slices will run IBM’s z/OS operating system, its CICS transaction monitor, its DB2 and IMS databases, its WebSphere application server, and its WebSphereMQ message queuing middleware.

IBM has also started a pilot of its SmartCloud Application Services platform-as-a-service cloud, which will expose runtime, middleware, and database services to customers without them having to manage the underlying virtual infrastructure on the SmartCloud public cloud run by big Blue. At the moment, this platform cloud pilot includes WebSphere and DB2 services as well as cloudy instances of SAP ERP software. this pilot is available for free, but you have to nudge your way to the front of the line to convince IBM to let you give it a spin. IBM expects for SmartCloud Application Services to be available in the third quarter.

It goes without saying that you could crank up an IBM i server and convert it to a SmartCloud Application Services platform cloud, allowing for secure multi-tenancy on it and only exposing runtime, file, database, and middleware services to users instead of a whole machine that they could monkey with. Let’s hope IBM remembers this, or if it doesn’t remember then big Blue doesn’t get in the way of those who do know it.

Abacus Solutions Puffs up an IBM i Cloud

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IBM i 7.1 Tech Refresh Sports Live Partition Mobility

AWS/400: Amazon Builds an AS/400-oid Cloud

Connectria Hosting Unveils an IBM i Cloud

Get Thee to the i Cloud, IBM’s Kugler Says

IBM’s Power-Based SmartClouds on the Horizon

Wanted: Cloud-i i-nfrastructure

IBM Launches Power7-Based Cloudy Stacks

Wanted: an AS/400-Centric system of Systems

Microsoft Azure: an AS/400 for Private and Public Clouds

Infor Signs On with Microsoft Azure Cloud Service, Unveils Infor24

IBM Buys Integration Appliance Maker Cast Iron

Power Systems i Weather Report: Partly Cloudy Soon

Upstart i Developer Brings AS/400s to the Cloud

looksoftware Developing Cloud Connector for i OS

IBM Creates a Cloud Computing Division

The X Factor: Head in the Clouds

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Bluetooth Software

353 days
by in bluetooth

No, it has nothing to do with teeth. Bluetooth software is the name of a new computer technology that is now becoming commercially available. it promises to change the way we use machines significantly. Bluetooth essentially is a cable-replacement technology. Conceived initially by Ericsson, it is a standard for a small, cheap radio chip to be plugged into computers, printers, mobile phones, or any other device.

A Bluetooth chip is designed to replace cables by taking the information normally carried by the cable, and transmitting it at a special frequency to a receiver chip, which will then return the information received. That was the original idea, but, a lot more is possible with the new software. If you can transmit information with between a PC and a printer, why not transmit data from a mobile phone to a printer, or to a computer?

It is a wireless protocol utilizing short-range communications technology facilitating data transmission over short distances, creating wireless Personal Area Networks. The intent behind the development of Bluetooth was the creation of a single digital wireless protocol, capable of connecting multiple devices. a radio technology called frequency hopping spread spectrum is used. it chops up the data being sent and transmits chunks of it on up to 75 different frequencies. in its basic mode, the modulation is Gaussian frequency shift keying, and it can achieve a gross data rate of 1 Mb/s.

The technology provides a way to connect and exchange information between devices such as mobile phones, telephones, laptops, personal computers, printers, GPS receivers, digital cameras, and video game consoles over a secure, globally unlicensed 2.4 GHz short-range radio frequency bandwidth. The Bluetooth specifications are developed and licensed by the Bluetooth Special Interest Group. The SIG consists of companies in the areas of telecommunication, computing, networking, and consumer electronics.

Bluesoleil 6 is the most popular Bluetooth device driver, it supports all features of BlueSoleil earlier versions, manages phone contacts, you can send short messages via BlueSoleil on your computer, transfer files between computer and Bluetooth phone, and it is Windows Vista compatible.

Spotmau PowerSuite Professional – Is it Worth the Money?

393 days
by in pentium 4 Ht Extreme Edition

If you own a Windows PC you already know this: Sooner or later, your machine will run into problems. Spotmau PowerSuite Professional 2008 promises an easy way for any non-geek to fix most PC problems, without requiring any technical knowledge on your part.

We decided to test Spotmau PowerSuite Pro 2008 to see if it works as advertised, and if it’s worth the money asked.

What is Spotmau PowerSuite?

Spotmau PowerSuite Pro is an easy-to-use, menu-driven bootable CD which you just pop into your drive, boot it, and fix a variety of Windows problems. Here’s top 5 tools included in the PowerSuite Pro 2008:

  1. Windows Recovery tools (recovers your Windows installation, a corrupt partition table, boot loader problems, missing files that prevent Windows from booting, and more.)
  2. Password Recovery tools (lets you change or reset your User or Admin passwords without having to log into Windows, as well as clear the BIOS/CMOS password.)
  3. Unformat & Undelete tools (recovers files you lost because of a formatted or damaged hard drive, as well as files you accidentally deleted.)
  4. Partition Genius tool (lets you create, delete, resize, move and split partitions without losing data, as well as format partitions, and convert between different partition types.)
  5. Clone Genius tool (lets you easily clone a hard drive for backup purposes, so that you can later restore your entire system quickly, if necessary.)

A lot more tools and modules are provided, but the ones above are those we consider most useful.

How we tested

We took a Windows XP machine with a Pentium 4 2.8 GHz CPU, inserted the Spotmau PowerSuite Pro CD, and tested several of the above features in a real-world environment.

The test results

1. Password Recovery tools work as advertised. we could easily reset both the Admin and User password on the tested XP box. The process is very easy and straightforward. Spotmau lets you specify which users need their passwords reset, and then clears their passwords. if you want a password changed rather than cleared, the software will prompt you to enter a new password and update Windows. we rebooted to verify that we could log into Windows XP with the new password, and we could, no problems here.

2. Clone Genius is a very good backup tool, but needs a bit of improvement. to test Clone Genius, we plugged two external USB hard drives into the PC, and tried to copy our entire XP system to both of them. One of the USB drives was recognized as an IDE drive for some reason, which was confusing, however the backup process still worked flawlessly for both the external discs.

3. Partition Genius works great. again, we plugged an external USB drive, and were able to easily resize and then split an NTFS partition without losing the data. It’s an excellent utility available for a fraction of the cost of similar products, such as Partition Magic.

So is PowerSuite Pro worth the money asked?

That is ultimately for you to decide.

This entire suite retails at $49.95, which is reasonable in our book, given the sheer number of features it offers. to compare, Partition Magic costs $69.95, and all of its features are covered by Partition Genius, which is just one of the many modules that come with PowerSuite Professional 2008. and if you consider the hundreds of dollars computer technicians typically charge for repairing a Windows PC and recovering data, PowerSuite is certainly worth a try.

Overall, apart from a couple of minor annoyances with Clone Genius, we were pretty happy with our testing of this software suite, and will continue to test it under different configurations so that users can make an informed decision.

Dell XPS 13 Ultrabook Review

410 days
by in cd Dvd Drives

“So you have a MacBook Air,” a man sitting next to me on a flight from new York to San Francisco says to me as he gestures at the laptop stuffed in my seat pocket. I don’t actually have a MacBook Air, at least not on the flight, but he isn’t the first person in the last couple of weeks to mistake Dell’s new ultrabook for Apple’s ultrathin laptop.

The ultrabook — a term coined by Intel to describe a new category of thin and light Windows laptops — bears a striking resemblance to Apple’s MacBook Air in both physical design and features. And that’s exactly the point, except Dell’s charging $300 less for similar features.

Thanks to Intel’s push, the XPS 13 is the fourth ultrabook to be released in the last couple of months. they look to go toe-to-toe with Apple’s leading laptop, with a thin design, fast boot times, and promises of long battery life. (Toshiba, HP, Acer, and Lenovo have all released ultrabooks in the last couple of months.) however, where the others have fallen short — notably on the balance of price, design, and quality — Dell has a very strong shot at succeeding. Or it would, if the XPS 13 just didn’t have three distinct pain points – its trackpad, screen, and battery life.

That fellow sitting next to me didn’t just mistake the XPS for an Air because it’s so thin — 0.7 inches thick at its thickest point. It also has tapered edges and the entire top lid is covered in a similar silver aluminum. The laptop sure does look incredibly similar to the Air from some angles, but there are some distinct design differences, notably under the lid.

Dell has used a 13-inch display with a very thin frame, which gives the laptop a smaller footprint than Apple’s 13-inch Air and lets it weigh 2.99 pounds (the Air weighs 2.96 pounds). because it’s so thin, there’s no room for a DVD drive, but the XPS 13 does have two USB ports, a headphone jack, and a MiniDisplay port for hooking up an external display. It is disappointing that there is no SD card slot, which always makes it much easier to get your photos onto a computer. (Apple, which had none, added an SD card slot to its current model of the Air.)

While the screen does have a shrunken frame, it isn’t a great quality display. It has lower resolution than the MacBook Air and the viewing angles are quite limited. That means I wasn’t able to see what was on the screen when it was pushed back slightly in my airplane seat, or from the side when I wanted to watch a quick video clip with my friend.

The most surprising thing to me during testing was how extremely well built the laptop is. While Dell has typically released very plasticy machines, the XPS 13′s mix of aluminum, magnesium alloy, and carbon fiber makes it not only one of the best made Dell laptop I have seen in years, but one of the best on the market.

Another major difference in design comes with the black rubbery palm rest and trackpad. I really preferred the feel of the surface to the metal on other laptops, but the trackpad itself is where the XPS begins to suffer from some usability issues. Dell has integrated the mouse buttons into the trackpad, the way Apple and several Windows laptop makers have. but the navigating experience is not as smooth as it is on Apple’s laptop and can be fustrating. For example, using two fingers to scroll is jumpy, and while pointing and clicking works decently, I noticed the cursor mistakenly jumping or getting stuck at times.

Toshiba’s first Windows tablet to hit stores in March

416 days
by in batteries For Toshiba

Toshiba will be introducing its first Windows-based tablet in March with the WT200.

The device offers a 10.1-inch LED backlit screen with a 1366×768 resolution. It weighs less than 800 grams, and is 14mm thick.

Designed for businesses, the device has Windows 7 Pro platform pre-installed, and promises compatibility with an in-office desktop environment

It offers all essential applications, software, and security, according to Toshiba product marketing manager, Justin White.

“Organisations can be assured that data is kept secure with the highest levels of data network security through the built-in trusted platform module (TPM),” he added.

When paired with the Toshiba Multi Dock and plugged into a monitor and speakers, the tablet serves as a desktop-type PC.

WT200 is equipped with built-in 3G, as well as SD Card slot, Micro HDMI, USB 2.0, and mini USB 2.0 connectivity options.

It is powered by a three cell 2700MaH lithium-ion battery, features a 64GB SSD, and 2GB RAM.

The WT200 will be available for $999.

The Pitfalls of Going Cheap on Replacement Batteries

427 days
by in batteries For Jvc

Lost or damaged the battery to your fancy and costly new camcorder, digital camera or cordless phone? be extremely wary when going online to find a replacement.

Many online providers – and there are MANY – offer unbelievable prices compared to factory original replacements. they are able to do so by offering non-branded or their own in-house brand of replacement camcorder batteries, digital camera batteries and cordless phone batteries. their advertisements sound almost too good to be true, especially after being told by your local electronics store how much a factory original replacement will cost. But these online deals usually are too good to be true – for what you save in money, you will pay for in quality.

These providers make all the usual promises of quality and functionality, but at the end of the day, they are resellers and marketers, not hardware manufacturers. as such, their products tend to be on the low end of the quality scale as they look to increase profit margins.

This is accomplished by creating camcorder batteries, digital camera batteries and cordless phone batteries that look, feel and connect just like the factory originals. the thing is, however, that most such batteries today are lithium-ion batteries, which can be made using a variety of different chemical compounds.

But not all chemical compounds are created equal, and some, while being much cheaper to acquire, result in much diminished battery life, lower energy density and longer charging times. it is a chemistry that experts say must be treated with care and respect for optimal results. you want someone who not only really knows what they are doing, but who also actually cares about getting it right.

In other words, you get what you pay for when shopping at these outlets.

When it comes to camcorder batteries, digital camera batteries and cordless phone batteries, it is recommended to buy only branded products. that is not to say you have to buy the exact brand as your camcorder, digital camera or cordless phone. doing that often costs up to 70 percent more. it is possible to buy a non-name brand product, but you do still want to make sure there is a brand behind the product.

There are many companies represented online that specialize in producing replacement camcorder batteries, digital camera batteries and cordless phone batteries, and their products often rival the quality of the factory original batteries.

These companies are somewhere between the original manufacturer and the peddlers of cheap wares described above. In price, they are only slightly more expensive than the non-branded resellers, but in quality they tend toward the high end of the scale by focusing solely on producing top-notch camcorder batteries, digital camera batteries and cordless phone batteries.

So buying something other than the exact brand of your camcorder, digital camera or cordless phone is not the issue. you can go cheap, just be careful of the cheapest option. a good rule of thumb is that typically the most expensive of the cheap options is going to provide the best quality.

Even so, take some time to do a bit of online research and make sure the product you are purchasing comes from a reputable brand that specializes in producing replacement camcorder batteries, digital camera batteries and cordless phone batteries. there is nothing more frustrating than finally receiving your replacement battery only to find that it doesn’t work or stops working after minimal use.

Leaked Image Of Thunderbolt on White MacBook? – SlashGear

808 days
by in usb Hubs

Intel’s Light Peak lightening speed data transfer technology known as Thunderbolt debuted on the new Apple MacBook Pro line last week. with Apple’s special event only a day away, we won’t have to speculate for long whether Thunderbolt will be implemented on the iPad 2 as well. however, today an image purported to be a leaked shot of the plastic white MacBook also sporting the Thunderbolt port has surfaced suggesting the MacBook series may also be getting revamped with the new data transfer technology very soon.

Thunderbolt promises bi-directional data transfer speeds of up to 10Gbps and will likely replace USB and FireWire ports in the future. it is estimated to be 12 times faster than FireWire 800 and 20 times faster than USB 2.0. The new USB 3.0 is still only half the speed of Thunderbolt. but not only this, Thunderbolt is able to daisy-chain multiple devices without a hub, something that USB was never able to.

Other Intel partners including LaCie, Promise, and Western Digital have already announced upcoming devices to feature Thunderbolt technology. We also noted last week that Nikon is rumored to be implementing Thunderbolt on their Nikon D4, which would make it the first DSLR to feature the new data transfer technology.

–thanks for the tip, Theo!

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