TechSpot - PC Technology News and Analysis

SanDisk has announced a new set of solid state drives aimed at the phenomenally successful netbook market. Available in 8GB, 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB capacities, the new drives are based on the more cost effective multi-level cell (MLC) flash memory and are designed as drop-in replacements for hard disk drives using the SATA interface – unlike their first generation modules which relied on parallel ATA.

The new drives are currently being built in Japan by a partnership between SanDisk and Toshiba, and they should be available in February 2009. While the company is not providing pricing information as of yet, they did say its 32GB modular SSD will be “priced at parity” with competing 80GB 2.5-inch hard disk drive offerings.

The upcoming Windows 7 beta found its way onto the Internet late last month amid favorable impressions from those who gave it a try. Specifically, Windows 7 build 7000 32-bit was leaked back then, and now the 64-bit version has also made its way to several file sharing sites as well.

Interestingly, Microsoft may not be overly displeased with the leaks. The arrival of Windows 7 beta code on file-sharing sites has resulted in rocketing interest in the next-generation operating system on search engines – and it is currently the most popular software download in the Pirate Bay's Top 100. A public beta is also expected to be announced at the CES 2009, so you may want to wait, though it's not clear when the actual download will be available.

Intel has issued its second revenue warning on the fourth quarter since November, with the company now expecting revenue to fall $2 billion short of its original forecast due to “weakness in end demand and inventory reductions by its customers in the global PC supply chain.” Revenue is now expected to be about $8.2 billion, down 23 percent over the same quarter last year and down 20 percent sequentially.

Intel’s latest warning comes as technology companies are starting to feel the impact of the global economic crisis, in what is likely to be a tough year as companies and consumers cut software and hardware spending. Additionally, the company said the year-end share price of WiMAX service provider Clearwire impaired the value of its investment, resulting in a noncash charge of $950 million to the chipmaker’s fourth-quarter earnings

On top of prepping some very interesting hardware for ultra-portable laptops, AMD is also bringing some very low-cost CPUs to the market looking to capture more low-cost desktop PCs. AMD has released two new processors, both under 2Ghz, which will attempt to compete with the Atom and other processors the like lower-end Celerons.

The Athlon 2650e will be a 1.6GHz part with 512KB of L2 cache, and the Athlon X2 3250e will be a 1.5GHz part with 1MB of L2 cache. They will have TDPs of 15W and 22W, respectively, quite a bit more than the Atom which uses anywhere from a third to a fourth of that much power. The platform as a whole won't be more power-hungry than Intel's offerings, as the CPU + Chipset together will still have a TDP of 27W, the same as a 945G Atom-based offering. The CPUs will be sold at a fairly low price point, as low as $40, aimed at the “Ultra-Value Clients.”

The Atom is doing well right now, though there is clearly room for improvement in the low-power market. Via’s Nano has a lot of changes planned, some vendors (like Asus) are preferring the Celeron over the Atom and the performance of the CPU still leaves a lot to be desired. If AMD's low-cost, low-power CPUs can give the Atom a run for its money in both price and performance, they have a good shot at stealing away some of its market.

It appears that Microsoft is going to offer Vista users some form of free upgrades to the Windows 7 operating system, depending on the time of their purchase. According to TechARP.com, a site that has accurately predicted the company’s moves in the past, Microsoft will be working with PC makers to offer a free or inexpensive upgrade path for people who buy Vista machines after July 1st.

This has yet to be confirmed by Microsoft so as of right now this still has to be labeled as a rumor. Nevertheless, a similar program was initiated just before the XP - Vista transition looking to prevent a slowdown in sales during the months leading up to the new operating system release.

There are a handful of restrictions for the upgrade besides the purchase date, of course, such as that the Vista product can only be upgraded to the associated edition of Windows 7 (for example, Windows Vista Home Premium to Windows 7 Home Premium) and the language version also has to be the same. In addition, TechARP says that the program is optional, meaning that not all OEMs might participate.

Will SD cards be able to rival hard drives for storage capacity anytime soon? Probably not, but it won't be because of a technical limitation – the next generation of SD cards, dubbed SDXC, have been announced this week. Among other things, the new format for the cards will result in a theoretical size limit of a massive 2TB, 64 times greater than the current 32GB limitation. That's a significant jump, considering that 32GB SDHC cards have been available for only about a year.

The SD association has been working to retain the existing form factor and interface for SD cards, but is pushing the technology forward at a very rapid rate. The SDXC standard will supposedly provide cards that will start at read/write speeds greater than 100MB/sec, and in the future could go as high as 300MB/sec. SD is a very popular format, particularly for devices like digital camcorders and cameras. With HD cameras becoming more popular and the amount of space needed to store high quality video increasing rapidly, SDXC is trying to keep up and fill that need.

The Best and Worst Jobs in the U.S @ Wall Street Journal
Take the Thermaltake Survey 2009, Win Prizes @ Thermaltake
Windows 7 beta: first impressions @ Chron.com
Where To Ditch Old Videogames @ Forbes
See more articles and reviews.

Five years ago in TechSpot:
Apple unveils the iPod Mini which goes for $249

Bioshock fans have been waiting for an announcement about when the promised sequel is due, and so far have loosely gotten confirmation that it's due before the end of this year with a short trailer released in October 2008. More interesting that the upcoming sequel, however, is news that 2K is apparently envisioning upwards of five Bioshock installments. Christoph Hartmann, president for 2K, has stated that they do see a logical way to, if done properly, release multiple sequels in the future for the game.

Mr. Hartmann is apparently wary of running the series too dry, ending up like some other mass-produced and mass-advertised series. While he won't name names, he sites certain series that demonstrate how large numbers of sequels can simply dilute things, becoming just a cash cow. Whether or not they can pull it off remains to be seen, and likely the success of the upcoming sequel, Sea of Dreams, will tell a lot about how “fresh” the series can remain.

That's not to say it can't be done. There are many successful series that had at least three if not more installments, such as the very famous Final Fantasy series from Square Enix, the Ultima series from Origin/EA and even more modern-day examples like The Elder Scrolls series, The Sims and many others from all genres. He does make a good point at being careful not to dilute things. It's difficult to do, and even if they are producing fresh content with every iteration, it's still very easy to fall into the “it worked last time, let's do it again” trap.

Joining the likes of Western Digital, Seagate and others, Toshiba has introduced a new portable hard disk drive solution that packs half a terabyte of storage capacity. Weighing in at 6 ounces, this palm-sized device uses the USB 2.0 interface for both data and power, and comes preloaded with NTI Shadow backup software for real-time file backup.

While the company is not sharing many details regarding the drive’s performance other than saying it has an 8MB buffer, if previous launches and the “ultra-quiet operation” claims are anything to go by, we are probably looking at 5,400rpm spindle speeds. The new product will retail for around $180 and joins a family of portable drives that include an “electric blue” 400GB model, a “carbon gray” 320GB version and a “hot rod red” 250GB model. It works with Windows XP, Vista and Mac OS X 10.3.9 or later, and is available now through Toshiba’s website and major retailers.

HP has announced the Mini 2140, an Intel Atom refresh to last year’s Mini-Note 2133 based on the 1.2-GHz Via C7-M processor. Starting at 2.6 pounds and $499, this netbook will feature the 1.6 GHz Intel Atom processor, an all-aluminum case similar to that of its predecessor, and a range of storage options that include standard hard drives up to 160GB in size and solid-state drives up to 80GB.

With the update, the screen also got a bump in size, going from 8.9 inches to a 10.1 inch panel with a 1366 x 768 resolution. Both three cell and six cell batteries will be available, which should supposedly be good for up to four and eight hours on the go, respectively – a vast improvement over the 2133 attributed to the platform switch.

Other features of the Mini 2140 include a nearly full size QWERTY keyboard, Wi-Fi certified WLAN, Bluetooth 2.0, VGA Webcam and several protection schemes to enhance the physical life of this small form laptop, such as the accelerometer-based drop protection for the hard drive. Expect to see this one in store shelves by the end of the month.

Netbooks will be an important part of this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and Asus is getting ready to showcase some of its new and upcoming goodies, including Eee PC touch tablets and a rather atypical yet interesting product called the Eee Keyboard.

The upcoming 8.9-inch Eee PC T91 and the 10-inch Eee PC T101H are the company’s first netbooks with a swivel screen. Both have Windows XP Home SP3 installed on them, use a customized Asus interface for touch screen functionality, and will reportedly be available with built-in GPS functionality, a TV tuner, and an FM transmitter as options. Asus didn’t share details regarding price or launch dates, though.

In addition to its multi touch-capable tablets, the company also showed off the Eee Keyboard, a compact keyboard with a 5-inch touchpad on the right side of the device and a fully functional PC inside. The Eee Keyboard apparently runs Microsoft Windows XP Home and comes with a 1.6GHz Intel Atom microprocessor, 1GB of DDR2 DRAM and an onboard 16GB or 32GB SSD to store data.

Interestingly, it will also come complete with wireless HDMI capability, enabling any compatible HD television to be used as a monitor for your computing activity. Asus is clearly not afraid to break out of the mold when it comes to netbooks, whether or not this new product succeeds is another question but it is certainly a cool concept for a home theater PC. Check out some more pictures over at Gizmodo.

Verbatim used Macworld to announce a new storage product that takes SSD technology and wraps it up in an ExpressCard compatible device. Verbatim's new ExpressCard SSD will come in sizes from 16GB to 64GB and is expected to become available before the end of February. Verbatim pitches the product as a superior solution than a USB-attached SSD thanks to the faster throughput offered by the ExpressCard interface.

The device, which is also compatible with PCs, isn't the first such component to hit the market, but Verbatim claims it will be the first to hit its advertised speeds with a read throughput of 125MB/sec and write speeds upwards of 30MB/sec. That's nothing compared to what the SATA interface offers, but certainly a suitable speed for quickly detachable storage. The price for the units will range from $100 to $300 depending on the storage capacity.

Comcast made good on its pledge to migrate its entire network management system to a new “protocol agnostic” platform by the end of 2008, according to reports, and the new rules are now fully operational in all markets. Broadband Reports has a fairly detailed summary of how the new Comcast policy works so as to slow traffic to high-bandwidth users during time of peak network congestion.

Basically the plan checks for two conditions to engage throttling: “sustained usage” of 70 percent or more of your allotted up or downstream throughput or if you are somehow identified as clogging things up for up to 15,000 subscribers attached to a given Cable Modem Termination System. Given any of these two conditions a user’s internet connection will be throttled for at least 15 minutes, or until his average bandwidth utilization rate drops below 50 percent for 15 minutes.

The new technique will not manage congestion based on what applications high-bandwidth subscribers are using. While this is certainly a more transparent approach it remains to be seen how effective it will be. In addition to the new throttling system, Comcast has also a 250GB monthly usage cap for all users.

I’ve been using Windows XP x64 for about a year now. My previous OS of choice was Windows 2000 which I really loved, I swore to never upgrade to XP and in a way I succeeded because XP x64 is really just Windows Server 2003 x64 with another name. The reason I finally upgraded was so I could access all of my new system’s 8GB of RAM, and also because I was getting tired of writing Win2K fixes for games like Bioshock and Crysis. But from the very beginning of the transition I was disappointed; XP x64, when handling large files would slow down to a crawl.

I tried in vain to look for a solution, to give you an example: I’ve got a RAID5 array with 3 x 1TB hard drives and a lone Raptor 150GB for the OS. If I played back a 1080p trailer off Apple’s site stored to my hard drive using Quicktime Alternative the video would start to skip massively if at the same time I copied a large file from the RAID5 array to my Raptor disk, or extracted a file using WinRAR in the same manner.

Of course this is not the only problem, just an easy way to reproduce it. When I extracted large files I noticed that the Task Manager did not report memory being used under its graph, however the counter for available memory under ‘Physical Memory’ would go down a whole lot, using as much as 4GB of RAM when copying files at least that large!

Read the complete entry, including a solution at the TechSpot Blog.

Video games and fitness have never really gone hand in hand, and it has only been in the past few years that game developers have recognized that there is a small (but growing) demand for games that involve physical activity. Nintendo has been one of the first to try and capitalize on this with Wii Fit, and though the benefits of it are still in the air and still arguable, there's no doubt that it's the start of something much bigger. In what can be seen as supporting evidence of that, a hospital in the UK has decided to make Wii Fit part of a rehabilitation routine for people in physical therapy.

Specifically, a hospital in England has been using Wii Fit sessions as a way to help people learn how to make use of prosthetic limbs, claiming that the balance board helps people understand how to control a replacement limb better and retain balance. This certainly seems like a unique approach to physical therapy, but one that makes sense. Hand-eye coordination improvement and video game use have gone together for a long time, according to many sources, and using video games would certainly be a more engaging way to train people.

While this may be limited to a single hospital at the moment, it wouldn't be surprising in the least to see similar endeavors all over the world. Every generation of video games has become more interactive and more engaging. Perhaps the stereotype of gamers as unfit will be dispelled because of this.