Acer will ship Windows 7 PCs by October 23, maybe
At a press conference today, Acer said it would ship a Windows 7 machine on October 23, though it promptly qualified that as "Windows 7 ready" Acer, one of the world's three biggest PC manufacturers, held a press conference in London this afternoon to announce its exciting new Timeline series of notebooks, and upstaged itself by appearing to pre-announce Windows 7. One of Acer's future products is the Z5600 PC all-in-one running Windows 7, which Acer said would be "one of the key products going into Christmas". Launch date? "It will on the shelves on October 23." "Have you just given away the launch date for Windows 7?" asked ZD-Net's David Meyer, amid much laughter. From his seat in the audience, Acer vice president Massimo D'Angelo, in charge of Europe, said it would be on the shelves running Windows 7 "or Windows 7 ready: then we will have the final news." D'Angelo said Windows 7 was "already available, and seems to run very well" -- albeit that's the RC (release candidate) version. If it isn't actually released by October 23, however, "there will be free upgrade options from Vista. I believe that, like last time, you will only pay the freight cost," he said. Microsoft has not announced an official release date, and John Curran, the American who runs Microsoft UK's Windows Client Group, told me that Windows 7 will be launched before 1 June 2010, when the free RC beta expires. "We're on track to deliver within three years of Windows Vista," said Curran. "The final date will be governed by the quality of the build," based on the performance and reliability metrics collected from millions of test PCs. However, Curran also confirmed that Microsoft was not planning to offer RC2 and RC3 builds for testing
Here is the original post:
Acer will ship Windows 7 PCs by October 23, maybe
Greenwash: Fujitsu’s ‘wind-powered’ laptop is powered by the most expensive green energy in the world, writes Fred Pearce
Fujitsu promises to buy 'green energy' to offset the emissions from the energy use of each of its new 'wind-powered' laptops. But consumers are being asked to pay an extortionate price for carbon-free guilt Every green should have one – the world's first wind-powered laptop . The idea of a little turbine plugged into a socket on the side is intriguing, even if the truth is a bit more prosaic. A lot more prosaic. In fact, to buy this machine you'd have to be green according to the definition preferred by my old dictionary. That is, "gullible". For this is probably the most expensive green power in the world.
Breakfast briefing: More chips than a chimpanzee’s tea set
• European regulators are circulating their draft ruling in their antitrust case against Intel - and, according to the New York Times, it could result in the largest fine ever . Elsewhere, British chip firms ARM and Wolfson took a slap in their latest results, while the Wall Street Journal speculates that Apple could be preparing to manufacture its own chips
Here is the original post:
Breakfast briefing: More chips than a chimpanzee's tea set
Flat battery leads to date problems
Caroline Good's home PC boots up with the wrong date and time Our PC says: "CMOS check sum error. Defaults loaded" on start up, and the date and time are always incorrect. Caroline Good This almost always means the CMOS battery on the motherboard is out of power though, rarely, it could be a memory corruption problem. You will need to take the lid off your PC and look for a flat silver cell of the sort often used in watches and hearing aids , or other small battery. It's very easy to change, but make sure the PC mains power is off and that you are not carrying an electrostatic charge. Computing guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Read more:
Flat battery leads to date problems
Should we be protecting our NAS network storage devices?
John Palmer is considering a NAS hard drive but says he is unclear about what protects his data I'm considering a NAS hard drive for my home network, but I'm unclear about what protects my data. Can I rely on the router firewall and the protected PCs? John Palmer It's a good question and this is a neglected area. At the moment, I suspect most people rely on the firewall in their router, and use the PC's antivirus software to scan external hard drives. This should be safe enough but doesn't provide real-time protection. Symantec is selling SAV for NAS (Symantec Anti-Virus for Network Attached Storage), but it's not altogether clear how this helps. Storage servers, which run their own operating system, should also be able to run their own antivirus software. A very small example is a Windows Home Server, but this is a much more expensive type of storage. Computing guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
See more here:
Should we be protecting our NAS network storage devices?
Letters and blogs: 30 April 2009
Reading the future People are paying for the same content when it is consumed on devices or in another format (Ebooks battle for next chapter, 23 April). Example: books are the fastest-growing category on the iPhone. The Espresso book machine is revolutionary. Nokia's Comes With Music is becoming a success. The Amazon Kindle is already making traction and we see that the traditional media will lose out – unless it evolves, ITV will miss out on Susan Boyle fame. The caveat is: prices may be lower in the digital world – and that means traditional media will suffer due to their large overheads, ie, content will be paid for, but at a lower pricepoint. That's partly why ebooks never took off, since many tried to charge the same cost for the ebook as they do for the print version (which is silly) but only now is the ebook market taking off driven by Kindle and Sony book readers but at lower pricepoints
View original post here:
Letters and blogs: 30 April 2009
Ask Jack: 30 April 2009
Waiting for Windows 7? I'm thinking of upgrading my PC – my current 512MB of memory and 80GB hard disk seem pathetic – but should I wait until Windows 7 in 2010? Peter Atkins JS: It depends whether you need to upgrade now. If your machine is too slow, you can speed it up significantly by fitting 2GB or even 4GB of memory for less than £50. You can also expand your hard drive space by adding a 500GB or 1TB external hard drive, though you'll only have USB v1 so transferring files will be very slow. This will not be money wasted as you will be able to use the external drive with your next PC as well. However, you can now get fantastic desktop PCs with DVD or Blu-ray drives, 4GB of memory, dual- or quad-core processors, 64-bit Windows Vista and decent LCD screens for very little money. The extra power may tempt you to do more interesting things, and if your time has any value at all, a new desktop will pay for itself very quickly. And while a clean installation of Windows is always better than an upgrade, the upgrade from Vista SP1 to Windows 7 is as good as this process gets. There is no upgrade from XP to Windows 7: you have to do a clean installation then migrate data. If you need to upgrade now, I have no hesitation in recommending Vista SP1, if it is correctly installed on good quality hardware
View post:
Ask Jack: 30 April 2009
Technophile: Canonical’s Ubuntu 9.04 reviewed
Canonical's Ubuntu update is faster, smoother and more responsive – enough to put a jaunty spring in the step of Jackalope users Canonical has unleashed the Jackalope, or Ubuntu 9.04, code-named the Jaunty Jackalope. It's the latest release of an operating system that has become one of the most popular Linux distributions, and it manages to balance adding new features (including cloud computing), a netbook release and an improved interface with performance. That's a balance that Microsoft and Apple don't always make with major updates to their operating systems. I've been using Ubuntu since 6.10, and with each release, Ubuntu has become a little more polished. Each update has built on their easy installation process. After installation, the first thing you'll notice is the much faster boot time. It was one of the main goals of the release . As others have said, everything just feels smoother and more responsive. I run Ubuntu primarily on an Athlon XP 2400+ desktop computer with a little over a gigabyte of Ram as a home media server. Windows runs sluggishly on it, even with a clean install, but Linux has given it a second life. Ubuntu comes in a number of flavours.
See the original post:
Technophile: Canonical's Ubuntu 9.04 reviewed
Is it really a good time to be asking for more IT money?
This should be good for a laugh - as the chancellor announces the largest peacetime deficit in history, the IT industry is lining up to say what the government really needs to do is spend more taxpayers' money on computers. Purveyors of IT systems and services are wasting no time in portraying the catastrophic state of public finances as an opportunity for technology to do its stuff. Let's call it the "one last heave" message. OK, we've spent billions over the past 10 years with little effect on the size and cost of the government machine - but one more round of investment could achieve drastic savings. For a clue to where such opportunities are perceived, take a look at the report of the Operational Efficiency Programme, published along with the budget. In it, Martin Read, a former chief executive of Logica, takes a look at the government's portfolio of IT systems and finds a mess. For a start, we don't even know how much we're spending - the accepted figure is £16bn, but Read says the real figure could be anything from £12.5bn to £18.5bn. What we do know is that a lot of systems out there are a) under-used and b) duplicating those in the ministry (or other public body) up the road. This is a consequence of the 1990s revolution in public management, which encouraged government agencies to behave as quasi-commercial entities. Five years ago, the Treasury realised that this thinking had gone too far, and started promoting the sharing of "back-office" services. However, as Read observes, this effort has made little difference to central government. He calls for government bodies to accelerate the process by consolidating and running the result as a resource for the whole of government. This makes more sense than the current absurd model of agencies trying to flog surplus services to each other, but there are snags
View original post here:
Is it really a good time to be asking for more IT money?
Broadband: Why are our mobile internet connections so flaky?
With broadband now standard at home, why are we still hobbled by poor, confusing mobile network connections on the move? Most of us have already progressed from dial-up connections to broadband and probably Wi-Fi, which means we have always-on internet access around the house. The next step is to have always-on access in the car or on the train, or wherever else we happen to be, which makes mobile broadband the obvious next step. Naturally, the networks that already supply us with ubiquitous mobile phone connections are keen to sell us mobile broadband as well. But, like other new markets, it's also confusing, and still has numerous traps for the unwary. How do you know how much data you've downloaded, and how much will you be charged for going over the limit? Would you knowingly spend £200 to watch Friday Night With Jonathan Ross, or to keep up your online life from Paris? Rob Webber, commercial director at Broadband Expert, says: "The first thing people know is that they've got a massive bill ... Suppliers should be forced to display these charges at the point of sign-up." According to Chris Marling, editor of Broadband Genie: "Mobile broadband is a real minefield, and often expectations are too high. Consumers are very confused about the difference between megabits and megabytes. You're sold a service in bits per second but your allowance is in gigabytes. It's not an easy translation to make." Living in a laptop world People need to read the small print and the "fair use" policies for each service, and to find out if they will be prevented from using Skype, Windows Messenger, filesharing or other activities. Ian Fogg, a principal analyst with Forrester Research, says the trend towards mobile broadband reflects a move to "a laptop world". PCs are going from one per home to one per person, and we expect to take them around the house and then out of the house. "The growth of netbooks is part of that picture," says Fogg. Also, he adds: "You need that internet connection for the computer to do what you expect it to do." Examples include email, messaging, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and so on. The need to keep in touch is driving the adoption of smartphones such as the iPhone as well as mobile broadband bundled with notebook PCs and netbooks. Increasing demand is being met by increasing supply, says Fogg. "The 3G networks are now just about good enough, and prices have gone from being prohibitively expensive to very cheap: from £1 per megabyte to £1 per gigabyte, for the cheapest." The problem is that the mobile phone networks haven't improved that much in the past three or four years. Fogg says data broadband's responsiveness is more like dial-up than broadband - "speed falls off very quickly if a lot of people are online"
Excerpt from:
Broadband: Why are our mobile internet connections so flaky?