HP Driver Unlocks Multi-Touch On Older Touchpad
If you haven't updated the driver for your laptop's touchpad lately, you may want to think about doing so, particularly if your laptop has a Synaptics touchpad. As a user on Hardware Zone forums discovered, there's a new driver from Synaptics that enables multitouch gestures as well as two-finger scrolling and three-finger click. What's really cool is that this driver enables this functionality for older laptops that didn't previously support these functions. Although it was thought that older touchpads were
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Nintendo Plans DS Invasion In Schools: The Future Of Learning Is Gaming
Uniforms. Tighter schedules. Removal of cellphones. Could school possibly get any worse? We're sure it could, but the higher-ups at Nintendo want to change up schools in a positive way. By introducing their products into them, of course! We have previously heard of Dance Dance Revolution being used in select Physical Education programs in order to get students to become active when they otherwise wouldn't, but we have yet to hear of any school making a sweeping measure to accept gaming consoles as a part of
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Internet Addiction Clininc Opens In London: "Screenagers" Urged To Attend
The Internet can be a pretty scary place, and apparently it can be pretty addicting too. Not that we're too worried about you checking back here for the 40th time today, but if you've found yourself having a tough time disconnecting in London, there might be some help just around the block. If you're willing to shuttle over and accept it. A new Internet addiction clinic has opened up in England's most famous city, as a private London hospital has launched what is said to be the nation's first dedicated technology
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Palm Disappoints, Teeters On The Brink Of Failure
When Palm demo'd the Pre a year ago in January, the phone was seen as the company's last chance to reverse its fortunes. Despite positive reviews and praise for the company's WebOS and Palm Pixi, the once-dominant cell phone and PDA manufacturer has continued to lose ground (and money). For Q3 2010 Palm reported a loss of $18.5 million. That's significantly better than a year ago, when the company lost $95 million, but the company's quarterly results are ominous for multiple reasons. First off, there's an awful
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Microsoft Confirms IE9 Won't Come to XP
When we previewed Internet Explorer's new rendering engine this week we noted that the same features that made IE9's hardware-acceleration possible probably aren't compatible with Windows XP. Microsoft initially dodged giving a straight answer to the question of XP support but has since admitted that the new browser won't be XP-compatible when it launches. This has created a small tempest of protest from those users still using XP, but this is less of an arbitrary decision than some appear to think. It's literally
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Desktop Sales Skyrocket, ASPs Rise
The NPD Group released a statement today that points toward surprising growth in desktop sales this past February. Historically, desktop sales have trended steadily downwards for the past ten years; notebook shipments first surpassed desktop shipments in 2008. New data suggests the pendulum has oddly swung the other way—desktop unit sales were up 30 percent in February, while desktop-derived revenue grew by 33 percent.Part of what makes the jump odd is that there doesn't seem to be a reason for it. Our first
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JVC Brings Bluetooth To The Camcorder Everio GZ-HM550
The camcorder sector has largely grown without too much attention over the past few years. It just hasn't emerged as one of those "must-have" mainstream technologies, whereas netbooks, smartphones and tablet PCs are just about everywhere. A lot of innovation is still going on with camcorders though, and while many of them are somewhat boring, this particular JVC caught out eye. The company just announced that this model (the Everio GZ-HM550) was shipping, and it definitely packs more features than your grandma's
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USB Mass Storage Support Coming Soon To Xbox 360
Microsoft's Xbox 360 Arcade console is about to get a lot more interesting, and a lot more viable. For most, the idea of buying the cheap(er) console and then buying an expensive Xbox 360 hard drive or 512MB Memory Unit was something that just added up to "too much." But in order to continually battle Sony and Nintendo, they are reportedly planning to enable USB Mass Storage support across the console line. If you're not much on terminology, this means that your normal USB drive will soon be able to be used
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Marvell's $99 Moby Tablet Might Just Be A Game Changer
The OLPC XO computer set out to change the way laptops were viewed and used in schools everywhere. It ended up costing a bit more to manufacture than originally planned, so it didn't make the vast impact than was intended. It still made a small impact, though, and now loads of poorer schools worldwide have computers that they otherwise wouldn't. Marvell is obviously looking to pick up where OLPC left off, and now that prices have sunk somewhat, they just be able to pull it off. The new device is called the Moby,
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Microsoft Confirms IE9 Won't Come to XP
When we previewed Internet Explorer's new rendering engine this week we noted that the same features that made IE9's hardware-acceleration possible probably aren't compatible with Windows XP. Microsoft initially dodged giving a straight answer to the question of XP support but has since admitted that the new browser won't be XP-compatible when it launches.This has created a small tempest of protest from those users still using XP, but this is less of an arbitrary decision than some appear to think. It's literally impossible to port Windows Vista/Win 7-style hardware acceleration backwards into XP. Microsoft would have to either develop a workaround from scratch or create a CPU-driven "software mode." Using such a mode could easily max out a CPU and negatively impact system speed and battery life.
So, yeah, that's what we call an improvement, particularly when compared against IE8.
We also don't think much of the argument that Microsoft is abandoning XP lovers. IE8 is much more secure than IE6 by any comparison and while XP is still humming along on an awful lot of netbooks, consistent sales data has shown that netbooks are almost always secondary systems, not primary ones. XP and IE8 are fine for a netbook, especially since it could be 6-12 months before we even see IE9 ship. After nearly 10 years it's time to let XP totter off and die with dignity.
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Desktop Sales Skyrocket, ASPs Rise
The NPD Group released a statement today that points toward surprising growth in desktop sales this past February. Historically, desktop sales have trended steadily downwards for the past ten years; notebook shipments first surpassed desktop shipments in 2008. New data suggests the pendulum has oddly swung the other way—desktop unit sales were up 30 percent in February, while desktop-derived revenue grew by 33 percent.Part of what makes the jump odd is that there doesn't seem to be a reason for it. Our first thought was that OEMs like Dell and HP could have slashed prices on their Core 2 Duo desktops to make way for the Core i3/i5 products Intel launched in January, but desktop ASPs were actually 11 percent higher ($670) than their notebook counterparts ($602.) NPD's vice president of strategic analysis, Stephen Baker, attributes this growth to Windows 7, writing: "Windows 7 is propelling the PC side of the market where desktop ASPs have been higher than notebook/netbook ASPs in three of the last four months."
Baker attributes the growth in desktop ASPs to the success of low-cost notebooks and netbooks, which have replaced desktops as entry-level systems for first-time buyers. "With consistent offerings under $400, partly in response to the netbook challenge and partly in response to competitive activity in the industry, notebooks now make up the lion’s share (64 percent of the non-netbook under $400 PC market in the six months ending Feb 2010 and one-third of the 4.4 million computers sold at retail for less then $400 in that time...in February notebooks under
$400 nearly outsold netbooks." If Baker is right, it implies that the line between notebook and netbook is getting quite blurry around the $300-$400 mark.
Given the fact that a majority of US households own a computer and have access to the Internet, it makes sense that 'first time' buyers, especially students, would gravitate towards a mobile system rather than a second desktop. We're not as willing to tie Windows 7 and desktop unit sales together. Historically, no Microsoft OS since Windows 95 has created a sustained uptick in PC sales. A number of analysts predicted a pent-up demand for Win 7, but we'd have expected that boost to mostly appear in the fourth quarter of 2009. The economic conditions of the past 18 months also make us leery of drawing monocausal conclusions—things may be improving, but they're scarcely wine and roses for a lot of people.
NPD rosily predicts "solid ASPs, better demand, and a strong upgrade path...2010 is likely to see the best growth rates for consumer desktops in years." We're all great fans of desktops here, but given how badly PC sales slumped in early 2009, we're not convinced that the February jump is more than a blip. Desktop revenues have grown in three of the past four months after 21 months of decline—we'll wait for a few more months of economic stability before concluding that desktops are experiencing a sort-of renaissance.
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Palm Disappoints, Teeters On The Brink Of Failure
When Palm demo'd the Pre a year ago in January, the phone was seen as the company's last chance to reverse its fortunes. Despite positive reviews and praise for the company's WebOS and Palm Pixi, the once-dominant cell phone and PDA manufacturer has continued to lose ground (and money). For Q3 2010 Palm reported a loss of $18.5 million. That's significantly better than a year ago, when the company lost $95 million, but the company's quarterly results are ominous for multiple reasons.First off, there's an awful lot of unsold inventory building up in partner stores. Palm may have shipped 960,000 phones last quarter (up 300 percent year-on-year), but its sell-through figures were much lower at just 408,000. That's a 23 percent decrease quarter-on-quarter. Worse, Palm's fiscal Q3 covers the Christmas buying season (which may have improved sales) and the company offered special deals through the same time period.
"Our recent underperformance has been very disappointing, but the potential for Palm remains strong," said Jon Rubinstein, Palm chairman and chief executive officer. "The work we're doing to improve sales is having an impact, we're making great progress on future products, and we're looking forward to upcoming launches with new carrier partners. Most importantly, we have built a unique and highly differentiated platform in webOS, which will provide us with a considerable - and growing - advantage as we move forward."
Wall Street doesn't believe it and to be blunt, we don't either. Solid products, deep discounts, two refreshes (both the Pre and Pixi now have 'Plus' flavors), and a strong OS offering have collectively failed to ignite widespread consumer interest in the company's products. Rubinstein talks about Palm's potential remaining strong, but the company may have literally run out of time. Palm's stock was hammered after its announcement, falling 12 percent to just below $5 before the market closed on Friday. We're already seeing investor speculation that the stock could actually fall all the way to $0 as investors flee the dying company.
Palm's best bet—and maybe it's only chance to survive in any meaningful way—is to start aggressively shopping around for an interested buyer. The fact that Palm has been unable to draw support for its WebOS in the face of competition from both the iPhone and Android is more a sign of supremely bad timing than a judgment on the company's value. Hopefully the likes of Google or Nokia will make Palm an offer. Brave words aside, it's hard to envision a scenario in which Palm triumphantly returns to profitability on its own.
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HP Driver Unlocks Multi-Touch On Older Touchpad
If you haven't updated the driver for your laptop's touchpad lately, you may want to think about doing so, particularly if your laptop has a Synaptics touchpad. As a user on Hardware Zone forums discovered, there's a new driver from Synaptics that enables multitouch gestures as well as two-finger scrolling and three-finger click. What's really cool is that this driver enables this functionality for older laptops that didn't previously support these functions.Although it was thought that older touchpads were not capable of multi-touch, this driver update appears to prove otherwise. Another pleasant surprise is the unlocking of two- and three-finger gestures since even modded drivers were not able to achieve this.
The drivers actually come from HP, but they will likely work on other laptops with Synaptics touchpads as well. There are drivers available for Windows XP, Vista, and 7.
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Need help building i7 3D/rendering workstation
Any and all comments on the build will be more than welcome. Despite my best efforts at research I still need your feedback.
The purpose of the machine will be primarily to function as a 3D/HD video/graphics workstation and secondary to function as a render machine.
Both goals, and especially the second, require the PC to have as much raw computing (CPU) power as humanly possible. The system should also be very stable as it will be running days, sometimes even weeks on end with full load.
BUDGET RANGE: About $1500 or thereabouts. Since I’ll buy it in euro (I'm in Belgium) you shouldn’t worry too much about conversions and just go for an approximate guess. The parts I listed cost about as much as I'm willing to spend on that particular kind of part (CPU, mobo, ...)
APPROXIMATE PURCHASE DATE: Within the next month. Would be willing to wait only if something is around the corner that will suit my needs a lot more than current possibilities.
SYSTEM USAGE FROM MOST TO LEAST IMPORTANT: 3D and HD graphics workstation. Rendering machine. A tiny bit of gaming if possible.
PARTS NOT REQUIRED: Keyboard, mouse, screen.
PREFERRED WEBSITE(S) FOR PARTS: I’m afraid I’m stuck with a local builder/shop as I’m having it be built there. Luckily they have a pretty wide choice of parts so most if not any of your suggestions are acceptable.
PARTS PREFERENCES: None that I can think of.
OVERCLOCKING: Yes. SLI OR CROSSFIRE: Not in the near future.
MONITOR RESOLUTION: 1680 x 1050
ADDITIONAL COMMENTS: I know it’s a lot to ask for considering it is to be overclocked and will need a cooler the size of Mt Everest, but I really, really would prefer a PC which runs as quietly as possible. My current one is on 24/7 standby to be drafted by the military for use as a sonic weapon. It’s really driving me crazy to be working next to something that sounds like it’s about to go into orbit at any second.
WHAT I'VE GOT PLANNED SO FAR:
CPU:
i7 920 or i7 930.
I prefer the 1366 socket over the 1156 because the i7 920/930 offers more “bandwith” (that’s how I understood it anyways) which apparently makes a difference for video editing.
The CPU would then be OC’d to 3,5 Ghz at least, Hyperthreading enabled of course. I’d get as much as I can. The magical 4 Ghz if possible. But the machine should be stable as a rock, so I doubt that’ll work out.
I’m in doubt about going for a 920 or a 930. Apparently the only difference is that the 930 is clocked somewhat higher. But someone suggested somewhere that the 930 is somewhat newer in design so should be easier to overclock.
CPU Cooler:
I was thinking of getting the Noctua NH-D14. It’s a massive beast, and it seems to be scoring best on all the benchmarks.
Since I just noticed the shop I’m using doesn’t carry the damn thing anymore I might have to go for the Cooler Master V10 which is also reported to cool reasonably well.
Anyone have experiences about which of the two performs better?
If you guys think the Noctua would be a lot better I’ll do my very best to get it.
Case:
Cooler Master HAF 922
The only reason I picked this one is because both the Noctua and Cooler Master coolers are immense in size and not all cases will fit them. Reviews also note the case’s fine airflow. I hope I’m right in choosing this case.
Motherboard:
Asus P6T probably. I’m a little at a loss as to which mobo to go for. I’m inclined to go for the P6T as it fits my budget and does nice in reviews. But considering I’m OC’ing I’m wondering if I should go for the Deluxe or another line of mobo’s entirely. Your advice on this matter would be much appreciated.
RAM:
12GB. I know, it’s a lot. But I’m wanting to start running quite a lot of simulations and they’re very heavy on RAM. My workflow is also very “multitasky” so I’m sure the 12GB will come in handy.
Corsair 12 GB DDR3-1600 Hex-Kit Retail. I don’t know anything about RAM and its relation to OC’ing. I heard having a lot of RAM (in this case an insane 12GB) will make it harder to OC. I also have no idea) will make it harder to OC. I also have no idea whether having 1600 Mhz ram or this 9-9-9-24 thing make any difference. The guides about overclocking the i7 didn't provide much information about this.
GPU:
This is a tough one. I first considered getting a Quadro workstation card… But then I realized they’re all basically consumer type chipsets with some extra RAM and a disproportionate extra cost.
Unless someone can convince me they have some amazing advantage I don’t know about they’re not an option.
I’m torn between the Nvidia GTX260 and the Radeon 5770. The 260 is said to score better in the 2D field (according to THIS test) which is rather important. It’s also CUDA enabled, which could be the next big thing in rendering. On the downside it has only 896 MB RAM, which isn’t enough to run a brand new kind of program which uses the GPU to help with rendering.
Then the 5770 has the advantage of 1Gig RAM. I heard that Nvidia artificially keeps the performance of their gaming cards down when dealing with Adobe graphics software, so that people will buy the Quadro cards. I’m not sure if this is true or not.
I occasionally game although the ability to do so or not isn’t a deal breaker.
Hard drive:
I honestly have no idea. I’m probably going to be editing HD footage so I’m guessing I’ll need some speed. I was advised against the raptor since it’s not safe enough. A SSD is outside my budget.
Currently I’m going for 2HD’s WD Caviar Black 640 GB. I don’t know anything about RAID.
Help with this would be great.
PSU:
Corsair CMPSU-650TX
Will 650 be enough?
Here’s my questions summarized:
920 or 930?
Cooler Master V10 or Noctua NH-D14?
Will the case fit the cooler?
Which motherboard should I get? Overclockability is a prime concern of course.
Will the RAM be a hurdle to OC'ing?
Which GPU to get? The GTX260 or the Radeon 5770?
Which hard drive solution to get to ensure the best data rate while editing?
How powerful a PSU will I need?
Thanks heaps in advance for reading my wall of text. And even more thanks for any reply.
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Internet Addiction Clininc Opens In London: "Screenagers" Urged To Attend
The Internet can be a pretty scary place, and apparently it can bepretty addicting too. Not that we're too worried about you checkingback here for the 40th time today, but if you've found yourself havinga tough time disconnecting in London, there might be some help justaround the block. If you're willing to shuttle over and accept it.A new Internet addiction clinic has opened up in England's most famouscity, as a private London hospital has launched what is said to be thenation's first dedicated technology addiction service. What's mostcomical about an otherwise serious venture is that the service is aimedat so-called "screenagers," which are teens that just can't seem to prythemselves away from the LCD in their bedroom. It's actually more thanthat; the name is given to children who actually fly into a ragewhenever they are instructed to turn their PC off.
As with any clinic, help will be funneled through intensive in-patientcare or via group therapy sessions, and while it will serve kids asyoung as 12, it's aimed at those in the 15-17 age range. RichardGraham, lead consultant at Capio Nightingale Hospital, told the LondonEvening Standard that some parents "end up having to call the police"in order to keep their kids under control when told that PC time isover. The therapy involves coaxing patients into experiencingone-on-one communication with others, using "real" communicationsversus online chatting. There's no public price mentioned on this, butwe know it's not cheap. Then again, if your kid yells and screamswhenever the LCD goes black, it's probably worth whatever they chargeif the docs can really cure it.
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