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Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Dell Adamo Arrives: Available For Pre-Order Today

Dell previewed the stylish "Adamo" at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) this January, and consumers worldwide have been eager to find out when this attractive laptop will be available ... and at what price. The wait is over. Starting today people who place a premium on precision craftsmanship and design can pre-order the Adamo for a starting price of $1,999.

Adamo, derived from the Latin word meaning "to fall in love," will serve as a flagship in a line of products under the "Adamo by Dell" brand. Dell claims Adamo was "created to disrupt the personal computing space with the combination of new design aesthetics, personalization choices and sought-after technologies."

Those are some fancy words for saying, "This notebook looks hot."

The Adamo uses a chassis milled from a single piece of aluminum featuring precision detailing and a backlit keyboard. The 13.4" edge-to-edge glass display features a 16:9 ratio ideal for viewing HD movies. Wireless connections include Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and optional integrated mobile broadband. Unlike some other thin notebooks on the market (such as the MacBook Air) the Dell Adamo doesn't sacrifice important features like a full complement of connectivity ports. In addition, the Adamo is available with solid state drives and comes in your choice of either Onyx or Pearl colors with a range of matching accessories.

Toshiba Satellite A355 Review

The A350 series notebook is the latest 16" notebook from Toshiba and the successor to the 15.4” A305. This new model offers the same look and feel of its smaller brother as well as the same system configuration. In this review we take a look at the Intel configuration of the A355 and find out if it performs as well as its smaller brother.

Toshiba Satellite A355-S6943 Specifications:


Windows Vista Home Premium (SP1, 64-bit)
Intel Core 2 Duo Processor P7450 (2.13GHz, 3MB L2, 1066MHz FSB)
16.0" diagonal widescreen TruBrite TFT LCD display at 1366x768 (WXGA)
ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3650 with 512MB video memory
Intel Wireless WiFi Link 5100AGN (802.11a/g/n)
4GB PC2-6400 DDR2 SDRAM (maximum capacity 4GB)
500GB+250GB Serial ATA hard disk drive (5400RPM)
DVD SuperMulti (+/-R double layer) drive with Labelflash
1.3 megapixel webcam
Harmon/Kardon stereo speakers
Dimensions (WxDxH): 15.1" x 10.5" x 1.6"
Weight: 6 lbs 11.6oz with six-cell battery
90W (19V x 6.3A) 100-240V AC Adapter
6-cell 10.8v 44Wh Lithium Ion battery
1-Year Standard Limited Warranty
Price as configured: $1,149.99

Getac V100 Rugged Tablet Review

When it comes to making rugged notebooks and tablets, Getac is one of the most respected names in the business. As impressive as the fully rugged Getac V100 tablet might be at first glance, there's one thing that makes this tablet really special ... a screen rated at 1,200 nits brightness! By comparison, a good notebook screen might only be rated as a 250 nit screen. We're talking about a rugged tablet that can not only be used in the middle of the desert, but that has a screen you can still read when the desert sun is beating down from above. Read on to see how well the Getac V100 holds up against our testing.

The New Dell Latitude laptops

The high-performance New Latitude laptops are sleeker, smarter and designed for improved portability. Improved wireless connectivity allows you to connect virtually anywhere*. Extended battery life helps your laptop last as long as your workday. Get up to 19 hours* of battery life - our longest ever - with the optional 9-cell battery, battery slice and solid state drive (E6400 only). Enhanced security features offer protection and prevention against unauthorized access. All wrapped in a sleek, durable design with Strike ZoneTM shock absorbers to protect your hard drive.

Roundup: Turning Your Mac into a Virtual PC

Platform virtualization (the process of running a second operating system inside a virtual environment on your computer) has been on my mind a lot lately, has it been on yours? If you have made a shift recently from Windows to Mac you may have wondered at one point if you could find a way to use any of your old Windows software.

This article is focuses on the experience of running Windows Vista as a guest operating system on a Mac OS X host. The host system is a Unibody MacBook with the following specifications:

Core 2 Duo P7350 2GHz
2GB DDR3 1066 RAM
256MB Nvidia Geforce 9400m (Shared Memory)
500GB 5400 RPM HDD
When talking about virtualization I'll be referring to the Virtual Machine (VM) a lot. This is the virtual PC that will be running the guest OS. The default setup uses about half of your host computer's CPU and RAM. That is how we will be configuring our VMs for this test.

Sunday, December 21, 2008

HP EliteBook 2530p

If you're a corporate road warrior or a student trying to fit as much computer as possible in the smallest space possible, the HP EliteBook 2530p might be the perfect notebook for you. This 12.1" workstation featuring the latest Intel low voltage processors and integrated graphics for extreme battery life, and plenty of ports and storage options inside an impressively durable shell. The EliteBook 2530p looks like a surprising amount of computer in a rugged three-pound chassis. Is it worth a little extra cash to get your hands on this tiny titan? Keep reading and find out.

Performance and Benchmarks

Our pre-production EliteBook 2530p came with the Intel SL9400 low voltage processor, clocking in at 1.86GHz, and jammed packed with 6MB of cache. For graphics, HP included Intel GMA 4500MHD integrated graphics. A fast 80GB Intel SSD was also included in our test configuration, which helped applications load without much lag, helps reduce temperatures and extend battery life. As mentioned previously, the SSD option also makes the notebook less prone to accidental failure due to hard drive impact.

Older generation low-voltage processors performed a much lower levels than standard processors ... a trade off for extended battery life. Thankfully, the latest generation of Intel low-voltage processors perform quite well and nearly rival standard processors in most tests. Typical business users who are only concerned with working in Microsoft Office and encoding the occassional video for work will have more power than they know what to do with it.

ASUS N10JC-A1

The high-class ASUS N10 is a netbook above all the rest, starting a new market segment called the "Corporate Netbook." The N10 offers similar features to standard netbooks, including an Intel Atom platform and WSVGA screen, but with the addition of optional switchable dedicated graphics and a fancy design. With a starting price of $649 for models with dedicated graphics; is a higher configuration worth the price jump? In this review we explain the differences between the N10JC and the cheaper Eee PC 1000HA and tell you if you should consider the costly upgrade.

Performance

From the moment I received this notebook I was very interested in seeing the performance of the Intel Atom platform with a dedicated graphics card attached. Almost all configurations use the dated Intel GMA950 graphics, which slow everything down, including movie decoding. With the NVIDIA 9300M graphics, this netbook might have a shot at decoding 720p video in a very compact package that has HDMI out.

For our test we tried a wide range of high definition content including an assortment of HD movies and HD movie trailers. Sadly, even though we tried a wide range of video codecs, including CoreAVC, the Intel Atom processor didn’t have enough grunt to keep a steady decoding framerate. Depending on the bitrate the N10 working with the NVIDIA 9300M graphics only managed 10-15fps, well below 24-25fps goal.

Since HD content was out of the question we moved onto video games as another area to see where the dedicated graphics might help out. Using Steam we pulled in Half-Life 2 and tweaked the visual settings to be easier on the system. With the resolution set to 1024x600 and most settings on medium the system average 20-25fps, which was playable, but still under what you would want for smooth gaming. Heavy action scenes dropped the framerate into the mid-teens, and if you weren’t lucky, got yourself killed in no time.