Computers – Page 7

Barebones Alienware PCs

A few days ago Alienware announced that you would be able to buy a barebones Alienware PC for $400 to make your own Alienware PC.

This offer will be for a limited time only but for the $400 you will get the classic P2 Alienware chassis in either silver or black, complete with an electric-blue lighting kit.

This is the most likely the most expensive barebones kit on the market and I don’t really understand why anyone would want one. If you know enough about computers to be able to build your own from a barebones kit, you should know that $400 is a little expensive for what you are getting. My suggestion is to just go with your own case, motherboard, etc. and be a lot happier.

Build your own Alienware PC [CNet]

Rumors of Brushed Metal iMac

Think Secret is saying that Apple may be releasing new iMacs at WWDC or very shortly afterward. The new iMacs will have a brushed metal casing and use the Santa Rosa chipset. Apple will also drop the 17″ version and lower the prices of the 20″ and 24″ models.

AppleInsider however says that it is unlikely for them to release it then because availability wouldn’t be until later this year. Think Secret is saying that the iMacs will be marketed as more of a high end computer for professional use.

This is great, I’ve been waiting for new iMacs because I don’t want to end up with an older model. I actually would say that this could be very true but I think that Apple has too much stuff going on right now and this could be good or could be spreading the company too thin.

Check out AppleInsider and Think Secret and decide what you want to believe.

HP to Offer Dual HD-DVD/Blu-Ray Drive in Desktops

HP will soon be offering a single drive option for HD-DVD and Blu-Ray needs in upcoming desktops. Giving customers the ability to burn and read CD’s, DVD’s, and Blu-Ray discs. Strangely the drive will only read HD-DVDs and not write to them.

May 9th is the date (according to CNet) when they will begin selling this option. This will make them the first company to sell a single drive solution for HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. The Pavilion Media Center m8010y and the Pavilion d4890y will be the models with this option and are both Intel powered.

HP started out on the HD-DVD side and because of this seems to have changed their mind about that decision and now is going to be neutral in this war. Not very good for the HD-DVD side but great for the Blu-Ray side.

Technical Support has gone down the Toilet

I hate calling for technical support because this is almost always how it goes. The people you talk to don’t have any answers and yet still talk to you like you’re an idiot.

“There is nothing unusual about this tech support call. Thousands just like it happen every day. Perhaps you can relate…“

[via TechEBlog

x86 Emulator in Java

JPC is a Java based x86 emulator. It is emulating a regular ol’ x86 based PC. The demo on their site shows it running unmodified DOS. This just goes to show you what you can do with DOS. You can head over to the Project page and run some games under the emulator within their page. They have 7 games that you can play right from within your browser. Its pretty amazing. Just how long until you can run Windows Vista in this thing (I don’t see that happing any time soon), but how cool would that be.

JPC – Interactive Demo

Shutdown Day is Tomorrow

I’ve talked about shutdown day before and I think its a good idea. I’m just reminding all of you that it is tomorrow and I know I’ll be at least trying to go the 24 hours. I’m still not sure if I’ll be able to but I plan on spending the day listening to podcasts I haven’t listened to yet.I hope that all of you will be able to find something else to do.

Commodore Gaming PC’s Open Shop Mid April

The Commodore will open its doors for shoppers in mid April. The computers look amazing. I am not going to buy one though because I like buiding my own, but I wouldn’t mind getting one of the cases for those PCs. Head on over and check out the computers here.

Shutdown Day

shutdownday.com is a website devoted to helping you answer one question, Can you survive for 24 hours without your computer?

“It is obvious that people would find life extremely difficult without computers, maybe even impossible. If they disappeared for just one day, would we be able to cope?
Be a part of one of the biggest global experiments ever to take place on the internet. The idea behind the experiment is to find out how many people can go without a computer for one whole day, and what will happen if we all participate!”

The website sets the date for March 24th. I encourage everyone to try it out because it is true, especially for all of us Geeks. We seem to live next to the comptuer, I know I do at least, we do spend a lot of time at the computer. Some of us are at the computer for work purposes and others because that is what they do for fun. Many teenagers now don’t watch as much TV as the last generation because they spend their time watching clips on YouTube and browsing MySpace or Facebook.

Let’s all try it out and we can find out how the day goes afterwards. But, for now head on over to shutdownday.com and leave a comment.

Or check out a video for alternative uses for a laptop:

Thermaltake’s 1,200W Power Supply

It’s amazing that it has come to this, this new power supply by Thermaltake has the highest output of any power supply so far. In our quest for faster and faster computers they are using more and more power but this seems to be a bit much. This is not for the regular joe though, its more for the hardcore gamer, only for those who have quad-core processors and quad SLI. Far East Gizmos

Writing Perl Scripts With Vista Speech Recognition

Doesn’t work as well as they say I guess. I haven’t had a chance to try it out but I’ve heard its pretty good. This video shows otherwise.

IBM has new Memory Breakthrough

IBM has deviced a way to double the speed of microprocessors, well kinda, the way it works is it reduces the memory bottleneck. IBM said that they were able to take DRAM up to speed with SRAM (which is much faster). What is good about this is that SRAM takes up much more space than DRAM does and IBM says that doing this will help reduce the memory bottlenecks that are created with the faster and faster microprocessors that are being made.

This is a great innovation in the memory space, I didn’t get into the nitty gritty of it because well I completely understand it, I’m not a RAM geek. InformationWeek talks about it a little bit more in depth and you can head there if you want to know more. If not then all you need to know is that Memory will get much faster over the next year or so.

Macs show color #e3823a Differently

SmugBlog has a post talking about how Macs show this color differently than PC’s do. It has some interesting examples that show that Safari will show this pictures slightly differently, even on the same web page.