PCs are lasting longer without a part going wrong, according to new research from Gartner. There has been a 25 percent decrease in annual failure rates for PC hardware over the last two years, the research firm said in a report published last week. It also found that notebooks have seen a significant improvement, even if they haven’t caught up in reliability with desktops.

A hardware failure was considered by Gartner researchers to be any problem that meant a hardware component would have to be replaced, whether a broken latch or a motherboard meltdown.

For notebooks built in 2003 or 2004, 20 percent of owners experienced failure in the first year on average, according to Gartner research. By the fourth year, that rate is predicted to rise to 28 percent. But the rate dropped to 15 percent in the first year for notebooks built in 2005 or 2006, and it is projected to be only 22 percent in the fourth year. Read the rest of this entry »

Designed for use in small to medium venues, Sonyā€™s latest E-series business projectors have been designed to deliver high picture quality combined with convenient features at an affordable price. The new entry-level LCD projector line comprises four new models, including Sonyā€™s first compact widescreen version. Each is designed for commercial applications, and specifically suited for use in classrooms and conference rooms. But the attractive design of the projectors also means they could sit well in your living room.

The new projectors represent the latest generation of Sonyā€™s VPL-E series. The VPL-EX50 reviewed here (like the VPL-EX5) offers a native 1024×768 (XGA) resolution, while the VPL-ES5 features a limiiting 800×600 (SVGA) resolution. For widescreen projection, the VPL-EW5 has a 1280×800 (WXGA) resolution. This line-up is entry level in name only though, as they deliver most of the features needed for quality presentations and commercial use - brightness, quiet operation, a variety of interfaces - along with ease of use and affordability. Read the rest of this entry »

Due to recent market developments we can expect a massive increase in volume of movies to be released on high definition (HD) Blu-ray discs. The market adoption of Blu-ray as the optical disc standard for HD content has inevitably resulted in a growing demand for Blu-ray playback solutions.

Though itā€™s actually based on Lite-Onā€™s DH-401S drive, the DX-401S (around Ā£150) is Philips & Lite-on Digital Solutions first external Blu-ray drive solution for computer users. The DX-401S is a Blu-ray reader (BD-ROM) that connects to your Windows XP or Vista PC via USB 2.0 and allows the playback of Blu-ray movies and Blu-ray media discs. Read the rest of this entry »

HPā€™s dvd1040e is an external 20x Super Multi DVD burner. Thus, it lets you quickly record to single- or double-layer DVDs, and to DVD-RAM. It lets you preserve (and edit) up to 8.5GB of video, photos, and multimedia on one double-layer disc, plus store, backup, transport, and share documents on DVDs and CDs. And this high-speed drive supplies you with the latest version (1.2) of HPā€™s cool LightScribe disc labelling technology. The only downside is that it doesnā€™t play Blu-ray movies. Plus, it fell off the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down.

The dvd1040e is encased in a black plastic chassis that can hardly be called contemporary. Indeed, the drive looks like a bygone product of the 90s. Still, itā€™s fantastic value at Ā£49.61 ($59.99) and should serve you well. The dvd1040e records to all major formats (Ā±R/Ā±RW, DVD-RAM, CD-R/RW), and even does it respectably: double-layer DVDs at up to 8x, recordable DVDs at up to 20x, rewritable DVDs at up to 8x, and DVD-RAMs at up to 12x.
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When AMD unleashed its Radeon HD 4850 graphics card last month, Nvidia retaliated by pushing its GeForce 9800 GTX down to the same price pointā€”$199. A quick look on Newegg shows most 4850s are available at around $189.99, and many of them come with mail-in rebates that can shrink their prices to as little as $159.99. How do the Nvidia cards compare? We checked availability and pricing at our usual online retailers to see.

Again, we limited our search to Newegg, TigerDirect, ZipZoomFly, and Buy.com in the United States, since these are the four computer hardware e-tailers with the most reviews on both our price search engine and ResellerRatings.com. We probed availability and pricing in the great Canadian north by looking at NCIX. Prices for NCIX listings are all in Canadian dollars, and we highlighted available models in green.

Let’s first have a look at GeForce 9800 GTX models clocked at (or reasonably close to) the default 675MHz core and 1100MHz memory speeds: Read the rest of this entry »

Ontario, CA, January 15, 2008 ā€“ With the smallest memory in the pack, itā€™d be easy to label the XFX GeForceĀ® 8800 GS the runt of the litter, but nothing could be further from the truth.

Thatā€™s because this 384 MB card has a killer instinct and looks to kill, offering its users the ability to achieve the same gaming feats of grandeur as a standard XFX GeForceĀ® 8800 GTS 640 MB graphics card as well as the ultimate in Blu-ray and HD DVD movie experiences available on a gaming PC. Read the rest of this entry »

A Closer Look
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For the first time Studio laptop computers from Dell company appeared in the beginning of June, when on the producer site we revealed reference about the models studio 1535/1536 . Now the series studio is presented officially. Here are the characteristics of the 17 inches model Read the rest of this entry »

Hard drives reaching 1 terabyte of storage is new, but not new enough to get excited about. However, since many enterprises still rely upon and trust tape as their primary data archiving medium, HDD reaching 1TB is relatively meaningless for them. However, now that Sun has unveiled 1TB capacity tapes, business with mass amounts of data to store have something to smile about. The Storage Tek T100000B tape drive is the first of such devices to reach 1TB and even higher capacities, thanks to a new formatting technique that lets it achieve more density than previous models.

Supposedly they have an updated format in the works as well, LTO-5, which will be able to format tapes as large as 1.6TB in size. Not all that exciting for a desktop ā€“ but for a company that needs to put hundreds of terabytes of data into cold storage for long periods of time, 1.6TB of tape in one package is definitely handy.

Lenovo has announced the launch of several new laptops in their IdeaPad and ThinkPad lines to coincide with the unveiling of Intelā€™s Centrino 2 platform earlier today. One of those is the new ThinkPad X200 ultra-thin laptop, which joins Appleā€™s MacBook Air and Lenovoā€™s own X300 as one of the lightest fully-functional laptops available today.
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