Another Pine Trail Eee PC has surfaced, this time on Amazon.de. Available now for pre-order at ~US$360 is the Asus Eee PC 1001P (what seems to be the little brother of the 1005P/PE) which packs the usual 10.1″ display in a clamshell body alongside a 1.6GHz Intel Atom N450, 1GB of RAM, a 160GB hard drive loaded up with Windows XP. Oh, and no dodgy bumpy trackpad! If you pre-order one now it will ship by January 6.

If you’re one of the lucky few with a new motherboard that packs a USB 3.0 port then this new adapter is the perfect device to speed up external hard drives. The Brando Unitek USB 3.0 to SATA adapter will connect up your old (or new) SATA hard drive via USB 3.0 and a standard power jack. There is even an option to connect IDE hard drives via an extra dock.

The device will cost you US$48, which isn’t bad for a device using new technology. The upside is that the adapter will instantly turn your HDD into an external, USB hard drive with theoretical speeds of up to 500MB/s; the downside is that there is no enclosure for the hard drive so you’ll have to be careful when transporting the hard drive around.

You can grab one now from Brando, and the device will support your hard drives up to 2TB capacity on your Windows 7, Vista, XP or Linux machine.

Nvidia’s DirectX 11 graphics card refresh was originally scheduled for a November 2009 launch, however due to manufacturing defects this was delayed to CES 2010. Now sources are saying that the GPU refresh wont occur until March of 2010, first with a GF100 card with a 40nm GPU and GDDR5 memory and followed by a GF104 card for the higher-end markets in Q2 2010.

Meanwhile, over in the ATI zone, ATI are planning to release some mid/low range DirectX 11 (Evergreen) cards to flesh out the lower areas of the 5000 series. We should be seeing a HD 5670 and HD 5450 as well as the leaked HD 5570 and HD 5350 cards launching sometime in January or February.

Middle clicking on the taskbar in Windows is a simple thing to do, however it will do different things depending on your Windows version. In Windows Vista, middle clicking a taskbar item will close it, just like closing a tab in your browser. In Windows 7, middle clicking the taskbar will open another instance of the program (eg. in Word it opens a new document). If you want to close the application like in Vista, you’ll have to middle click the preview window, which is easy enough. Try these simple mouse-click shortcuts in future; you might find yourself using it all the time.

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project is set to take another step forward with their cheap laptops for third world countries with news that they are planning on releasing a few new models. Of course, the new models plan on being cheaper and more powerful, which should be great seeing as though the price of the original OLPC was more than hoped for.

We should be seeing an OLPC XO 1.5 in January of 2010 which has the same design but replaces the AMD processor with a VIA one, has 4x more DRAM and flash memory for 2x more speed. It should ship for ~US$200 at launch. The OLPC XO 1.75 (which should launch early 2011) will be cheaper, at around US$150, and carry 2x the speed at 1/4 the power thanks to an ARM processor on the inside.

Most interesting is the OLPC XO 3.0, (concept) pictured above, that should be hitting markets in 2012 for under US$100. It features a single sheet of flexible plastic with a touchscreen that covers most of the surface area, and insides similar to the OLPC XO 1.75. The XO 3.0 is going to replace the unreleased XO 2.0 in the line-up. We are eager to see if the XO 3.0 concept does carry out at such a cheap price; it’s an interesting concept that should catch on in more places than just developing nations.

The staff here at The PC Report just want to wish you a very merry Christmas and we hope that you have a great time over the Christmas break. Maybe you’ll get some cool computer stuff or gadgets to have some fun with; maybe you’ll share them with us! Anyway, have a good time over the next few days with family, friends or whoever.

We’ve seen a few mockups for the Firefox 4.0 user interface re-vamp before in July, and now we’re getting some more. These latest shots come from Mozilla dev Stephen Horlander’s personal blog where he shares heaps of info regarding the latest changes to the Firefox UI. He does mention, though, that these changes will likely be present in Firefox 4.0 and that no UI re-vamp will occur in Firefox 3.7.

It appears as though Mozilla is taking cues from both the Ribbon interface we see in Windows applications such as Wordpad, Paint and Office 2007/2010 as well as Google’s Chrome browser. One thing does stand out in the new screenshots is the application button, which is said to replace the menu toolbar that fills up space on older Firefox versions. This application button is being tested in many locations (below).

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An injunction against Microsoft to stop them selling Word has occurred before: it was Microsoft vs i4i, where i4i held a patent for custom XML tagging, something used by Word in the way it saves files, which Microsoft wilfully infringed. Microsoft lost the case and was barred from selling any versions of Word that contained the custom XML; however the injunction was delayed upon request until Microsoft could appeal the case.

Microsoft appealed the case, and today, once again, lost. The US Court of Appeals has ordered Microsoft to drop the Custom XML editing in Word, which has effectively banned current versions from sale and also prevents all versions of the entire Office suites from sale because they contain Word. The injunction will come into effect on January 11, 2010.

However, Microsoft has said that they have been preparing for this outcome since August, and will be ready to distribute copies of Office 2007 and Word 2007 without the feature by the injunction date. Microsoft Office 2010 will not be barred from distribution because it doesn’t contain the infringing technology, so you can keep downloading the beta all you like.

Ah, it’s so nice to see Internet Explorer finally de-crowned as the world’s most popular browser. In the latest statistics provided by StatCounter Global Statistics we are seeing a very slight margin to Firefox 3.5 over Internet Explorer 7, a great milestone for Mozilla. Of course, these stats count each version of the browser separately and when you add all the Microsoft browsers together IE still comes out on top, but hey, it’s still a milestone for Firefox.

It was just a few days ago that we posted some news on the upcoming Asus Eee PC 1oo5P/PE and now Intel has officially announced the new Pine Trail Atoms we’ve been waiting on. In the line-up we’re seeing an N450 designed for netbook use as well as a single-core D410 and dual-core D510 made for nettops (that we’ve seen before) and a NM10 Express chipset. All the processors have a clockspeed of 1.66Ghz are said to use 20% less power than the current-gen Atoms.

As said in various reports, the new Pineview processors don’t give much of a performance improvement over the N270 and N280 even though they contain the memory controller and graphics chipset on the die as well as the processing cores. At least the inclusion of the graphics on the chipset makes the Eee PC 1005PE last for 10 hours on the one charge. We should be seeing more of these chips at CES 2010.