The PC Report

Fujitsu have announced today that they have started to ship some nice little USB 3.0 chips to go on motherboards in early 2010. The MB86C30A is a USB3-to-SATA bridge chip and can support the full 5gbps available from the USB SuperSpeed specifications. This chip is perfect for external hard drives thanks to the USB3-to-SATA bridge – meaning external storage will become much faster. The first engineering samples of this chip are expected for August.

–Source–

There are a few things I like to look for in a laptop: it’s thin, it’s light, it’s cheap and its powerful enough for day to day work. This laptop meets all my standards, being only 2.5cm thick and weighing 1.8kg put still packing some nice specs: a 13.3″ screen, Pentium Dual Core T3400 @ 2.16 GHz, 3GB RAM, Intel GMA X4500HD graphics (yuck), 250GB HDD and all the networking standards such as 802.11n and Bluetooth.

Also included when you purchase the N3400 is an external DVD burner, as a DVD burner isn’t included inside the laptop; very useful if you want to reinstall Windows or watch DVDs. The price tag for this laptop is just above that of a netbook, coming in at US$799 – fairly reasonable for what you get (unlike a MacBook Air)

–Source–

Ok, so we all know Western Digital, and we all know their hard drives. Well, it’s that time again where WD releases a first of something, last time being a 2TB 3.5″ desktop HDD, and this time – a laptop-designed 2.5-inch 1 terabyte hard drive.

Under the name of Scorpio Blue 1TB and Scorpio Blue 750GB, these drives have already been released and shipped to manufacturers. Unfortunately these drives are a bit thicker than usual, being 12.5mm thick rather than the usual 9.5mm; this means most laptops can’t have one of these installed in their regular HDD slots. But, of course, you can always chuck them inside external hard drives, which is what WD is releasing them in

For US$189.99 you can grab a 750GB My Passport SE and for US$249.99 you can grab the 1TB version. Still, it’s only a matter of time before Alienware will chuck them in their high-end gaming laptops

–Source–

Final Cut Studio, the film editing software used by more than 1.4 million people, has just been updated by Apple. The new version updates all the software in the pack to the newest version – Final Cut Pro 7, Motion 4, Soundtrack Pro 3, Color 1.5 and Compressor 3.5. Of course the biggest update would be for Final Cut Pro, which adds new features such as new Apple ProRes codecs, background encoding (easy export) and iChat Theatre support.

Of course, this may not mean much to people not familiar with Apple’s Final Cut Studio, but for those who have never used the program or who want to use it Apple has given the software a price cut. The new price is US$999, down US$300 from the original and existing users can upgrade for US$299. Check out all the new features via Apple’s site.

I’ve been hearing a lot of Apple Tablet rumours as of late, and today another one was brought to my attention by PearShaped in our forums. Apparently it has been said that Apple will finalise its tablet and launch it in early 2010, after being “riddled with setbacks.”

According to AppleInsider the tablet will be 3G enabled, have a 10″ screen and be fitted out with a custom-made ARM processor just for the tablet – not an Atom as most netbooks have these days. Above is the “thumbs-up” artists rendition of what the tablet will look like. I personally am not sold by the looks of the tablet; it’s a bit plain for my tastes and I certainly hope there is at least one button somewhere on the device.

We would love to hear your thoughts on the looks/insides of the Apple Tablet either via the forum thread or by the comments below

For those of you not following the story here is Microsoft’s press release from several days ago:

REDMOND, Wash., July 20, 2009 — Today, in a break from the ordinary, Microsoft released 20,000 lines of device driver code to the Linux community. The code, which includes three Linux device drivers, has been submitted to the Linux kernel community for inclusion in the Linux tree. The drivers will be available to the Linux community and customers alike, and will enhance the performance of the Linux operating system when virtualized on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V or Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V.

The code is licensed under the GPL v2, an unheard-of move from Microsoft to be making open-source contributions, especially to Linux, and at the magnitude of 20,000 lines.  Some of the initial reactions weren’t quite on the money though – the drivers are to help linux run on Windows. They’re simply being competitive and trying to improve their own product.

But wait! Then they started saying that the code was released because Microsoft were originally working in breach of the GPL (the Microsoft-haters jumped on this one).

And now Sam Ramji, a senior director at Microsoft says:

Microsoft on Monday contributed the Linux Integration Component drivers to the Linux community for the reasons stated in our release. Microsoft chose the GPLv2 license for the mutual benefit of our customers, partners, the community, and Microsoft.

Microsoft’s decision was not based on any perceived obligations tied to the GPLv2 license.

Ah well. Maybe it’s not such a big deal after all. Back to those Microsoft-haters I mentioned before – I reckon Linus is right that there can be too much blind hatred in the open-source community of Microsoft.

You might remember the post I made last week about Apple whining to Microsoft to get them to stop showing the Laptop Hunter ads because “they took like $100 off or something” from their MacBook Pros. Well, Microsoft has actually done something this time.

In the second “Lauren” Laptop Hunter’s Ad, Microsoft decided to remove the reference to the price of the MacBook Pro, which at the time was stated to be over $2,000 but has been cut down now to $1,700 – just within the price range of the “Hunter.” Too bad for Apple, because the ad is still showing, and is still going for a much cheaper Windows machine over a Mac.

Microsoft and the European Commission have recently announced a new proposal that would allow Microsoft to include IE in European versions of Windows 7, but direct users to a “ballot screen” where they are given the choice of getting competing browsers (refer to image above).

Previously Windows 7 E was not going to include any web browser. Of course OEMs would have been able to add one, but retail customers would have to have a browser on a USB key or use Rafael’s method.

Personally, I the idea is a HUGE improvement over the old plan. Getting Windows without a browser included was a ridiculous plan. Please, leave your thoughts in the comments below.

Microsoft is one of the biggest companies in the world, and it’s not very often that you hear about big company’s sales declining. For Microsoft, their fiscal year 2009 has just come to a close and they have released their sales statistics.

Total revenue for Microsoft’s fiscal year 2009 dropped by 3.2% from US$60.42 billion down to US$58.44 billion. This had to mean profits dropping too, which they did by 17% from US$17.68 billion to US$14.57. In response to this, Microsoft’s chief financial office said that “our business continued to be negatively impacted by weakness in the global PC and server markets.” Hopefully things will pick up next fiscal year, with Windows 7 being released and all

–Source–

We have been seeing plenty of gaming laptops as of late, and this is the next one to claim the “world’s most powerful gaming laptop” title. This beast is huge, with enough width to have at least 2 USB ports on top of each other AND have more room on both sides. I would expect the laptop to weigh over 3kg

Onto the specs, in which we see some very similar things to Alienware’s M17x laptop: an Intel Core 2 Duo Extreme processor, dual GTX 280Ms, up to three SATA 2.5″ drives (HDD or SSD), up to 8GB DDR3, an (optional) Blu-Ray drive, a massive 18.4-inch screen with Full HD (1920×1080) resolution, programmable gaming buttons and a 3MP webcam. Of course, with all this stuff it’s bound to come with a huge price tag, US$2,999 to be exact

–Source–