The PC Report

MSI is putting on a pretty good deal here with their new C-Series laptops. There are a total of 4 new laptops in the new series -  the 16″ CR600 and 15.6″ CR620-030, CR620-031 and CR620-033 – ranging from US$530 to US$750. All laptops come loaded with Windows 7 Home Premium, and have 16:9 HD displays at 1366×768.

The CR620 models have either a new Core i3 or Core i5 processor from Intel, 4GB of DDR3 memory, come with either a 320GB or 500GB hard drive and the CR620-033 comes with a Blu-ray combo drive – possibly the best deal because it’s only US$699 and comes with an i3 CPU as well. The CR600 has Nvidia GeForce 8200M graphics but unfortunately only carries an Intel Pentium Dual Core as a processor.

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The Asus Eee PC T101MT is the latest touchscreen addition into the Eee PC range – and it also packs a swivel display. The official word on this laptop is that it comes with a 10.1″ swivelling resistive multi-touch touchscreen display with a resolution of 1,024×600, an Atom N450, up to 2GB of RAM and 320GB hard drive, Windows 7, webcam and the usual netbook-style ports and a 6.5 hour max battery life.

As per usual, Asus has denied us info on a price or release time frame, but we also know that with the netbook purchase you get a free one year 500GB Asus WebStorage trial.

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Wolfram Alpha is quite possibly the best maths and computational tool available on the internet. The Wolfram|Alpha “Computational Knowledge Engine” is basically an intelligent search engine that instead of outputting sites for you to visit based on search keywords, it works out solutions and answers, and gives information based on what you’ve entered.

For example, enter the parabolic equation y=x^2+3x+5 and it’ll graph it for you. If you enter death michael jackson it will find the date of his death and post information about that date. Enter gdp australia and it will output info about Australia’s GDP. There are so many more uses, you should just try it out for yourself – head over to Wolfram Alpha now.

According to Windows watcher Paul Thurrott, Microsoft Office 2010 will be hitting general availability on June 15 this year, while insiders at Microsoft say that they will RTM Office 2010 sometime in late March/early April. Currently, Office 2010 is in the Release Candidate stage, with the RC being released to testers a few days ago.

When available, Office 2010 will be on offer in five different packages: Starter (the free version with ads), Home and Student, Home and Business, Professional and Professional Academic, with pricing ranging from US$99 to US$499. Also, if you purchase a copy of Office 2007 between March 15 and September 30 this year, you will get a free upgrade to the equivalent version of Office 2010.

If you’re one of the few that like to keep all of your software open-source, then chances are you’ve given Microsoft Office the flick and are using OpenOffice. Well, OpenOffice has been updated to version 3.2 and come with a plethora of new features to satisfy your document-making and office needs. OpenOffice should also be notably more stable and faster to open and use.

OpenOffice is available for Windows, Mac OS, most Linux distros and Solaris and is a great free alternative to Microsoft Office. You can grab the download from OpenOffice.org.

A new Windows Activation Technologies Update for Windows 7 is coming that is said to check for 70 known activation exploits. The update will be optional, but marked as Important in Windows Update when it is distributed later this month. You will also be able to get a copy via the Genuine Windows site starting from February 16th. The update is said to not jeopardise user’s privacy by giving Microsoft’s servers personal details.

If it turns out that you have used an activation exploit and it is found via the update, it will notify you that you have a non-genuine copy of Windows and change your desktop wallpaper to plain black. Periodically it will also remind you that your copy is pirated and you will be stuck with a permanent watermark on your desktop.

There’s nothing particularly special about the design or layout of this keyboard/mouse combo – it’s just a standard look with a pretty standard set of buttons; nothing too flashy or special. On the inside though is something unique and a first for wireless keyboards and mice: both the keyboard and mice of the Logitech Wireless Desktop MK710 have a 3 year battery life from a pair of AA batteries.

Of course, the claim of 3 years battery life may not be true for all; it’s based on a standard 2 million keystrokes per year and various conditions for the mouse. However even so you won’t need to change those batteries for several years saving you from the hassle and saving the environment from waste. If you’re European and want this package it should be available to you this month. Americans will have to wait until April to get their hands on the Wireless Desktop.

Today AMD has taken one big step in announcing that samples of their Fusion APU (Advanced Processing Unit), codenamed “Llano”, should be available in the first half of this year with volume production in 2011. The 32nm chip will pack both a quad-core processor as well as  a DirectX 11 supporting graphics processor on the one die. The chip is said to run at 3GHz+ and will support DDR3.

This “Llano” chip will go head on with Intel’s single die CPU+GPU solution, Sandy Bridge, which is also set for a 2011 production release. However, AMD will have the heads up on the Intel chip with their DX11-supporting GPU (which is based on the Evergreen DX11 lineup); Intel’s chip only supports DX10. AMD is also boasting that the chip will be less power consuming thanks to  power gating – a technique used on Intel’s Nehalem chips to help lower a core’s power and power up another core (hence Turbo Boost).

Also, for those of you wondering, Intel’s Arrandale and Clarkdale chips are not the same as these single-die CPU+GPU solutions – the Arrandale/Clarkdale chips have two dies (one for the CPU and one for the GPU). Anyway, no doubt we’ll see more of these chips later this year.

Never fear! Another Radeon is here! And so soon too after we saw the HD 5450 just last week. Anyway the new card is the ATI Radeon HD 5570 and of course it supports DirectX 11, Eyefinity and all the other features that the HD 5000 series cards have. The HD 5570, like the HD 5450, is targeted at the HTPC users with its low profile, low power consumption, low price and quiet cooler.

The HD 5450 is made on the 40nm process and has 627 million transistors on its die. The core clock comes in at 650MHz with 400 stream processors and 20 texture units for a total power of 520 GFLOPS. The card will have 1GB of DDR3 RAM on board with a clock of 900MHz and a data rate of 1.8 Gbps. It’s also rated at using 9.7W of power during idle with a “typical” rating of 38W.

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IBM recently opened up a bandgap for graphene-based field-effect transistors and now there here to show us what this means for all of us. IBM has demonstrated a 100GHz (that’s right, 100 gigahertz) graphene transistor that IBM hopes will eventually reach commercialisation and then replace the standard silicon chips we use today completely. Of course, the technology is in it’s early stages, but it does look promising for future processors.

Even though actual commercial chips are far off, IBM says that “the breakthrough we are announcing demonstrates clearly that graphene can be utilized to produce high performance devices and integrated circuits.” Look into the future guys and you may see these chips in widespread use…