Hasta La Gadget!

Back in June, when Acer first announced the Aspire S7 Series, two things seemed noteworthy: these were the company’s first touchscreen Ultrabooks, for one, and they were easily its best-made. Whereas the earlier S3 and S5 skew a bit boring, the S7 is made of aluminum, with either a metal or Gorilla Glass lid, depending on whether you choose the 11- or 13-inch version. What’s more, it has a 1080p IPS display, which looked just as nice in our initial hands-on as the spec sheet would have you believe. Throw in a choice of Core i5 and i7 processors and a RAID 0 SSD configuration, and you can easily expect the same fast performance we recorded on the S5. So is this it? Has Acer finally built an Ultrabook we can heartily recommend? More to the point, does the 13-inch model get enough things right to justify that $1,400 starting price? Find out in our review after the break.

Continue reading Acer Aspire S7 review (13-inch): great Ultrabook, a shame about the battery life

Filed under: Laptops, Acer

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Now that Steam will be available for Ubuntu any time now, you might be interested in taking a look at System76‘s latest and greatest Ubuntu-powered laptop designed specifically for the gaming enthusiast: the Bonobo Extreme. The open-source machine-maker has made Ubuntu PCs before, like the Gazelle and Serval laptops and the recent Sable Complete all-in-one, but none come close to the Bonobo Extreme in terms of speed and performance. The base model is tricked out with an Intel i7 3630QM 2.4GHz processor, an NVIDIA Geforce GTX 670MX 3GB GPU, 8GB of DDR3 RAM, a 500GB 7200 RPM hard drive, an 8x DVD drive, an 8-cell battery and a 17.3-inch glossy, backlit display. At this configuration, it’s already quite the wallet-buster at $1,499 (and that’s after the $100 Christmas discount), but you can push that sum skyward fairly easily if you’re a stickler for premium components. But perhaps its beautiful backlit keyboard, spacious Synaptics Clickpad and the sheer satisfaction of shooting Left 4 Dead zombies will help soothe the financial pain.

Filed under: Gaming, Laptops

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Via: OMG Ubuntu

Source: System76

If size and weight aren’t nearly as important as turning heads at your local coffee shop, then why bother with today’s banal hardware if you’ve got a perfectly good Macintosh Portable lying around? One nostalgic modder with a disregard for luggability has updated Apple’s very first laptop to run OS X, creating what he calls “a great café computer.” Obviously, the software isn’t all that’s changed, as behind the white plastic hides the internals of a Toshiba NB100 netbook sacrificed for the project. The keyboard has been painstakingly rewired through a USB controller, and the ball mouse now houses an optical cousin which connects via the original cable. A cordless drill battery powers the thing, which has also been gifted with all the mod cons — WiFi and USB connectivity — to make it pretty usable. If you’re interested in build pics, the tech-savvy hipster promises to post them soon at the source link below, and for a tour of the finished article, a video awaits you beyond the fold.

Continue reading Self-declared hipster builds Macintosh Portable case mod, reckons it goes well with skinny jeans (video)

Filed under: Laptops, Apple

Self-declared hipster builds Macintosh Portable case mod, reckons it goes well with skinny jeans (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 19 Nov 2012 10:22:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Earlier today, we heard the news that NASA had suffered a major security breach when the laptop of an associate deputy administrator was stolen out of his car. The laptop contained the personal information of a number of NASA employees, including social security numbers. Naturally, this is a pretty big problem for NASA, so now it’s no surprise that we’re seeing the organization take measures to make sure that nothing on this scale happens again.

The problem with the stolen laptop was that it wasn’t properly protected. The information was stored away behind a password, but just protecting vital information like that with a password never means that it’s 100% secure. Had the information on the laptop been encrypted, this whole mess could have been avoided, despite the fact that the laptop was stolen.

NetworkWorld reports that NASA is now requiring full disk encryption on its laptops. The organization wants this implemented on the “maximum possible number of laptops,” by the time November 21 rolls around next week, with each and every laptop NASA owns required to have encryption capabilities by December 21. Once we’re past that date – provided we all survive the apocalypse – no unencrypted computer will be allowed to leave NASA’s buildings.

So, at least NASA is doing something to prevent unprotected computers from falling into the wrong hands. That won’t be much consolation to the folks whose information might be floating around in the wild at the moment, but NASA is offering to pay for credit tracking and insurance in the event that their identity is stolen. Keep it tuned to SlashGear, as we’ll update you on this breach if any new information becomes available.

NASA now requiring encrypted laptops to avoid future breaches is written by Eric Abent & originally posted on SlashGear.
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It’s been increasingly tough to keep all of Samsung’s Windows 8 tablets straight recently, with changing names adding to the confusion, and it looks like you can add one more variation to keep track of. A new Series 7 model, the ATIV Smart PC Pro 700T, has turned up at the FCC today boasting some hereto unannounced LTE connectivity — although that doesn’t come as a huge surprise considering Samsung’s already delivered a non-Pro ATIV to AT&T. Of course, that “Pro” designation means you’ll be getting an x86 processor and the full-fledged version of Windows 8 instead of RT, but it’s not clear what other changes this version might have in store compared to non-LTE model.

Correction: As some have pointed out below in the comments below, the non-Pro model does also come with the full-fledged version of Windows 8, not RT.

Filed under: Laptops, Tablets, Samsung

Samsung ATIV Smart PC Pro tablet with LTE clears the FCC originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 14 Nov 2012 15:39:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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