HP’s just unleashed four new Pavilion Elite HPE desktops — the 110f, 120f, 130f, and 170f. Terrifically creative naming scheme aside, the HPE series offers a choice of processors, including AMD Phenom II Quad-Core or Intel CPUs, and ATI Radeon or NVIDIA GeForce graphics. The desktops are also configurable for an up to 2TB hard drive, and up to 24GB of DDR3 RAM. Other features of these bad boys include front panel 15-in-1 card readers, DVD burner, wireless LAN 802.11a/b/g/n, an optional tv tuner, pocket media drive, and Blu-ray. We don’t have pricing or availability yet, but we’ll update you when we do. Full press release and specs are after the break.
New Year’s Eve is upon us, ring it in with some New Year’s-themed wallpaper. Judging by the wallpapers we found, 2010 is going to be all the neon and sparkles the futurists of yesteryear promised us.
Note: The “Full Size” link directly under the picture only shows you the sample image we uploaded for this gallery. You need to click on the name of the particular wallpaper in the right hand column to access the full range of sizes at the source site.
Not keen on the gallery layout? See all the larger images on one page here.
Glowing 2010 by ~ritamd Click on the link above to visit the author’s page and access the full size image.
Nobody likes staring at a boring desktop when they fire up their computer every morning. Keep your wallpaper fresh with the five most popular sites Lifehacker readers use to satisfy their wallpaper needs.
Photo by goincase. Wallpaper on monitor available here.
Earlier this week we asked you to share your favorite wallpaper site. We quickly learned that—while not everyone has a strong opinion about Linux distributions or encryption software—everyone has a favorite wallpaper site; readers logged nearly 500 votes for their favorite wallpaper sites. Now we’re back to share the five most popular sites used by Lifehacker readers to dress up their monitors with fresh wallpaper.
Vlad Studio features the work of Russian wallpaper artist Vlad Gerasimov. He cranks out hundreds of great wallpapers, ranging from holiday themes to abstract art. Vlad Studio has wallpaper in a wide range of sizes suited for everything from your mobile phone to a multi-monitor setup. Mobile wallpaper and desktop resolutions at 1600×1200 and below are available for free. Images larger than that are available only to registered users. If you want access to the larger resolutions, now is a great time to pick up a subscription. Vlad is running a Christmas-special where the $30 lifetime membership is available for $20.
4Chan is an image-based forum where anyone can anonymously post and share images and comments. It’s divided into sub-boards devoted to all sorts of topics like Anime, video games, etc., but has gained notoriety for some of its more unsavory sub-boards. The /Wallpaper/ board, nonetheless, is bustling and updated nearly 24/7 with images from around the web. Since the 4Chan boards are a bit kludgy to use if you’re not trying to comment and just looking for images, a variety of scrapers have sprung up to help you pick through all the images in /Wallpaper/. You can visit 4Chan directly at the link above or you can use services like Nik.Bot and 4Walled to browse through the wallpapers available through 4Chan. Be strongly forewarned, however: although the /Wallpaper/ forum is much tamer than other areas of 4Chan, you’ll still find a large number of Maxim-level NSFW wallpaper images and the occasional Playboy-level NSFW images when you’re browsing. If you’re not prepared to explain some really awkward internet memes to your boss, you’d better save 4Chan /Wallpaper/ for home.
Social Wallpapering borrows the vote up/down model used by many social aggregators (Reddit, Digg, etc.) and applies it to desktop wallpaper. Users vote up their favorite, vote down their least favorites, and upload their own images to be ranked by other users. You can browse by rank, category, view random images, and sort by screen size to help you drill down through the huge collection to find the wallpaper you want. Prefer to grab everything and sort it out later? Social Wallpaper makes their entire wallpaper collection available for download via BitTorrent. If you’re looking for a site where you can not only find fresh wallpaper but participate in helping your fellow wallpaper lovers find the best images, Social Wallpapering is a solid choice.
Interfacelift is an enormous repository of wallpaper images. Thanks to the button-based layout at the top of the screen, you can easily drill down through wallpapers using factors like rating, number of comments, screen type, and so on. Once you select your screen type—widescreen, full screen, dual monitors, etc.—you can pick from available resolutions so you never end up clicking on an image and finding out it’s not available in the resolution you want. Every search result gives you information about the image plus a drop down menu for size selection and a quick download. Interfacelift has recently added a feature called “The Loupe” which allows users to vote on incoming submissions to accelerate the process of new materials being added to the database.
If you’ve visited your fair share of wallpaper sites and gotten tired of the endless stream of glowing line-art and video-game wallpapers, then you’ll enjoy browsing the wallpaper archives of DeviantART—a subdivision of the artist-centric site. You’ll find everything at DeviantART from the more common glow-lines variety of abstract wallpaper to quirky paintings, photographs, and computer-rendered images. Most of the users at DeviantART are prolific contributors, so if you find a wallpaper you really like, make sure to check out the user’s gallery to see if they have any other gems to share. DeviantART doesn’t have the advanced wallpaper-oriented search features that many of the other wallpaper sites have, but you can still search by image size and sort by popularity.
Now that you’ve had a chance to look over Lifehacker readers’ favorite wallpaper sites, it’s time to cast a vote for your favorite:
We have two honorary mentions to hand out this week to extremely deserving sites that have contributed a multitude of awesome wallpapers over the years: Digital Blasphemy and Mandolux. Got more to say about your favorite (or a favorite that didn’t make the list)? Let’s hear it in the comments.
Apple has issued a firmware update to address display issues affecting many brand new 27-inch iMacs.
The update, labeled 27-inch iMac Graphics Firmware Update 1.0, is 683KB large and requires Mac OS X 10.6.2. Installation instructions are available at Apple’s website.
Customers complained in support forums about display and performance issues with the 27-inch iMac shortly after its Oct. 20 release.
Our readers have submitted thousands of screenshots of their best desktop configurations, and over the year we’ve featured some truly impressive and unique desktops with you. Here’s a look back at some of the best this year had to offer.
Just like the most popular desktops in 2008, this list is comprised by the popularity of the post in 2009. You can click through to the original post for details regarding how each user put together his/her killer desktop. So check out the top 13 featured desktops below, including Enigma, the one that started off the year with a bang.
The Reader rykennedyan’s Starlight desktop was far and away the most popular single desktop of 2009, and with a beautiful wallpaper like that, it’s not hard to understand what drew readers in—but the theme had much more going on, with an entire set of launchers and system information in a bar at the bottom of the screen.
Barely a week went by after the amazing Starlight desktop before rykennedyan blew us all away again by transforming his desktop into an impressive recreation of the popular Halo 3 first-person shooter, complete with system stats and information blended into the screen.
Reader zackshackleton’s desktop took a comic book panel and blended the system stats right into the conversation bubbles, making one of the most fun desktops we’ve seen all year—and sparking a wave of desktops with stats integrated directly into unlikely background images.
Reader Painkilla05’s stylish desktop was inspired from a Microsoft research video showing what computer interfaces might look like in the year 2019, with system stats and information wrapped around the sides of the screen—just like they might be on a futuristic tablet.
Reader Chaebi69 took the Enigma desktop customization, transformed it with an artistic wallpaper, and blended the whole thing together into one of the first great looking desktops of the year—and it didn’t hurt that he included the Hulk.
What desktop nerd-fest would be complete without at least one LCARS desktop? Reader momoses answered the call for one of the most often-requested customizations and turned his Mac into a lookalike for the computer display in Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Reader chaebi69 continued his artistic flair with this stunning display of useful information blended perfectly into a simple wallpaper. Between the vertical calendar, customized dock, and Century Gothic font, it was an amazing theme that fit together extremely well.
If there was a prize for the nerdiest desktop, there’s no question at all that reader Andreas would win, and while it’s not the most beautiful desktop in the world, the incredible amount of information that he was able to pack into one screen is simply amazing.
Reader нawk went an entirely different route—instead of overloading the screen with loads of information, he stuck with a simple wallpaper and just the important system stats, ending up with a clean, minimalistic look that sparked a wave of minimal desktops.
The Gaia desktop suite transformed reader Sweetshop Union’s Windows 7 desktop with widgets, wallpaper, Rainmeter, and a visual style to match, resulting in a polished, unique, and beautiful overall look.
Reader Cody took the Enigma desktop customization and combined it with a retro vector wallpaper to make a slick, colorful, and completely awesome theme.
Reader TDuck’s OS X desktop was all about the beautiful wallpaper image, but if you look closely you’ll see that he blended circular system information graphs right into the slick overall theme.
Have a favorite featured desktop from 2009 that wasn’t featured here? Let’s hear about it in the comments.
Intel’s Arrandale chips haven’t been the best-kept secret around, and today Chipzilla made ’em official: the Core i3 and mobile Core i5 will launch on January 7, and we’d guess a bunch of new machines come along for the ride. Although the desktop Lynnfield Core i5 is a quad-core, both the new Core i3 and mobile Core i5 are dual-core — and in a first for Intel, both of the new chips have an integrated GPU core that’s being branded “Intel HD Graphics.” The new GPU is supposedly good enough for “high-end” HTPC use, but manufacturers can add switchable discrete GPUs, so don’t fret too much. Both Arrandale chips have Intel’s latest hyperthreading tech, and the mobile i5 also has the Turbo Boost core-overclocking feature found in the desktop i5 and i7, which redirects power to a single core to boost performance when needed.
We got to see a few Core i3 and i5 laptops and desktops in action at Intel’s pre-CES briefing today, although we didn’t get to run any tests. The mobile Core i5 systems on display were doing a fine job running Call of Duty 4, while the scaled-down Core i3 rigs were playing Blu-ray movies and World of Warcraft — not a bad demo, but we’ll let you know when we see some real numbers.
Windows only: If you want a little extra eye-candy in your Windows management, T3Desk is an alt-tab alternative that gives you 3D windows arrangement and more.
Click on the image above for a closer look.
T3Desk works on all versions of Windows but it really shines in Vista and above where it can take advantage of Aero. After installing T3Desk you can use keyboard shortcuts to minimize and maximize windows to the edges of your monitor, arranging them in a pseudo-3D fashion. T3Desk can be tweaked in a variety of ways including how the windows are angled, animated, their level of transparency, the apparent distance from the viewer, and how they transition from the virtual desktop back into use.
You can drag windows and dock them to the four sides of the monitor, use Aero Peek to see which windows are on the virtual desktop, and set an always include/exclude list for applications to easily exclude applications from the effects of T3Desk.
Some caveats about T3Desk: the biggest issue is that it won’t work with multiple monitors. All 3D windows are pushed onto the primary monitor. Another minor issue is the inability to customize the application’s hot keys. Those complaints aside, it works as promised and provides a novel way to arrange and view open applications.
T3Desk is free and Windows only. Have a favorite application for tweaking the appearance of Windows and managing your applications? Let’s hear about it in the comments.
Apple on Tuesday afternoon won a permanent injunction against Psystar, a Florida-based Mac cloner. The ruling prohibits the startup from selling hardware hacked to run Mac OS X.
US. District Judge William Alsup issued the ruling, banning Psystar from the following:
Infringing Apple’s copyrights in Mac OS X .
Circumventing any technological measure used by Apple to prevent unauthorized copying of Mac OS X on non-Apple computers.
Creating or selling a product intended to circumvent Apple’s methods for preventing Mac OS X to be installed on non-Apple hardware.
Aiding or abetting any other person or entity to infringe Apple’s copyrighted Mac OS X software.
Doing anything to circumvent the rights held by Apple under the Copyright Act with respect to Mac OS X.
In short, that means Psystar can no longer ship generic hardware that’s running Mac OS X. And the cloner can’t sell goods that assist consumers in creating Hackintoshes. Psystar must comply no later than Dec. 31, 2009.
However, it doesn’t spell a complete end to Psystar’s Rebel EFI software, a $50 downloadable utility that enables consumers to create Hackintoshes of their own — even though the ruling about circumvention applies to DIY solutions. Psystar argued Rebel EFI was not explicitly covered in this case and thus should not be included in the injunction. Alsup said Rebel EFI was not covered in the injunction, but the startup could continue to sell its software “at its own peril.”
“What is certain, however, is that until such a motion is brought, Psystar will be selling Rebel EFI at its peril, and risks finding itself held in contempt if its new venture falls within the scope of the injunction,” the final judgment states.
Long story short, even though Rebel EFI was not explicitly mentioned in the case, its functionality is banned by this injunction. So although technically Rebel EFI can be sold, it would be a very, very bad idea.
Psystar opened its business selling Mac clones in April 2008. Apple filed a lawsuit three months later against Psystar, alleging copyright, trademark and shrink-wrap licensing infringements.
Apple on Sunday apologized to customers for shipping delays of its new high-end iMac. Incidentally, many consumers have reported issues with Apple’s latest iMac, which some have speculated to be the cause of the delay.
Apple’s online store lists estimated shipping times of two weeks for both 27-inch iMac models. Delivery time for the two 21-inch iMacs is within 24 hours.
“The new iMac has been a huge hit and we are working hard to fulfill orders as quickly as possible,” an Apple spokesperson told CNET. “We apologize for any inconvenience or delay this may cause our customers.”
CNET’s Jim Dalrymple points out that customers have started a thread in Apple’s support forums which has surpassed 81 pages worth of comments and complaints about issues with the iMac’s display. Many report that their screens appear to be flickering.
Consumer reports of problems with the 27-inch iMac surfaced in late October. Dozens reported performance issues ranging from sluggish Flash playback to erratic hard-drive behavior.
Apple has not acknowledged issues with its latest iMac.
Have a problem with your iMac? Computerworld started a new website to track the 27-inch iMac’s problems. Report them there.
No heart-stopping new revelations here, but it’s always good to get an official indication of a company’s plans for the forthcoming year. Samsung, it appears, is firmly set on building and selling a tablet of some sort, whether it be a Joojoo-like buttonless wonder or a more conventional keyboard-equipped device. There’s also a note on multitouch and 3D, with Sammy promising to introduce more mainstream displays with support for them, as well as converting all its laptop and desktop screens to LED backlighting from the middle of 2010 onwards. We’re happy to see CCFL consigned to the annals of history, but Mr. Samsung, if you really want to excite us good and proper, you’d add an O to the front of that monitor technology and stick to the same schedule.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
Nobody likes staring at a boring desktop when they fire up their computer every morning. Keep your wallpaper fresh with the five most popular sites Lifehacker readers use to satisfy their wallpaper needs.
Our readers have submitted thousands of screenshots of their best desktop configurations, and over the year we’ve featured some truly impressive and unique desktops with you. Here’s a look back at some of the best this year had to offer.
