Dell’s promise: that the Alienware M11x is the “most powerful 11-inch gaming laptop” around. And they’re right! It’s hard to imagine packing much more oomph into such a portable frame. Then again, there’s a reason Muggsey Bogues never won MVP. More »
Envy 14, Envy 17, and Pavilion dm4 cited in HP support docs originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 26 Mar 2010 15:33:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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A Core i3 processor, Blu-ray drive, and 320GB hard drive for $629.99 — does the Gateway NV5933u really need more of an introduction than that? We didn’t think so, since that’s all it took for us to track down the budget multimedia 15.6-inch laptop and get it into our eager hands. For a budget system it sure has the specs to carry it on home, but after the dog has barked at the mailman and you’ve gotten it out of the box, how is it in actual everyday use? You know where to find out. We’ll see you after the break in our full review.
Gallery: Gateway NV5933u review
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Gateway NV5933u review originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 26 Mar 2010 14:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Acer’s aspirational laptops have a new Ethos to them now, and it clearly has something to do with entertainment. The newly revealed 18.4-inch 8943G sports a 1920 x 1080 resolution and a true 5.1 surround sound setup, meaning that somewhere within its shell reside five miniature speakers and a sub. Processor options range all the way up to the quad-core Core i7-820QM, which offers 8MB of built-in cache and a 1.73GHz clock speed that cranks all the way to 3.06GHz when required. ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5850 graphics and up to 1.28TB of storage (2x 640GB) complete the overkill recipe. The 5943G is basically a scaled down version, offering as it does 1366 x 768 resolution across a 15.6-inch display, a 2.1 internal speaker arrangement, and a merely adequate 640GB storage maximum. The rest of the specs are shared, including a 4,800mAh battery, which should perish quicker than you can say “desktop replacement.” Pricing and availability have not yet been announced.
Gallery: Acer Aspire Ethos
Acer launches Aspire Ethos line with swanky 5943G and 8943G models originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 25 Mar 2010 05:51:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Fear not mobile workstation lovers, it may have taken HP a bit more time to refresh its 17-inch EliteBook 8740w, but it’s officially here now and ready to champ at the bit with a combo of cutting edge features / specs. We’ll start with the externals first — the 7.8-pound, magnesium-alloy chassis is covered in the same gunmetal finish as the other recently-announced Elitebooks, and the 17-inch HP Dreamcolor screen is nothing short of stunning. It has 64 times the colors of other displays and can be ordered with HP’s Mobile Display Assistant color calibrator. Inside the workstation is rather frightful — it can be configured with a choice of Intel Core i5 or i7 processors and [either] ATI ‘s newest FirePro M7820 or NVIDIA Quadro FX GPUs. While the 8740w starts at $1,999, the $3,899 spec’d version happens to be HP’s most powerful mobile workstation ever with a quad-core Core i7 processor, 7,200rpm 320GB hard drive, and NVIDIA Quadtro FX 3800M graphics with 1GB of DDR3 RAM. We were told that the 8740w would be shipping in early April, but it appears that you can order them up right now at the source link.
Gallery: HP EliteBook 8740w press shots
Gallery: HP EliteBook 8740w hands-on
HP EliteBook 8740w pumped up with Intel Core 2010 CPUs, ATI / NVIDIA graphics originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 24 Mar 2010 00:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Continue reading Lenovo ThinkPad Edge 14 and 15 shipping to small businesses, cupcake lovers
Lenovo ThinkPad Edge 14 and 15 shipping to small businesses, cupcake lovers originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 19 Mar 2010 19:39:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Well hello again, Dell Adamo XPS. Though the incredibly thin and uniquely designed laptop disappeared from Dell.com last week and we received official comment that it was a “limited edition product with a finite number of systems available,” the Adamo XPS has reappeared in its $2,000 glory on the company’s site. According to Dell’s blog, it was merely just a move to restock the inventory and direct customers to retailers that had fresh stock — well why didn’t you just say that Dell! And do not fear about the Adamo brand, Dell reports that all is well as it starts to apply the design to other lines, just as we saw yesterday with the Vostro V13. We’re still a bit confused by the reappearance, but it sure is good to see you again, Adamo XPS. We wish you a long successful life with many many price drops.
Dell Adamo XPS alive and kicking, back for order on Dell.com originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 18 Mar 2010 13:39:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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So, all this storage talk has gotten you excited about upgrading your laptop’s crappy old 120GB drive? It’s about time, dammit.
Traditional hard drive have never been cheaper, and the advent of flash-memory based SSDs—that’s solid-state drives—delivers a storage upgrade path that actually deliver solid, real-world benefits that you’ll notice every single day. SSD-equipped PCs boot faster and are quicker to load applications. In fact, the only bad thing about SSDs is their cost—a 128GB solid-state drive can cost upwards of $400.
So what’s the right storage solution for you? Read on, and I’ll tell you what you need to know.
SSDs sound pretty sexy, but you’re running an old machine—say an Athlon 64—and you’ve got an immediate problem. Your porn collection has filled your old 500GB drive. You need more space, stat, and there’s no reason to shell out more than your PC is worth for a 128GB SSD. Lucky for you, terabyte drives are cheap—$90 at Newegg for an awesome drive. There are a few key specs to watch out for when buying a hard drive for use as your system drive. The speed that the platters spin at has a direct correlation on the performance of the drive. Faster platters = faster data transfer. For an inexpensive, mainstream drive, that means you should be looking at 7200rpm exclusively. The number of platters is also relevant. The fewer platters there are in the drive, the faster the drive will be. For those reasons, I recommend Seagate’s 7200.12 series 1TB drive. At $90, it’s cheap, fast, and reliable.
Total Capacity: 1TB
Total Cost: $90
Today, the 128GB SSDs sit in the sweet spot for price to performance ratio. However, smaller SSDs don’t necessarily sacrifice anything in terms of performance, just capacity. (The brand of controller used and configuration of the memory are much more important to SSD performance.) So, if you want to scrimp, you can buy a smaller SSD for Windows and your applications, and pair it with a traditional hard drive where you store your large files—like your music and video files. If you want to get really tricky, you can even use symlinks—special links that are invisible to applications but are between files or directories—so that your applications don’t even realize your files are on different drives.
While Intel’s mainstream 160GB SSDs cost about $500, the 80GB retail version comes in right around $220, and even includes a mounting kit, so it will slide into your 3.5-inch drive bays (most SSDs are 2.5-inch drives, sized for laptops and servers). That’s not a ton of capacity, but it’s more than enough if you just want to install Windows and your applications. You’ll need to install games and store your media on a secondary drive, but for that you can use an inexpensive traditional drive, like the Seagate 7200.12 1TB. And, the quick boot and speedy application load times are more than worth the hassle. One caveat, when buying Intel SSDs, make sure you get the second generation drives (they’ll have G2 in the model number). The first-gen models don’t support TRIM, which is an important feature for maintaining the drive as you use it. We’ll talk about TRIM in a moment.
Total Capacity: 1.08TB
Total Cost: $310
While it’s definitely tempting to put a speedy SSD in your laptop—after all quick load times and a complete lack of moving parts does sound spiffy—if you use your portable machine like I do, you’d probably rather have some extra space. Lots of extra space. That’s why I recommend the Western Digital 640GB Scorpio Blue drive. It’s a 5400RPM drive, but its balance of price to space is excellent, and it shouldn’t eat through your battery too quickly. When you upgrade the hard drive in a notebook, you need to know what height drive your computer can accommodate. The easiest way to find out is to look in Device Manager (in Windows) or in System Information (in OSX) and see what model drive you have currently. Then Google that model number to find out thick your current drive is. Anything that size or smaller should fit. At 9.5mm, the Scorpio is a perfect upgrade for my MacBook Pro.
Total Capacity: 640GB
Total Cost: $99
What’s a truly nutty storage solution? How about a pair of 160GB SSDs paired with 2TB of the fastest traditional hard drive in the world? While there are some faster SSDs out there, they’re either based on untested controllers or have had problems in the past. When dealing with bleeding edge, we’ll take reliable and slightly slower in some situations over speedier with a chance to lose our data, which is why we recommend a pair of 160GB Intel’s X-25MG2’s running in RAID0, paired with a speedy and spacious 2TB Western Digital Black drive. This gives you 320GB of storage on the RAID, more than enough space for Windows and all your applications and games, plus an extra 2TB for your music, videos, and… yes… your porn collection. It’s the best of both worlds, but with a pair of $500 SSDs, it’ll cost you!
Total Capacity: 2.380TB
Total Cost: $1280
There are a few things you need to know about SSDs, before you shell out big bucks for one. First, because of the way flash memory works, either the operating system or a vendor-provided piece of software needs to do some occasional housekeeping to keep write speeds up. If your drive supports the TRIM command—as the second-generation Intel SSDs I recommended do—Windows 7 will take care of the scut work for you.
If you’re running XP or Vista, you’ll need to manually run the Intel SSD Optimizer every few weeks or months, whenever you notice write speeds slowing down. It’s part of the Intel SSD Toolbox. Unfortunately, the SSD Optimizer doesn’t run on RAID arrays, so it’s a bad idea to RAID your SSDs, unless you’re running Windows 7.
You should prevent defragmentation programs from running on SSDs—they’re not necessary and can actually degrade performance. Windows 7 will automatically disable defrag, but you’ll need to turn it off manually in XP or Vista.
Unfortunately, there’s no way to properly maintain an SSD on OSX today. OSX doesn’t support the TRIM command and there aren’t any OSX-native tools for Intel drives. The only way to restore like-new write speeds on a Mac is to backup your drive, format it, then restore from your TimeMachine backup. If you frequently write large files, you’ll definitely notice the performance hit. For that reason, it’s not a great idea to buy a SSD to upgrade your MacBook Pro today.
Will Smith is the Editor in Chief of Tested, a new site for people who love technology. Recently at Tested, he’s talked about Apple’s first netbook, shown you how to disassemble a Flip camera, and tested condoms to see if they make good waterproof cases for gear.
Memory [Forever] is our week-long consideration of what it really means when our memories, encoded in bits, flow in a million directions, and might truly live forever.
What if we told you there was a way to have the svelteness and power of Dell’s $1,500 Adamo for less than half the price? You’d be interested, right? That’s exactly why we’ve been trying to get a Dell Vostro V13 in-hand since its launch a few months ago. Besides starting at $449 – our unit’s configuration rings up at a higher $844 — the less-than-an-inch-thick, aluminum clad Vostro V13 promises five hours of battery life and good-enough everyday performance. Sure, it was created for small business types, but its blend of style, performance and price had us convinced that it could be the best ULV laptop out there. Ah, but is it? We’ll tell you everything you want to know after the jump in our full review.
Gallery: Dell Vostro V13 review
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Dell Vostro V13 review originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 17 Mar 2010 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Could this be another example of online advertising presaging the onset of a hardware upgrade from Cupertino? Apple’s ads on Australian tech pub PC Authority have been spotted displaying some rather peculiar price tags for its flagship mobile and desktop computers. Whereas Cupertino’s Aussie online store lists the most affordable versions of the MacBook Pro, MacBook Air and Mac Pro at A$1,599, A$1,999 and A$3,599, respectively, the above, official-looking ads would seem to disagree. Clicking on them still leads to the currently priced (and specced) machines, but looking at them suggests that — in the absence of some major conspiracy or a splendidly random price hike — we’re getting an early peek at the pricing of the newly updated models of each of those series. The MacBook Air has jumped by A$400 so that what used to be its costliest base price is now its lowest, while the MBP has suffered a A$300 bump in cost of entry. Then again, considering the expectation that the mobile computers will get Core i7 CPUs while the Mac Pro will get all dressed up with Core i7-980X regalia, this development is perhaps not all that surprising. The major thing to take away here is that the long-awaited upgrades might finally be arriving. We’re putting our piggy banks on alert, just in case.
[Thanks, Matthew]
Update: We’ve come across some other pricing inconsistencies contained within Apple’s own New Zealand site. Find out what’s happening after the break [Thanks, ScottNYC].
Update 2: The prices above have been corroborated by Apple’s Australia site, which now suffers from the same schizophrenic pricing as its New Zealand compatriot. You’ll find screenshot evidence after the break.
New MacBook Pro, Air and Mac Pro pricing potentially leaked by Apple ads and online store (updated) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 17 Mar 2010 06:33:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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