hardware

Computer? But I hardly knew ‘er: A mini review of a mini Dell inspiron

“Well, the good news sir” so the Dell phone rep tells me “I see here you have 364 days remaining on your 1 year warranty”. 24hrs after delivery, my brand new micro mini subnotebook is cold and refusing to boot. This after blue screening of death on me 5 min in to an important client presentation. Ah well, these things happen. In which we learn, the importance power point in every meeting is often overstated.

My little Dell Inspiron Mini, your candle burned too bright. You gave me about 45 combined minutes of Windows XP before intermittently, then completely dying out. I blame the solid state drive (these early days of SSDs, not so solid) the tech thought it was the network card, but whatever. The unit is winging it’s way home to Dell for a new one. Apparently I am not the first to have problems. Could also explain why the backorder on inpiron 9′s is at least two weeks (One theory: Intel Atom shortages, another: a lot of the units don’t work right).

Anyway, since a lot of folks have asked, here’s my abbreviated review of an abbreviated mini…

(Formerly) Canada’s ATI makes a huge comeback in the graphics business

The graphics company once know as ATI has launched something of a coup this week with two new products the Radeon 4850 and 4870. NVDIA has been dominating the desktop 3D graphics market for a while now but it looks it’s now ATI’s turn to leapfrog. Now it’s just too bad they got themselves bought [...]

The G-phone stirreth

Google said to be shipping 50,000 Gphones by year’s end. A UBS analyst is rumored to have information that HTC, a Taiwanese handset manufacturer, will ship about 50,000 cell phones made for Google by the end of the year. “These initial phones are not going to be for sale, says Benjamin Schachter, at UBS. “These [...]

Hold on to your dollars

The Canadian Dollar reached parity with the U.S. Greenback yesterday. In on honour of this auspicious day, I thought I’d see how translates for far for tech consumers out there. Comparing prices at Apple.ca and Apple.com. Remember 1CAD = 1USD.   CAD USD Premium iPod Touch 329 299 10.0% iPod Nano 169 149 13.4% MacBook [...]

6 Big Myths about buying a laptop computer

I get asked this one a lot, and here is what you need to know. My advice may surprise you. I’m going to explode a few popular myths by explaining what not to look for then give my advice for what’s really important. What really doesn’t matter: MHz doesn’t matter – Don’t pay a lot [...]

 

ThomasPurves.com