Saturday, May 19, 2007

Acer Ferrari 5005WLMi


A sports car is a blast, but on a long drive its tight confines and sacrifices in creature comforts make a sporty luxury car more alluring. The same line of thinking is behind the $2,399 Acer Ferrari 5005WLMi (a Windows Vista Ultimate version is available for $2,699). It delivers the sharp looks of the ultraportable Acer Ferrari 1000 but in a scaled-up package that's more comfortable to use in the home, office, or dorm.


With its glossy carbon-fiber-patterned lid, red accents, and yellow prancing-horse logo, the 5005WLMi stands out from the field of gray and silver notebooks, without being as outlandish as the Alienware Aurora or Asus Lamborghini models. At 6.6 pounds and an inch thick at its leading edge, the unit is manageable to carry.


Pop the lid and you'll find a sharp black-on-black color scheme. The full-sized keyboard is laid out in Acer's unique "smile" configuration, which makes for a more natural wrist position for touch typists (the shape is subtle enough not to be offensive to traditionalists). The expansive keyboard deck is covered in a rubberized material that feels good under your palms, and the touchpad features a four-way scroll rocker switch between the two mouse buttons, though in this price range we would have preferred to see a fingerprint reader there. Given the room around the keyboard, dedicated multimedia control buttons would also have been nice.


The 15.4-inch glossy widescreen is sharp and clear. Onscreen images looked great, but the panel's relatively high resolution (1680 x 1050 pixels) made for small default fonts in apps and on Web pages. DVD playback showed accurate colors but with some motion blur in moving images. As with other 15.4-inch panels, viewing angles were good side to side; just watch for glare.


Sound quality from the front-firing stereo speakers was good, with little distortion even at maximum volume. That said, with a chassis this size, we expected speakers with more power and a bit of bass punch. But with a multiformat dual-layer DVD burner-a slot-loading model-as well as a complete range of ports, the 5005WLMi is a good multimedia machine overall. You'll find an S-Video out port, HDMI (High-Definition Multimedia Interface) support, and an S/PDIF-capable headphone jack in addition to a 5-in-1 memory card reader.


Extra touches abound. Acer includes Bluetooth wireless, a comfortable Bluetooth travel mouse, and a VoIP phone that slips into the PC Card slot. The company's "Empowering Technology" e-tools (accessible via a quick-launch button) include utilities for speedily accessing security, wireless, and performance settings, as well as system-recovery tools and more. A swiveling 1.3-megapixel webcam above the screen is useful for videoconferencing, though we noticed a tendency for images to blur even with small amounts of movement.


If the 5005WLMi disappoints at all, it's in overall performance. It's powerful enough for typical business and even light gaming duties. It's just that with a name like Ferrari, we expected this system to be in the front of the pack. Instead, the 5005WLMi's 2-GHz AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-60 CPU, married to 2GB of RAM, delivered an okay score of 219 on MobileMark 2005. That's merely average and well behind performance leaders that reside in the mid to high 200s.


Gaming and 3D performance from the 256MB ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 GPU were good, with a score of 7,515 on 3DMark03 and a playable 42 fps on F.E.A.R. (at 1024 x 768-pixel resolution). At 3 hours and 26 minutes, battery life was typical for a machine in this class. Wireless throughput from the unit's integrated 802.11b/g radio was low, however: 7.9 Mbps at 15 feet from the access point, and just 6 Mbps at 50 feet.


In addition to the Acer utilities, you get CD/DVD creation software (from NTI) and Norton AntiVirus protection. Acer's one-year parts-and-labor warranty is nothing special, but unlike others, the company includes lifetime toll-free tech support. There's even overseas support for globe-trotting jet-setters. There's a lot to like about the 5005WLMi. It's not the fastest notebook on the track, but you'll be pleased with its looks and features.

Posted by Nandy18 at 9:24 PM | | Comments

Thursday, April 12, 2007

Fujtisu rolls out upgraded FMV Lifebooks

Fujitisu looks to be adding yet more options to its Lifebook line of laptops, introducing newly-upgraded H-Series, E-Series, and S-Series models.

Of the three, the H-Series comes out on top in terms of specs (and price), with the new FMV-H8240 model boasting a 15.4-inch WUXGA display, along with a Core 2 Duo of an unspecified sort, an unspecified NVIDIA graphics card, a max up 4GB of RAM, and 60GB hard drive.

In the middle of the lot, the FMV-E8240 also boasts a yet-to-be-determined Core 2 Duo procesor, with your choice of WXGA or WSXGA+ 15.4-inch displays, a 40GB hard drive, and a max 4GB of RAM.

Lastly, the FMV-S8340 takes a slightly more portable route with its 13.3-inch WXGA display, along with that same unspecified Core 2 Duo processor, up to 4GB of RAM, a 40GB hard drive, and a promised 5.5 hours of battery life.

Look for all three to hit Japan between May and June, with prices ranging from ¥221,550 to ¥351,750 (or roughly $1,860 to $2,955).

Posted by Nandy18 at 9:59 AM | | Comments

Sunday, April 8, 2007

Toshiba's fancy new Qosmio G40 desktop replacement

Toshiba has finally shed the frumpy aesthetics of its Oosmio GXX line of desktop replacements and co-opted the clean white lines of the R400 for the brand new Qosmio G40.

There's the "usual" 17-inch 1920 x 1200 screen, dual 200GB hard drives, T7300P Core 2 Duo processor (Santa Rosa), 2GB of RAM and other basic necessities like that, but things get extra interesting with the 512MB GeForce 8600M GT graphics, an HD DVD-R drive and HDMI 1.3.

The laptop should be come to at least Europe in June, with an asking price of around 3000 euros (about $4004 US).

Posted by Nandy18 at 11:06 AM | | Comments

Thursday, April 5, 2007

MALIBAL announces 20-inch Veda Series notebooks

After having bemusedly watched the jokesters at LAPTOP magazine struggle to operate a Dell M2010 laptop in public, we're pretty sure it's only the most hardcore of LAN partygoers who are snatching up these 20-inch models -- so it must be this small but dedicated demographic that Las Vegas-based MALIBAL is targeting with the new Veda series of desktop replacements.

Almost certainly rebadges, the first round of Vedas do indeed offer some pretty impressive components, including dual core AMD Turion 64 X2 processors, up to two NVIDIA GeForce Go 7950 GTX cards in SLI pushing 1,680 x 1,050 pixels, as much as 4GB of RAM and 400GB of storage, along with integrated TV tuners, dual-layer DVD burners, and the seemingly de rigueur 1.3 megapixel webcam.

Available only through MALIBAL directly, this model starts out at $2,799 and keeps moving skyward until it's too expensive to take out of the house.


Posted by Nandy18 at 12:49 PM | | Comments

Cario concept notebook: the wardriver's best friend

Even though it's pretty obvious that Anna Lopez's Cario concept notebook is only meant to be used while parked outside your localNeighbourFi hotspot , there are enough idiots out there who would be surfing while driving that we kind of hope the design lives and dies as a CAD file on Ms. Lopez's PC.

Only slightly less dangerous than some of the in-car offices we've seen, the Cario seems to use its lid for support while the user types at a rather uncomfortable angle directly on the screen -- if ever a product screamed for a Bluetooth keyboard, it's this one right here.

All in all not a bad idea for those unfortunate individuals who work out of their cars, and despite the fact that we already have a pretty snazzy in-dash PC, we're starting to regret the fact that we replaced our factory steering wheel with one of those tiny, Cario-incompatible chain link numbers. Fashion over function, ya know?

Posted by Nandy18 at 12:39 PM | | Comments

Thursday, March 22, 2007

Clevo strikes again with NVIDIA 8800-based M570RU 17-inch laptop

If that 11.9-pound monstrosity, Clevo’s D900C, is just a bit too much laptop for you, there's always second best: the 17-inch M570RU.


Clevo hasn't stripped everything out of this guy, there's still the NVIDIA GeForce Go 8800 graphics, room for 4GB of RAM and even the addition of Intel's latest wireless chipset for 802.11n MIMO WiFi.

The screen has been pared down to a 1280 x 800 resolution, but where the M570RU really differs from its big brother is that it's running a traditional mobile version of the Core 2 Duo processor, instead of that Core 2 Duo Extreme desktop chip inside the D900C. Other frills include a webcam, subwoofer and fingerprint security, along with a snazzy orange trim.

No word on price for this one, but we're guessing that just because it has a mobile processor and weighs a few less pounds, doesn't mean you'll be seeing one of these for less than a couple grand.

Posted by Nandy18 at 11:10 AM | | Comments

spilled liquid on your laptop???

The bad thing about a laptop is that you tend to sit down with it at places where a computer actually doesn’t belong. Like the livingroom, the garden, the kitchen or even in bed. That’s the whole point with a laptop, that you can move around with, but unfortunatley we also very often present our preasiuos black boxes for uneccesary risks like enjoying a glass of wine in its precense.

Accidents with beverages and laptops are more common then I though and this became apparent after I wrote the article Salvage your device after liquid spill which was about a router that got water into it.

The amount of emails that I’ve gotten since then from people that spilled both wine and other things into their laptops made me do this experiment / tutorial where I will pour one glass of wine and one of lemonade into my laptop and then recover it.

Don’t even think about doing this as an experiment unless you’re 110% sure about what you’re doing!! Not only can you ruin your laptop beyond repair but you can also get to see other unwanted effects like electrocution, fire or even explosion caused by the shortcut the liquid causes. You’ve been warned.

For this experiment I used an old Dell Latitude CSx 500Mhz that was donated to me after my former boss managed to crack the screen on it after passing an x-ray machine while travelling. Except for the screen that has a crack in it; it’s a perfectly fine laptop. As liquids I used a glass of a lemonade.

Have a look at the video to get you started with what the effect the wine and lemonade had on the laptop. It’s less dramatic then you’d think

So now you have a laptop which has suffered from alcohol and sugar poisoning and the absolute first thing you need to think about is to disconnect all power sources to not make things worse. E.g. unplug any AC adapters and take the battery out of the laptop.
The second thing you need to keep in mind is that time is not your friend. Many people that have this happening to their laptop will try to ‘dry it out’ and this is one of worst things you can do.

All liquids contain minerals which lead electricity and many liquids contain sugars and other interesting ingredients which of many are corrosive.

You need to get this out of your laptop as soon as possible.

Actually it’s quiet simple. Take the laptop apart, which can be a challenge in itself, and rinse the parts affected (no more no less) in tap water and when it’s clean rinse it again with distilled water to make sure that the tap water in gone as it contains minerals, chlor and calcium. Let it dry and then assemble it again.

Posted by Nandy18 at 11:05 AM | | Comments