Acer Aspire One - Replacing SSD with 1.8″ HDD
August 16, 2008
A few days ago we mentioned that tnkgirl Mobile had been modding their SSD-based 1.8″ Acer Aspire One to handle bluetooth. Now they’ve since published a how-to guide (complete with lots of pictures).
The SSD is slightly smaller in the area where storage is located, compared to the HDD version (which takes a 2.5″ Serial ATA (SATA) hard drive). As such, the space is limited and you are basically having to work with 1.8″ size devices.
tnkgrl Mobile replaced their SSD with a 1.8″ 60GB Samsung HDD. The Samsung drive has 8MB of buffer and spins at 4200rpm.
Read: tnkgrl Mobile
OCZ Core Series V2 SATA II SSD
August 15, 2008
OCZ announced a new series of 2.5″ Serial ATA (SATA) Solid State Drives (SSD) yesterday, with a cool twist.
OCZ claims the new series, the OCZ Core Series V2 SATA II SSD, will cost half as much as existing comparable SSDs (although no pricing was mentioned) and will be offered in capacities up to 250GB.
The cool twist - they have a mini-USB port on the end. OCZ says this is to allow for firmware updating in the future, to “further enhance compatibility or performance with future platforms.”
The stats:
- Read speeds: Up to 170 MB/s
- Write speeds: Up to 98 MB/s
- Seek time: Less than 0.2 - 0.3ms
- Mean Time Before Failure (MTBF) : 1.5 million hours
- Warranty: 2 years
Read: OCZ Technology
Dell Mini Inspiron = Inspiron 910?
August 14, 2008
There is a Brazilian site (Odontopalm) that claims to have details of the 8.9″ Dell Mini Inspiron, only they are referring to it as the Inspiron 910, (and they mention it was called the E at one point).
Now it wouldn’t surprise me if we get details from outside the US - it happens all the time that things get leaked by accident, and Dell’s netbook is definitely targeted towards exposing people to computers who might not have been exposed to them in the past (or at least lowering the barrier of entry). South America would definitely be a big market for them.
They are talking about a launch date of August 22 (next week). I consider that reasonable - we thought they would announce it earlier this week when they announced the new Latitude E series, however, in retrospect, it would have been foolish to do so. Much better to have them a week or two apart so that you can maximize the publicly for each series.
This is going to be a special device for Dell, given their push into the Indian and Chinese markets (Dell 500, etc.) as well as other developing markets.
It’s also the complete opposite of the Latitudes they just announced, which are at the high-end of Dell’s mobile products.
As far as the naming convention - the “910″ could signify that it was a 9-inch model (8.9″ but many just round it up), and obviously they wouldn’t want to use 900 or 901 (or 90x anything) since that’s what Asustek is doing.
Things we knew that they mentioned:
Read more
MacBook Air Revision Soon?
August 14, 2008
Could a revision of the 13.3-inch MacBook Air be just around the corner?
PhoneNews.com seems to think so. They are reporting that for the most part, the MacBook Air will still look the same. The internal components will change quite a bit from what we saw in the MacBook Air that was first released back in January of this year. A custom platform and CPU was being used in able to keep cooling and power requirements low. PN believes that they will move to a standard-sized Penryn Core 2 Duo, which could reduce the cost, while increasing the speed.
Read more
Dell XPS M1330 to get 128GB SSD Option
August 13, 2008
Amidst all the hoopla over the new Dell Latitude E-series business line, a nice upgrade / option was added to the consumer-oriented 13.3-inch Dell XPS M1330 (an option available to the Latitude E-Series).
It’s a 128GB Samsung FlashSSD Solid State Drive and it’s listed as “Ultra Performance”. It’ll set you back $450-$500 (depending on what model of M1330 you select), but that’s not bad at all, given the same drive would have been two-three times that just six months ago.
The current Dell XPS M1330 laptops are currently starting at $899, and you can get an M1330 with a 128GB SSD for as low as $1400 USD (see the Dell XPS Laptops page at Dell.com for details).
Things to Like and Dislike About the Acer Aspire One
August 13, 2008
Kevin Tofel over at jkOnTheRun has posted five things he likes and five things he doesn’t like about the 8.9-inch Acer Aspire One.
Among the likes: Build quality, the display, and the battery life. Among the dislikes: Upgrading the memory on the Aspire One and the SSD.
I’m bringing this up because by this time tomorrow, I should have an Acer Aspire One in my hands, and will definitely be going over it during the next several days (actually for quite a while to come). Reading his comments (as well as the video he and JK posted) has been driving me nuts, while I’ve been waiting on my HDD version to ship.
I decided to forego the SSD route - part of what I’ll be using this for (and it will used as a personal machine by me) required me to have quite a bit of storage, so chances are I will be replacing the 120GB hard drive with something in the 320GB range. I’m also going to be upgrading the memory.
I’ll be documenting this as I go along (including any and all upgrades). Because I bought this for myself, I expect to be doing quite a bit to it - I maybe even replacing the wireless card for some networking hardware that I’m testing.
The model I bought:
- AOA150-1006 LU.S040B.110
- 120GB HDD
- 1GB Memory
- Windows XP Home
- White
Read:
- jkOnTheRun - 5 things to dislike
- jkOnTheRun - 5 things to like
