Month: February 2009

NVIDIA Ion – The Benchmarks and Reviews Are Starting

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NVIDIA Ever since NVIDIA said they wanted to boost netbook performance, quite a few people have been eagerly anticipating the results of that endeavor.

This week, we’ve started to get a glimpse of what’s to come when NVIDIA pairs up their GeForce 9400M GPU chipset with Intel’s Atom CPU. Quite a few websites and publications have been allowed to release their impressions and previews of an NVIDIA Ion reference PC platform. While it’s not in a netbook form factor at this point, it does provide a good starting point as several of the sites have taken them apart and you can see just how small they are. While the systems had dual-core Intel Atom 330 CPUs, they restricted them to one core (basically like an Atom 230 running at 1.6GHz) so you can get an idea of netbook performance.

PC Perspective also did a comparison to an ASUS Eee PC 901, and the 3DMark scores of the Ion were well over 10 times faster. LAPTOP Magazine mentioned it also blew away all other ultraportables in that range, except for the ASUS N10Jc (which is running a GeForce 9300M graphics chipset).

Among the features of the platform

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Windows 7 Editions Announced, Talks About Netbooks

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Windows 7 Microsoft has announced the various editions of Microsoft Windows 7 today. They believe most customers will gravitate towards one of two editions – either Windows 7 Home Premium for consumers, or Windows 7 Professional for business users.

There are some major changes coming, and while some were clearly needed, others will be met with derision. The biggest/worst decision as far as future netbook owners should be concerned, is that the OEMs producing netbooks will probably be selling them with Windows 7 Starter. That’s what Microsoft wants to happen.

Windows 7 Starter only allows you to run three applications at a time. Forget about the fact that many of us are using the Windows 7 public beta (which has the “Ultimate” feature set) and that it runs just fine on netbooks. Hopefully most of the netbook makers will offer something other than Windows 7 Starter, for not much more. It’s a software limitation that doesn’t match the fact that by the time Windows 7 is available for retailers, the netbook hardware will be quite a bit faster and better than the first generation from this time a year ago.

From the Microsoft press release:

The first change in Windows 7 was to make sure that editions of Windows 7 are a superset of one another. That is to say, as customers upgrade from one version to the next, they keep all features and functionality from the previous edition. As an example, some business customers using Windows Vista Business wanted the Media Center functionality that is in Windows Vista Home Premium but didn’t receive it in Business edition. Customers won’t have to face that trade-off with Windows 7. With Windows 7 there is a more natural progression from one edition to the next.

The second change is that we have designed Windows 7 so different editions of Windows 7 can run on a very broad set of hardware, from small-notebook PCs (sometimes referred to as netbooks) to full gaming desktops. This way, customers can enable the scenarios they want across the broad hardware choices they have.

Microsoft also felt the need to talk about Windows 7 on netbooks, through Brad Brooks, corporate vice president for Windows Consumer Product Marketing.

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Sony VAIO P – Typing, Size, Performance (Pocketables)

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Jenn K. Lee over at Pocketables has put together an extensive collection of articles on the new 8″ high-resolution Sony VAIO P series. The model reviewed comes with Microsoft Windows Vista, and surprisingly, the amount of software that Sony included on the desktop with the … Read more

Asus Eee PC 1000HG Announced

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Another member of the The Asus Eee PC family has been announced – this time it’s the Asus Eee PC 1000HG, and it will be available in Taiwan, at least for now. No word on release dates for other areas. Features include a Huawei 3G … Read more

Asus Eee PC 1000HE – Information, Pre-Ordering

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Asustek has officially started promoting the new 10″ Asus Eee PC 1000HE. It’s one of the first netbooks to feature an Intel Atom N280 1.66GHz CPU. How much of an impact the N280 is on battery life has yet to be seen, but Asustek is … Read more