Geek Choice Blog » Computer technology

HP getting into ultrabooks with the Folio 13

Joseph Ruthaford — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 13:01:41 +0000

HP has thrown their hat into the mix of ultrabooks with the announcement of the Folio 13. The machine will be 13.3 inches and less than 0.7 inches thick although heavier than the MacBook Air at around 3.3lbs this machine also has the longest lasting battery life in its class. Clocking in at about 9 hours of battery life! This is two hours longer than the air.

HP is also aiming for an Air-like level of design with a real metal outer shell, single-surface Imagepad for its trackpad and a backlit keyboard. The PC claims more expansion, though, including Ethernet, HDMI out, USB 3.0, and an optional TPM security chip on top of the card reader.

The system ships with 4GB of RAM and a 128GB solid-state drive standard, but tries to undercut Apple by using slower parts. Base systems ship with a 1.4GHz Core i3 and have to be optioned up to the 1.6GHz Core i5 that Apple only reserves for its lower-end 11-inch system.

Folio 13 systems should be available starting from December 7 and, at $899, will be about $300 less than the MacBook through HP’s cost-cutting. The PC builder is just the third major Windows builder to step into the ultrabook arena and is taking a different approach to Acer and ASUS, both of whom have tried to get faster components or more closely imitate Apple’s teardrop shape.

Windows 8 Fast booting

Joseph Ruthaford — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 12:13:59 +0000

In yet another Building Windows 8 blog entry by Steven Sinofsky, there is a demonstration of Microsoft’s upcoming operating system’s fast boot time. In the demonstration, Windows 8 boots up in less than 2 seconds. Pretty amazing.

Microsoft focused on three key goals for improving the boot time. First, there has to be effectively zero watt power used when off, there needs to be a fresh session after boot, and there needs to be very fast times between pressing the power button and being able to use the PC. Microsoft’s solution? A new “fast startup mode which is a hybrid of traditional cold boot and resuming from hibernate.”

“Now here’s the key difference for Windows 8: as in Windows 7, we close the user sessions, but instead of closing the kernel session, we hibernate it. Compared to a full hibernate, which includes a lot of memory pages in use by apps, session 0 hibernation data is much smaller, which takes substantially less time to write to disk. Using this technique with boot gives us a significant advantage for boot times, since reading the hiberfile in and reinitializing drivers is much faster on most systems (30-70% faster on most systems we’ve tested),” Sinofsky states.

So this means Windows 8 will boot faster thanks to the less work done by resuming from a hibernated system session compared to a full system session. “We added a new multi-phase resume capability, which is able to use all of the cores in a multi-core system in parallel, to split the work of reading from the hiberfile and decompressing the contents. For those of you who prefer hibernating, this also results in faster resumes from hibernate as well,” Sinofsky mentions.

Below is the video demo.

Apple’s new iMac’s look at what you can do!

Joseph Ruthaford — Wed, 04 May 2011 12:05:16 +0000

The true geek in me needed to share this. Engadget received one of the new iMacs and shared their story but what is truly epic about this is they decided it would be cool to place 2 30 in monitors on the iMac to make a 3 monitor display as seen above. Wicked cool right? So here are some other tidbits of info on these new iMacs: those who’d rather swipe than drag can now choose to order theirs with a Magic Trackpad instead of a Magic Mouse, though we’re sure Apple would surely be happy to sell you both. Additionally, the 21.5-inch model can now be configured with a 256GB SSD, just like its big bro. The bigger news, of course, is what’s on the inside, with updated Radeon HD graphics featuring GDDR5 memory and Sandy Bridge processors all-round. Oh and did I mention two thunderbolt ports. Thank you Engadget for sharing this information with us!

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Final Cut Pro X with 64-bit support

Joseph Ruthaford — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 12:59:08 +0000

For all of you video editing enthusiasts out there Final Cut Pro X is getting a rebuild from the ground up and it will have 64-bit support… YAY! Chief Architect of Video Applications Randy Ubillos demonstrated a beta release of the program at NAB. e “rebuilt from ground up” video editing suite — which now shares a similar look and feel with iMovie — will be shipped with 64-bit support to finally make use of more than 4GB of RAM, as well as handling 4K clips on 8-core editing rigs (by way of the Grand Central Dispatch feature on OS X Snow Leopard). Most notably, though, is that this new FCP will always be rendering instantly in the background, meaning you can edit on the fly much like you do on iMovie! There’s also a whole stash of other new features: editing before media ingest, magnetic timeline, people detection, instant color matching between clips, smart collection of media based on custom keywords and people, auto image stabilization on import, and many more. Itching to get your hands dirty with Cupertino’s new video tool? You’ll be able to download it from the Mac App Store in June for just $299.

Motorola Xoom: flash fail!

IE9 Being Explored

Joseph Ruthaford — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 13:16:31 +0000

It’s just been 24 hour but IE9 has hit the ground running and taken the internet by storm. Internet Explorer 9 has been downloaded over 2.35 million times in the first 24 hours since it’s release on Monday night. That is over 27 downloads every second or if you really growing. Although even though those numbers are nice to see, Firefox still has IE beat. Firefox version 3.5 was downloaded 5 million times in 24 hours and Firefox 3 in 08 was downloaded a massive 8 million times in one single day. But that number is a bit inflated if you figure that back in 08 there wasn’t many browser choices that were as secure as Firefox. Now with Google Chrome, Safari and of course the newest version of Firefox on the way this new Internet Explorer might actually be comparable to the likes of Chrome and Firefox. Below is a video of the IE9 launch event that can fill you in on what IE9 is all about!