Photo: brianjmatis / Flickr

The heart of Silicon Valley seemed to be the ideal venue to build a museum chronicling the history of computing, and that is just what happened when the Computer History Museum recently unveiled their new £15 million renovated premises.

Revolution

Apart from the renovated building, the Computer History Museum also unveiled a new exhibition, entitled ‘Revolution’, which will feature over 1,200 items, unbelievably only representing 1 per cent of the museum’s entire stock!

Included among the iconic computing artefacts are IBM’s 026 punch card machine, dated from 1946, and a Data General Nova from 1969, which Apple founder Steve Wozniak claimed to his father that he would own one day, including it’s 4K memory processor.

Inspiring history

The full name of the exhibition is ‘Revolution: The First 2,000 Years of Computing’ and is about more than just dates and numbers, as president and CEO John Hollar explained in an interview.

‘Computing is so much a part of our lives today. It touches everything we do,’ Hollar told reporters. ‘When you think about how quickly computing is moving, [its] history can be lost in an instant. So we work really hard to make sure that those important stories and the things that have been built are preserved and presented to the world.’

Massive display

The exhibition’s space consists of roughly 25,000 square feet, out of the total 125,000 square feet of museum space, and opens visitors’ eyes as to how far humankind has come in the past 2,000 years. It’s easy to forget that the computing didn’t begin with the Apple I or II or even the highly successful IBM PC all those years ago, but rather with the simple abacus, the first working calculator dating as far back as 2700-2300 BC.

The museum opened its doors last Thursday, in Silicon Valley, California.

Photo: Acer

As PCs get faster and faster and the chips inside them get smaller and smaller, we’re seeing the desktop tower slowly disappear and now we have all-in-one PCs. As it is with most pieces of technology, it can be a bit of a nightmare to find the right device. Helping those in need, we’re taking a look at the simple yet functional Acer Aspire all-in-one PC and the higher end creative beast, the Apple iMac.

The Acer Aspire Z5600 is quick and reliable

The Acer Aspire Z5600 is generally impressive all-in-one PC; it looks great with its silver finishing and provides excellent computing speeds. The Z5600 is powered by an Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200 which clocks in at 2.33GHz. Acer have also thrown in 4GB of DDR3 memory to keep the machine running smoothly and efficiently. The Acer’s touch screen display shows off some wonderful clarity, and the graphics chipset supports high definition which is a definite plus. The Z5600 is performs wonderfully well and those looking for an all-in-one PC that can handle a bit of everything at speed should consider the Acer Aspire Z5600. The Acer Aspire Z5600 retails at £699.99.

The Apple iMac – perfect for creatives

Photo: Apple

The Apple iMac is one of the best performing, if not the best, all-in-one PC available on the market today. Apple has designed the iMac to look industrially smart while remaining sleek. It’s powered by an Intel Core 3 Duo 3.06GHz processor, which ensures that iMac is one of the fastest machines to either process images on Photoshop, encode music files in Apple’s iTunes, do a bit of media multitasking or even for those who want try out a few games on the Apple iMac. The display is immaculate is supported by an ATI Radeon HD 4670, which is a more than capable HD graphics card. The 21.5-inch Apple iMac retails at £892.06 and is highly recommended for those who like to edit anything from videos, music to images.

All-in-one PCs are definitely the way to go for those looking for computing power and looking to keep everything minimal and stylish. They definitely go a long way in meeting a whole lot of different uses and the Apple iMac, though being a little more expensive, is definitely one of the better machines available out there on the market.

Nokia, the brand known for its mobile phones the world over, now believes that the company can do something fruitful in the laptop, or converged devices market, as well. Almost everyone is familiar with Nokia. The company enjoys maximum market share in the mobile phone domain and has proved itself as the world’s largest mobile phone manufacturer. Nokia has offered every type of mobile up until now. From the basic units to smartphones, everything is available in the company’s portfolio.

Now the company is looking forward to dip its toe into the laptop or converged device market. Nokia’s President and CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo said that now he wants the company go beyond just making mobile phones. This is because nowadays the smartphones are so advanced that it’s difficult to demarcate between a smartphone like the Nokia N96 and a netbook like the Acer Aspire One A110-AW. Whilst maintaing their low prices, netbooks have become very advanced and are capable of housing a cellular modem for receiving 3G mobile broadband. So the company thinks that it’s feasible and worthy to jump into the converged device market.

Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo said, “We don’t have to look even for five years from now to see that what we know as a mobile phone and what we know as a PC are in many ways converging. Today we have hundreds of millions of people who are having their first Internet experience on the phone. This is a good indication.”

Looking for a reliable Solid State Drive? Then look no further than the new Apex series SSDs. Developed by OCZ Technology, a leading provider of innovative, ultra-high performance and high reliability memory and computer components, the Apex series promises to deliver the most beneficial and reliable secondary storage upgrade to date.

The company has rolled out its new OCZ Apex SATA II 2.5” Solid State Drive (SSD) Series that offer the PC enthusiasts, system builders and mainstream computer users a cost-effective way of boosting their machine’s performance. Based on the flash technology, the Apex series SSDs are optimised to deliver mind blowing performance at less cost per gigabyte as compared to the traditional hard drives like the Western Digital Scorpio Black, for example. Apex series incorporates the latest storage technology and features internal RAID 0 architecture and enhanced controller. Apex SSDs are snappy devices and can speedily handle the data read/write operations. It can achieve a read speed of 230MB/sec and write speed of 160MB/sec.

Apex drives are ideal to use in laptops as it consume less power and like all the other SSDs it is completely shock and bump resistant. Available in storage capacities of 60GB, 120GB and 250GB these solid state drives comes with an affordable price tag and can be owned by a wide range of consumers.

Microsoft has recently launched its pay as go computing scheme under which the company has decided to charge the customer for the software and hardware they use. The company will measure the amount of computing power, in order to charge the customer under a pre-paid or post-paid plan.

This is like a mobile phone service subscription where the user pays per call or SMS. The only difference is that the users will be now charged according to their PC usage. This is beneficial for the user as he won’t have to purchase software, like the entire Microsoft Office 2007 professional edition. Instead he can simply subscribe for that software and pay depending on the usage. However, the company also admits that in the long run users will end up paying more than the original purchase cost of the software. So obviously this only makes sense for people who use the software or computer relatively infrequently, otherwise buying both out front would be the more economical option.

According to Microsoft, “A user may buy a multi-core processor with a significant amount of memory and advanced video support for gaming applications that are only used on the weekend, while the user’s day-in, day-out activities may involve little more than word processing or web-browsing.” The pay as you go computing plan will charge the users after considering their disk storage space, memory usage and processor cores used. This plan will benefit both the supplier and the consumers. The company says, “The user is able to migrate the performance level of the computer as needs change over time, while the supplier can develop a revenue stream business that may actually have higher value than the one-time purchase model currently practiced.”

New years a coming and so are New Year Resolutions , computer users around the world, weather you use a PC, Mac or if you just rely on your trusty laptop. There will always be room to improve something you do on your computer, so that it will be more reliable, run faster and be less prone to nasty viruses, Adware and Spyware attacks. So here are 5 New Year Resolutions for computer users to stick to over 2009

Don’t be skimpy on Virus protection, although free programs like AVG are pretty good these days, you will get much better protection by paying for your security, your ISP will also be able to beef up your security, for as little as £2.99 a month.

Adware, although virus programs do hunt out Adware there is nothing like being over protective of your computer so go to stopzilla.com and run some individual scans of your system.

Keep your Hard Drive Clean, regularly clean out your drive and store things either to CD or to an external drive, this will lessen the risk of bad ass viruses hiding in the back ground.

Get your hard drive to repair itself, most Windows users know they need to defragment their hard drive on a regular basis. However the amount of people that do this, or know what it means is pretty low, so get your computer to do it automatically, if you need help doing it have a look at this.

Finally here is one that all home computer users can do “Learn more about your computer.” The kids get bored of having to help Mum and Dad use the family computer, so try and teach yourself a bit, if not take a course. There are plenty of free computer courses available throughout the country.

So they you have it a few New Year Resolution suggestions for computer users in 2009, hope it helps and Happy New Year.

The much needed HP Pavilion tx2500 tablet PC has finally been released to end users with the latest upgrades and tech specs. Optimised for running resource hungry tasks, the tx2500 has a solid chassis and design. It’s basically an upgraded version of the tx2000. The overall design and form factor of the tx2500 is same as the tx2000. However, for security purposes, this time the HP laptop is a little more rugged and durable. The main top lid has got an ‘Echo’ imprint finish which extends to the silver keyboard. However, such a design unfortunately attracts a lot of fingerprints. So you may end up wiping it off frequently.

Coming to the hardware configuration, the tx2500 is a real head turner. It packs all the latest high-speed peripherals in its compact size. In short, the tx2500 offers much more performance than its predecessors, like the Hewlett-Packard HP Pavilion tx2130, for example. In fact, you can run any application (whether it’s a game or any other executable or software such as Adobe Photoshop) on the tx2500 without any hiccups. It packs the AMD Turion X2 Ultra ZM-86 2.4GHz processor as the main CPU plus 3GB of DDR2 RAM to bolster the processing. For high definition graphics processing, an ATI Radeon HD 3200 GPU is also added to its hardware and all this is optimised to perform on a Windows Vista Business operating environment.

The tablet offers a storage capacity of 160GB, in addition to a lot of connectivity options. The HP Pavilion tx2500 supports 802.11 a/b/g/n WLAN, Bluetooth, Gigabit Ethernet and features an ExpressCard/34 Slot, one Multi-format card reader, three USB 2.0 ports, dual headphone jack, single mic jack, one additional expansion port and one VGA and S-video interface. For added security and better communications a web cam and fingerprint reader is also integrated in the device.

CyberPower has rolled out a new 4 port USB hub called CP-H420MP which has a built-in rechargeable battery pack. It is a small and sleek device that offers high speed USB 2.0 connectivity and enhances the functionality of your PC, laptop, notebook and netbook by providing additional 4 ports to connect your peripherals, all at the same time. The best part of this USB hub is unlike other legacy hubs it is optimised for high speed data transfer and integrity. It offers a connectivity of up to 480Mbps, i.e. 40 times faster than its counterparts.

Besides this the CyberPower CP-H420MP is dual speed compatible and can be used to connect USB 2.0 compliant peripherals, as well as those which follow USB 1.1 specifications. The rechargeable battery pack integrated with the hub provides all the energy to the hub for its operations. If the battery is not fully charged then it automatically recharges itself as soon as you connect the CyberPower CP-H420MP with your PC. And yes, like the other USB hubs this one also supports Plug and Play (PnP) function. That means that you can connect the CyberPower CP-H420MP with your PC anytime or disconnect it without rebooting the PC. Essentially the accessory is perfect for devices with very few USB ports, such as certain laptops or a netbook. An LED is also embedded into the hub which turns on to notify whether the device is successfully connected or not.

Unfortunately there has been a significant increase in laptop theft and data misuse in recent years. Thousands of people are losing their confidential information every day. Despite the fact that laptop users are employing theft detection and data security software on their computers, laptops are still targeted the most. This may be due to the fact that many of the offenders already know a way to hack such security software and how to breach the security parameters.

So, what to do? The best option for saving data is to leave it outside the laptop. Users who use Citrix GoToMyPC need not carry their data along with them. However, GoToMyPC is not actually a physical protection device like the Pretec i-Disk Secure USB disk. Instead the Citrix programme is a piece of software. With it users can easily access their files, execute programmes, work on applications from any location using the web browser and save everything again on a remote hard disk. With such flexibility offered by the GoToMyPC, mobile computer can safeguard their entire data collection completely against theft.

According to Bernardo de Albergaria, vice president and general manager of global marketing and eCommerce for Citrix Online, “With GoToMyPC, business travelers have options. They can either travel with a blank laptop and connect to their files back at the office or simply leave the laptop behind and access their information when they get to their destination from any Internet-connected computer. With GoToMyPC, they don’t have to worry. The data is safe back at the office, and they can reach it anytime from anywhere. They’ll never lose it, even if they lose their computer.”

AM Micro, the specialist distributor providing market specific product solutions through resellers, mail order channels and major retailers has recently announced that it will be distributing Rain Design laptop accessories in the UK as well. Rain Design is a San Francisco based company that specializes in the manufacturing and designing of innovative accessories for the PC and laptops. Initially the company was developing products for the Apple Mac only, but now it has started to accessorise other PCs too. As of now AM Micro will be distributing three innovative accessories in UK. These are the iLap, the mStand and the i360° turntable.

iLap is a unique laptop stand that keeps your machine cool. It also helps you to adjust your laptop in a better position so that you can work tirelessly for long hours. This device is made of aluminum and has a sand-blasted and silver anodised finish. You can use it with the Apple MacBook as well as other notebooks that have 12 inch, 13 inch widescreen, 14 inch, 15 inch, 15 inch widescreen and 17 inch widescreen. The mStand is a laptop stand that is meant to transform the machine into a stylish workstation. And last but not least, the i360° turntable can turn your laptop into a swiveling Cinema Display.

Tags for this article: laptop, accessories, design