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Use Humyo with care
Just a small caveat if you are think of taking up Humyo.com's offer of 30BG free online storage. The web-based access seems OK (though note that 25GByte of the storage used has to be multimedia files) but I hit a slight snag when trying out the PC client, which addresses the online storage as another drive. This is assigned the letter H by default.
Everything worked fine until I plugged a flash drive into a hub attached by XP machine. It registered the drive but I couldn't access it until I closed the Humyo link. The flash drive then listed happily when addressed as H.
By this time I had forgotten that I was editing a document stored on the Humyo drive. All was well until I tried to save it, when Word crashed and lost my document with a day's work on it. Happily I was able to retrieve it by cannibalising two tmp files. This was not Humyo's fault but it does show the pitfalls of working directly from remote storage: best work from a local copy if there is any chance of your link going down.
The original error may have arisen because XP assigned the hub a set of drive letters before anything was plugged in. Humyo is trying to reproduce the error, and will produce a fix if necessary. It should not stop you from using Humyo, so long as you are aware of it.
Phenom X4 9850 overclock record: 3.1GHz
We’ve had the Phenom X4 9850 for a day now and we’ve clocked all four cores stably to 3.1GHz using a regular Akasa AK-876 air cooler. That’s a modest 24 per cent boost over its native 2.5GHz clock speed.
We used a Gigabyte GA-MA790FX-DQ6 motherboard, 2GB Corsair TwinX 1066MHz Ram (downclocked to 800MHz but linked to the bus so it increased to 888MHz), a 0.225V core boost, a 14x CPU multiplier and a 222MHz bus speed to achieve this magic number.
That voltage boost is rather big, but our sample was also happy to sit at 2.8GHz with a simple 0.05V increase. It even booted at 3.2GHz, but couldn’t load Windows properly.
When overclocked, our preliminary results show it is 13 per cent faster than a 2.66GHz Core 2 Extreme QX6700 in PCmark05 and two per cent faster in Cinebench 9.5. It’s still slower than a 3GHz QX6850 and a long way off high end Penryn quad cores.
At its default speed (2.5GHz) the Phenom X4 9850 can’t keep up with Intel’s slowest Core 2 Quad Q6600 processor in PCmark05 CPU test, Cinebench 9.5 or X. It does beat the Q6600 by 160 points in 3Dmark06’s CPU test though.
The Phenom X4 9850’s big hope lies in a decent retail price. Pre-order pricing lies at £170 which, in the UK, is £20 more than a Core 2 Quad Q6600.
A full review will follow, but here are some more scores from our 3.1GHz overclocked sample:
3Dmark06 CPU: 4526
Cinebench 9.5: 478 (single core), 1473 (quad core)
Cinebench X: 2707 (single core), 9959 (quad core)
PCmark05: 9172 (just 7396 at 2.5GHz)
A full review will come soon, but for now these results can be directly compared to PCW's other CPU tests at www.reportlabs.com
Faster, bug-free Phenoms arrive
Four new TLB bug-free Phenoms go on sale later this week, the 2.2GHz Phenom 9550, the 2.3GHz Phenom 9650, the 2.4GHz Phenom 9750 and a new king of the hill: the 2.5GHz Phenom 9850. The latter has an unlocked multiplier so enthusiasts can overclock it to 2.8 or 2.9GHz, speculates Jon Carvill, AMD’s European PR manager.
A faster 2.6GHz Phenom will appear in the coming months, while the original Phenoms (9500 and 9600) will slowly be phased out.
AMD promises to shake up the low-end quad core arena by releasing an energy efficient version of the Phenom, called the Phenom 9100e. 9100es are cherry picked from AMD's manufacturing line for their excellent thermal properties. They run at 1.8GHz and have a thermal design point of 65W, significantly lower than the Phenom 9700's 125W TDP (Phenom 9700 review here) and the 9600's 95W TDP.
Microsoft the gender bender?
Headline writers know well that words can be tricky beasts, especially when written in a hurry. Witness the London Evening Standard splash during the premiership of Harold Wilson, after he axed a number of ministers during a Cabinet reshuffle. It was headed: "Wilson gets his chopper out!"
The same peril lurks in domain names. The official Microsoft Exchange resource site is called MSexchange.org. We wonder how many times it is going to get hit by people seeking to change their gender.
Irony of the skeletons still rattling in Microsoft cupboards
Microsoft simply can't shake off its past. The US Supreme Court has denied a request by the company to drop an anti-trust suit filed by Novell in 1994 alleging anti-competitive behaviour by Microsoft 10 years previously. Curiously, Novell is now under fire for cosying up to Microsoft over reconciling the competing ODF and OpenXML formats.
Will wind farms wed server farms?
Computing should be moved from desktops and server farms to areas of abundant renewable energy such as solar and wind, Cambridge University's Professor Andy Hopper suggested yesterday. The Guardian quotes him as pointing out that computing is special in that processing can be done anywhere.
UK computing apparently accounts for 2.8m tons of carbon emissions a year, just under 2 percent of the national total. Fifteen percent of this is down to desktop computers.
The downside of concentrating it into relatively small areas is that data storage and processing could be vulnerable to catastrophic physical attack. Distributed data and processing, and indeed distributed harvesting of renewable energy, would surely be more resilient.
This is not to dismiss Hopper's idea. It would prevent the not inconsiderable losses involved in trunking energy across the country, it could provide work in low-employment areas, and it could make renewable energy generation viable on, for instance, islands where the cost of building and maintaining power transmission lines would otherwise prohibit it.
It might also lead a reversion to the days before electrical power, when industries tended to cluster around energy sources in the form of fuel or renewables like water.
Painting by numbers is pretty nonsense
A promotional event for an online security
specialist is hardly an occasion that springs to mind as likely to provoke a
discussion about the nature and meaning of Art. But one last week staged by
MessageLabs actually took the form of an art exhibition, called Infected Art, Bringing Cyber Threats to Life.
Curb your IE8 enthusiasm
Don't be tempted to download the early beta of Internet Express 8 on the assumption that you can use it as your main browser. It has been posted to help developers build support for some of the new features into web sites, and is too unstable to be used for anything but testing. Just calling up the history bar was enough to crash it on my machine, and you do not get the option to install it alongside IE 7 so that you have that version to fall back on.
The new Automatic Crash Protection features kicks in occasionally to restore one tab when another crashes. But IE8 can also go into a loop where it crashes every time you start it up, apparently because it tries to return to the status quo ante. If this happens to you, right-click the IE icon and choose the 'Start without add-ons' option, then close and reopen the browser as normal.
The new Activities and WebSlice features, outlined yesterday, look interesting but few sites yet support them and I could not find anything to try them on. Even the Microsoft Add Activities page turned up errors.
In short there is very little in this build to review. This may change as Microsoft tweaks the code and developers post IE8-savvy pages. We'll keep trying and keep you updated.
Embarrassing 'Vista capable' emails mirror earlier Microsoft deception
The New York Times today prints extracts from some of those embarrassing emails cited in the Vista-capable class action Microsoft is trying to stop – and shows that some things have not changed at Microsoft since I first joined PCW.
One of the first events I covered was a Microsoft preview of Windows 95, then codenamed Chicago. One of the issues, then as with the Vista release, was whether existing machines would be capable of running it.
Microsoftee after Microsoftee stood up and assured us that Windows 95 would run in 4Mbytes of Ram, which was then standard on home and office desktops. They were not lying: they were repeating what they had been told by their employer. But it was, to put it mildly, being economical with the truth.
Windows 95 ran in 4MB of Ram like a 96-year-old runs up Snowdon. Existing machines needed a costly upgrade to 16MB.
The NYT says Microsoft marketers used the term Vista Capable to avoid the implication (or persuade themselves that they were avoiding the implication) that the machine would necessarily run all versions of Vista. And that Microsoft set a low threshold on Vista Capable specs to avoid blighting sales of entry-level XP PCs.
The decision, says the NYT, met considerable internal protest. "Even a piece of junk will qualify," said Microsoft program manager Anantha Kancherla said in an email.
And after the Vista release Mike Nash, vice-president of Windows preoduct management, wrote that his laptop had been reduced to a '$2100 e-mail machine' that would run only a hobbled version of Vista, and could not cope with his favourite video-editing program.
The cache of emails unsealed by the judge hearing the case also contain complaints by Microsoft high-ups about a lack of Vista drivers shortly after the release of the OS. Microsoft says the number of Vista drivers has doubled since then.
Will Femtocells revolutionise triple-play packages?
Mobile operators like Vodafone will bundle ADSL broadband, a femtocell router and two mobile phones by the end of the year, speculates femtocell-maker Thomson.
Sound interesting? Perhaps not at face value but femtocell routers, like Thomson’s new TG870, do so much more than just telephony and mobile broadband.
Femtocells are little 3G mobile phone masks and the premise is they will sit side-by-side with Wifi routers in the home, giving your mobile phone excellent coverage indoors. If you make a phone call through it, the call gets routed through your ADSL to the mobile phone operator’s “femtocell aggregator” which is plugged into the tradition phone network.
Fraunhofer’s cheap 3D monitor
Fraunhofer, inventor of the mp3, has developed a 3D LCD monitor that doesn’t require green-and-red paper glasses.
It’s also cheaper and more versatile than previous designs since it doesn’t require an expensive lens and you don’t have to sit rigidly in front of it to see a 3D effect.
The 3D trickery starts with a glass panel, placed on top of any regular TFT display, which has ingrained black lines so that each eye sees a completely different set of pixels. A webcam then tracks your eye positions and software renders two images – one for each eye. If you move about, the webcam will track you and the images will adjust accordingly.
Fraunhofer only licenses out its technology, so we won’t see this exact concept model on sale. Its 20.1in panel had a 1,600x1,200 native resolution but needed to be fed a 3,200x1,200 resolution image.
My first impressions are that it is just as effective as Zalman’s 22in 3D monitor which costs over £400. We’ve had the Zalman monitor in our labs for several months now, but its drivers aren’t yet finalised.
Corsair's 1000W supply to get triple-SLI certification
Corsair says its 1kW power supply will be the first to get Nvidia’s stamp of approval for triple-SLI use.
The HX1000W is essentially two 500W power supplies in one box and the combined current provides a massive 960W over the 12V rail, which the CPU and graphics cards use.
Corsair says the HX1000W can supply a full 1000W at 50°C, while many other manufacturers base their figures on 40°C testing. It reckons many other companies would call the HX1000W a 1200W supply if they sold it.
It’s modular in design, so it’ll be easy to use if you’re building a PC, and comes with a five year warranty.
The browner side of Cebit
Despite the headlines, the Green Village only accounts for about 1/50th of Cebit this year, perhaps not even that.
One of its biggest contributors, Fujitsu Siemens, is trumpeting its energy-saving credentials inside, while fuelling a dozen quad bikes outside.
Climate Savers Computing also sits in the Green Village and is recommending 80+ per cent efficient power supplies for PCs and the proper use of Windows’ power management settings.
Big companies like Microsoft, Intel and HP donate cash to Climate Savers and in return its website advises you to buy Microsoft’s, Intel’s and HP’s products. They have to meet various Energy Star targets, but heaps systems not on the list do in some way.
Barbara Grimes from Climate Savers said it would be too costly for manufacturers to calculate their carbon footprint per unit sold, forcing the price up for end users and forcing smaller companies out of the market due to the resources required. Greenpeace, on the other hand, announced yesterday it thinks carbon dioxide is a relevant issue.
If quad biking is too dirty for you then there are game booths, where you can play a bit of Counter-strike or Call of Duty 4, in every other building. Intel has the best one though, with five racing car simulators side-by-side so you can see who is best.
The good, the bad and the ugly of Windows Home Servers
Windows Home Server (WHS) has been given a much needed boost in the last two weeks, thanks to new models from Belinea and Fujitsu Siemens.
Microsoft’s woes stem from a bug which occasionally corrupts the files you backup onto WHS and Medion, for starters, is withholding a product until a fix arrives.
It's refreshing to see Belinea make an orange and white WHS, rather than in grey or black. This is, after all, something that you have to live with if you buy it.
Fujitsu Siemens' WHS is definitely the ugliest of the bunch however. It uses an Intel design and I’m guessing it is twice the volume of any other WHS. It looks like a massive cinema projector.
Update March 7: Iomega just told me that it too has put its Windows Home Server plans on hold, despite earlier naming its 500GB "HomeCenter Server" model. Iomega is waiting to see how the whole WHS thing pans out...
Gainward and Inno3D Geforce 9800GX2s sneak out
Gainward and Inno3D have shown off graphics cards based on Nvidia's upcoming Geforce 9800GX2.
The card was supposed to be kept a secret until 18th March, but since this is Nvidia's new high end model, manufacturers look keen to unveil their designs.
We're informed the 9800GX2 uses two 65nm G92 chips, like that used on Nvidia's 8800GT and 8800GTS graphics cards, sandwiched together like the 7950GX2. AMD's ATI Radeon HD 3870X2 is the target and if the past performance of two 8800GT and two 3870s is anything to go by, the 9800GX2 could well end up being the fastest card in existence.
They are huge cards:
Below, notice the HDMI port on the back of the Gainward card (also present on the Inno3D version), which will make gaming on a big TV easy:
Cebit08’s new Homeplug devices
There are dozens of companies showing off Ethernet-over-mains devices at Cebit08, but here are the best bits:
Intellon’s prototype "homeplug in a wall socket" is an extremely neat design which can be used instead of regular wall sockets to network a house.
An Intellon spokesperson, who didn’t want to be named, said that Wifi dead-spots and poor Wifi performance for video meant there was a demand for new homes to use Homeplug. The company is already in talks with an unnamed house builder in the UK to get them into new builds.
Sadly, you can’t retrofit your house with these cool wall sockets unless you’re a certified electrician - otherwise you’ll invalidate your home insurance.
The Intellon spokesperson rubbished the idea that powerline technology transmits wirelessly from floor to floor. Due to the strict power emissions the EU puts on all consumer electronics, Homeplugs can only talk to each other wirelessly if they are up to 3cm apart, but no more.
Convergence is the Homeplug buzzword of choice this year, since a raft of audio and video streamers, as well as set top boxes, are getting Homeplug built into them. More exciting than that was Gigafast’s Homeplug that hosts a USB port. It lets a computer in another room use the USB port as if it were built into the machine. Here it is plugged into a USB rocket launcher:
Gigafast’s Homeplug-enabled security camera could really kick Wifi cameras into touch, especially when combined with its video decoding box the other end, plugged directly into a PC.
For now, however, none of Gigafast's products will be on sale in the UK.
Nearly every manufacturer is showing off a “Y-cable”, which combines a power supply and Homeplug into one box. An Ethernet and a power cable comes out of the transformer, so a wide range of existing devices don’t have to be modified to use Homeplug. The only downside to this technology is the high cost of a Y-cable and that they can only provide up to 30W power output, since if you go higher the signal-to-noise ratio becomes too low for Homeplug to operate.
One powerline to rule them all
Devolo, the largest Homeplug seller with 2.5million out of the total
12million sold, will give the Homeplug Alliance a big boost in the coming months by using Intellon chips only and dropping Intellon's competitor, DS2, altogether.
Netgear has also backtracked from using DS2-only chips in its high end consumer range by releasing a 200mbit/sec Homeplug AV device called the XAV101.
Intellon's dominance could make buying powerline brands that use Panasonic or DS2 chips a gamble, since each is incompatible with the next.
Devolo is demonstrating the next speed hike, 400mbit/sec Homeplug prototypes, at Cebit08. In reality, file transfer rates (TCP) of 180mbit/sec are achieved in good conditions. The plugs use a low frequency for the first 100mbit/sec (this frequency is compatible with older AV Homeplugs) and add a new, higher frequency for the remaining 80mbit/sec.
Backwards-compatibility is a move in the right direction because Homeplug AV (200mbit/sec) devices are not compatible with older 14 and 85mbit/sec plugs, which was a blow for early adopters.
Devolo says 400mbit/sec products will arrive in a year's time at the earliest.
Dual-sim Windows Mobile phone spotted
General Mobile has launched a phone can hold two sim cards at once, the DSTW1.
It is the world's first dual-sim device to use Microsoft's Windows Mobile operating system, which should spread its appeal among business customers.
Sim cards from around the world, with the exception of America, can be used and if you're chatting on one line and the other one rings, you can answer the second call and put your first on hold.
The real appeal for me is that you could have one British sim card inserted and a foreign one fitted to avoid the unfair cost of receiving a phone call when you're abroad.
Its specs include a Texas Instruments 200MHz CPU, 256MB Rom, 64MB Ram, a Micro-SD slot, a 2.8in 240x320 pixel touchscreen and a 2 megapixel camera.
It weighs a hefty 144g and can last through 240mins talk-time or 150 hours on standby. The fastest data access it appears to support is Edge, which means 100Kbit typical download speeds and is a massive disappointment in the face of 3.6Mbit HSDPA enabled phones.
I'm promised it will go on sale in the UK in the second half of this year and its stand-alone price, without a contract, will be around €550 (£420).
Quad-tuner, Sky HD capture and Freeview HD from Hauppauge
Hauppauge has launched a raft of new products, the most eccentric of which is a PCI Express card with two digital and two analogue TV tuners so you can watch or record four channels at once.
The WinTV-HVR-2200 also includes a remote control and an inbuilt 7-day EPG .
If you can only focus on one thing at a time, Hauppauge has also launched H.264 capture devices that can encode HD video in real time. This means the WinTV-HVR-900-HD can transfer movies and TV shows recorded on a Sky HD box to a PC in excellent quality using component cables.
Hauppauge has also released Linux drivers for its Nova USB TV tuners, which it says is in direct response to the commercial success of the Asus Eee PC.
Software to make its products work with Freeview HD are ready to go too, just awaiting the widespread roll-out of the terrestrial service. The HD software is available in France, where HD has taken an earlier foot-hold, but I desperately want this now since anyone living within London can point their antenna towards the Crystal Palace transmitter and pick up BBC HD.
USB bottle opener
Ok, that's a bit of a misleading title. This USB bottle opener won't open beers on its own when you're feeling lazy, but it does offer up to 8GB storage.
If you're a typical man who carries both a USB stick and bottle opener, this Trekstor USB stick is a valuable space saver and it's attractive too.
Fujitsu Siemens zero-Watt-standby monitor finalised
Fujitsu Siemens has shown off the finished design of the first computer monitor to draw zero Watts in standby.
The early prototype used a solar panel to maintain an internal capacitor’s charge which flicks a relay when it detects a video signal. The new model doesn’t have solar panels but includes an auto-light sensor instead. In bright light the monitor draws around 46W, which drops to 27W when the monitor’s brightness is reduced in dark surroundings.
The monitor is now called the Scenicview P22W-5 ECO and will go on sale in the summer.
It’s UMPC Jim, but not as we know it
Microsoft representatives were put in an uncomfortable position when the Asus Eee PC 900 was officially unveiled yesterday. One of Microsoft’s general managers, Thomas Bauer, was careful to say that its Origami interface was only for true UMPCs and not the Eee PC. Bauer had an even tougher time when he had to explain why Microsoft was promoting XP so actively, despite Vista superseding it a whole year ago.
If you prefer a ‘real’ UMPC, like the Samsung Q1 Ultra, then here are some interesting designs on show at Cebit:
The Wibrain B1H has the biggest trackpad I’ve seen on a UMPC and a qwerty keyboard too. There were a dozen samples on display and the Wibrain is already on sale. The €700 (£530 approx) model has an impressive spec sheet, including a 4.8in 1,024x600 touch-screen LCD, 802.11g Wifi, Blutooth, a 60GB hard disk, 1GB Ram and a 1.2GHz Via C7M CPU.
Gigabyte did a last minute u-turn on its 7in Eee competitor, but released three UMPCs in a hand-held format instead.
The first, and the most exciting in my opinion, is the MID (mobile internet device) M528 with inbuilt GPS. It has a sliding qwerty keyboard, uses an 800MHz Intel Atom processor (on the Centrino Atom platform), 512MB Ram, a 4GB SSD, a 4.8in 800x480 touch-screen LCD, a VGA webcam, Blutooth, 802.11G Wifi. It weighs 340g, some 200g less than the Wibrain B1H, and runs Linux.
The other two, the UMPC M704 and M700 (the latter, pictured right, has Vista rather than XP, but no keyboard), have larger 7in 1,024x600 touch-screens, 768MB Ram and 40GB hard disks but use Via C7-M CPUs and UniChrome graphics which always prove to be less capable than the Intel competition in our tests.
Amtek’s U560 is another new UMPC I’ve spotted. It uses Intel’s 800MHz A110 processor with 512MB Ram, GMA 950 graphics and a 4.8in 1,024x600 LCD has a slide-up display, which proved to be successful on Sidekick mobile phones. It’s main drawback is its weight, which is 675g. It’ll go on sale this month for $600 (£305 excl Vat approx.)
Not content stealing the show with the Eee PC 900, Asus has also released two hand-held UMPCs, the R50 and R70.
The R50 features a "sun-readable" 5.6in
touch-screen display and is based on Intel’s new Centrino Atom platform. It
includes HSDPA and Wimax support, as well as a digital TV tuner, 12GB SSD for
storage and twin webcams, back and front.
The R70 has a bigger 7in screen and adds a GPS module. Both run Vista on a 1.6GHz Atom CPU.
More details of that £99 laptop
Elonex has fleshed out (slightly) details of its £99 ultra-mobile, which has been tailored for the the education market. The custom LNX chip uses the classic x86 PC architecture and was manufactured China "because it was the only way we could reach the price point," according to an Elonex spokesman.
The Elonex site describesthe machine as having 128MB of dedicated Linux DDR-11 SD RAM memory, but you can be rest assured that the software is actually held in the non-valatile ROM. The spokesman said the RAM (there's a 256MB option) been "optimised for Linux."
The device supports Wifi and wired Ethernet, and there is a Bluetooth opetion.
The optional WristVault memory described on the site (optiions up to 16MB) is standard USB flash in the form of a wristband, presumably in the hope that schoolkids won't lose it. But you can use any USB drive.
If this class of device becomes more common, and solid-state disk prices remain high, I would not be surprised to see recessed USB ports coming in that allow you to add memory without having it stick out at the side. Talking to memory specialist like Sandisk and Kingston at Mobile World Congress last week, it became clear that SD cards cannot compete with USB 2.0 on transfer rates, but they are certainly lkess v ulnerable, snug in their slots.
Asus sticks 8.9in screen and Windows XP on Eee PC
Asus has given sneak previews of its next Eee PC at Cebit today, based on a bigger 8.9in screen.
Its 1GB DDR2 Ram, 8GB flash hard drive and a 1.3megapixel webcam are all superior to that in the original cheap-and-cheerful Eee PC.
It's undeniably attractive piece of kit in the flesh, doing away with the awkward black bars the 7in Eee PC had. The chassis remains the same as the old Eee and, if it stays under £300, it'll be a winner in my book.
That's more than the £220 7in Eee PC, reviewed here, but it should include Windows XP, which Asus is pushing so heavily that it dedicated a whole booth to the Windows + Eee marriage at Cebit.
If you're content with a cheaper 7in Eee PC then you can now buy one in a range of colours, including blue, pink and yellow. Like so:
