Review All-in-one PCs have been around for ages and it’s not hard to understand their appeal. They feature the wire-free tidiness of a laptop, combined with the big screen of a Desktop PC. The concept sustains many admirers, with Apple’s iMac range doing very well indeed with just such a form factor.
MSI’s Wind Top AE1900: touchscreen computing on Windows XP
Getting in on the act is MSI’s Wind Top AE1900. Appearing as a rather stylish widescreen monitor, the whole unit is set into a clear plastic surround, which forms a pair of feet at the front and at the top is a small silver 1.3Mp webcam.
A standard set of monitor control buttons fall easily beneath the fingers of your right hand, and it’s not until you look at the left hand side or rear of the unit that it gives away its true computer credentials at all. Tucked away to the left is a pair of USB ports, a card reader and a vertically mounted DVD Super Multi format drive. Read the rest of this entry »
Round-up We love hardware, and if you ask us how to make an old computer go faster, we’ll recommend a hardware upgrade. But 34 million people opt for a software tune-up in the US alone, estimates Iolo, a company that makes tune-up software.
Iolo’s System Mechanic 9 does a good job of finding services you don’t use
Click for full-size screen grab
Can such a large number of people be wrong? We thought we’d take a look at some popular tune-up apps that explicitly claim they will speed up your computer or, when more carefully worded, are “designed” to speed up your computer.
We didn’t set out to see if these applications really could fix registry problems and related crashes because it’s difficult to objectively measure such abilities, especially as every program claimed to be able to fix more than 1000 registry problems, most of which were simply dead links and things like having Windows updates disabled. Handy, perhaps, but not as interesting to us as the performance promises. Read the rest of this entry »
Review Shuttle has managed a feat of engineering with the XPC SX58H7. It has shoehorned a Core i7 motherboard into a small(ish) form-factor case – it measures 325 x 208 x 189mm – of the kind we’ve seen on models such as the SP45H7.
Shuttle’s XPC SX58H7: engineering miracle?
It is the work of moments to remove the main cover, drive bay, ICE fan unit and CPU cooler, and lay the innards open to view. The layout is similar to other XPCs, although this is the first time that we have seen twin PCI Express graphics slots in a Shuttle. It’s not the first time Shuttle has used this feature as you can see from the spec of the SX38P2, but it is the first time we’ve seen it on our test bench. Read the rest of this entry »
Review Although the Shuttle All-in-One PC X5000TA looks like a TFT display with a chunky bezel for the speakers, it’s actually a proper PC that is controlled through its 15.6in touchscreen. It’s housed in a relatively sleek chassis that measures 391mm wide by 327mm high and is only 36mm thick. The fold-out stand at the rear swings up to double as a carry handle so the 4kg weight – including the external power brick – isn’t much of an obstacle if you’re lugging the X5000TA from one room to another.
Shuttle’s All-in-One PC X5000TA: touchscreen gimmick?
The machine is powered by an Intel Atom 330 dual-core processor and runs on an Intel 945G chipset with integrated GMA 950 graphics so it has the same features as most netbooks on the market. Other parts of the specification include a 2.5in 160GB Sata hard drive from WD and a single 1GB module of 667MHz DDR 2 memory from Transcend, though it runs at 400MHz. The Shuttle supports up to 2GB of Ram and there’s a second memory slot available for expansion. Read the rest of this entry »
Review A whole heap of companies have started offering miniature Linux-powered PCs in the last few years, from Zonbu, Sumo and Koolu to DecTOP, that sells the device formerly known as AMD’s Personal Internet Communicator. A number bear an almost suspicious resemblance to x86-powered thin clients, being based around inexpensive, low-powered but cool-running System-On-a-Chip (SOC) devices such as AMD’s Geode processors, as used in the One laptop Per Child XO-1.
The Linutop 2: so quiet only the activity lights indicate that it’s in use
French vendor Linutop’s original model of its eponymous machine was the size of a Nintendo DS, with no on-board storage at all – it booted from a USB stick. It’s now been replaced with the Linutop 2, essentially a rebadged Ion A603 MiniPC from First Computer – but with European support. The new model is about twice as big – roughly the size of 4 stacked CD jewel cases – and now sports double the Ram (512MB), a power button and a whole gigabyte of internal storage. It has four USB 2 ports, VGA, Ethernet and sound in and out – and that’s it. The processor has been bumped from a 433MHz Geode LX700 to a 500MHz Geode LX800, but state of the art PC performance, this isn’t. Read the rest of this entry »
