July 1st, 2009
The 1220 is Dell’s latest and smallest addition to its Vostro laptop range. The Vostro 1220 has a mere 12.1 inch display and measures 294 x 37.6 x 228.7 mm and weighs in at 1.52 kg with the four cell battery option. Not bad considering the similarly-sized HP TouchSmart rocks in at over 2 kg. As usual with Dell you can configure up the unit as desired, here are the minimum specs with the minimum price tag for the Vostro 1220.
* Intel® Celeron™ 900 (2.2GHz, 1M L2 Cache, 800Mhz FSB)
* Genuine Windows Vista® Home Basic
* 12.1 inch WXGA display with TrueLife (Wide View)
* 8X DVD+/-RW DVD+/-R Roxio and Cyberlink PowerDVD™ DX 8.2
* 2GB Shared Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 800MHz, 2 DIMM
* 160GB 5400RPM SATA Hard Drive
* Integrated 1.3MP Webcam and Digital Mic with webcam
* Dell Wireless™ 1397 802.11b/g Mini Card
All this adds up to a mere US$800, which compares nicely to the HP TouchSmart. There are some differences in the specs between the two units with obviously touchscreen functionality standing out a mile, but if you don’t like smudgy screens then the Vostro 1220 could be your winner.
Source: Dell
Featured tags: dell laptop
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Posted in Hardware by JB | No Comments »
June 29th, 2009
It’s been a while since we’ve taken a look at a desktop, but we’re back with a good one, or so we think. The Aspire M5800 is the sole unit from Acer in their Prestige desktop range and boy does it stand out. Here are the specs on the M5800
* Windows Vista® Home Premium
* Intel Core 2 Quad Q9400 2.66 GHz Processor
* 8 GB DDR3 RAM
* 750 GB SATA Hard Drive
* NVIDIA GeForce GT230 with 1.5GB Shared Graphics Memory
* Labelflash DVD±R/RW Drive with Double Layer
* Integrated Audio, 7.1-Channel speaker configurable
* 802.11b/g Wireless WiFi
* 10/100/1000 BaseT Gigabit Ethernet
* Multi-in-One Card Reader
* Front ports: 4 x USB 2.0
* Back ports: 4 x USB 2.0, IEEE 1394, 2 x PS2 ports (Keyboard, Mouse), Optical S/PDIF Port, 6 x Audio Jacks, Headphones, Microphone, RJ-11 (Modem), RJ-45 (LAN), DVI, VGA, HDMI
* Expansion slots: 2 x PCI (occupied), PCI Express x1 (available), PCI Express x16 (occupied)
* Drive bays: 2 x external 5.25″ (available), 3 x internal 3.5″ (two available)
There’s no monitor of course, but these days everyone seems to do a bit of mixing and matching on the display unit and box so that’s probably not a big problem. And the price tag rocks in at US$800 which is pretty impressive but also explains the lack of Blu-Ray and 802.11n love. But the grunt from the CPU and 8 GB of memory is probably worth it, the missing bells and whistles can be tacked on later.
Source: Acer
Featured tags: acer desktop
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June 13th, 2009
Almost two years ago, we showed you the SATA HDD Stage Rack which takes zeroes and ones from any old 3.5 or 2.5 inch HDD drive and feeds them to your PC. Bringing things up-to-date, Brando have launched their HDD Multimedia Dock which handles said HDD drives and can pump out HD media through it’s HDMI output. That’s right, the Multimedia dock will hook up straight to your HDTV without a PC. Oh yeah, it’ll still hook up to your PC via USB too.
* Handles 3.5 and 2.5 inch SATA HDDs
* USB 2.0 connectivity
* Handles MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX 3.11/4/5 and XviD video formats
* Handles mp3, wav, aac and wma audio formats
* AV, YPbPr, HDMI (576P/1080i) outputs
* CX/5.1H audio output
* 130 x 120 x 68 mm (without HDD)
* 453g (without HDD)
And this little sucker can be yours for only US$79, not a bad price for a very handy little unit.
Source: Brando
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June 10th, 2009
Even Sager actually avoid calling the NP9280 a notebook or laptop preferring the ‘desktop replacement’ moniker. And they reckon it’s the world’s most powerful ‘desktop replacement’, whilst we aren’t too certain about that, it’s specifications still make your eyes pop out and your wallet tremble with fear - squeezing i7s into a laptop isn’t going to be a cheap process. Anyway for the brave here are the specs on this desktop, err, laptop
* Intel® Core™ i7-920 Processor (2.66GHz) 8MB L3 Cache
* 17 inch WUXGA LCD (1920 x 1200)
* Nvidia GeForce GTX 280M Graphics with 1GB DDR3 Video Memory
* MS Windows® VISTA Home Premium 32/64-Bit Edition
* 3GB Triple Channel DDR3 SDRAM at 1066MHz - 3 X 1GB
* 250GB 5400rpm SATA 300 Hard Drive
* 8X DVD±R/RW/4X +DL Super-Multi Drive & Software
* Intel Wi-Fi Link 5300AGN - 802.11A/B/G/N Wireless LAN Module
* Internal Bluetooth V2.0 + EDR Module
* Smart Li-ION Battery Pack (12 Cells)
That little lot will set you back a cool US$2350 so we’ll give you a moment to recover … not cheap but what did you expect for i7-920 processing power. The Sager NP9280 certainly packs a powerful punch and just for fun we maxxed out the unit too. Ending up with a total of $5474 which gave us Intel® Core™ i7-975, Vista Ultimate, 12 GB memory, 160 GB SSD and a Blu-Ray reader. Strangely no space shuttle tiles were included to protect your legs from the heat the Sager NP9280 will pump out. And just to make sure all that heat does easily escape, there are no less than four cooling vents on the underside of the unit. We like the NP9280, we’re just not convinced anyone will actually buy it, so if you have let us know what you think when you’ve let your legs cool down.
Source: Sager NP9280
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Posted in Hardware by JB | 2 Comments »
for US$355. Still not impressed? We aren’t either.
for only $600.
