As soon as I saw this PC I liked it. It’s the latest model from Gateway, the cow hide PC manufacturer, snazzily entitled the Gateway One. And I think with its radical design - yes I know Apple fans its old skool for you - it could be a winner. Within ten seconds of reading the specs I was already working out where I’d mount the monitor/PC on the wall in my office.

Anyway let’s put its looks aside for a moment and check what’s under the bonnet. The top of the range US$1,800 model sports a Intel® Core 2™ Duo T7250 dual-core processor, ATI Mobility Radeon™ HD 2600 XT graphics card and 500 GB of SATA II storage in the form of a couple of HDDs. All models boast a 19 inch LCD widescreen display which also contains the processor, HDDs, a DVD drive, seven USB 2.0 ports, a FireWire port, a couple of memory slots and ‘hidden’ speakers.

The keyboard and mouse are both wireless and the unit boasts 802.11n wireless connectivity. So with one cable (yes just the one) you can connect this sucker up and away you go with your fully functional internet ready PC. As mentioned before the monitor/PC is wall mountable thus saving even more precious desk/floor space. The guts of the unit are easily accessible via a couple of latches situated on the back of the monitor.

So on paper the ‘One’ looks pretty good and certainly gets a big ten out of ten on design and space-saving. I do wonder how stable the unit is as on some side views of the monitor/PC the stand at the back of the unit doesn’t look that big, but hopefully the heavier components would have been placed at the bottom to enhance stability.

For the more frugal amongst us the bottom end model sports an Intel® Core 2™ Duo T5250 dual-core processor, Intel Graphics Media Accelerator X3100 card and 320 GB of storage but consequently sports a more wallet friendly price tag of US$1,200.

Featured tags: desktop gateway gateway one

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Good news for the planet, Lenovo has just announced their latest energy-saving desktop code-named Blue Sky now rather un-sexily re-branded as the ThinkCentre A61e. The press release states that this latest offering from Lenovo can save users up to 50% in energy costs when compared to previous, presumably Lenovo, models. How have they managed to do this? Well here’s a breakdown of some of the more pertinent and energy-saving features on this little sucker.

* Use of energy saving processors, namely the 45 watt AMD Athlon 64 X2 dual core and AMD Sempron single core
* Low speed fan
* Low noise level
* Manufactured from up to 90% reusable/recyclable materials plus 90% recyclable packaging

Consequently the unit has earned Lenovo a Gold Star from EPEAT, the Green Electronics Council and exceeds the EPA’s Energy Star 4.0 criteria. And the savings for you and me? Well Lenovo believe

A user could save on average more than $20 a year in energy savings and the equivalent of the carbon dioxide emissions created by two round-trip plane flights from Boston to New York.

Twenty bucks a year is nothing to write home about, but how can you put a price on the nice warm fuzzy feeling you get from saving the planet, eh?

Other upsides to this unit include it only being the size of a phonebook and weighing in at 8 lbs and the basic model sports a US$449 price tag whilst featuring XP Pro, 512 MB memory, 80 GB HDD, a 64 MB ATI Radeon X1200 card and a DVD reader. Not bad, eh? The downside? Well, its butt ugly, but when you’re saving the planet what does beauty matter.

Source: Lenovo

Featured tags: blue sky desktop energy saving lenovo thinkcentre a61e

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Writing important text in a browser window can be an awful experience, especially if the written text exceeds a few rows. Supposing you have a Wordpress blog out there, you would normally connect to the admin interface and type the text into an online form, editing and formatting it by hand. If your browser crashes, or if your Internet connection drops, you know as well as I do that some of the text you typed *might* be lost. And if you compare the editing form with a traditional word processor such as Word, you find a big difference between the available features.

Like I said, a big reason for the difference mentioned above is that Word can take advantage of the processing power that you have at home, while your browser needs to stay lightweight to transfer data quickly over the network. These applications function more like traditional word-processing applications and offer some extended features that your browser doesn’t offer. To get started, you simply need time to experiment. I am going to present a desktop blogging client that might change the way you post to your blog.
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