The guys at Alienware have squeezed a couple of 320 GB 2.5 inch drives into their Area-51 m9750 and Aurora m9700 models. This makes these notebooks the first to sport such a capacity and if you were so inclined to have 640 GB of HDD space available you could squeeze in an amazing 163,000 tunes or 160 movies depending on what your passion is.
On the downside the Area-51 model weighs in at a hefty 8.5 lbs which doesn’t exactly make it a lightweight laptop but then who’s going anywhere when you’ve got so much music and vid to enjoy! It also sports a hefty price tag with a required US$2,400 just to get you the base model with 640 GB of storage. There’s a Solid State 128 GB option available too.
With the increase in popularity of external hard drives and their ever increasing capacity you may have thought manufacturer’s would have given up on trying to squeeze more capacity into a notebook but apparently not. So if you’re looking for a grunty notebook with copious amounts of storage you probably can’t go wrong with one of these offerings from Alienware. Oh yeah, deep pockets a requirement too.
Samsung have announced that their 64 GB solid state drive (SSD) has been snapped up by Alienware and Dell and is now available in the manufacturers notebooks. Dell is offering the drive on its XPS M1330 ultra-portable notebook and Alienware have got dual SSDs tucked away in its Area-51 m9750 gaming notebook along side a spinning 200 GB oh-so-yesterday HDD.
Despite only having a 64 GB max capacity - that figure will, as with all figures techie, increase over time - SSD does boast a number of advantages over its older sibling the HDD
* No moving parts, so less bits to go wrong
* Noise free
* Produces little heat, always a bonus with a lap-burning laptop
* Handles shocks and knocks better
So hats off to Samsung for getting this little sucker out into the world, another step forward in the endless quest to squeeze more stuff into less space.
In a weekend where we were bombarded by iPhone news in the tech arena this item almost slipped under the Our Picks radar undetected. Fortunately my eagle eye spotted it and it made quite a refreshing change from all the media hype attention towards the iPhone. Anyway enough of my cynicism and on with the story.
The OLPC (one laptop per child) project is nothing new having started way back in 2005 but last week it was something new for 300 pupils at the Galadima Primary School in Nigeria. Although the school has no electricity, the OLPC article mentions that neighbouring houses do, so presumably the pupils and teachers charge the units up at home.
Judging by the comments in the article, using a laptop at school for the students is a massive leap forward in terms of learning
Five primary 4 children are working on a dictionary of their local languages, and working on here means constructing. The project has been modified from a list of words that Abiword (the word processing software activity) did not recognize to a formal-looking local language to English dictionary. They split the team into two to work on two different local languages simultaneously. It is simple but outstanding work. These children work on their dictionary project during school hours in between class assignments, when otherwise they would be restless.
It’s great to see technology being used in this way and the more projects we see around the world like this the better. To find out more about the OLPC project check out their website.
With Microsoft bringing you the Digidesk, a PC in a desk, here’s the reverse from ASUS, a desk around a laptop. Whilst funky wooden laptops are nothing new, I think that they do look super trendy and would certainly turn heads down at the local Starbucks! I wouldn’t be so sure about placing my coffee cup so close to the keyboard though. One thing to note is that the mousepad looks wooden too, touch sensitive wood eh? Very clever ASUS ;)
One of the downsides of using a laptop is having to carry around all the extra bits and pieces with you, charger, connection to external display etc. Check out this little sucker - a mouse that folds up and slots into your PCMCIA slot. Of course the manufacturer is assuming you have nothing else in the slot however it certainly wouldn’t cause an unsightly bulge in your laptop bag if stored externally.
The SlimG4 folds out into a handy two button, touch sensitive scroll, USB mouse. It doesn’t look as if the unfolded position is adjustable so unusually sized hands may have issues with the mouse but for the average user this may well be a valuable addition to your laptop’s peripherals especially as it is priced around US$40 to US$45.
We do have one concern about its use under pressure - it does look a bit flimsy and we are worried what would happen if you applied a lot of pressure on the raised hinge. You wouldn’t want the G4 suddenly folding up on you when you are zeroing in on that sniper during a session of Halo. However as far as we are concerned anything that minimises space usage is good.
If anyone has used a SlimG4 please let us know what you think.
We decided to ignore obvious input/output jokes and just state the facts. Well the facts are that you plug it into a USB port and it humps your laptop. Thats about it really. It’ll probably amuse your work colleagues for a couple of hours and help you wile away a lazy afternoon at the office. Anyway here’s a great video of the little pooch in action.
Two things in the video amused us. One was the plastic cover on the USB connector, presumably to ensure no viruses were transferred. Secondly we’d love to know what the pop up message was on the laptop when the doggie got going - some sort of buffer overflow we guess.
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The guys at Alienware have squeezed a couple of 320 GB 2.5 inch drives into their Area-51 m9750 and Aurora m9700 models. This makes these notebooks the first to sport such a capacity and if you were so inclined to have 640 GB of HDD space available you could squeeze in an amazing 163,000 tunes or 160 movies depending on what your passion is.
