Loyd Case

SAN FRANCISCO—Intel is shifting most of its focus in the processor market to dual-core CPUs, suggesting that by the end of 2006, better than 75 percent of the CPUs that the company ships will be multicore processors. We sat in on a dual-core architecture session Wednesday at the Intel Developer Forum here presented by Benson […]

In 2004, the price per megabyte plummeted in all forms of storage. Hard drive prices headed south, and the price of flash memory of all form factors plunged, even as the thirst for more space to store the digital aspects of our lives skyrocketed. Hitachi Global Storage estimates that the modern house may have up […]

To RAID or Not to RAID?Personal RAID storage is a hot topic—even somewhat controversial. Theoretically RAID 0 offers better performance, but at the cost of increased risk: If one of the two drives fails, you lose your data. RAID 1 offers redundancy and protection, but you only get half the capacity of the two combined […]

AMD has been steadily marching up the processor performance curve, while Intel has been scrambling for a new strategy, having to face up to the fact that scaling to 4GHz and beyond simply may not be possible with this chip architecture. Scaling up the frequency was critical to Intels plans, as the deeper pipeline in […]

When we heard that Sony was shipping a “liquid-cooled” PC, visions of pumps, hoses and thermal fluid danced in our heads. As it turns out, Sonys new VAIO RA-810G uses a more prosaic heat-pipe solution to cooling the 3.4GHz, Prescott-based Pentium 4 processor. We were also intrigued, however, because the RA-810G uses Microsoft Windows XP […]

Storage for your digital stuff has never been cheaper. We recently received an ad in our inbox from a well-known electronics retailer. The startling item in the ad was a 1 gigabyte compact flash card for under $90. Recently, Jim Louderback, in his When Im 64 feature, found a Seagate 160GB ATA drive for roughly […]

Imagine a six-drive array of 80GB hard drives that fits entirely in a single 5.25-inch, 1/2 height drive bay. This is made possible by using 2.5-inch drives primarily targeted for laptop systems. We originally saw this JMR SATAStor at the Intel Developer Forum a year ago. Of course, you cant just drop a six-drive array […]

The Dilemma As an operating system, Linux has many things to recommend it over Windows. Gaming, alas, is not one of them. Compared to Windows, Linux just doesnt have anywhere near the same level of good games. Yes, there are a few here and there, but overall, Windows continues to dominate as the PC gaming […]

Robert Heinlein is famous for writing some of science fictions classic novels. We remember him today, however, for his famous acronym: TANSTAAFL (“There Aint No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.”) Heinlein was by no means the first writer to express that sentiment, but he used the acronym often enough that it stuck. TANSTAAFL is […]

Fast Burn When the first DVD burners came to market, they were exotic beasts costing hundreds of dollars. On top of the steep price tag, the battle waged between the Recordable DVD Council (which supports a DVD-R/-RW standard) and the DVD+RW Alliance (with its competing DVD+R/+RW standard) only served to stymie users further. While the […]

At this years Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC), Microsoft released another sneak peek at its next generation operating system, code-named Longhorn. PC Magazine, along with the rest of the WinHEC attendees, received a DVD with the 4072 build. This preview is based on that build. The latest build is similar to the one released at […]

Before we launch into the specs and features of the new Hitachi 400GB hard drive, we need to point out a few things. Hitachi is not targeting this hard drive for your normal PC desktop. Its really aimed at an emerging application category known as “near-line backup.” Another area of interest is media storage applications, […]