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Sharkoon’s T28 ATX Case Designed For Easy HDD Installation and Graphics Card Legroom

December 21st, 2011
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A case without easily accessible hard drive bays or enough room to accommodate beefy components is one that is liable to get chucked out of a window in frustration at some point. Sharkoon’s T28 case is designed to alleviate those issues.

The otherwise black case is available with red, green, or blue accents and features eight hard drive bays. It can also handle two 5.25-inch drives, and a pair of mounting frames for 2.5-inch drives is included. Part of the hard drive cage (containing three bays) can be removed to provide 40cm of space for a long graphics card.

The T28 allows for a CPU cooler up to 16.5cm high and a PSU up to 29cm long. The case is now available for 54.90 euros.

Sharkoon presents another series of cases: Available in three color editions, the Sharkoon T28 offers a lot of space especially for hard drive installation, thankfully due to the removable hard drive cage, and also perfect for extra-long graphic cards.

Externally the Sharkoon T28 offers a black body and a rectilinear mesh front design. Power and Reset buttons are elegantly chromed. In regards to the front connectors, Audio In/Out stands ready between three USB2.0 ports and a USB3.0 interface. An acrylic window on the left side panel gives an insight into the interior of the colored mainboard tray. Choose from three color editions: Red, green, and for the first time after numerous customer suggestions, blue. Also, the operating and hard drive LEDs illuminate in the edition color as well as the three pre-installed 120 mm fans. Two fans rotate in the front, the third in the back. All possess a 4-pin power supply and a 3-pin mainboard connector.

The Sharkoon T28 allows various options with the drive assembly: Two external 5.25 inch and eight internal 3.5 inch bays are available. In one of the two 5.25 slots an external 3.5 inch device alternately can be mounted, appropriate installation material is enclosed. 2.5 inch disks also find room: Configuration includes two mounting frames for hard drives and SSDs in both installation sizes. If necessary, the case converts in no time to support the installation of longer graphic cards: The eight hard drive bays are divided, with two firmly installed and a separate modular hard drive cage. By removing the middle three-cage, enough room is created for up to 40 cm long graphic cards.

In regards to the other functions Sharkoon focuses on proven comfort: The mainboard tray is provided with a CPU cooler mount opening and feedthroughs for orderly and concealed cable relocation, the drives assembly occurs with practical quick-locking mechanisms, the power supply is positioned on the floor of the case directly over a dust filter protected air intake, and in the rear two rubberized hoses are provided.

The Sharkoon T28 measures 475 x 200 x 440 mm (L x B x H) and weighs 6.6 kg. The maximum CPU cooler height averages 16.5 cm, the maximum power supply length is 29 cm.

End customers will find the Sharkoon T28 case available immediately for the suggested manufacturer’s price of 54.90 euros from authorized retailers.

Source:http://hothardware.com/News/Sharkoons-T28-ATX-Case-Designed-For-Easy-HDD-Installation-and-Graphics-Card-Legroom/

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Are Windows 8 Tablet and Chip-Makers Teaming to Copy Apple Magic?

December 6th, 2011
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Unless Microsoft starts making its own processors and devices, it can’t be an Apple-like company in control of everything. But it may get part-way there by asking chip-makers to team up with only one or two device-makers for Windows 8 tablets.

In a report from DigiTimes, unnamed sources say Microsoft is letting ARM processor makers Nvidia, Qualcomm, and Texas Instruments each pick two hardware partners for Windows 8 devices — one major and one minor, depending on the amount of technical resources invested.

Qualcomm has reportedly selected Samsung as its major partner and Sony as its minor partner. Texas Instruments is going with Toshiba as the major partner and Samsung as the minor partner. Nvidia chose Lenovo as its major partner and Acer as its minor partner, says DigiTimes.

Although DigiTimes doesn’t explain why chip-makers and device-makers are pairing off, the narrower focus should accelerate development and testing as Microsoft tries to have Windows 8 tablets ready in the second half of 2012. An earlier report from Bloomberg, which said Microsoft is limiting each chip maker to a single computer maker, suggests that the partnerships aren’t mandatory but that Microsoft will provide incentives to participants, such as lower software prices or performance-enhancing features.

Notably absent from the partnership list is Asus. The company may be working only with x86 processors for now — either by Intel or AMD — hopefully with a modular design like the Eee Pad Transformer.

Because DigiTimes’ report mentions only ARM processors, I’m guessing the partnership program doesn’t apply to x86 processor makers Intel and AMD. That makes sense, because otherwise we’d only see four hardware companies making traditional x86-based Windows 8 laptops and desktops.

Source:http://www.pcworld.com/article/245489/are_windows_8_tablet_and_chipmakers_teaming_to_copy_apple_magic.html

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Seven Good Reasons to Upgrade to Firefox 7

September 28th, 2011
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Six weeks to the day after the official release of Firefox 6, Mozilla on Tuesday rolled out Firefox 7, the next version of its popular Web browser for Windows, Mac, Linux and Android users.

The new release comes as part of the rapid release schedule Mozilla implemented for Firefox earlier this year, by which users are offered upgrades every six weeks.

Business users who want less-frequent updates will soon have a slower alternative schedule, as I noted last week. The first such enterprise-focused Extended Support Release (ESR) version of desktop Firefox is expected to be based on Firefox 8 or 9 later this year.

In the meantime, there are plenty of reasons to make the switch to this newest version, which is now available as a free download. Many of them, in fact, boil down to one key thing: faster speed.

1. Memory Management

Ever since Firefox 7 entered the Aurora channel back in July, its primary focus has been speedier performance and better use of memory, and that emphasis is apparent in the software released today.

Firefox 7 manages memory more efficiently than its predecessors did, Mozilla says, for a speedier Web browsing experience. “Users will notice Firefox is faster at opening new tabs, clicking on menu items and buttons on websites,” the organization says. “Heavy Internet users will enjoy enhanced performance when lots of tabs are open and during long Web browsing sessions that last hours or even days.”

A new Mozilla Hacks blog entry posted today offers several key metrics demonstrating Firefox’s new nimbleness.

2. More Speed

New tools included in Firefox 7, meanwhile, are designed to make it easier for developers to build speedy Web experiences for users. A new version of hardware-accelerated Canvas, for instance, speeds up HTML5 animations and games in the browser, allowing developers to build more compelling and interactive Web experiences.

Firefox now also supports the W3C navigation timing spec API so developers can measure page load time and website navigation against bandwidth speed, website traffic and other factors. This API allows developers to test user experiences remotely and easily so they can quickly optimize websites and Web apps for different types of users.

3. A New Performance Tool

Focusing on future speeds, Firefox 7’s new Telemetry tool collects performance feedback so as to help Mozilla make future Firefox releases even faster.

“Firefox 7 marks a turning point in how we measure Firefox performance,” reads a Mozilla Hacks blog post from this morning on the topic. “Traditionally we measured Firefox performance on individual developer machines and our build & release infrastructure. However it turns out synthetic benchmarks do not correspond to real-world Firefox usage: it is difficult to model a ‘typical’ computer in a lab environment.”

Exceptionally slow consumer hardware, changes in usage patterns and preinstalled “bloatware” can all affect Firefox performance in unexpected ways, the post notes.

The browser’s new Telemetry tool will prompt users to opt into reporting performance data to Mozilla. “This data will supplement our existing benchmarking infrastructure to help us optimize future Firefox releases,” the post explains.

Telemetry performance metrics are very lightweight, however, and will not negatively impact Firefox performance, Mozilla says.

4. Add-On Compatibility

When Firefox 6 launched, 97 percent of add-ons compatible with Firefox 5 were still compatible with version 6, according to Mozilla add-ons product manager Justin Scott, who wrote a blog post yesterday on the topic.

Not only that, but “we’re on track to launch Firefox 7 tomorrow with 99 percent compatibility from 6,” Scott added. With Firefox 8, which will reach beta later this week, compatibility issues should improve even more, he wrote.

Add-on users can also install Firefox’s Add-On Compatibility Reporter to flag any problems with the software they use.

5. A Cross-Platform Approach

By supporting tools like WebSockets across desktop and mobile platforms, Firefox lets developers create faster, seamless Web applications for use on mobile phones, tablets and computers. Firefox also now supports the W3C navigation timing spec API across desktop and mobile platforms, so developers can optimize websites and Web apps for different types of devices, platforms and networks.

A number of features in Firefox for Android, meanwhile, are designed to make it faster to browse the mobile Web, such as the ability to copy any website text and paste it into emails, website forms and SMS messages.

6. Free, as in Beer

Firefox is free in more ways than one. First and foremost is that it costs you nothing to install, use or upgrade–a winning feature by most accounts, though certainly not Firefox’s only one.

7. Free, as in Freedom

Perhaps even more important, though, is that Firefox is open source software and so it doesn’t restrict your use of the browser in any way. There’s no vendor lock-in, and it’s eminently flexible and customizable to your needs.

Also significant is that Mozilla is what it calls a public benefit organization, existing not to make money but to make the Web better for everyone.

Source:http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/240662/seven_good_reasons_to_upgrade_to_firefox_7.html

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NextWindow Produces Two-Millionth Touch Screen for the PC Industry

September 9th, 2011
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NextWindow, a wholly owned subsidiary of SMART Technologies Inc. (NASDAQ: SMT) (TSX: SMA), announces that it has manufactured its two-millionth touch screen for the PC industry. Combining its PC and large-format businesses, NextWindow has manufactured well over two million touch screens since 2003. NextWindow is consistently chosen by OEMs and ODMs for its unique optical technology, strong reputation and excellent client service. NextWindow components have proven to be effective solutions for desktop and large-format touch screens and monitors. This significant milestone reflects NextWindow’s strong position in the touch screen panel and components markets, and it reflects the continued demand for touch-enabled desktop computers with screen sizes of at least 20 inches (50.8 cm).

NextWindow has collaborated with 12 top PC makers globally to develop touch PCs for the commercial, corporate and consumer markets, among others. The company has supplied touch screens, including proprietary, patented optical technology, to top desktop computer makers for eight years. OEM and ODM customers include ASUS®, Dell®, HP®, Lenovo®, Medion®, NEC® and Samsung®. NextWindow large-format touch screens are frequently used in corporate and education environments, as well as for digital signage.

“As touch recognition has now become mainstream, users are enjoying a wider variety of hardware applications, ranging from in-home PCs to in-store kiosks,” says Al Monro, CEO, NextWindow. “We’ve been a major supplier to the desktop computer touch market for many years, and this milestone is a testament to the quality of our products and the excellent customer relationships we have built.”

Source:http://www.prweb.com/releases/2011/9/prweb8778746.htm

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Faux Futurists Want to Keep PC Gaming in the Past

September 8th, 2011
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Some day soon, Nvidia’s CEO Jen-Hsun Huang is going to walk on stage at some obscure electronics industry event and say these words: “We love PC gaming. Our heritage is in 3D gaming hardware. And that’s why we’re more excited than ever to announce we’re never making another gaming video card again.”

Sound like a doomsday scenario? Then you might be a PC game tinkerer.

There are two types of PC gamers. Firstly, there are people who love PC gaming because of all the fantastic things PC games have that their console or mobile games do not: a complex, precise interface; the ability to easily extend game experiences with modifications both official and otherwise; an incredible wealth of indie and experimental games; and the best graphics and sound experience a normal human being can buy.

Then there are the gamers who like the PC because they mistake tinkering with hardware from a couple of dozen of vendors—all of whom get their silicon from three giant corporations—as some sort of engineering, despite that it’s more or less electric LEGO for masochists. These tinkerers are holding back PC gaming hardware—and that includes the very benchmark by which they gauge themselves: graphics performance.

PC gaming isn’t going to die—but PC tinkering just might. And it’s not heretical to be okay with that. I’m disappointed in the short-sighted, overly defensive members of the PC gaming community. Last week I wrote an effusive post about the Razer Blade gaming laptop, pointing out all of the laudable, intelligent things Razer (and its engineering partner, Intel) were doing with the new product line—as well as the thing they were screwing up. (The price.)

Instead of measured rebuttals, many of those that chose to comment on my piece trotted out arguments that have been in place since the original Nintendo hit the scene—arguments which are even less true in the modern gaming and technology landscape than they were two decades ago. (There were some polite, reasoned responses, as well, although they were the minority.)

It’s all the old insults: “Go play your console.” “If I wanted a dedicated gaming machine with fixed hardware specs than I’d buy a console.” Or perhaps most tellingly: “Honestly, this is why I *Enjoy* PC gaming. Unless you have an amazing rig, you can’t play games. This limits the people I game with to people at least as geeky as me (you have to be geeky to assemble these systems).”

Tinkering is a hobby, not the basis for a platform. The average person (the people who actually make up the “mass” of the mass market that drives technology forward) does not want to build a PC. They don’t want to jailbreak their phone. They don’t even want to know what jailbreaking is. They don’t want to troubleshoot a broken computer to make a game work, even if it gets them a game with more impressive graphics.

Most people just want to play a game. Now, it’s true that PC gamers are not most people. We’re enthusiasts—the hot-rodders of PC hardware. There are a few million of us out there—and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with enjoying our hobby—but most PC gamers seem to have forgotten that we are a small offshoot of a much larger industry, one that built computers for spreadsheets and word processing, not gaming. The same industry that is currently moving away from the Windows PC as the default, mainstream computing platform.

So PC gamers got very upset upon my suggestion that, you know, maybe it’d be okay to let Intel and Nvidia (and perhaps AMD) standardize the PC platform a little bit so that programmers and operating system engineers could more readily access the kind of computational power that’s inside our hot-rod PC hardware. And as I watched it unfold, I felt like I was watching a bunch of polo players quibble about saddle design next to a freeway.

It is absolutely asinine that our smoking-hot, electricity-slurping gaming towers and massive laptops aren’t providing experiences so far beyond that available on consoles and mobile phones that even non-gamers could immediately see the difference. Sure, we can tell the difference between Infinity Blade running on an iPad and latest Unreal Engine game running on a $1,500 PC. But you know who can’t? Millions upon millions of people who buy games.

And don’t forget that the games will follow the money. And right now the money is moving into free-to-play, mobile, and hosted games, be they on Facebook or on streaming services like OnLive. Consoles aren’t even the only, or indeed the largest threat to PC gaming! We’ve probably got one more generation of “hardcore” dedicated consoles like the Xbox before they, too, are obsolesced by streaming or mobile hardware.

PC gaming isn’t going to die. But it’s going to change. And unless PC gamers embrace that change, we’re going to find ourselves increasingly marginalized, with fewer games to experience that are unique to PC. I don’t hate the tinkerers. But it’s time they stopped pretending that they hold any real influence over where the future of gaming is going.

Source:http://kotaku.com/5837957/faux-futurists-want-to-keep-pc-gaming-in-the-past/

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That’s Happening On Your Windows Or Linux Computer

August 2nd, 2011
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If you’ve ever wanted to keep an eye on your computer from your smartphone whilst you’re out and about, then you’ll know how limited your options are. You could use a remote monitoring tool such as LogMeIn Ignition to physically control the machine, but it doesn’t offer a quick overview of resources on your phone and the application costs a cent shy of $30, which isn’t exactly a price that encourages impulse buying.

If LogMeIn doesn’t fit the bill, and you’re looking for an application that can show you all the information that you need to know on the screen of your smartphone, without having to take control of the actual machine and navigate Windows on a 3.5-inch screen, then you may want to take a closer look at PC Monitor.

The app recently hit version 2.0 and took a price dive with the version upgrade. In fact, the price dived so deep that it is now completely free to download, so you have no real excuse not to check it out.

Before you can begin to use PC Monitor on your phone, you must first download a desktop client that allows the Android application to interact with your computer. You can currently download the desktop version for Windows (32 or 64-bit) or Linux, but Mac users are out of luck at the moment.

Once you have downloaded the 3MB program, you can proceed to install it and then set up your account with the service. If you don’t already have an account, you will be prompted to choose a username and password which you will later use to set up the service on your phone.
From the desktop client, you can choose to monitor certain processes, scheduled tasks and other services running on your machine. You can’t view every single service that’s running on your machine unless you manually select them all, as the application is designed to monitor certain key services rather than everything that’s happening on your computer, but if there are some that you want to keep an eye on, then you’ll be able to select them without any problems.

Once everything is set up on the desktop end, you can finally get to the good part and download the free Android application. It’s less than a megabyte, so you don’t have to worry about a large app taking up all of the internal storage up on your phone, and it doesn’t take long to download.

When you first open the app, you will be prompted to login with the information you just used to set up your desktop client. Use the same username and password as before, and you will be given a list of all the computers which are currently being monitored. I’m currently only monitoring one computer, but if you’re managing a few – you can manage up to three for free, and then there are tiered plans available for users who want to manage more – then you might want to arrange your machines in to groups so that you can quickly access relevant information together.

Once you’re viewing information about your computer, you can see a system overview which will show you how much CPU is currently being used, how much free RAM you have available and your external IP address too.

If you want some more detailed information then you can scroll down to the ‘System Details’ section of the app where you can view more hardware information such as temperatures and fan speeds of the computer, as well as all running processes and monitored services. From here, you can even view all of the information on your local hard disks and browse the file structure for any .log files that you wish to send or interact with.

The application is also capable of sending commands from your phone to the desktop client remotely, and there are a number of default commands such as ‘Logoff’, ‘Restart’ and ‘Shut Down’ that you can choose from. In addition to this, a Wake on WAN feature is also supported. If you want to send your own commands to the computer then you can do so by opening the command prompt in the ‘System Details’ section of the app. You can type any command using the keyboard on your phone, and then PC Monitor will wait for a reply from the machine and display the contents on your screen.

If you want to be able to see everything that’s going on in your computer, then PC Monitor is definitely worth looking at. I have never seen an application before that can monitor every minor detail of your PC so comprehensively on your phone, and display it in a really easy-to-view manner. It’s a must have for any power user out there, so if you have a Windows or Linux computer and want to check it out, then you can download it for free from the Market right now.

Source:http://www.androidpolice.com/2011/08/02/app-review-pc-monitor-allows-you-to-keep-an-eye-on-everything-and-i-mean-everything-thats-happening-on-your-windows-or-linux-computer/

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BitFenix Shinobi Window PC Case Review – A Ninja Worth Your Coin

August 1st, 2011
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One of the most important factors when undertaking a custom PC build is the design and functionality of the chassis itself. It sets the tone for the build to come, and for some, even dictates specifically which components are needed to match the case.

It is the centerpiece of any build, and more importantly, a part that you will always look at first before anything else. A conscious decision is needed and this, the chassis, raises a few questions.

Is the build centered on gaming and video transcoding, a professional business environment, or just simple web-surfing? Does the case have clearance for long video cards? Is the cable management easy to maneuver or will I have clumps of wire everywhere? Does it support enough ventilation, room, and compatibility for overclocking, water-cooling, and multi case-fan support? Finally, the most important question is whether it will fit my budget?

BitFenix, since their inception into the chassis market back in April 2010, have been making a lot of waves in a short period of time, producing attractive, affordable cases that appeal to a wide audience and not just gamers. They may be new but the people behind the company certainly are not. Many are former Cooler Master employees who worked on the ever popular Storm and HAF series cases, and the other few lot are from Abit.

The company is rooted firmly in the gaming industry, quite evident by its association with the KODE5 pro-gaming circuit, and the team predominantly has experience designing kit for this area. Having already released chassis for all three price-points, the full-tower Colossus Black, the mid-range, mid-tower Survivor, and the one under inspection for this review, the budget-minded Shinobi, BitFenix is poised and ready to meld those small waves into a large splash.

Source:http://thessdreview.com/hardware/bitfenix-shinobi-window-pc-case-review-a-ninja-worth-your-coin/

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