Items tagged with PCs
PAX East is chock full of dazzling sights and sounds. One of the crown jewels was a series of custom-built PCs showcased by Gigabyte's Aorus sub-brand. The seven systems were designed and built by either an enthusiast community member or a professional modder. Aorus contributed parts but otherwise allowed the creators to execute on their vision. We caught up with one of the builders, Kevin Tabor from Mod My Mods, who gave us an overview of each of the systems. The builds span a wide range of stylings. There are a couple systems with minuscule footprints and others in massive towers. One system uses the aggressive stylings of the Cougar Conquer chassis while others float free in open air frames....
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Computex 2018 is currently underway and Intel has announced that Sprint is now a partner in its 5G PC rollout plans. Intel and Sprint will work together on 5G-connected PCs that will be offered from Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Microsoft. Both laptops and 2-in-1 machines will be offered packing 5G starting in 2019. With 5G on the horizon, Intel is still going to be working on 4G-equipped computers as well. Intel plans to help deliver ten more 4G-connected PCs from Dell, Asus, Acer, and HP before the 5G machines roll out, which presumably will mean these other PCs are coming this year. This is in addition to the 25 Intel-powered 4G machines that are on the market already. What’s a bigger...
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The PC market has been limping along for years and the lackluster sales have taken a toll on Lenovo, which announced today that it is planning to lay off as many as 3,200 employees. The company simultaneously announced plans to restructure its Mobile Business Group (MBG), which includes Motorola, in an effort to improve its smartphone development. Lenovo Chairman and CEO Yuanqing Yang announced the job cuts today in an email to employees. The cuts are meant to help Lenovo reach its goal of 30 percent market share in the PC market. (Lenovo estimates that is has about 20.6 percent of the market now.) Although Lenovo has a large worldwide staff, the cuts are significant: the 3,200 people losing...
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AMD officially took the wraps off of its Radeon R7 and R9 300 series of graphics cards, and disclosed some details regarding the R9 Fury—a.k.a Fiji—during a livestream held near the E3 convention earlier this week. We have much of the information revealed during the event posted for you right here if you’d like to take a look.Today though, we’ve actually got one of the “new” Radeon R9 300 series cards in-hand for some review and benchmark action. We put “new” in quotes, because the entire R7 and R9 300 series lineup is built around the same GPUs used in the R7 an R9 200 series. The Powercolor PCS+ R9 390 8GB card we’ll be showing you here, for example, features an AMD Hawaii GPU at its heart,...
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For months, it's been rumored that Microsoft would unveil a new version of Windows 8.1 with specific Bing branding and a lower price tag. Now the company has formally unveiled the SKU, which will carry a "reduced cost" to manufacturers of PCs that cost less than $250. Microsoft also makes Windows free to devices with a screen smaller than nine inches, What this means is that devices that sell for less than $250 and have screens smaller than nine inches will get W8.1 + Bing for free. Other devices will be able to buy W8.1 at a reduced price, but the scope of the discount isn't known. The impact on the end user of the "with Bing" SKU is minimal. A system that ships with this version of Windows...
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Computer sales are slumping, but Windows 8 isn’t to blame for the slide, according to market consultant Gartner. The research firm said that PC shipments (including laptops), which dropped to 76 million in the second quarter, can be attributed to the rising popularity of tablets, rather than customer dissatisfaction with Microsoft’s latest operating system. HP's Z1 Workstation for business. Image Credit: HP “We are seeing the PC market reduction directly tied to the shrinking installed base of PCs, as inexpensive tablets displace the low-end machines used primarily for consumption in mature and developed markets,” said Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner. The...
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Lots of people believe that tablets will replace desktop and laptop computers in the not-so-distant future; count Frank Gillett of Forrester Research as one. But his vote counts for a little more because his job is to forecast tech trends. In a blog post, he ticks off the many advantages of tablets: they’re small and light (but not too small), have excellent battery life, have swift always-on capabilities, are ideal for casual sharing in meetings, have delightful delivery systems for consuming content, and in some instances can be used for meaningful content creation. Because of the above, he predicts that tablets will become the preferred computing device for millions of people. He does...
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If you walk into any Walmart and head over to the HDTV section, one of the brands that will jump out at you is Vizio, which has built a reputation for building and selling comparatively affordable TV sets. In a way, Vizio is to TVs what Rosewill is to PC parts -- value oriented. Perhaps bored with focusing almost entirely on HDTVs (Vizio also dabbles in related equipment, like home theater speakers and Blu-ray players, as well as tablet PCs), Vizio is reportedly taking its low-cost mojo over to the PC industry. In an interview with USA Today, Vizio's chief technology officer, Matt McRae, goes into a bit of detail about new PCs Vizio plans to unveil at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas...
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We've discussed the fragmentation of Android and the shoddy update services of the various carriers before, but the Droid 3's situation is raising these issues again. According to pre-CES reports, Verizon is poised to end-of-life (EOL) the Droid 3 along with its entire current lineup of MiFi hotspots. The BlackBerry Curve 3G and Palm Pre 2 are also reportedly on the chopping block, but the former is low-end device that's several years old, while the latter is a bit of an anachronism. The Droid 3, in contrast, is barely six months old. It's the only Motorola phone with a physical keyboard that Verizon carries, and it's already become a poster child for the problems with the Android ecosystem....
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One of the less logical claims that's been made about tablets in the past twelve months is that the devices would somehow supplant or replace notebooks. This last has been supported by various companies, including Apple (claims that Apple became the top mobile vendor in 2011 factor tablet sales into the equation). Sales data continues to indicate that tablets are not, in fact, replacing notebooks and are unlikely to do so. A new report from IHS Supply sheds more light on the situation. "Despite the intense competition from media tablets, notebooks remain a useful tool that has become an essential part of modern life—rather than a luxury item,” said Matthew Wilkins, principal analyst...
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Occasionally when a company talks to the Chinese media, statements get lost in translation or twisted out of context by the time they're converted to English. It happens, and had we awoken to find Lenovo denying reports it told a Chinese newspaper it fully expects shove Dell aside to become the world's second largest PC vendor in the world (in terms of market share) by the end of the year, we wouldn't have been surprised. But lest anyone doubt Lenovo was completely serious or that the company's comments had somehow been misconstrued, Lenovo today issued an open statement reiterating it expects to surpass Dell sooner rather than later. "Lenovo has tremendous momentum in the market. We continue...
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When it comes to the personal computing market, Apple is considered the cream of the crop these days. But a new quarterly report from PC repair firm, RescueCom, shows that increasing numbers of Apple customers are having trouble with their beloved Macs. Lenovo has been crowned as the most reliable, while ASUS, despite losing market share, beat Apple to claim the No. 2 spot. So says the first Computer Reliability Report of 2011, which covers Q1. RescueCom determines reliability by comparing the units shipped by a specific manufacturer versus the number of repair calls for that brand. Granted, the company admits that this methodology isn't perfect. It depends on the likelihood that a customer will...
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We wrote earlier about China's new censorship moves with regards to PCs, mandating that new PCs there have site-blocking software installed, or at least provided via an included CD. Ironically, though not surprisingly, it turns out that the filtering software, "Green Dam-Youth Escort," contains pirated code.According to Solid Oak Software, the makers of CyberSitter, one of the more popular Internet-filtering programs, not only does Green Dam look similar to CyberSitter, it uses DLLs identified with CyberSitter, and even gets updates from Solid Oak's servers. Piracy? A Chinese company stealing intellectual property? No way... CYBERsitter - Solid Oak SoftwareGreen Dam - SoftwareSeriously,...
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While it's no secret that China blocks web sites that it doesn't want its citizens to view, the Wall Street Journal is reporting an escalation in this censorship. The WSJ reports that China plans to require that all PCs sold in the country as of July 1st be equipped with software that blocks access to certain Web sites. The software's Chinese name is "Green Dam-Youth Escort." The software was developed by Jinhui Computer System Engineering Co. Additional input came from Beijing Dazheng Human Language Technology Academy Co. According to Bryan Zhang, founder of Jinhui, Green Dam operates in a way similar to such products as Net Nanny, that allow parental blocking of sites. Green Dam would use a...
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