Latest Components Articles

• 22 February 2012

• News: Price of DRAM plunges to all-time low of around $1

  Prices of DDR3 DRAM memory used in laptops and desktops have dipped to an all-time low of around US$1, and will continue to fall, which could help PC makers pack more memory into computers, analysts said.

• News: Huddle launches intelligent Sync tool to rival Sharepoint

  British cloud-based content collaboration firm Huddle has launched a new intelligent file synchronisation tool, which the company describes as a Dropbox for the enterprise.

• Opinion: How to Share an External Drive Between a Mac and a PC

  Looking to share an external hard drive between a Mac and PC? The best way to do it is with a drive formatted as FAT32. Though this format has some limitations, it enjoys nearly universal support from active platforms, including Mac and Windows operating systems, and many gaming and Linux OSs.

• News: AppSense DataLocker app makes Dropbox suitable for the enterprise

  Virtualisation provider AppSense is making its first move into cloud-based data storage with the launch of a new product called DataLocker, which enables users to encrypt sensitive information in their Dropbox account.

• News: Windows Server 8 to be storage-focused OS

  With the beta of Windows Server 8 to be released in the next few weeks, Microsoft executives said the next-generation OS is focused squarely on storage.

• 21 February 2012

• News: Intel tests foundry waters

  Intel is exploring whether it can branch out as a foundry by opening its chip manufacturing facilities to more third-party customers, the company said on Tuesday.

• News: Microsoft to tightly integrate Windows 8 and SkyDrive

  Microsoft will extend SkyDrive from being an online file storage service into what the company calls "a device cloud" that is closely integrated with Windows 8, the next version of the company's OS.

• 20 February 2012

• How-Tos: My PC Doesn't See My Hard Drive

  When Wendell tries to boot his PC, an error message announces a disk read error. It's as if his hard drive--with three year's worth of work on it--doesn't exist.

• How-Tos: Install an Old Laptop Hard Drive in Your Desktop

  Reader Fred wants to know if a laptop hard drive can be plugged into a desktop PC. "The pin out appears to be the same," he notes, "but there is no separate power-supply connector."

• Opinion: Atom-Sized Transistor Foretells Quantum Computer, Scientists Say

  Scientists say they have created the first transistor from a single phosphorous atom using near-atomic precision, which could keep development of processors on track with Moore's law until at least 2020 and offers the possibility of a general-purpose quantum computer that processes data significantly faster than current devices.

• How-Tos: Troubleshoot your motherboard's network adaptor

  When a reader noticed that the LED on his PC motherboard's Realtek LAN adaptor was permanently on, our Helproom Expert diagnosed a software or driver issue, and showed how to troubleshoot your motherboard's network adaptor.

• News: Samsung decides to spin off LCD business

  The board of directors of Samsung Electronics has decided to spin off the company's LCD (liquid crystal display) panel manufacturing unit, it said Monday.

• 19 February 2012

• News: Intel moves ahead with wireless integration into mobile chips

  Intel is expected to share details this week about its effort to work wireless capabilities into chips, which could make mobile devices and PCs smaller, cheaper and more power-efficient.

• News: Intel ponders solar-powered CPU tech in graphics, memory

  Intel's experimental solar-powered processor may have started off as a fun project, but the chip maker is now looking to extend the technology to hardware such as graphics processors, memory and floating point units.

• 17 February 2012

• News: The Byte - Chrome OS update, SSDs bleak outlook, tablet race results, Android 5.0 Jelly Bean

  Today on The Byte: Amazon’s Kindle Fire is catching up to Apple’s iPad; Google hopes to fixed dropped Wi-Fi on its Chromebooks; and Researchers think that SSDs have a bleak outlook.

• News: Slow smartphone? It's not the network, it's NAND flash

  Bad performance can be blamed on flash memory rather than CPU or network bandwidth, a team of researchers have found.

• 16 February 2012

• News: SSDs have a 'bleak' future, researchers say

  As the circuitry of NAND flash-based, solid-state drives shrinks, performance drops precipitously -- meaning the technology could be doomed, according to new research.

• News: Report: Intel May Delay Ivy Bridge, Most of 2012 Looking 'Dark' for Notebook Industry

  You may have to wait a little longer for that new Ivy Bridge ultrabook: Volume shipments of Intel's upcoming 22 nanometer die shrink of its Sandy Bridge architecture will be delayed, says Asian news (though as often rumormonger) site DigiTimes. Why? Because consumers aren't snapping up notebooks fast enough.

• News: SanDisk shows its fastest ever consumer SSD drive

  SanDisk has announced a super-fast SSD drive for consumers that once again puts the company’s drives near the top of the performance currently on offer from the technology.

• News: Iomega launches desktop, rack-mountable NAS line

  Iomega introduced a new line of arrays that can utilize either high-capacity SATA drives or solid state drives, offers up to 36TB of capacity and has web-based management features.

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