Technology News » Laptops

Review: Acer Aspire 1810TZ 11.6in CULV notebook

Kat Lorbissy — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 17:17:08 +0000

So you want a small notebook, but you’re put off by the average netbook’s puny graphics, relatively low res screen and limited-horsepower Atom processor. What do you do?

We think you could do a lot worse than Acer’s Aspire 1810TZ. Sony’s skinny and compact Vaio X is nice, but it’s not cheap. Acer’s alternative is a wee bit more bulky, but since it’s on sale for around £450, it’s considerably less expensive.

The 1810TZ is part of Acer’s Timeline series of long-endurance laptops, so it’s also a good long runner.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. The 1810TZ is a kind of netbook-plus. Its size suggests a netbook – its 285mm width is set more by the large keyboard than by the 11.6in widescreen, LED-backlit display – but it has a dual-core Pentium SU4100 processor clocked at 1.3GHz and 3GB of 800MHz DDR 2 memory.

Full review at theregister.co.uk.

Review: Samsung X520 notebook

Abdul Montaqim — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 21:23:32 +0000

With smooth, curved edges and an eye-pleasing design, the 15.6in X520 slips into Samsung’s new X-series range. There are two other X-series models: the 11.6in X120 and 14in X420. The focus is on mobility here and, as such, all feature so-called CULV – Consumer Ultra-Low Voltage – processors and integrated graphics from Intel.

When first announced at IFA earlier this year, Samsung made something of a bizarre marketing move by proudly proclaiming the batteries powering the X-series will not explode. Good news for those with an adverse reaction to spontaneous combustion then, and we’re happy to confirm the X520’s battery remained free of flames during testing. As well as not exploding, Samsung also claims the battery will last a nine-hour road trip from Paris to Barcelona. We’ll come to our own battery tests in a moment.

According to Samsung, the X520 is extremely robust and “doesn’t need any extra protection”. We wouldn’t go quite this far, and while the chassis is by no means flimsy, it does have some weak points – pick it up with a firm grip and you’ll hear a bit of creaking, especially around the optical drive.

Full review at theregister.co.uk.

Quad-core chip makes sense for Apple laptop

Abdul Montaqim — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 15:16:18 +0000

If the speculation about a new MacBook Pro is on the money, the step up to Intel’s quad-core mobile technology would have a profound impact on this vaunted line of Apple laptops.

So, why would Apple adopt a Core i processor in a laptop? The short answer is OS X Snow Leopard. The new operating system is designed to be better at wringing more performance out of multicore processors–and the Core i chips pack four cores.

The long answer is the Core “i” chips themselves. The Core i, a.k.a. “Nehalem,” is a brand new Intel microarchitecture brimming with performance improvements over the current Core 2 design.

For starters, the recently announced mobile i7-820QM processor integrates a hefty 8MB of cache memory–compared with the 6MB in the fastest Core 2 Duo that Apple currently offers on the MacBook Pro. Generally, the larger the cache memory, the better the performance.

But Intel has done a lot more than just up the transistor count via a larger cache. While the quad-core i7-820QM is rated at 1.73GHz, a single core can be “overclocked” to 3.06 GHz. Intel does this with a technology dubbed Turbo Boost, which speeds up and slows down individual cores to meet processing and power-efficiency needs, respectively.

Need more convincing? The Core i7 also comes with Hyper-Threading, which can double the number of tasks–or threads–a processor can execute. You won’t find that in the Core 2 chips.

Digital media creation also gets a boost. Intel claims up to 81 percent faster video encoding.

Click here to read the full story at cnet.com.