Posts by Tony Smith, Editor, Reg Hardware

Netbooks and Mini-Laptops

@LPF

The Acer doesn't have a bigger screen, and I don't think a big hard drive is a key feature in a netbook. But I do think battery life is for a lot of people.

@AC

The Dell didn't come first, the Eee did. It's not a 1-2-3 positioning. If it were, the Dell would be in third place.

Re. Battery Life

I did consider including a battery life column. However, we haven't tested all the configurations listed, so there would be gaps. And while we could have listed manufacturers' claims, we all know how accurately they reflect real-world usage.

I did start compiling battery capacity ratings, but then found that not all vendors quote these, preferring the decidedly more vague battery cell count, which doesn't tell you anything beyond vendor A's six-cell battery has twice the capacity of its three-cell battery.

How does that compare to vendor B's four-cell battery? No one can say.

The web has plenty of reviews - some of them Reg Hardware's - of the many configurations listed.

Ten tweaks for a new Acer Aspire One

@KenBW2

Ken, any Linux is a little scary for users accustomed to GUI-centric operating systems. Using the command line, editing config files - these are not tasks Mac owners and PC users usually do.

But I'm interested: does Ubuntu let you do *all* of these things through a GUI?

Actually, since a lot of Linux things are hidden or not installed on the AA1, presumably because Acer figures the user doesn't need them, and 'full' distro will be more flexible that the AA1's version of Linpus.

Sony coughs to third-gen PSP power problem

@AC

There won't be a retraction, because Sony hasn't confirmed their executive *didn't* say the new model exhibits a reduced battery life when compared to the previous model.

Fujitsu intros 5.6in bonsai laptop... with Vista

@All

By your command...

Story updated with prices. Make sure you're sitting down.

LG plotting autumn offensive against Eee PC?

@David

The Dell E will be announced on 12 August, and will undoubtedly be shipping almost immediately thereafter. Michael Dell's cued up to make a big speech about mobility on that day.

Remember you read it here first.

@Andy

Your wish is my command...

Fujitsu intros half-a-tera pocket drive

@wil

Or proof-read your comments? :-)

Seriously, mea culpa. The error is the proof-reader's.

Apple iPhone 3G

@Anon Koward

"a pic of my peni"

Strewth... How many do you have?

Sony PS3 movie downloads are go

@William

Love to - but it clashes with my Dragon 32 Users Group reunion...

Rambus sues Nvidia

@RMBS32

What, it should be 'Nvidia sues Rambus'?

Sorry, 'Rambus soothes Nvidia'?

No?

Nikon D40 entry-level digital SLR

@Jared

Different cameras with different audiences in mind and therefore different scores regarding their suitability for the DSLR newcomer.

The Top Ten 3G iPhone beaters

@All

Re. SE X1, E71, BlackBerry Bold etc

When you can buy 'em, we'll review 'em.

Samsung fires up 128GB SSD massive attack

@Steve Hogan

It's 64 x 16 gigabits (Gb) - not gigabytes (GB)

So divide your 1024 by 8 and you get the required 128GB.

Leak reveals Xbox 360 Pro debut due

Re. Prices

FYI, that £76 is a conversion, for your reference, not a price.

As we all know taxes, import duty, add the number you first though of, etc will alter the final UK price above that.

For future reference, prices in brackets are conversions, prices not in brackets are manufactuer-named prices.

Vista woes fuel Mac sales surge - analyst

@Gildas

Mr Sapiens,

15in laptops are ten-a-penny thanks to vendors stocking up earlier in the year and not selling as many as they hoped to.

There are far fewer 13in laptops sitting around in warehouses at the moment, and a price check in Dell's 13in laptops will reveal a price far closer to the MacBook's.

15in way cheaper than 13in? Crazy but true. The only exception is... ahem... Apple's 15in MacBook Pro, which really should be cheaper.

"It is the doom of men that they forget..."

Nvidia GeForce GTX 280

Re. Crysis

Says Leo:

"The figures are right - I retested and they came out that way time after time.

They look wrong, but it's proper game play and it played like mud with the 'faster' card on those settings."

No PAYG 3G iPhone in UK until Christmas

@AC

Yes but... Windows Mobile...

Apple takes axe to MacBook Air SSD price

@AC

OK, which one - not mentioned in the story - is thinner?

Asahi premiers pint-pulling robo-barman

Re. Guiness

The reason there's a large head is because almost everyone who serves the stuff up pops the glass down flat and leaves the gas-propelled - nitro-keg, invented by Guiness, and a crime against decent ale - liquid to pour out of the tap.

Half a pint's worth of proper pulling experience tells you if you hold the glass at an angle, this is far less of a problem. And gets the beer to the thirsty punter (ie. me) much more quickly.

This is why I gave up drinking Guiness in pubs. Stick to Guiness Export, sold in bottles, pours a treat and is far more flavoursome.

This week I have mostly been drinking Roaring Meg:

http://www.springhead.co.uk/mod.php?mod=userpage&menu=804&page_id=6

@Stu

Why worry about Magners? Surely no one drinks it now it's stopped being fashionable among the trendy-wendies?

Re. Guiness... as long as it's quick. Anything's better than waiting two hundred years for some bar-monkey who's lapped up the adverts to finally hand over your beer...

Mandriva One 2008 Spring Eee PC Wi-Fi glitch

PS.

FYI, booting with Wi-Fi disabled and then re-enabling Wi-Fi with Fn-F2 doesn't help.

Ripfactory Ripserver CD-ripping NAS box

@Mark

Presumably it doesn't, which is why it's a CD ripper not a DVD ripper.

But I wouldn't put it past a Linux/Unix buff to enhance the NAS' OS accordingly... :-)

Asus pledges end to Eee PC 900 battery swap 'delay'

Mat

Oh, alright then...

Available to buy: your own frakkin' 7ft Cylon

@AC

By your command...

aluminum -> aluminium

Best SF since B5?

Bollox to all this yankee 'sci-fi' cod-philosophy... Bring Back Blake!

AMD CPU shoot-out: Phenom X3 and X4

@AC

As Leo notes in the comments above, he turned the fix off and it made no difference.

Even AMD admits enabling the fix has no impact on B3 performance.

Asus Eee PC 901 Linux Edition

@steogede

We didn't try the 900 because we haven't got one, and since the 900's future is decidedly bleak, we can't imagine Asus letting anyone borrow one now that the 901's imminent.

The 901 is better than the 900 for a range of reasons even if its CPU isn't actually that much more powerful - despite the higher megahertz rating.

There'll be more on all this when we test the Windows XP version of the 901, which should make better use of the Atom's HyperThreading capability.

T-Mobile points to cut-price PAYG 3G iPhone

@commenter

Fair point - that page wasn't there when I wrote the story.

Asus Eee PC 901 to hit Blighty on 1 July

@H3N0451

Asus' is an example of a very well-established, commonplace typographical convention that drops the second 's' when the word already ends in an 's'.

Register Hardware, like The Register, has been following this convention for as long as it's been around.

Pinnacle Video Transfer

@Natalie

I did try it with VHS, but the results were no better than those achieved with other sources: interlacing artefacts on videotape material, heavy compression effects etc. Again, though, it's watchable when scaled down on a portable device.

However, it did reliably reproduce all the tape drop-outs. :-)

Asus offers Brits Eee PC 900 battery swap plan

@Mat

Maths cock-up: should be £11.75 - fixed now.

Missing MacBook Air cables

@David

They're on Apple's online store.

Power supply:

http://store.apple.com/Apple/WebObjects/ukstore.woa/wa/RSLID?mco=MjA1NTgx&fnode=home/shop_mac/mac_accessories/power&nplm=MB283

Ethernet and monitor cables:

http://store.apple.com/Apple/WebObjects/ukstore.woa/wa/RSLID?nnmm=browse&mco=MjM1NjI&node=home/shop_mac/mac_accessories/cables

Asus Eee PC 901 spied on web... in black

Re. beach

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/05/21/new_eee_girl/

Asus' Atom-powered Eee PC spied on web

Re. battery

We did point the lower-than-Eee PC 701 spec battery out in our review of the 900 - where we also noted that we got not very much less battery life than we did with a 701, despite the 900's less capacious battery and faster CPU.

We've asked Asus to comment, but they have declined to do so. The company's under no obligation, of course, to supply the same spec here as it does elsewhere. And potential customers are under no obligation to buy until Asus sorts this out.

Intel: future iPhone to be Atom powered

Re. emulation

From the story:

"Emulation would be essential to allow Apple to carry forward all the third-party development work done on iPhone software up to that point."

By the time this thing appears - if it appears - there'll be a lot of third-party ARM binaries out there that won't necessarily get recompiled but which users will expect to continue to run.

If it was a simple as these guys say, we'd never have needed 680x0 emulation and, later, PowerPC emulation in Macs. Or Dragonball emulation in ARM-based Palm devices, etc, etc.

Apple to announce handheld games console at WWDC?

@Richard

Dunno how you can claimed Apple has "failed" in the mobile market. No matter what you think of the iPhone, Apple's shifted several million of 'em at least. That's not a failure.

Sony Ericsson Z770i mobile phone

@AC, re. partial reviewage

Fair point, AC, but I think World+Dog has established how phone interact with PCs, and Mac users have come to expect they'll often need to do a bit of iSync tweaking to support new handsets - or buy a third-party plug in, as you did.

There's little point rehashing coverage of, say, Sony Ericsson's PC software *every* time we review an SE product. Even more so all the phones that just use Microsoft's ActiveSync.

These days, this stuff works, and while Vendor A's software may be slightly better than Vendor B's, no one's going to buy Vendor A's phone solely as a result of that.

So, instead, we focus on the more tangible reasons that punters *do* buy phones for, though we'll always point it out if a Bluetooth sub-system is below par, or there's an obvious issue with content syncing.

AT&T to slash 3G iPhone price to beat unlockers?

@Maths

8GB 3G iPhone = $399. Minus $200 = $199

16GB 3G iPhone = $499. Minus $200 = $299

BT bundles MS Office with Linux laptop

@all

Ask and ye shall receive...

Story now updated with picture of typical Eee user.

Asus Eee PC 900 Linux Edition

Re. Battery Capacity

Anonymous: the review unit was supplied by Asus UK, so hardly a grey import. The battery supplied was 4400mAh, and we have to review the unit on the basis of what it does include, not what it might include.

@Michael

I don't understand your beef with these things. If you don't want something small, buy something big - it's your choice. As you say, the price is the same, so pay it for performance, or pay it for portability.

But I would say that the 701 is certainly *not* useless. I've used the one I bought at two major shows - CES and Mobile World Congress - and, while the small screen size was slightly inconvenient, it didn't prevent me producing and editing copy; getting photos and editing them; uploading all of said pics and stories to El Reg's server; playing some movies stored on SD card; video-Skyping the wife and child; staying with Vulture Central through IM.

I installed Windows so I even got to connect using a HSDPA 3G modem.

In short, almost everything* I'd otherwise have done with my 'regular' laptop, but with a darn sight less hardware to lug about.

Thumbs up to Asus et al, I say.

*Mac OS X programming which, for obvious reasons, I can't do on the Eee.

@Stuart

I stand corrected.

The Bios contains an Operation Mode setting in the Advanced panel. It flips the 900 between "high performance" mode and "power saving".

There's a Bios Boost option too: start-up time is usually 28s, but this falls to 24s when Bios Boost is turned on.

Price cut fails to push Xbox 360 past PS3 in UK

@Anonymous Coward re. Bias

It's an exclusive because only we have the Chart Track and Sony info. Other sites that simply parroted the Microsoft press release didn't bother to check with anyone else. We did.

MS' claimed attachment rates are questionable and disputed by other console makers. Watch out for a follow-up story shortly.

The 360 has been around for 18 months more than the PS3 and a year longer than the Wii in Europe. So of course it's going to show a better life-to-date revenue. What's worrying is that it's still only managed to take a 42 per cent share - less than half - despite this singular advantage.

For the record, Register Hardware, has no favourite among the three leading consoles. Had Sony or Nintendo made similar claims, we'd have exposed those as meaningless too. A doubling of sales meaningless? It is when the company making the claim doesn't quantify the sales.

Selling not many consoles then doubling your sales still means you haven't sold very many consoles. Growth rates are meaningless without either a 'before' or 'after' sales figure.

Hauppauge pitches PC TV tuner at Freesat punters

@Ricky Cann

I've spoken to Hauppauge about this, and it claims that the WinTV Nova-S USB2 *will* be able to pick up Freesat HD.

An important point to make is that the software in the box, WinTV 6, won't display HD content, but a version that will, WinTV 7, is going to be available for free download in the near future - hopefully in time for Freesat's launch.

If you need HD viewing before WinTV 7 appears, apparently CyberLink's software does the business.

Mac OS X Tiger out, Leopard back in

@Adrian

I did consider that, but with an external drive containing approx. 200GB of raw video footage and iMovie projects, but only 30GB of free space on my MacBook Pro, I can't repartition unless I get *another* external HDD to back-up the 200GB onto first. If I'm buying a second HDD, why bother partitioning.

The big external drive is currently used for archiving and back-up. It's enough for a couple of years. I'd like to use Time Machine with it precisely so I don't have to buy an otherwise unnecessary hard drive.

@Joey

I have Pages, but it's essentially a word processor with some basic newsletter-oriented page layout elements. I need a *proper* DTP app. For me, after years with QuarkXPress, InDesign was a real joy to use, but I'm darned if I'm going to spend the price of two Asus Eee PCs to update the thing just because Apple's changed OS X so much.

If I was a professional designer it would be a different matter. But I'm not, so it isn't.

Still, it's a good suggestion, so thanks.

Pentax compact pulls out all the stops

@Anonymous

Register Hardware is The Register's sister site, it's not the same thing. We like smaller text here, they prefer it bigger.

You can always increase the text size using your browser.

Ten years old: the world's first MP3 player

Sony, MiniDisc etc

Sony had digital music players out long before Apple did - some nice ones too. Yes, they used ATRAC, but no, they weren't sidelined because of Sony's love of MiniDisc. Like many other such players, they were just too darned expensive and - crucially IMHO - had too small a capacity.

But Sony's kit was a darn sight better looking than all the plastic rubbish coming out of Taiwan and Korea at the time.