No Hard Drives

A tiny component found in all Hard Drives was made in Japan, but following the earthquakes production was moved to Taiwain, which has now suffered floods. As a direct result there is a world-wide shortage, and we are limited to only being able to purchase 5 Hard Drives at a time. Worse than this, the price has risen around 300% in less than two weeks. We are recommending if you can wait to replace or upgrade your Hard Drive to wait, although sometimes this is not always possible if for example your Hard Drive has completely failed Posted Nov 11

Microsoft reported to Office of Fair Trading

By Becta - the governments education technology agency. Why? In a word, Vista! Its lack of "interoperability" seems to be the key issue, and we certainly cannot disagree. The problem is that schools subscribe to Microsoft's licensing terms in return for cheaper software. Schools do not have a choice but to use Vista with its inherent lack of compatibility. Posted Nov07

XP Availability

Production has now ceased. No new stocks are available. Posted Apr 10

Carbon Efficient Servers

Even if your serious about "carbon footprints" or saving the planet, how about saving money? In recent tests AMD and Intel 3Ghz processors were put head to head using ServerPowerEfficiency technology. The AMD server using 5 different loadings used between 7.3 and 15.2% less power than the Intel in the same tests. When idle it used 44.1% less power. Logically less wear and tear equates to longer usability, but more important, AMD CPU's are generally Mhz for Mhz cheaper than Intel anyway. Posted Sept07

Environment Friendly CPU from Intel

Intels' new Penryn processors are by unintelligible technical gobbledygook smaller and quicker. The incorporate Hafnium metal which is more efficient than the current silicon dioxide, eliminating wasteful electricity leaks. With no harmful lead (and halogen from 2008) materials used in production they are better for our environment. Posted Nov07

iPad

Apple predict selling a mere 7.1 million iPad's this year, but expect this to increase to 20 million a year by 2012. With all you gadget geeks out here, we can't see that's far wrong!! .Posted April 10

Whose taking over who

Acer's just taken-over Gateway (for a reported $710m), making them the worlds 3rd biggest manufacturer behind HP and Dell, knocking Lenovo (IBM) down to 4th. Gateway took over Emachines in 2004, and is attempting a take-over of Packard Bell. However Lenovo are also in talks with Packard Bell. Dabs who were previously trying to partner Gateway will re-open talks now Gateway have been bought out! Confused? We are! Posted Sept07

Facebook - getting you fired - getting you arrested!

A 16 year-old has just been fired on Facebook! She had posted the loss of £10 of her (now former) employers money whilst out on a staff biscuit run. Her manager fired her via an online post.
With 200 friends Pasquale (on Itay's 100 Most Wanted List for brutal slayings) has been arrested thanks largerly to his social networking on Facebook.
Look out kiddo's, big brother is watching you!! Posted April 10

Tax Allowances

First year allowances were increased for small business' from 40% to 50% for computer equipment purchased between 6th April 2006 and 5th April 2007 - half the cost can be offset against profits in the year incurred. Posted July06 Microsoft Support and Patches For Windows 98, Office 97 and Outlook 98 ceased in June 2006. Support and patches for NT4 ceased in December 2005. Posted Nov07

PMR Hard Drives

Perpendicular Magnetic Recording hard drives should soon arrive on our doorstep. Data is stored vertically instead of horizontally = more data can be stored = larger capacity hard drives. Seagate already produce a 160Gb Hard Drive for a laptop! Posted July 06 768Mb Dedicated Graphics The new GeForce 8800 Ultra GTX clocks at 612Mhz, with memory bandwidth over 103Gb per second coming in at around £600 is considered to be the fastest graphics engine currently available, and has DirectX 10 support. Check your motherboard is compliant before you buy! Posted May 07

Storage

Storing 1.6TB's (Terabytes) - that's 150 million pages to us mere mortals on disk is just around the corner. The theory is that this technology will replace the well worn HD Technology (as advertised on t.v.!) Posted Nov 06

Windows Vista

Available in 32 and 64 bit, on DVD only, with Home Basic, Home Premium, Business Basic, Ultimate (£75-£150), and upgrade versions for each (£102-£360). As always, we recommend you wait several months until at least some of the bugs are ironed out, and peripheral manufacturers have made drivers available for their product to run on Vista. Microsoft are so confident in their new product they claim for every $1 they earn, their suppliers will earn $15 in service and support. Posted Feb 07

ATI 1Gb Card

For all you serious gamers, CAD and imaging professional users out there, the FireGLV7350 at an estimated £1,300 should kept your needs going for a while. For those poorer amongst you the 512Mb edition, the FireGLV7300 is a mere £1,000. Why the price? ATI suggest the cards produce processing power 7x faster than a 3Ghz Pentium! Posted Aug 06

DVD? Forget that. You want FMD

That's right, being developed at the moment are Fluorescent Multilayer Disks, backwards compatible with CD's and DVD's. These disks can 140Gb of data, 30x's more than DVD's, and 200x's more than CD's. No release date as yet folks. Posted Dec 05

Tim Berners-Lee

Don't know who this guy is? Without him you wouldn't be reading this! He invented the World Wide Web in 1989 and is now the director of World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). His latest idea is for a Semantic Web where computers undertake basic data analysis which us mere mortals currently undertake. Let's hope it works eh! Posted June 99