Left: Dell Precision M4500 | Right: Lenovo ThinkPad W510 (not to scale)

It’s okay Dell, we’ll pretend you have an original design. Although I guess to be fair, the top cover certainly is…original.

It seems like just yesterday that Windows 7 hit shelves and we were all clamoring for a Vista replacement. However time has flown since last October and we’re into Q2 2010 already, with the latest rumors on the intarweb pointing to Q4 for the release of Windows 7 SP1.

There’s no word on what issues this service pack will address, but I’m sure there are still plenty of people with a list of stuff they would like to see fixed or improved.

What do you want improved/fixed on Win7?

So what do you want to see in SP1? I must say that overall my Win7 experience has been pretty good.

I’m running 64-bit Ultimate on my ThinkPad X61 with 4GB RAM and a 7200rpm drive with great results. Performance is excellent, although I do have two regular bugs. When resuming from standby, Google Talk will start maxing out the CPU and I’ve got to restart it. Also resuming from standby, sometimes my IBM/Lenovo USB fingerprint keyboard won’t respond and I need to unplug/re-plug it.

I also use a corporate T400 with a blank install of Win7 Enterprise, then loaded down with the usual corporate dragnet and a domain logon. I must say, despite having 3GB RAM (32-bit OS) and a 7200rpm drive, performance is terrible. Having setup an “offline” profile on this machine, it seems this is due mainly to the domain logon process. For whatever reason, it brings system performance to a halt and uses a ton of RAM.

Another pain with the T400, entirely separate from Win7, is how video RAM is allocated. This model has switchable ATI graphics and with 3GB installed, it takes half a gig for the integrated graphics, even when running on discrete. I’m considering disabling the integrated graphics in the BIOS and seeing if I can reclaim that much needed RAM.

Still, overall I’m rather happy with Windows 7 to date. I immediately miss the long overdue window management features (snapping and such) when I use a prior OS. Performance is also rather excellent on the new PCs that come through the lab, at least partially due to Lenovo’s Win7 Enhanced Experience on new models.

Source: [The Reg]

It may sound crazy, but social and economic factors have led to a shortage of labor for LCD manufacturers, which in turn means production isn’t meeting targets and us consumers have to wait longer.

A few factors are contributing to the shortage of laborers in factories, including higher cost of living in the cities, increased labor demand in rural areas and a general dislike of factory work among this generation of young workers. This fundamental shift in China’s labor force looks to present a longer term challenge for companies that rely on production workers, which of course effects nearly every piece of electronics on the market today.

I’ve not see any laptop shipment delays due to LCD availability just yet, but if demand increases it may very well become apparent.

Source: [DisplaySearch]

An errant press announcement on Intel’s website dated March 1st lets us know that the faster 1.83GHz Atom N470 PineTrail processor will officially launch…on March 1st.

Of course Lenovo wasn’t selling netbooks with the N470 last month. Of course not.

This means we may see some updated Lenovo IdeaPad S10-3 and S10-3t netbooks soon, with the faster processor and hopefully a better OS choice than Win7 Starter.

Source: [Intel] via [Slashgear]

Integrated chip designer Qualcomm, whose products are in many wireless devices, is now talking about upcoming versions of their newly released Snapdragon ARM processor. Later this year they expect to make available a faster 1.5GHz dual core version of Snapdragon, likely in an effort to stay competitive with new offerings from NVIDIA and others.

Debuting earlier this month in Lenovo’s Skylight smartbook, as well as Google’s Nexus One smartphone, Qualcomm’s 1GHz Snapdragon processor is a formidable step up in the low power processor arena. Even before the Snapdragon was released, NVIDIA’s multimedia-friendly Tegra was a force to be reckoned with and NVIDIA isn’t just resting on their laurels.

NVIDIA recently announced details on their second generation Tegra 2 platform, which is rumored to take multimedia-centric PCs (not unlike the new Apple iPad) by storm later this year. Snapdragon is already behind the game with HD performance and it seems Flash as well, so they need something up their sleeves.

This will be an interesting year for new tech devices, that’s for sure.

A new architecture has been developed to increase the space available on a hard drive by reducing the bits wasted with the formatting architecture, which will debut with certain new Western Digital hard drives.

Once upon a time doing IT support as a part time job, and always for family & friends, I can recall the numerous questions about why their hard drive didn’t have all the GB it was supposed to. Those familiar with computers have known for quite some time that for a hard drive to operate, a certain amount of the physical storage media is used for logically organizing all your data.

As you can gather from the picture above, less space is wasted on logically organizing your data and thus more can be dedicated to actually storing it. Western Digital calls this Advanced Format and it can realize 7-11% more space than a drive that uses “legacy” formatting.

From the sound of things, this is an industry standard and not proprietary to Western Digital, so we should see this across all hard drives eventually. The only catch is that Windows XP does not natively support this, but Western Digital does offer a tool to remedy that.

Source: [Western Digital PDF file] via [Geek.com]

Back in October we briefly covered Intel’s new Core i7 Turbo Boost feature, which allows for each of the four cores to be independently throttled to higher speeds based on demand and thermal load.

A few of you had questions on how exactly this would work and we just had another reader step up with some details on how/when the cores are throttled. I’ve reposted his original comment below for your absorption. If anyone has any additional clarification, please feel free to share in the comments!

unclewebb says:

The Core i7-720QM can use a maximum multiplier of 13, 13, 18 and 21 when 4, 3, 2 and 1 core are active.

In all Core i7 CPUs, the multiplier is completely dynamic and can be constantly changing. It can transition between the above 4 values hundreds of times a second based on load and how many cores are in the active state.

If you are running a single threaded activity and only a single core is in the active state, the multiplier can go as high as 21. If any background activity kicks in and wakes up a second core, the maximum multiplier will instantly drop to 18. If a third or fourth core becomes active then the maximum multiplier drops down to 13. As soon as the background tasks are completed, cores can go back to sleep which allows the maximum multiplier to increase. This is happening constantly.

Software like CPU-Z that samples the multiplier once per second might not give you a clear idea of what the constantly changing multiplier is up to. Intel recommends using the high performance timers within the CPU to accurately calculate the average multiplier over each 1 second interval. This method is outlined in the November 2008 Intel Turbo White Paper and is the method that both RealTemp and i7 Turbo use which can be downloaded from here.

http://www.fileden.com/files/2008/3/3/1794507/RealTempBeta.zip

i7 Turbo will clearly show you what each thread of your Core i7 CPU is up to.