New Lenovo "not up to Thinkpad's standard"

LAPTOP LOGIC tests the Acer Travelmate 8204 WLMi laptop. It is an expensive top of the range laptop with a poor battery capacity according to the review. Nonetheless, it garners an editors' choice. It has a built in camera a carbon fiber lid, a bluetooth VoIP phone and quite a few other options. At its heart, there's a Core Duo 2GHz processor, 2GB memory, 120GB HDD and a Radeon X1600. Have a look at the flash movie to see the laptop in action. Personally, I think that it is a great machine to work with.

Rahul Sood, Voodoo's CTO has posted an entry on his blog on the storage market and agrees that the best storage vendor out there is by a mile, Seagate. Hitachi, Samsung and Western Digital are also worth having a look and they all have their strength. I've been using a IBM/Hitachi drive for quite some time and although it is a Desktar, it has served well. No mention though of Fujitsu in the post although it is a company to reckon with. Finally, it might have been a good idea to pay tribute to the lost ones - Maxtor, Micropolis et al.

BIOSmagazine tests the Lenovo 3000 C100 laptop which is proving to be a poor substitute for the IBM Thinkpad range, although Lenovo says they are completely different ranges aimed at different markets. These machines don't have the IBM halo and the trackpoint. For the rest, there's an impressive five hours, 80GB HDD and a lacklustre 15-inch XGA display. No dual core there - but quite a few software tools that are often more welcomed than any hardware gimmicks. For the rest, there's not much to write. Firewire, S-Video, Centrino-like compatibility and Windows XP. But Vista will probably struggle.

Bjorn3D tests the Noise buster AKVIS. It is not what you may think. It does not reduce noise from hard disks or components. It is actually a piece of software - a plugin - for Photoshop, Paintshop Pro and the likes. Don't know if that particular plug-in is compatible with GIMP. Reducing noise is something quite difficult to explain in words. Therefore, Bjorn3D has included some photos. It is easy to set up but it is expensive and there are some other worthy competitors out there, which are cheaper and more feature-laden.

The Abit AN8 socket 939 motherboard is on review at Bit Tech. Abit recently merged with Universal Scientific Industrial Company but is still keeping the name. The mtherboard comes with uGuru, Silent OTES and a lot more features. You get the Realtek ALC850, SATA II RAID, firewire ports and the usual specs that you would find in high end motherboards. There are quite a few SLI motherboards out there starting with the £72 A/R-MVP all the way up to the A8N32. Overclockable and stably solid, buy it if your budget allows.

UK-based DoomedPC tests the MSI X1900XTX graphics card, admittedly one of the best video cards on the market. Radeon the Red as it is called is a big card with a Dual slot format and a huge fan. It tears though the benchmarks with such ease that you have to ask yourself if there is anything that can stop that monster. Go for a larger TFT screen if you want to make it break a sweat as 1280x1024 pixels is simply not enough. µ