Hardware wonders of the world

Monarch was the first to send me a link to Semprons on sale, here, and it looks like they are quite available. Solid systems start at $799, not bad for a 'new' product, especially one with a fairly capable discrete graphics card. The case might not be a Hornet, but an Antec Sonata on a budget system is hard to bitch about.

But how do they perform? Well, HotHardware was the first to send me a review, and you can see the performace here. As you can see, it is not a clean kill either way, which goes to show that the CPU ranking scheme is doing about what it should, providing relative performance levels.

Moving on from CPUs to memory, we come to the perfect memory to use with a Sempron, high end overclocking memory. OCZ just came out with PC-4000 Gold Edition Rev. 2. This is DDR, no 2, with 2.5-3-3 timings at 500MHz. Yup, we have moved into the era of high speed AND low latency, a good thing to be sure.

Straddling the hardware and software sides of the world, we come to Seagate. It has announced that Barracuda drives shipped to Latin America will have Linspire installed on them. Luckily, they did not install Lindows on the drives, that would have gotten them sued.

Moving right on, we come to Slysoft. It has grabbed the rights to CloneDVD from Elby, and are now offering CloneDVD2 directly on the net. If moving to Antigua is what it takes to keep the copyright nazis off your back, that is a price I would gladly pay. I mean, island paradise, no one spying on you, and did I mention the island paradise part? Whatever the case, CloneDVD2 gets my serious seal of approval.

Moving to the slightly more legal side of things, we come to Sitekeeper from Executive. It has just launched V3.1 of the update and patch management program. While it is not all that much of a useful substitute for Linux in the security and patch management category, if you just HAVE to use Windows, it looks good. It can push patches and updates out to machines, and make an admin's life much easier. Better yet, there is a trial version downloadable for free. µ