PC and Components

The Northern Territory government has launched a new electronic prescription service that aims to reduce discrepancies caused by doctor's handwriting and improve patient care.

An executive shake-up at Advanced Micro Devices earlier this week has left some analysts speculating that the move may be a prelude to a major corporate restructuring.

Microsoft is looking at alternatives to ultra-low-cost laptops in the drive to arm people in developing nations with a way to communicate and access the Internet, and the company is turning its sights on cheaper devices that can give people a start in computing, such as smartphones and shared computing.

It's not exactly how devotees foresaw Linux reaching mass-market desktop PCs, but it could be a turning point nonetheless. Taiwanese giant Asus is to embed DeviceVM's Splashtop Linux on millions of mainstream motherboards.

The One Laptop Per Child Project and Microsoft plan to make both Windows and Linux available on a version of the project's XO laptop, the companies said Thursday.

When Gordon Moore made his prediction in a 1965 issue of Electronic Magazine (download PDF) that the number of transistors on a chip would double every year (eventually updated by Moore to two years and then updated again by Intel to 18 months), it was just a "lucky guess" based on a few points of data, he recalled in an interview in 2006. But the idea, which has grown to encompass ever cheaper, ever smaller, ever more powerful components, has so captivated the IT industry that you can't attend a technology conference without seeing at least one PowerPoint presentation displaying the Moore's Law graph.

iPhones, broadband and gamers give reason for economic hope.

Green has never been sexier. It's the new black, and it sells.

Say goodbye to the tower.

One day after the resignation of the One Laptop Per Child's president was publicly revealed, the educational project's founder and chairman says the group's XO laptop may evolve to use only Windows XP as the operating system, with open-source educational apps such as its home-built Sugar running on top.

Lenovo Group Chairman Yang Yuanqing wants to challenge perceptions of Chinese companies as mainly producers of cheap, low-end products.

Microsoft co-founder and Chairman Bill Gates has been giving keynote speeches at Las Vegas conventions, including the Consumer Electronics Show and the now-defunct Comdex, for decades. Before his last CES keynote speech as a full-time company employee, he talked with the IDG News Service about his legacy as an innovator, the background behind some of the deals announced at CES this week and directions for Microsoft.

For much of his 34 years at Intel, Justin R. Rattner has been a pioneer in parallel and distributed processing. His early ideas didn't catch on in the market, but the time has come for them now, he recently told Computerworld's Gary Anthes.

Why would a business that focussed on technology recovery, refurbishing and resale, want to re-brand itself? Ask TechTurn, once called Newmarket IT, who felt that its service - diverting potential IT scrap from e-waste to usable technology, or IT salvage - was an idea whose time had come.

In his famous paper published in April 1965, in the journal Electronics, Gordon Moore wrote: "Integrated circuits will lead to such wonders as home computers -- or at least terminals connected to a central computer -- automatic controls for automobiles, and personal portable communications equipment." Analyzing the future of the industry, he predicted that, "reduced costs is one of the big attractions of integrated electronics, and the cost advantage continues to increase as the technology evolves toward the production of larger and larger circuit functions on a single semiconductor substrate. For simple circuits, the cost per component is nearly inversely proportional to the number of components." This became known as Moore's Law. Forth-two years later, it is still valid. But will it be the same in, say, 10 years from now? Justin Rattner, Intel's chief technology officer, answers that question in this interview.

Hardware upgrades can be a blast. Slide 2GB more RAM in your machine and everything just works faster and smoother. Updating a laptop or desktop with an SSD (solid-state drive), however, can be tricky and not so rewarding, as I am finding.

Anyone with the remotest interest in ICT development will have noticed the battle raging at the "bottom of the pyramid," where competing initiatives have been vying for the hearts, minds and dollars of schoolchildren and education ministries the developing world over. This particular battle is being largely fought by Intel and OLPC (One Laptop Per Child), once partners but now sparring in opposite corners after months of wrangling led to an acrimonious split earlier this year.

Solid-state disks (SSD) are probably some of the most talked-about new gadgets of late. They easily distinguish themselves from the mechanical hard drives of the Jurassic period because they have no moving parts. Like USB drives, they use nonvolatile flash memory to store data, but SSDs are wrapped in an enclosure the size of a 2.5-inch mechanical laptop drive and have a SATA interface for an easy connection to the internals of your portable.

You may very well prefer to postpone the task of refreshing your fleet of desktop systems and monitors, an exercise that can be both expensive and time-consuming. But inevitably, machines break down or your needs change, so you have to bite the bullet.

What Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away. Such has been the conventional wisdom surrounding the Windows/Intel (aka Wintel) duopoly since the early days of Windows 95. In practical terms, it means that performance advancements on the hardware side are quickly consumed by the ever-increasing complexity of the Windows/Office code base. Case in point: Microsoft Office 2007, which, when deployed on Windows Vista, consumes more than 12 times as much memory and nearly three times as much processing power as the version that graced PCs just seven short years ago, Office 2000.

Western Digital's MyBook Office Edition range is an inexpensive business-focused external storage option. Though lacking a range of interface options such as FireWire or eSATA, the range's software bundle allows for increased connectivity options.

The AP-7131 is a tri-radio 802.11n access point (AP) featuring Motorola's adaptive AP architecture. It simultaneously supports high-speed client access, mesh backhaul and dedicated dual-band intrusion protection.

NetComm's new wireless router offers multiple users 3G connectivity simultaneously by sharing one PC-MCIA 3G card.

Epson's RX690 is a capable colour inkjet multifunction printer that provides high quality printing and scanning results. While some functions are hard to use, this Epson printer will provide home users with a great alternative to professional photo labs.

The MP970 is Canon's latest top-end inkjet multifunction. It has a higher price point than its competitors, but has a number of well-designed functions in order justify this.