There are little things in life that nag at you long enough that you can’t ignore them anymore: a growing leak stain in your ceiling, a strange sound coming from your car, Miley Cyrus, Frank TV. For Microsoft, that little thing is netbooks. Yes, those cheap, low-powered, 8-inch screen mini-notebooks running Linux or Windows XP are the latest Vista killers. Data from IDC shows that 6.5 million netbooks were shipped during the first three quarters of 2008, up just a tad from 181,000 the year before. Microsoft has been open about the threat that netbooks pose to Vista. In its quarterly earnings report, the software giant pointed directly at explosive netbook sales as one of the main reasons for the sluggish year-over-year Vista growth. Microsoft has no plans to push Vista on netbooks (Vista is actually running on some netbooks, but only 1.5 percent of them, according to IDC). The hardware requirements of Vista and the licensing costs are too much for netbook OEMs. Only the newest and strongest netbooks could handle Vista. (more…)

There are little things in life that nag at you long enough that you can’t ignore them anymore: a growing leak stain in your ceiling, a strange sound coming from your car, Miley Cyrus, Frank TV. For Microsoft, that little thing is netbooks. Yes, those cheap, low-powered, 8-inch screen mini-notebooks running Linux or Windows XP are the latest Vista killers. Data from IDC shows that 6.5 million netbooks were shipped during the first three quarters of 2008, up just a tad from 181,000 the year before. Microsoft has been open about the threat that netbooks pose to Vista. In its quarterly earnings report, the software giant pointed directly at explosive netbook sales as one of the main reasons for the sluggish year-over-year Vista growth. Microsoft has no plans to push Vista on netbooks (Vista is actually running on some netbooks, but only 1.5 percent of them, according to IDC). The hardware requirements of Vista and the licensing costs are too much for netbook OEMs. Only the newest and strongest netbooks could handle Vista. (more…)

Smolt is a opt-in hardware profiler developed by Fedora Project and now adopted by OpenSUSE and in consideration by Ubuntu as well. While originally developed for understanding commonly used hardware, InternetNews looks at the potential for Smolt to be a tool to count Linux users. "Smolt could also potentially be a tool for counting the total number of users for a given platform, though that's not its ideal use case. The Linux Foundation's Ts'o noted that Smolt probably wound not be that great for counting Linux users as a whole. Fedora's Frields agreed, noting that Smolt is probably not as good for counting users as it is for counting proportional use of hardware across the user base. 'We prefer to count users with other methods, which we document on our wiki openly and transparently,' Frields said."

More details about Microsoft's upcoming Windows 7 operating system emerged Wednesday. The OS will have a shorter boot time; offer greater reliability; more efficient memory usage and improved battery life for laptops, according to Microsoft's Jon DeVaan, Steven Sinofsky and Mike Anguilo, who spoke at the Windows Hardware Engineering conference. Perhaps most significantly, Sinofsky and Anguilo demoed Windows 7 running on a miniature notebook, or netbook, with a 16 GB solid-state drive and 1 GB of random access memory running an Intel Atom dual-core 1.6 GHz processor.

Microsoft's Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) is in full swing this week, hot on the heels of the recent PDC. The main subject is, of course, Windows 7. This being a conference focused on hardware makers, Microsoft made a whole slew of announcements related to how Windows 7 will deal with hardware.

It's no secret that SSDs suffer from performance penalties when it comes to small random writes. Even though more modern SSD try to solve some of these issues hardware-wise, software can also play a major role. Instead of resorting to things like delaying all writes until shutdown and storing them in RAM, SanDisk claims it has a better option. At WinHEC yesterday, the company introduced its Extreme FFS, which it claims will improve write performance on SSDs by a factor of 100.

Fujitsu debuted two updated models and an entirely new model in its LifeBook line of notebook computers Tuesday. The new U820 and P1630 are new versions of models the hardware maker released in 2007. The all-new LifeBook N7010 features two screens -- a traditional 16-inch wide display as well as a 4-inch color touchscreen situated near the keyboard. The 5.6-inch LifeBook U820 weights 1.32 pounds and features an Intel Atom Z-series processor. Fujitsu promises 7.5 hours of life with a four-cell battery and 3.5 hours with a new two-cell unit.

It seems that Haiku hacker Francois Revol (mmu_man) posted a few messages to a thread in MSI's forums asking to provide hardware with open specifications and/or (non-GPL) FOSS drivers such that alternative operating systems like Haiku and others could benefit and be supported as well. His messages were seemingly squelched by a forum moderator as "rubbish" while other, pro-Linux, postings seem to have remain untouched. Francois decided to respond with a public blog rant of his own opinions regarding the state of open source driver support and vendors' responsibility to their customers.

Apple's new MacBooks had gamers singing their praises when CEO Steve Jobs unveiled them last month. The company dropped integrated Intel graphics chipsets in favor of Nvidia's new GeForce 9400M, which is also integrated but which promises more than a basic step up in 3-D performance. "The new graphics chips are going to be at least twice as fast as the older MacBooks, and that should put them in the range to support more games," said Glenda Adams, who heads up internal development at Aspyr Media.

Good news for those of you who got hooked on climbing gear after reading about the USB Carabiner Flash Drive, this new safety hardware combo comes with a built-in analog watch and a LED flashlight. Made of robust metal alloy case for strength and durability, the Japanese movement is long lasting and accurate. It is also water resistant for those moments when you get caught out in the rain. The super bright LED torch lights up at the press of a button, and projects a strong light up to several meters. Features: Watch, carabineer and torch survival tool Robust metal alloy case Carabineer clip to connect the unit to bags, belts, key chains etc. Japanese movement with glowing hour markings Super bright white LED torch Size: 8cm x 4cm x 1.4cm The Carabiner with Watch and LED Flashlight is available for £29.95 (about $48 USD) over at the BoysStuff.co.uk website.