Vince Freeman

It seems that everyone and his dog are busily working on netbook product lines, promoting their current editions while quickly adding newer revisions. Asus may have started the revolution with the Eee PC in the fall of ’07, but Acer and MSI quickly joined it, and since then Dell, HP, Lenovo, and others — nine […]

Page 1 Introduction and Case Page 2 Processors and Cooling Page 3 Motherboards and Memory Page 4 Hard Drives and Optical Drive Page 5 Video Card, LCD Display and Audio Page 6 Mouse, Keyboard & Controller Page 7 Communications, Operating System, etc. Page 8 Price Roundup and Closing Remarks Introduction With the back-to-school season upon […]

After Nvidia introduced its entry-level GeForce 9 Series graphics-processing-unit (GPU) lineup, we expected a response from AMD, and that company wasted no time in giving us one. After all, AMD’s ATI division has been on a serious roll lately, and its high-end Radeon HD 4800 line has been taking Nvidia to town. The Radeon HD […]

The loudest buzz in the PC graphics market is usually about Nvidia’s and AMD/ATI’s latest ultra-high-end products — cards with graphics processing units (GPUs) strong enough to whip any game on the market, more onboard memory than your current desktop, and power requirements that could shut down the grid. But what about the rest of […]

Has the Athlon 64 Duo Upset the CPU King’s Roadmap? The CPU market is one that rewards innovation and performance, but chews up and spits out players who don’t bother to bring their “A” game. But sometimes, a contestant rides a hot streak and runs the table — just as AMD has done with the […]

Athlon 64 and Prescott Get Ready To Rumble After a busy spring, desktop PC processor buffs have nothing to watch but summer reruns — Intel’s Pentium 4 and AMD’s Athlon XP received speed bumps and faster front-side buses in April and May, respectively, but things have been pretty quiet since. That’s going to change in […]

Ultra-High-End Technology Goes Mainstream The insatiable need for ever-higher-performance hardware is one of the hallmarks of personal computing, but lately it’s gotten positively decadent. There used to be a clear line between the desktop PC — i.e., the humble e-mail and word processing system — and the professional workstation, or high-priced hub of the most […]

Intel Leads the Way To 90 Nanometers Intel has a number of different strategies to blunt the blow of AMD’s Hammer, and one of them was formally announced during this week’s Intel Developer Forum — the Pentium 4 successor codenamed “Prescott.” Due in the second half of this year (most are betting on the fourth […]

Suffering Companies Take It Out on Consumers Each morning I check the technology news, and every day I ask the same question: Why are so many companies actively trying to hurt the computer industry? With PC sales and overall profits down, many firms are looking to “maintain market share,” “explore secondary markets,” or any number […]

Let’s say your company recently upgraded a fleet of 450MHz Pentium III desktops to newer, faster processors. What are you going to do with the original chips? One standard business practice is to slap them into inventory and take a depreciation write-off. This works fine until the auditors ask for a physical count and find […]