Could this be the next generation of laptop displays?
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Pixel Qi Demos Amazing E-Ink Laptop Screen
Overclocking, since its beginnings, has always been about achieving more value for your money.
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Tom’s Hardware Italy Lands 3DMark Hall of Fame
LG Display announced earlier this morning that it has successfully created the “world’s thinnest” 42- and 47-inch LCD TV panels, measuring only 5.9 mm (.23 inches) thick.
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LG LCD Display Only .23 Inches Thick
Microsoft laptop mouse gets a shrunken dongle.
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Microsoft Shows Laptop Mouse With Nano Dongle
Microsoft continues its quest to convince people to watch TV on their PCs with today’s announcement that Netflix subscribers can finally stream more than 12,000 movies and TV episodes through Windows Media Center. But there’s a catch; two, actually.
First, the feature is available only to customers running Windows Vista Home Premium or Windows Vista Ultimate; if you’re still rolling with Windows XP Media Center Edition, you’re out of luck.
Okay, so we can’t expect Microsoft to continue enhancing XP when Windows 7 is waiting in the wings. But what about people who bought Windows Media Center extenders—especially the new breed that are compatible only with the Windows Vista version of Media Center? Sorry, you’re in the same boat. Microsoft won’t be extending the Netflix feature to that hardware. Microsoft figures if you’re savvy enough to set up a Media Center Extender, you can figure out how to install one of the third-party Media Center plug-ins that already enable Netflix streaming.
“The enthusiast knows how to install a Media Center plug-in that can do that,” said Ben Reed, Microsoft’s Senior Product Marketing Manager for Windows Media Center. “We’re focusing on delivering the best TV-watching experience on a TV. There’s Hulu and all the network portals for watching TV content, but the consumer faces a different user interface with every site.”
The consumer’s other option, as Reed pointed out, is to buy an Xbox 360 (along with an Xbox Live Gold membership). But this space is crowded with other competitors, too, including the dead-simple Roku box and Internet-capable Blu-ray players with built-in Netflix clients.
Although we weren’t able to access the new service before our story deadline, the user experience Microsoft described to us does sound compelling. For starters, you won’t have to open your Netflix account in a web browser and add movies to your “Watch Instantly” queue before you can begin streaming them. You’ll also be able to search the Netflix library using a filter that shows only content that’s available to watch instantly. Reed told us subscribers will be able to manage both their disc-rental and watch-instantly queues from within Windows Media Center, which should be a improvement over standing in front of your TV to read the small text. Lastly, the Windows Media Center edition of Netflix is designed to work with any Windows Media Center-compatible remote control.
If you need another reason to build a home-theater PC, here it is.
We first saw it in January. Hopefully it’ll be out by the end of June.
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Asus Eee Keyboard Launching Late June
SSDs are all the rage for performance-oriented builders these days, but they aren’t without problems. Even the largest solid state drive is too small to hold all the stuff we need to store on the C: drive—games, photos, music, videos, etc.—and the inexpensive models max out at around 64GB of capacity. And there’s the performance problem, to boot. All but the most expensive SSDs suffer from very slow write speeds, which can have a significant impact on your real-world performance.
So what’s the solution? We’re going to show you how to set up your Windows install like a Linux setup—with the OS and primary apps on the SSD, and your user profile and space-hogging games on a traditional hard disk. This gives us the best of both worlds—the folders we write to most frequently are on a traditional disk, while our boot and app load times can benefit greatly from the fast read speed and low random-access time of an SSD. Best of all, you can use even a tiny 64GB SSD without having to constantly manage disk space—picking and choosing which apps and media will be stored on the small drive.
While you can change the default path of your user profile using the Windows Pre-Install Kit, it’s more trouble than it’s worth to do it that way. Instead, we’re going to tweak Windows after it’s already in place. The first thing you’ll need to do is install Windows on your SSD, which is essentially no different than any other time you’ve installed Windows. When you’re prompted to create an account at the end of the install, don’t use the account name you actually want; use a temporary placeholder instead. You’ll create the actual account you’ll use later. Don’t install any applications until after you’ve moved your user profile.
Once Windows is installed, you should create the user account you intend to use. Go to the Control Panel and search for Add User. Create your account, but don’t log in yet.
We’ve tested our procedure with Windows Vista and Windows 7 Beta 1, but it should work with XP as well if you adjust the paths yourself (Vista and Windows 7 store user profile in C:\Users by default, XP is C:\Documents and Settings). Once Windows is installed and updated with drivers and security patches, you’ll need to set up the partitions on your hard disk.
We created two partitions on our hard disk, one for the user profile and one for games and other large applications. To access the partitioning tools, right-click Computer in the Start Menu and click Manage. Go to Disk Management. Then, right-click your hard disk and create a new partition. We made each partition roughly half of the drive, but if you have a lot of media files, you may want to make your user profile partition larger than your game partition. Once the two partitions have been formatted as NTFS, you can continue to the next step.
Next, you’ll want to assign a drive letter to your user profile drive. We chose U:\, but you can use whatever letter you prefer. In U:\, you’ll need to create a folder called Users. Now, reboot your computer and go into Safe Mode by pressing F8 as it boots. Once you’re in Safe Mode, go to C:\Users and copy the Default and Public folders to U:\Users\Default and U:\Users\Public. You’ll likely find some *.tmp files that simply won’t copy; it’s OK to skip them.
After that’s done, you should open the registry editor (press the Windows key on your keyboard and type regedit). Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList. In that folder, you need to change the value of the Default key to U:\Users\Default, the Public key to U:\Users\Public, and the ProfilesDirectory to U:\Users. Reboot your PC and log in using the account you created in step 1. During the login, Windows will create your new user account, which should be in U:\Users.
If you didn’t take our advice in step 1 and start with a clean install, this is the point at which you should copy the contents of your old user profile into your new directory. Rather than doing a wholesale copy/paste of the whole directory, it’s safer to only pull the files you need.
You’ll also want to open the registry and do a Find for C:\Users. We found about 20 instances on our test machines, even in a fresh account. While there are some tools that will do an automatic find and replace on the registry, we chose to manually use regedit so we could verify each change ourselves. Open regedit (type regedit after pressing the Windows key), click Computer at the top of the left pane, and then go to the Edit menu and click Find. Type C:\Users and click Find. Then manually change each key to U:\Users. Press F3 to find the next instance, and keep at it until you've changed all the entries. Reboot your PC, then restart regedit and search one final time to ensure you didn't miss any entries.
If you're doing this on a machine that's been used, there will likely be a massive number of registry changes necessary. In that case, download Registry Finder (www.acelogix.com/regfinder.html, 30-day trial) to automate some of the process. While it’s not perfect, Registry Finder will find and change many of the entries for you. You'll still want to do a manual search with regedit, but Registry Finder could save you an hour of copy/pasting.
At this point, you could delete C:\Users if you so desire. We find that it's better to leave the folder, so that even poorly behaved apps that use a hardcoded profile path will continue to work. You should, however, occasionally check the C:\Users folder to see if any files have popped up there.
At this point, your Windows install is ready to go. However, before you install any big apps, you should mount your games partition so you don't waste precious space on the SSD for games.
Now, we're going to mount your games partition in the file system. First, you create a folder in your C:\Program Files directory (or C:\Program Files (x86) on 64-bit Windows) called Games. Go back to the Computer Management console and click Disk Management. Right-click the Games partition and select Change Drive Letter and Paths. Select any drive letters that are currently being used and click Remove, then click Add. Select "Mount in the following empty NTFS folder", and browse to the Games folder you just created. Now anything you install at C:\Program Files\Games will actually be stored on your hard disk, and not your SSD. Paths and permissions will also be inherited. Be sure not to mount your Games folder to any additional drives.
