Seagate 400GB External Hard Drive

Seagate Technology, maker of the world's most popular hard drives, announcedtoday at CES it is now shipping its popular Seagate External Hard Drive with newcapacities up to 400GB. Available with easy pushbutton-button backup andaward-winning backup software, and with its stylish design, cool-runningruggedness, and a convenient on/off switch for power savings and data security,the Seagate External Hard Drive offers the most convenient way to store all thetreasures of your digital lifestyle. Perfect for a PC or Mac, Seagate ExternalHard Drive lets you safely store massive amounts of digital video and picturesof family and friends, business files, the latest computer games, favoritemusic, and more. It was developed from the ground up to deliver the highestconsumer design standards ever seen in a hard drive.
With Seagate's unique interlocking design, users can stack multiple SeagateExternal Hard Drives horizontally, or place the drive vertically for thesmallest footprint on the market. A sturdy, upright stand and non-slip rubberfeet on two sides ensure the drive can be arranged in many convenient ways andwon't slide around or slip off a desk. And users can plug and unplug the drivewithout turning off the computer. The Seagate External Hard Drive runs muchcooler than other high-capacity external drives, because it's designed todissipate heat in any configuration -- vertical or stacked. Plus, lifetime techsupport means that users can call for friendly technical advice for the entirelong life of the drive.

"As people pile up more and more digital photos and videos, digital music andother content, they need a reliable, simple way to store and back it up," saidBrian Dexheimer, Seagate executive vice president of Sales and Marketing. "It'sone thing to lose a spreadsheet -- it's another thing entirely to lose picturesof your kids. Consumers want easy to use, plug-and-play solutions that don'trequire an electrical engineering degree to master. That's why Seagate designedour drive to be exceptionally easy to use, while maintaining our signaturereliability and performance."

In the past several months, Seagate has introduced a variety of external storageproducts designed to address consumers' needs for reliable, flexible and simplestorage. The new Seagate USB 2.0 Pocket Hard Drive -- the world's first 5GB harddrive truly small enough to fit in a pocket or backpack -- redefinescost-performance when compared with traditional USB thumb drives. And the newSeagate USB 2.0 Portable External Hard Drive offers up to 100GB of portablestorage in a sleek and very small footprint perfect for travel -- it's theworld's first external drive featuring a 100GB, 2.5-inch hard drive with ablazing fast 5,400-rpm spin speed.

Reliability is crucial to consumers. External hard drives may get moved aroundand are often stacked. With their high shock tolerance and excellent heatdissipation, Seagate external drives are built to handle these usage patterns.The inventive new drives are built on the world's most advanced hard drivetechnology platforms from Seagate, and are designed to make data and digitalcontent storage, backup and transfer more reliable and easier than ever to meeta variety of consumers' computing needs. Seagate is at the forefront of rapidlyevolving consumer storage trends -- with these new drives, consumers now havebetter control of their data, video, music, digital photography, games andmultimedia.

Available Now

The Seagate External Hard Drive is now available in capacities of 200GB, 300GBand 400GB featuring pushbutton backup and dual USB 2.0 and Firewire connectors,or in capacities of 160GB and 250GB in an economical storage-only solution withUSB 2.0 connector. The Seagate External Hard Drive features a worry-freeone-year warranty that covers all parts and labor, plus free technical supporteven after the warranty ends. Ask for this and other Seagate products at BestBuy, CompUSA, Fry's, D&H, and other retail stores.

SAPPHIRE HD 6950, 6870 Dirt 3 Special Edition

Bothcards SAPPHIRE HD 6950 Dirt3 Special Edition (shown on the left) andSAPPHIRE HD 6870 FleX Dirt3 Special Editionare non-overclocked edition. However, both of them are bundled with a Dirt 3 game coupon, which allows you to download the full game for free. Addtionally, the HD 6950 Dirt 3 Special Edition also features a special cooler with a dual fan configuration.

Full press releasehere-SAPPHIRE.

Heresthefull specifications of the HD 6950 Dirt3 and HD 6870 Dirt3.

Pogoplug launches Series 4, ads USB 3.0 connectivity and USM

The latest addition to Pogoplugs growing family of devices is adding quite a few new features and it looks like the company wants to take a serious slice out of the home storage/home cloud market with the Series 4. That said, the price has also gone up and you still have to add your own hard drives, but at least the Series 4 comes with a little twist to make this a lot tidier.

The Series 4 Pogoplug appears to be the same as the recently announced Pogoplug Mobile, but with a few additional features. However, the two are only sharing the same look and basic features as the company has made quite a few changes. First of all were looking at a larger device, as the top comes off to reveal a SATA/USM (Universal Storage Module) connector which will accept either a 2.5-inch internal SATA hard drive or one of Seagates GoFlex 2.5-inch hard drives. Theres also a USB 2.0 port hidden in here somewhere.

As with the Pogoplug Mobile the Series 4 sports Gigabit Ethernet and an SD card slot, but it also adds a pair of rear USB 3.0 ports for further storage expansion. Were not sure if the ARM processor inside the Series 4 has received an upgrade as well, but its entirely possible that Pogoplug is using the same PLX NAS7820 SoC as it did in the Pogoplug Video, a product that is now discontinued and that sold for twice that of the Series 4, especially as this dual core ARM11 SoC (ARMv6 architecture) has a PCI Express interface which would allow it to connect to a USB 3.0 host controller. Its also entirely possible that were looking at the same Marvell 88F6192 Kirkwood ARMv5 SoC as found in the Pogoplug Mobile, as this two has SATA and PCI Express support, although its only a single core SoC.

Pogoplug is making a big deal out of the fact that its products features infinite storage expansion, although this is only true in as far as you can plug in additional storage devices until you run out of ports. As with previous products, the Series 4 comes with 5GB of cloud storage, something that was announced last month by the company. Were not sure why you need to use another could service when the Pogoplug is meant to be a cloud storage device, but such is life and not all things make sense. In as much as we think the Pogoplug Series 4 is a neat device, especially as it allows you to stream media around your home or share it over the internet as well as use it as a simple NAS, we cant but wonder why anyone would be willing to spend US$99.95 (S$130) on one when you can pick up a two bay NAS for little more. The ability to share files might be better than with a basic NAS, but theres no data redundancy and we doubt the performance will be as good as that of even a cheap NAS.

Source: Pogoplug

News'flash' No Flash for Xoom + Honeycomb combination

So the Motorola Xoom tablet is well on its way to hitting retail shelves, and certain carriers will get first dibs on the device before the tablet is released for saleas a standalone unit and not as part of a data contract bundle. That sounds good enough for us: after all, just about all the details pertaining to the Xoom has already be revealed, so nothing else could go wrong for Motorolas and Googles flagship tablet, right?

Unfortunately for us consumers, it would seem that this is a typical case of Murphys Law in action. Apparently, a microsite hosted by US carrier Verizon to advertise the Xoom has dropped a bombshell which is sure set tongues wagging. According to Verizon, it seems that the first batch of Xooms being sold to consumers will be offered sans support for the all-important Adobe Flash plugin, as shown in the image below.

Now, the lack of Flash support for Android devices is definitely not unheard of. After all, earlier versions of Android were well-known for not having support for the Flash plugin as well, and it was only with Froyo that Android users were finally able to experience the full web experience often touted by Google and hardware OEMs as a key factor of its alleged superiority over iOS.

Still, it does not change the fact that the lack of Flash support is definitely not going to give Honeycomb users the full web content that they can come to expect, especially after the success that was Froyo and Gingerbread. That being said, it is worth pointing out, if only for consolations sake, that Flash will eventually make its way down to Honeycomb, as long as users do not mind waiting it out for a few more months. After all, eventual Flash support is still infinitely better than opting for a platform that has completely zero support for the plugin, is it not?

Source: Verizon

MSI unveils GT780DX Notebook with 4.16GHz clocked Core i7

MSI has dared to do what no other notebook manufacturer would by selling a gaming laptop with a heavily overclocked mobile Core i7 EE processor tipping beyond the 4GHz barrier. This will be as part of a limited edition variant of its GT780DX, running a Core i7-2920XM Extreme Edition with frequencies of up to 4.16GHz on tap in Turbo Boost mode (up from the stock 3.5GHz Turbo Boost frequency).

MSI has made this possible by packing the notebook with a superior cooling solution it calls "Cooler Boost". MSI says with this cooling tech implemented the fans can work at higher than usual rotation speeds resulting in a temperature drop by as much as 10c.

The GT780DX is already quite the impressive piece of portable gaming prowess with its 17.3-inch (either 1600x900 or 1920x1080) LED-backlit display, NVIDIAs GeForce GTX 570M graphics core supported by 3GB of GDDR5 memory and up to 16GB of DDR3 system memory.

Up to two HDDs can be incorporated into the GT780DX with the premium option being a couple 750GB 7200rpm in RAID 0, offering 1.5TB of storage space. Further to that is space for a DVD or Blu-ray drive.

Polishing off this notebooks feature set is the SteelSeries-made LED backlit keyboard (providing a good batch of gaming oriented features), a couple USB 3.0 ports, an eSATA port, HDMI 1.4 and VGA video outputs as well as Bluetooth 3.0 connectivity and a 9-cell battery.

Pricing on this limited edition overclocked model hasnt yet been disclosed. The base (non-overclocked) model of the GT780DX with its Core i7 2670QM processor sells for US $1,749.99.

Source: MSI

New program allows you to deblur images at touch of a button!

Vladimir Yuzhikov, a software engineer working in image and signal processing, has created a windows application, "SmartDeblur", which allows the user to, at the touch of a button, sharpen up foggy and unfocused images. Yuzhikov explains that the app sharpens up blurring which occurs from both movement and poor focus.

This kind of blurring (ie, non-artificial blurring) has been impossible to fix with conventional software until now, and Yuzhikov explains that the mathematics behind it are 70 years in the making. Trying to fix blurring is thus not a particularly new thing, but actually succeeding is.

Examples of SmartDeblurs effects

The images are not perfect, as you can see above and it seems like motion blur is more difficult to fix than simply poor focus. There are artifacts all over the images, but that being said, the improvement they exhibit is very impressive indeed.

If you want a copy of the program, and again, note that it is for Windows only, you can download it here

Nvidia Shop Decor Competition - Presentation Grand Finale

Well, it's been a busy month for all of us, and come tomorrow, it will be thetime where the heros should be honoured.

All of you are welcomed to come down and witness the end of this grand event!

Starting from 12pm onwards, the 4 sweet Nvidia ladies will be in Sim Lim Square,promoting awareness for VR-Zone and Nvidia.

From 1pm onwards, Mad Mod Mike will join in the crowd, and present prizes tothe top 3 shops:

1pm ~ 1.30pm: Bizgram Pte Ltd - Prize presentation of being the 3rd bestdecorated shop. Also, we'll give out the prize for the Online Voting winner, whovoted for this shop. (Inno3D Geforce 6800GT)

1.30pm ~ 2.00pm: DAT Computers Pte Ltd - Prize Presentation of being the 2ndbest decorated shop. Prizes for the Online Voting Winner (Inno3D Geforce 7800GT)will be given presented here also.

2.00pm ~ 3pm: Media Mart Computer - Prize Presentation of being the BESTdecorated shop. Prizes for the Online Voting Winner will be given out here also(Inno3D Geforce 7800GTX). **SPECIAL PERFORMANCE OF MAD MOD MIKE WILLCOMERENCE OVER AT MEDIA MART DURING THE PRIZE PRESENTATION!!!


So do join us Tomorrow, Saturday, 26th Nov 2005, for closing ceremony of theFIRST EVER Nvidia Shop Decor Competition. Especially for the MMM segment, it'lldefinitely be a huge surprise!

NVIDIA preparing revised GTX 560 Ti

As we wait for next-gen 28nm GPUs, NVIDIA is preparing an upgrade for the popular GeForce GTX 560 Ti. Much like the GeForce GTX 260 was upgraded to GTX 260 (216 Core) in 2008, the GTX 560 Ti is set to be revised as GTX 560 Ti (448 Core). Despite the branding, the GTX 560 Ti (448 Core) has much more in common with GTX 570 than the vanilla GTX 560 Ti.

Unlike the GTX 560 Ti, which is based on a fully enabled GF114 die, the GTX 560 Ti (448 Core) will be based on the GF110 die. In essence, it is GTX 570 with 1 SM disabled, and likely underclocked. It features 14 active SMs, which indlude 448 SP / CUDA Cores and 56 TMUs; 320-bit memory and 40 ROPs - a very similar configuration to the old GTX 470. Along with increased performance, power consumption is expected to rise over the 384 SP GTX 560 Ti. A benefit to using GF110 means the revised 560 Ti will feature 2 x SLI connectors, enabling 3-way SLI. In terms of display outputs, DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort are included. Visually, the reference GTX 560 Ti (448) is expected to look identical to the reference GTX 570.

The revised GTX 560 Ti is expected to compete with overclocked SKUs of the HD 6950 2GB, and fill in the gap between HD 6950 2GB (~$280) and GTX 570/HD 6970 (~$340). Priced right, the GTX 560 Ti (448) could be an enticing option until the next-gen GPUs hit. NVIDIA is preparing to release its first Kepler part, GK107, in Q1 2012. However, performance GPUs to succeed the likes of GTX 560/570/580 are only expected later in 2012.

With the GTX 560 Ti (448 Core) there will be no less than 4 different versions if GTX 560 on the market - GTX 560, GTX 560 Ti, GTX 560 Ti (OEM) and now, GTX 560 Ti (448 Core) - a new height for GPU nomenclature chaos.