I remember some time ago in order for a laptop to gain ‘Vista Premium Certified’, it required a hybrid harddrive. Now, I guess not.. but question still remains.. where are the hybrid harddrives? It’s been almost 3 years or more since it was mentioned..
I mean, there should be at least one around now. Samsung and Seagate announced theirs last year. So where are they? Does ReadyDrive work just as bad as ReadyBoost?
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Engadget is reporting Art Lebedev are working on the Optimus Mini 3.0 which may include a touchscreen and wireless bluetooth.
Anyone thinking what I’m thinking? This would be sweet to stick on the dash of your car to use as an input device. It may require AC power though.
Sphere: Related ContentSo I try to boot up my Fujitsu U810 last night and something horribly goes wrong. It wouldn’t boot. Right after the BIOS information shows up, I could hear a bad clicking sound from the harddrive and it would immediately shut down and go through an endless loop of restarting.
To say the least, I was bummed out. I initially thought my drive was gone. I’ve already dropped U810 about 3-4 times and it always came back like a champ. I didn’t remember dropping it this last time but I could have jarred it by not gently setting it down on the table. Thoughts of replacing it with a $500-600 32GB SSD drive crossed my mind so I can prevent things like this happening since I am always mobile with this device and could use the extra durability.
So I pull out my thumb drive which contains Bart PE which I installed a while back in case something like this happens to any of my computers. As long as you can boot from the USB port, you can run this slimmed down version of Windows for diagnostics, testing, and recovery purposes. I basically wanted to check if my C:\ drive was intact so I could go on to the next step. Bart PE is great in that you can also get a network connection and backup the contents of your drive if you computer doesn’t want to boot up.
It turns out my harddrive was fine. Within Bart PE, I could see the entire contents of my drive and ran chkdsk which showed everything looked ok.
Then I remember the last thing I did. I put the U810 into hibernate mode. Ok, this told me the master boot record (MBR) was screwed. I have a dual-boot set up of Windows XP and Ubuntu and have GRUB as the bootloader. So somehow hibernating screwed up the MBR and left me with an unbootable machine.
So I began searching around for a Windows XP install CD. I did not have one. The usual solution for fixing the MBR is running a boot disk or Windows XP install CD, going to the recovery console, and running fixmbr in the command prompt.
I searched around and found that the Ultimate Boot CD contained some utilities to recover the MBR. I downloaded the ISO and burned a CD with the MacBook. After connecting an external CD drive to the U810, I booted the CD to see if I can fix this thing. To say the least, trying to find a utility that worked was frustrating. Some of the utilities ran a virtual machine and left you with a DOS prompt without telling you the name of the .exe file to run. I ran several boot managers from the CD and successfully booted into XP, but couldn’t figure out how to fix the MBR with the boot loaders. At least I could get XP going, but there’s no way I’m going to carry around an external drive just to get it to boot.
After about an hour, I found partition application that successfully restored the MBR and used the XP partition as the default boot partition.
The next thing I did was wipe out the Ubuntu partitions, install Partition Magic, and resize the XP partition to use the cleared up space. I didn’t use Ubuntu much anyway. If I ever need to screw around with distros, I’ll go back to using VMWare.
So… phew.. damn I’m glad I didn’t have to reinstall the OS or replace my drive. Bart PE and Ultimate Boot CD saved my ass and prevented me from considering trying out Vista again.
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I ordered some accessories last week for the Fujitsu U810 from the Fujitsu store.
One of the items was the docking station. I finally brought it in to work today and took some snapshots with the iPhone.
On the back are 3 USB ports, VGA, LAN, and power. The right side includes an additional USB port to make it 4 total.
There’s not much to it. The piece of metal in the back slides in to make it more portable. It works fine and will make it much easier to set up at my second location.
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Panasonic unveiled a rugged UMPC at CeBit. Based on Intel’s Atom (Silverthorne), it has a 5.6″ touchscreen and is water, dust, and shock proof.
I’ll assume this is not cheap since it’s under the Toughbook line. This should be aimed to field workers.
Panasonic Also has an Atom Powered UMPC! : Akihabara News .com
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OLPC News posted a hands-on review of the Elonex ONE, UK’s first sub £100 laptop. It’s aimed to compete with the OLPC XO. The design is very similar to the XO in that the guts of the machine is behind the screen rather than below the keyboard.
Some interesting details:
Akihabara news posted 40 (!) photos of the new black and blue colored Panasonic R7’s. Comparing to a 15″ MacBook Pro, you can see this is a very compact subnotebook.
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