Home & Small Office Computer Guide

The saga of the laptop battery recall that started with Dell and then moved on to Apple, Toshiba and Fujitsu just goes on getting worse. Dell will be recalling an additional 1 million batteries and now Lenovo (IBM) have started to recall laptop batteries that they purchased from Sony.

The Mozilla Foundation has announced that a new version of Firefox has been released although at the moment it’s really only suitable for experienced suers and developers. The final safe version should be available by the end of October.

The new version will have a new look with several very different features. The toolbar will be see-through until you need to use it and a new way of bookmarking sites will be available. The new version will also come with some new security features as well.

At the moment computer makers have only one option and that’s to buy the processor and the memory as two separate items but that may change in the near future. Intel has now displayed a dual core processor with 256mb of RAM attached directly to each core.

Whether this will prototype will be developed further and ultimately be released is yet to be seen but it will be interesting to see if the gain in speed is really worth the ultimate cost.

At the moment computer makers have only one option and that’s to buy the processor and the memory as two separate items but that may change in the near future. Intel has now displayed a dual core processor with 256mb of RAM attached directly to each core.

Whether this will prototype will be developed further and ultimately be released is yet to be seen but it will be interesting to see if the gain in speed is really worth the ultimate cost.

A couple of weeks ago the price of a stick of RAM (Random Access Memory) went up overnight here in Australia by a whopping $21.00 a stick. It makes you wonder how the laws of supply and demand could really lead to such an increase in the price of RAM.

Sometimes though other things that we don’t necessarily know about can seriously affect the prices we pay. During 2001 and 2002 the price of RAM in the US was artificially inflated when executives at Samsung’s US unit and others agreed to fix the price of RAM at well above the real market price.

Last year Samsung pleaded guilty to price fixing and now one of their executives is doing prison time for the same offence. You can read the full story here

It just makes you wonder now anytime that RAM goes up by such a large amount overnight.

Well it had to happen - Dell issued a recall notice over Sony batteries and then Apple issued a recall notice over Sony batteries and now it’s Toshiba’s turn to issue a recall notice for laptops that contain a Sony battery.

Toshiba says that about 340,000 laptops are affected and they are all either Dynabook or Dynabook Satellite laptops manufactured between March and May 2006.

I wonder if Sony are now wishing they had never got into the battery building business because this latest recall pushes the total number of affected batteries up over the 6 million mark.

With the release of the new Intel Core 2 processors consumers are once again being hit with marketing that focuses on speed. Users are being told that they need to upgrade simply because new machines fitted with the new processors will run much faster than the old Pentium and AMD powered computers.

But does processing speed really matter? Will it actually have an impact on the bottom line of your business?

I guess that depends on just what your business is but for us the increase in processing speed is not going to affect our productivity at all. In fact, like most people, an increase in processing speed won’t even be noticed.

Despite the fact that we’re running high-end graphics programmes and HTML editors all at the same time the increase in processing speed is really not worth worrying about and it’s hard to justify upgrading our machines just for an increase in speed.

What does affect our productivity and our bottom line isn’t processing speed but screen size. If you want to be able to work faster add a second monitor to your computer and you will be amazed at just how much more work you can get done.

After inadvertently releasing the price list for Vista on their Canadian website Microsoft seems to have had second thoughts about the price point for their new operating system.

Microsoft has now officially announced that pricing for Vista will be the same for comparable versions of XP and nominated $US199 (around $A258) as the price for Windows Vista Home Basic.

Microsoft has also announced that Vista will be available for businesses in November and consumers in January.