Guillotine

Today Intel announced that they are ready to start offering the i7 mobile CPU for laptops. Using Intel’s “Turbo Boost” technology the new chip is supposed to be 75% faster than current generation laptop mobile CPUs.

“These processors in addition to the new Intel® PM55 Express Chipset, provide the best laptop experience for intense gaming, digital media, photos, music, business applications and other multi-threaded software that hungers for faster processing speed. The chips also boost overall performance when using several of these applications simultaneously.”

Pricing for the Intel® Core™ i7-920XM, Intel® Core™ i7-820QM and Intel® Core™ i7-720QM mobile processors is $1,054, $546 and $364, respectively.

Read the full story here:  Intel Unveils Fastest Laptop Chips Ever With the New Intel® Core™ i7 Mobile Processor

Okay… Another reason I haven’t posted much in the past couple weeks (aside from a brief marathon involving watching all 167 episodes of InuYasha) was that my 2 year old PC finally started showing signs of getting ready to kick the bucket. I started getting warnings on the Intel monitor that the CPU was running about 50-60 degrees F above normal (actually went up to the terminal temp range several times). I had intended to wait until next year hoping to score an i7 after the prices dropped a bit, but it wasn’t meant to be, so I spent the past week rebuilding my PC (most of that time reloading software).

Read more after the jump… [More]

So you just bought a new DVD writer and while loading the software you get yet another copy of Nero Essentials. If you are like me you usually delete the program as a worthless pile of junk. Typically it winds up requiring you to buy the full version to enable the encoder for whatever happens to be the current standard video codec (h.264/MPEG 4 at the moment), and even on the features that are included it usually did a so-so job. It also tends to be sluggish.

Well… This week I needed to burn some DVDs… From MPEG 4 files as it happens. I tried several free online programs and trials only to get lousy results (from choppy picture to missing sound), or a watermark. Now I could live with a watermark… If they didn’t take up 1/4th of the screen. Finally I decided to break down and buy a full DVD suite. The major players being Roxio, Cyberlink, and Nero… Ulead was not considered because I downloaded a trial version with hideous results and a lousy interface (and I’m usually a big fan of Corel products so was terribly disappointed). Roxio looks nice, but it’s quite expensive… Cyberlink I’ve used before and liked the program, but it comes in two versions… Standard for around $79, and the Ultra at around $130. Well… Some of the features I wanted were only available in the Ultra version, and I wasn’t quite ready to drop $130 on software I will rarely use. I was really starting to miss my Mac with iMovie and iDVD right about then. The only remaining product for consideration was Nero 9, and as I mentioned above I have never been impressed with their OEM bundle versions.

Read the rest after the jump. [More]

So the first volume of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya Manga arrived in stores last week, and of course I scoured the town looking for a copy (Don’t know how others may fare but the only local stores here carrying the book are Books A Million, and they only received 2 copies per store.) At any rate I secured my own copy and read it tonight while tossing candy at trick or treaters. Read my impressions after the jump. [More]