How to dodge the Intel Sandy Bridge recall

Friday, February 4th, 2011

The past days have seen some of the world’s biggest component manufacturers scrambling to find solutions to Intel’s Sandy Bridge recall. The situation is becoming clearer, with most deciding to offer customers free swaps when the revised P67 and H67 boards begin appearing in April.

For now you can work around the issue by simply plugging all hard disks and optical drives into the unaffected SATA 6Gb/s ports on your motherboard. But Asus and Gigabyte are aware not everyone knows how to do that, so both have come up with ways to educate less tech-savvy consumers.

Gigabyte is offering its customers a small utility (left) to detect if a motherboard is faulty: simply download the Gigabyte 6 Series SATA Check tool and you’ll be told if you’re using the affected ports, with guidance as to which ports to use instead.

Asus has come up with a more basic solution, sending us the above close-up photo to illustrate exactly which ports could prove problematic. As you can see, Intel-controlled SATA 6Gb/s sockets are safe to use, as are the SATA 6Gb/s ports controlled by the third-party Marvell chip by which Asus adds more ports to its boards. Only the four SATA 3Gb/s ports are faulty.

Both are clear and simple methods of helping those who may be perplexed by all the talk of SATA 3Gb/s and SATA 6Gb/s. If you’re using a motherboard made by MSI, Intel or anyone else, these precise solutions won’t apply, but if you dig out your motherboard manual and use the photo above for guidance, you should be able to figure it out quite easily.

Green IT looking pale at CeBIT

Thursday, March 5th, 2009

One of the primary themes of CeBIT this year was supposed to be Green IT. Interest in the subject is “overwhelming” according to the CeBIT website.
And indeed there’s an entire hall dedicated to it this year, albeit one of the smaller ones. But still hall 8 – “Green IT World” – is sparsely occupied. The subdued ambience is a long way from the heaving mass of bodies in hall 21, where the likes of MSI and Gigabyte are showing off their shiny stuff amid loud music and pneumatic young ladies wearing shirts which appear, very regrettably, to have shrunk in the wash.

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Netbook rivals battle it out at CeBIT

Wednesday, March 4th, 2009

The big netbook guns are out in the halls of CeBIT this year, with MSI, Asus and now Gigabyte showing a raft of new low-cost models. Here’s a round-up of what’s new.

MSI
On the MSI stand, the Wind U100 series has blossomed into the U110, U115 and U123 series. The U110 Eco promises to bring the Wind’s Achilles Heel – its battery life – up to snuff, with a claimed 12 hours on the standard battery. MSI says this is possible with the use of the new Intel Menlow mobile platform, originally intended for Intel’s pet MID (mobile internet device) product category but now half-inched for netbooks.

The U115 is, MSI claims, the first hybrid netbook with both SSD and hard disk storage, but aside from that looks the same as the U110, and both share the same styling as the original Wind U100:

The Wind U123 is slightly higher-end, with a posher, more angular look and aimed at business users, and it brings an integrated 3G broadband adapter to the Wind range:

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