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.

No, the green IT area is spartan, quiet, and there’s really not a lot going on. Fujitsu Siemens has the best-populated stand, showing off its zero-watt PCs and low-energy servers. IBM has an area devoted to energy optimisation (again in servers); Sun has something similar, backed up by a static display of a low-energy vehicle it sponsors but isn’t related to anything very much; and Hitachi has what you’d be hard pushed to describe as a stand since it didn’t seem to be showing anything at all when I was there.

And that’s pretty much it, really. It all seemed uncomfortably as if lip service is being paid to green IT, but very little else.

In other halls – especially the Future Parc dedicated to research – there were plenty of solar cells in evidence but it’s telling that few of these are currently in commercial products. One of the rare commercial uses of solar panels I did see was from a company called Sunload, which was showing off a really rather cool set of bags, luggage and foldaway devices using flexible solar panels. Bags with solar cells in the lid flaps are pretty much the best way I’ve seen so far to make use of solar energy in everyday life. The products aren’t distributed in the UK but I’ll be trying to coax some stuff out of them to look at anyway.

And, of course, there was the biodegradable flash drive, which while not likely to cause the world to stop turning on its axis – and also not really biodegradable – was at least innovative.

But it’s a bit of a poor show, all things considered.

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:

Gigabyte
Over on the Gigabyte display, the big news is the Thin Note M1024, and it certainly is thin:

A 10in screen and Atom N270 processor put it squarely in the netbook camp, but the MSI reps on the stand are pitching the price around the $600 mark, which may well put it over £400 when it hits the UK in a few months. The M1024 weighs just 890g with a six-cell battery, but the pedestrian black-and-grey design doesn’t do it too many favours in our eyes.

Asus
On the huge Asus stand, Eee PCs are out in force, although there are fewer new netbook models than we’d expected. On its very own stand is the new convertible-tablet model, the Eee PC T91:

Nearby was the svelte range of S models, with the S101 we’ve already seen along with new S101H high-capacity version. There are also some updates to the 1000H in the form of the 1002HA, with 120GB hard-disk storage and 10GB SSD (which somewhat contradicts MSI’s claims to have the world’s first hybrid), as well as the 1008HA, which adds an Atom N280 processor:

The first hint of the abandonment of Windows XP as the default OS for netbooks can also be seen on the stand. One of the S101s I saw is running Windows 7, and there were little cards scattered about the Eee stand proclaiming Windows 7’s brilliance. This no doubt makes Microsoft very happy.

All of these models should be on the streets of the UK in between one and three months’ time, and obviously we’ll be reviewing them in full just as soon as we can get them into our labs.