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.

MSI Wind U160 netbook: first look review

Wednesday, January 6th, 2010

Listen to the chatter of the reps at the stand, and you could quickly believe that the MSI Wind U160 is the shape of netbooks to come. Forget the slightly squat designs of yesteryear: the U160 is slim and beautiful enough to have won an iF Product Design Award. And it really is slim: 25mm at its thickest point. As this “official” MSI photo shows, it brushes up rather nicely too:

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MSI X-Slim X420: first look review

Wednesday, January 6th, 2010

I had a brief play with the MSI X420 at CES Unveiled last night, the opening salvo in the five-day technological war that is Las Vegas’ Consumer Electronics Show – the biggest, as they’re rather fond of telling us, in the world.

The X420 is interesting not only of itself, but because its 14in thin-and-light design is a form factor that many people expect to be huge in the coming year or two. Light weight, thin profile, low price and high battery life are the key driving factors, and though we don’t yet know what the X420’s price is going to be in the UK (it’s $799 in the US) it’s set to deliver on the three other factors.

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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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MSI’s new-look Wind U120 – now with integrated 3G

Thursday, October 9th, 2008

MSI’s Wind U100 has earned quite a few admirers in PC Pro’s offices, but if there’s one thing lacking from it and all the current crop of netbooks, it’s integrated 3G. 

Right on cue, MSI have just sent us a few shots of their forthcoming Wind U120, which will be officially launching in January. Draft-N and HSDPA 3.5G will be integrated as standard, and we presume the rest of the specification will be the usual netbook fare. So you can expect an Atom N270 processor, 1 or 2 gigabytes  of memory and probably a 120GB hard drive as a bare minimum given MSI’s propensity towards mechanical disk drives in their notebooks. We have a gut feeling that it might even be the first netbook in the range to sport Intel’s forthcoming N330 Dual-Core Atom processor.

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MSI netbook gets second Wind…

Friday, July 11th, 2008

You may have read our review of the MSI Wind earlier in the week. If you didn’t, here’s the deal: we liked it. A lot.

So we were even more pleased to discover that the very same laptop was going to be available from PC World for signicantly less cash – £32 to be precise at £238 exc VAT. Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, we reckon.

Aside from the slightly different colour scheme – the Advent 4211 Netbook has a black lid where our MSI review sample was all decked out in white – it’s an identical piece of kit. A decent 10in, 1,024 x 600 resolution wide screen is complemented by one of the most usable keyboards we’ve yet seen in a netbook – and the trackpad’s not bad either.

Inside is an 1.6GHz Atom N270 processor and this is backed up by 1GB of RAM and an 80GB hard disk and around the edges is a decent array of ports and expansion slots. With this specification, the 4211’s XP installation will run at a fair old lick.

The battery is, unfortunately, also the same – with a minimal capacity of 2,200mAh promising similar, underwhelming battery life.

Still, we gave the MSI Wind U100 five stars in our original review, and the lower price means this version looks even better value for that rating. Look out for a full review very soon…

Look what just blew in… MSI’s Wind

Thursday, May 29th, 2008

Since we first caught a glimpse of MSI’s Eee rival, the Wind, we’ve been eagerly waiting to get our hands on one, and just an hour or so ago, one of our lovely contacts at MSI obliged us.

And while the pictures may have looked promising, the Wind is even more alluring in the flesh. The matte white finish looks good, and feels good too. It’s no match for the model looks of HP’s Mini Note 2133, sure, but as our recent review made abundantly clear, looks aren’t everything.

The base feels sturdy enough, and the gentle curves do look rather attractive in a pleasingly plain, understated kind of way. The lid is a little more pliant, and really tugging on it left ripples waving across the display, but it’s clearly strong enough to fend off the odd knock here and there.

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To Eee or Not to Eee?

Thursday, May 15th, 2008

I’m in something of a quandary. After seeing just how much work I can get done on the train – there’s an awful lot of time to be had in between businessman having fights with their portable bicycles and then hammering away on their Blackberries – I’ve decided to buy some sort of ultraportable laptop.

My motivation is that while I’d like to work on the train, getting anything done at the moment requires more effort than I’d like. Which, ideally, is no effort at all. At the moment, hammering out a review on the journey home involves lugging a (relatively) heavy laptop in an extra bag, with the respective power cables in case I decide to use it when I get home, too. I’d like to condense this down somewhat, and some sort of smaller, lighter laptop stands out, as I’d be able to slip it into my backpack with everything else.

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