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Ten techs to watch in 2009

Posted on 2 Jan 2009 at 12:29

But there are other benefits, too. Solid-state drives can be much smaller than current mechanical devices, and draw as little as 2% of the power. And, because they have no moving parts, they're more reliable than drives that use spinning platters, and run silently.

So far, SSDs have been held back by a simple problem: price. Memory chips are immensely expensive compared with magnetic platters and, with an 80GB SSD costing many times the price of a 1TB hard disk, it's no surprise they haven't yet taken off.

But the pace of the market is quickening and, as demand increases, drives are inevitably becoming more affordable. The SSD snowball is rolling, and 2009 could well be the year it crashes into the mainstream.

6. THE RISE OF UBUNTU
Linux has been heralded as the next big thing for so long that you might wonder if the word itself was Latin for "false dawn". Yet one distribution today stands well above the rest, at least as far as consumer PCs are concerned: Ubuntu.

Now well established as Dell's favoured Linux distro, Ubuntu's prospects are rosy, not least because it's increasingly found on netbooks such as the Dell Inspiron Mini 9, which look set to capture at least a fifth of the PC market in 2009. A netbook-specific version of Ubuntu set to launch early next year could tempt even more manufacturers to pre-install the cost-free OS on their devices.

Yet perhaps the biggest sign of encouragement for Ubuntu is that the people behind it have finally understood that not being Microsoft isn't enough to tempt the mainstream user - it has to be better than Microsoft. "The great task in front of us over the next two years is to lift the experience of the Linux desktop from something that's stable and robust and not so pretty, into something that's art," Mark Shuttleworth, the man behind Ubuntu's commercial arm, Canonical, told developers recently. We can't wait to see the end result.

7. 64-BIT WINDOWS
Two statistics illustrate the continued rise of 64-bit OSes. Just over a fifth of new PCs in the US are now 64-bit, according to Microsoft.
Another, more anecdotal piece of evidence is the sheer number of PCs with 64-bit Vista that now arrive in the PC Pro Labs: five out of seven Windows-equipped machines in a recent Labs test came equipped with the more versatile version of the operating system.

The vastly larger addressable memory space brings the potential for a dramatic performance boost. While 32-bit PCs are limited to 4GB of RAM, including any memory devoured by graphics cards, 64-bit systems can make use of as much RAM as the motherboard can handle, which is often as much as 8GB or 16GB - a far more efficient use of your computing resources than having a PC hamstrung by 32-bit barriers.

The increased adoption of 64-bit Vista - and the rumour that Apple's next version of OS X, Snow Leopard, will be 64-bit only - helps banish fears that drivers won't be available for 64-bit systems.

Now that it's actually worth having a more powerful 64-bit system, thanks to increased performance and widespread driver support, we're convinced that 64-bit OSes will be heading towards the mainstream in 2009.

8. WINDOWS LIVE MESH

Several people in the PC Pro office have been won over by Microsoft's new Live Mesh service, which recently went into public beta. Live Mesh completely solves the traditional problem of accessing and synchronising files between PCs. It's the most innovative product to come out of Redmond in a long time, and we predict it will soon be as ubiquitous as Facebook and Gmail.