| Daily Deals 9/11/12: Dell Vostro Quad-Core Laptop, Logitech G510 Keyboard and More Posted: 11 Sep 2012 11:51 AM PDT  
Top Deal: Hey kiddos, today's top deal is Dell's 15.6" Vostro 3555 AMD A6-3420M 1.5GHz Quad-core Laptop. This Vastro is equipped with 4GB of Ram, a 320GB hard drive, a backlit keyboard, Windows 7 Professional, and comes with a $100 gift card. Normally priced at $519, with the gift card, this essentially brings the overall cost down to $419 (duh!). You can check out the deal here. Laptops: 17.3" Asus G75VW-TS71 Gaming Laptop w/Core i7 Quad-3610QM Quad-Core, 12GB RAM, Blu-ray, 2GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 660M for $1,199.99 at TigerDirect (normally $1,329.99). Computing Hardware & Peripherals: Logitech Gaming Keyboard G510 for $69.99 with $5.43 shipping (normally $119). Western Digital My Passport 2TB USB 3.0 Portable Hard Drive for $164.00 with free shipping at BuyDig (normally $199.99 - use exclusive coupon code LOGIC5). Seagate Expansion 3TB USB 2.0 External Hard Drive for $129.99 with free shipping at TigerDirect (normally $150). Asus Black Diamond Concurrent Dual Band Wireless-N Router for $60 plus shipping shipping at TigerDirect (normally $80). Samsung 27" 1080p, 2ms LED-Backlight Monitor for $399.99 at TigerDirect (normally $430). Samsung 830 Series 128GB SSD for $96.49 with free shipping at B&H Photo (normally $116.49). Kingston SSDNow V+200 120GB SSD for $69.99 with free shipping (normally $90). |
| What Does Intel's Haswell Platform Mean for the Future of Computing? Posted: 11 Sep 2012 11:31 AM PDT  Intel, the world's largest semiconductor player, wasted no time in talking about its energy-efficient Haswell microarchitecture at Tuesday's Intel Developer's Forum (IDF). Haswell is positioned to be Intel's Ivy Bridge successor, and it will bring significant power savings to the PC party, with some chips sipping a mere 10 watts of power. With Haswell, PC makers will continue to push the envelope with thinner and increasingly powerful notebooks and tablet PCs.
Not only will Haswell require less power than Ivy Bridge, they'll be just as powerful, and in fact GPU performance will be up to two times better than Ivy Bridge. That's an impressive leap. Haswell will play an especially important roll in tomorrow's Ultrabooks. Towards that end, an Intel rep told TechRadar that Haswell will be the first chip "built from the ground up with the Ultrabook in mind, and tomorrow, we're saying that it's going better than expected." To put the generational leap into perspective, Intel claims that battery life on an Ultrabook next year will be around nine hours for a system that would typically crap out after five hours today. But it's not just Ultrabooks that stand to benefit from Haswell. While plans are still being hashed out, don't be surprised to see a number of tablets sporting Haswell inside, a form factor that's a prime candidate for a low energy processor with strong graphics performance. Follow Paul on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook |
| Snag a Samsung Galaxy S III for $99.99 for a Limited Time Posted: 11 Sep 2012 10:29 AM PDT  In just one more day, Apple is set to announce the iPhone 5, and if you find that about as exciting as watching paint dry, perhaps Amazon has something that's a little more up your alley. For a "very limited time only" (how very limited, we don't know), you can pick up Samsung's flagship Galaxy S III device for a Benjamin ($99.99 shipped), plus a $35 activation fee, provided you agree to a two-year service agreement.
So basically it's now a $135 device, compared to the $200 price tag it normally commands (plus the same activation fee). Unfortunately, the offer is good only on new individual or family accounts, though on the bright side, you can choose between AT&T, Sprint, or Verizon, along with choice of color (red, white, or blue). Need a refresher? The Galaxy S III is Samsung's top-o-the-line Android smartphone. It has a 4.8-inch Super AMOLED display (1280x720), dual-core 1.5GHz processor, 2GB of RAM, 16GB of internal memory, microSD card slot with support for cards up to 64GB, NFC support, Wireless-N, 4G LTE, and Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. Word on the Web is that an Android 4.1 Jelly Bean update is not far off. For more details, check out TechRadar's in-depth review. So there you have it folks, a pretty sweet Android smartphone selling for half price, provided you pull the trigger before Amazon unloads this deal. Follow Paul on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook |
| Rogue Hacker Takes Credit for Knocking Millions of GoDaddy Sites Offline Posted: 11 Sep 2012 06:25 AM PDT  As if Mondays aren't challenging enough to get through as it is, many of the websites belonging to GoDaddy's 10.5 million customers were unplugged yesterday afternoon following a hacker attack. A day later, GoDaddy is still working to completely restore service across the board. Twitter user @AnonymousOwn3r took responsibility for the attack, and interestingly enough, Anonymous is trying to distance itself from the rogue hacker.
At 10:25 am PT yesterday morning, GoDaddy posted a note saying that "GoDaddy.com and associated customer services experienced intermittent outages. Services began to be restored for the bulk of affected customers." Later on in the afternoon, GoDaddy followed that up with a second message saying, "At no time was any sensitive customer information, such as credit card data, passwords, or names and addresses, compromised. We will provide an additional update within the next 24 hours. We want to thank our customers for their patience and support." There hasn't been another update since then, but there has been plenty of chatter on Twitter. The hacker appears to have worked on his own, as Anonymous was quick to deflect angry tweets at the party allegedly responsible for the attack. GoDaddy has also been using Twitter to communicate with its subscribers. The last tweet came more than 13 hours ago, in which GoDaddy indicated that most sites were back online as it continues "working out the last few kinks." Follow Paul on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook |
| Western Digital Announces World's Thinnest 2.5-inch Hybrid Drive Posted: 11 Sep 2012 06:10 AM PDT  A few months after it started shipping the Scorpio Blue 7mm hard drive, aimed at Intel-based ultrabooks and other ultra-thin and light notebooks, Western Digital on Monday up the ante by announcing what it claims is the "world's thinnest 2.5-inch hybrid hard drive." The world's largest HDD maker said it has begun sampling the 5mm-thin hybrid HDD and will be showcasing the technology during the upcoming WD Investor Day on September 13, 2012.
"Mobile devices are becoming smaller, thinner, lighter and more responsive," Matt Rutledge, vice president of client storage solutions at WD, said in the press release announcing the new hard drive. "Working with our technology partners, WD has developed new 5mm hard drives that enable high capacity storage along with excellent performance and superior economics to allow our customers to expand their thin offerings." In its press release, the company touted the main advantages of PC makers using its 5mm hybrid drive, which combines MLC NAND flash with magnetic disks for caching of most frequently used data: "WD 5 mm hybrid hard drives will enable the market's thinnest computers to offer 500GB of capacity, utilizing almost 50% less volume compared to current 9.5 mm hard drives and at one tenth the cost of similar capacity SSDs." Even though the press release is silent on availability, the fact that it mentions Asus and Acer as partners suggests that the first ultrabooks bearing this new WD drive will in likelihood be from these two Taiwanese PC makers. Image Credit: Western Digital |
