DigitMemo.com

“It looked like fireworks, which would have been cool had it not been in my house.” The latest in a series of laptop fires.

A computer network administrator at a Columbus, Georgia, hospital is the latest consumer to encounter the flaming laptop syndrome.

Douglas Brown said his Dell 9200 wide-screen laptop’s batteries exploded into flames, he called 911 and the fire department responded with two pumpers, a ladder truck, the HAZMAT unit, an ambulance and the battalion chief.

Click for more on Dell Laptops Still Exploding »

It works better for older system with less than 512MB ram than the newer ones.

PC Stats has an interesting six page review regarding Microsoft Windows Vista’s ReadyBoost feature. ReadyBoost is supposed to allow the user to plug in a fast USB stick into their system to speed up work the OS needs to do and effectively improve the computer’s performance by storing non-essential information on the drive. The review concludes that this is not the case with current USB keys on the market. Although ReadyBoost does improve overall performance on the system, it is not enough to make a significant difference or to raise some eyebrows. It seems that on older computers with little memory (512MB), ReadyBoost can help out much more than on newer systems - probably the systems Vista would be installed on anyways. Surprisingly enough, however, ReadyBoost did make a slight mark even on video game performance and system startup time.

Click for more on Windows Vista & ReadyBoost: Does it Make a Difference? »

DDR3 prices are expect to go down next year, as Intel plans to use DDR3 for its mobile parts. Once the memory hits mainstream the prices are rapidly going down.

So if you are shocked with the current prices of DDR3 just give it some time and X38 chipset will finally prove the real power of this new low voltage memory and a next generation mobile platform will certanly help the prices to go down.
Notebooks are really getting popular and so will DDR3 notebooks.

Source: fudzilla

AMD next week will announce its latest effort to add new instructions to the x86 architecture, although just what is a bit of a mystery. A company spokesperson would only acknowledge that there will be news surrounding enhancements to the x86 instruction set on August 30, but that was all.

AMD has added its own clones of Intel extensions, such as the SSE instructions, plus its own, 3DNow! Its biggest and most successful effort was the x86-64 extensions, which made the architecture 64-bit while retaining backwards compatibility. Intel initially dismissed the idea of 64-bit x86 extensions but embraced them soon after.

Click for more on AMD adds new Intructions to the x86 feature set »

“With the discovery last week of the connection between Vista’s poor networking performance and audio activities, word quickly spread around the Net. No doubt this got Microsoft’s attention, and they have responded to the issue.

Click for more on Microsoft responds to Vista network performance issue »

Though much argued, I still prefer to adopt UAC in Windows Vista, so to launch an app in administrator mode, I have to right click and select “Run as administrator”.  Being a command line fan, it would be convenient to have it done through some keystrokes.

I searched and found some tool, works fine, but its a bit bulky and comes with lots of (unnecessary) features. To keep things simple, I decide to write one myself. And its done with a size of 6K.

Click for more on Sudo for Windows Vista »

Google’s acquisitions and patents support the suggestion that there’s phone work going on. If Google emerges with spectrum rights, that’s when the fun begins.

Now that Apple’s iPhone has passed from anticipation to release, talk of a Google mobile phone has taken its place as a favorite online fixation.

The latest whisper comes from Rediff, an IT publication with offices in the United States and India, which claims that the Google phone, or Gphone, will be released within two weeks in India.

Click for more on Google Phone: Revolutionary Or Evolutionary? »

AT&T says NO to software unlocking…

So, as you may have seen, earlier this morning at 3AM local time UniquePhones (the team behind iPhoneUnlocking.com, who’ve claimed to have the second proper iPhone SIM software hack) got a threatening call from AT&T’s legal team urging them to not release their software — or else. Now, we can understand why any smallish business wouldn’t exactly want lawyers repping AT&T (and Apple) breathing down their necks for a potentially market-shifting discovery — which is why the company is now officially holding the release of their SIM unlock solution indefinitely while they assess their legal position. Fair enough, but we still haven’t even had a chance to verify their solution does unlock iPhones.

Click for more on iPhone SIM unlock software iefinitely delayed »

If you use Windows, do your best to avoid anything that requires a ping to WGA. And for those of you doing installations and upgrades this weekend, we recommend that you avoid activation at this time. If you attempt a validation and it fails, your install may be marked as non-genuine, which could lead to several annoyances. First things first, do not reboot a Windows machine that has been marked as non-genuine.

If you have encountered this problem, Please go to www.microsoft.com/genuine and click VALIDATE WINDOWS to resolve this issue immediately.

Late last night we started receiving reports from readers experiencing problems with Windows Genuine Advantage authentication. Users of both Windows XP and Windows Vista were writing to say that they could not validate their installations using WGA, and one user even said that his installation was invalidated by the service.

Click for more on Windows WGA server down, everyone’s pirate today »

Keyboard shortcut is well known and widely adopted to speed up working. And there are lots of hotkey utilities around to launch your favorite apps without a mouse move. However, you might not know that, Windows itself, can assign hotkey to an application, without any 3rd party software(thus no additional resource consumed).

Click for more on Assign hotkey to your application without additional software »