Dave Altavilla
Recent posts
In terms of brand recognition, Lenovo's ThinkPad probably has some of the best "brand equity" of just about any notebook line in the history of Windows PCs. A favorite among IT managers for their rugged reliability, especially in business environments, Lenovo's ThinkPad brand, previously acquired from IBM, helped propel the company towards...
Read more...
It’s a ThinkPad. No, it’s a Yoga! No, it’s...a ThinkPad Yoga. Lenovo has melded two of its popular laptop design approaches together to create a sort of hybrid ultrabook, bringing together elements of its workhorse ThinkPad lineup and multi-mode capable Yoga notebooks. It has the work-friendly keyboard design of the new generation...
Read more...
If you’ve ever worked in a professional environment for an extended period of time, chances are you’ve used an IBM-come-Lenovo ThinkPad at some point. Their simple black rectangle designs with the little red dot on the keyboard are downright iconic... To that end, the latest notebook in the T-series, the...
Read more...
Both Intel and AMD have quite successfully combined CPU and GPU engines onto single chips, but up to this point they have tended to work as autonomous islands. The CPU and GPU share some resources, but not a single memory pool. That changes today though, with the official launch of AMD’s Kaveri-based APUs, the...
Read more...
In November last year, we gave you a first look at LSI's forthcoming SandForce SF3700 PCI Express SSD Flash controller. It's an impressive silicon integration of both a native PCI Express x4 interface and SandForce's excellent SSD controller technologies, along with some refinements and advancements baked in. At...
Read more...
At CES 2014, Dell assumed a much lower profile than they had in previous years for the show. We've seen Dell occupy entire top levels of swank, high-end hotels and invite artists and entertainers to show off their wares. No longer beholden to stockholders and analysts, since Michael Dell took the company back private...
Read more...
Some of us have already touched-down in Las Vegas for the week, while still others are enroute. The folks from NVIDIA, however, have likely been on site most of the weekend gearing up for their big press conference that is scheduled to take place just minutes from now at 11:00PM PST, 8:00PM EST. Just what NVIDIA...
Read more...
...Eventually, Apple caved to the demands of the market, and perhaps demands from within its own mothership, as it revealed the iPad mini. In typical Apple fashion, the original mini was priced higher than other 7” slates in the market, with the company all but conceding the sub-$300 tablet market, while plenty of others fought it out...
Read more...
Back in September at a press event held in Montreal, NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang announced what he called “one of the most important works NVIDIA has done for computer graphics.” The technology was called G-SYNC. G-SYNC is an end-to-end graphics and display architecture that starts with a Kepler-based GPU...
Read more...
Just over a year ago, Samsung broadened its Note portfolio to not only include phones, but tablets as well. The company saw a need to introduce a slate that catered to working professionals, power users, and those who need more content creation capabilities -- hence, the Galaxy Note 10.1 with the S Pen was born. In the ever-challenging...
Read more...
It almost goes without saying that the Google Nexus 5 is one of the most anticipated Android phones to launch in 2013, save perhaps for Samsung's Galaxy S 4. Previous generation Nexus devices from Google, whether phone or tablet, have proven to offer a lot of bang for the buck, excellent design and build quality and a pure representation of...
Read more...
It almost goes without saying that the Google Nexus 5 is one of the most anticipated Android phones to launch in 2013, save perhaps for Samsung's Galaxy S 4. Previous generation Nexus devices from Google, whether phone or tablet, have proven to offer a lot of bang for the buck, excellent design and build quality and a pure representation of...
Read more...
Sony's PlayStation 4 console has undoubtedly roared off to a great start, shipping over 1 million units in North America in just 24 hours but amongst those fast and furious hot new PS4 shipments apparently are a fair percentage of duds. Microsoft fell victim to a thermal issue early on with Xbox 360 units when they...
Read more...
The seemingly never-ending onslaught of new graphics cards as of late continues today with the official release of the AMD Radeon R9 270. Like the Radeon R9 270X that came before it, the Radeon R9 270 isn’t a totally new product. This mainstream graphics card actually leverages the same GPU that powered...
Read more...
The ASUS Transformer Book T100 packs an impressive list of features into a diminutive chassis and companion keyboard dock. After working with system, it's clear that ASUS is hoping to capture lightning in a bottle, for the second time... It has been six years since ASUS launched the first Eee PC and kicked off a...
Read more...
Heads-up, if you're running older versions of the Windows operating system, Microsoft Office or Microsoft Lync communication platform software. Microsoft released a security advisory noting that the TIFF (Tagged Image File Format) image handler in some of these older Microsoft software suites is subject to a...
Read more...
Intel has a sharp focus on the education sector as of late, whether you consider their program supporting universities and higher education with their Arduino-compatible Galileo development board for the new Quark X1000 SoC, their 7 and 10-inch Education Tablet initiative, or their latest acquisition of Kno, an...
Read more...
One of the hallmark features of Google's Nexus 5 flagship smartphone by LG isn't its bodaciously big and beautiful 5-inch HD display, its 8MP camera, or its "OK Google" voice command / personal assistant feature. Frankly, that's all been done before. What does stand out about the Nexus 5 is Google's new Android...
Read more...
While out at AMD’s tech days in Hawaii, a number of folks were chit-chatting about recent developments and some of our peers felt compelled to mention how “terrified” NVIDIA was of AMD Hawaii GPU, that AMD caught NVIDIA off guard, and that they wouldn’t have any real answer until well into 2014. We sat back and listened...
Read more...
OCZ is at the ready with a brand new line of solid state drives in its popular Vector family of products, targeted at performance-conscious PC enthusiasts. The new Vector 150 builds upon the success of the original Vector, which debuted last year at about this time, but offers better sustained performance and longer endurance, despite its...
Read more...
It has been a while since I personally have setup a bench, rolled up my sleeves and built a test system with top-shelf components, a fresh OS install and some overclocking mojo. However, Intel's recent release of Ivy Bridge-E gave us a hankering to do just that. We've been testing a lot of tablets, smartphones and...
Read more...
It has been a while since I have personally setup a test bench, rolled up my sleeves and built a test system with top-shelf components, a fresh OS install and some overclocking mojo. However, Intel's recent release of Ivy Bridge-E gave us a hankering to do just that. We've been testing a lot of tablets, smartphones and ultrabooks,...
Read more...
