NaughtySpawn

Posts Tagged ‘dell’

Looks like my idea of Microsoft cozying up to HP to work on the Slate isn’t going to happen. Microsoft has been kicked to the curb and with the acquisition of Palm, HP is more interested in making the webOS the powerhouse behind and future tablets.

HP was very blunt on where it goes from here, saying it plans on "doubling down on webOS," meaning we could very well be looking at a webOS-based tablet in the near future.

Do you get the feeling Microsoft has been left holding the bag here? They have a tablet OS nobody wants. The tablet market is going to keep growing and Microsoft is going to be on the outside looking in.

Ouch!

If Dell gives MS the snub and chooses Google for their tablets then Microsoft will be totally locked out of the market.

Rumor: Hewlett-Packard Kills Microsoft Tablet Project (Slate)

So how funny is this, on the day that Apple is releasing their iPad 3G model, both the Courier and the Slate are dead and delayed products. Can you say huge sales day for Apple? There is no way they could have planned this better!

My new machine arrived on the doorstep last night and I wasted no time in hooking it up and checking it out. It was smaller than I thought, the Inspiron case is noticeably smaller than my previous Dimension case. But it was quite and fired right up. I zipped around inside Windows 7 for a couple of minutes, then promptly turned it off and dismantled it.

I wasted no time in removing the original 640GB hard drive and replacing it with my own 1.5TB and 1.0TB drives. Additionally I stuff in two video cards, one PCIe and the other PCI. The case is an absolute pain to work with and you need to be careful you don’t slice your finger off on all the exposed edges of bare metal. Fact of the matter is, there’s tons of extra room inside the case for more drives, but the odd design doesn’t allow for more than two. I suppose I could just "stack" them in there and hope they don’t start rattling around.

With the innards completely changed around I powered it back up and installed Windows 7. I admit Win7 did a great job of installing itself. It picked up all the drives and understood there were two video cards and three monitors hooked up. It loaded a basic set drivers and multimon was working without me having to configure anything. I need to actually install updated drivers but I liked how Windows got it right.

Funny thing is, I installed Windows and got several apps installed in less than an hour. You can’t actually get XP installed in an hour so that’s progress!

I didn’t get much done with it, but it’s still running even after I ripped it’s guts out and made all sorts of hardware changes. Tonight will be a frenzy of app installations. I got a few of the smaller apps done and even got Office 2007 on there, but there is still so much to install.

So what did I actually get you ask? An Athlon II X4 630 with 8GB of Ram. I added 2.5TB of drive space and two NVidia graphics cards (an 8500 and a 6200).