Consumer version of Surface could hit by 2011

In targeting casinos, restaurants, and hotels, Microsoft knows it is barely scratching the surface of the demand for its tabletop computer.

The company is convinced there is a mass market for an interactive touch-screen computer, but perhaps not in its current US$10,000 version. CEO Steve Ballmer told financial analysts last month that Microsoft had a plan to speed up the arrival of a consumer version of the tabletop computer Surface.

Originally, Microsoft had said it could take up to five years for a home version of Surface, but Microsoft is now aiming to have that out in three years' time, according to an interview that Microsoft's Tom Gibbons did with Fortune magazine.

"In the three-year time window, we absolutely see how to get there," Gibbons told Fortune. "If we can beat that, we'll try to beat that."

But before it can focus on the home market, Microsoft still needs to work on satisfying the initial customers for the product. When it announced Surface in May, Microsoft was aiming to have its initial customers with products in hand by years' end. By the fall, though, CNET News.com reported that Microsoft was unlikely to meet its goal.

"We're running a couple of months later than I'd like with our deployments, Gibbons said in the Fortune interview. "While I was hoping we'd have something out now, we'll definitely have something out in the next couple of months."

Via Crave CNET

Vista backstabbed by Nvidia drivers

Since its release, the latest operating system from Redmond has been blasted for being buggy and unstable. Turns out a major reason for that wasn't Vista itself, but the Nvidia graphics drivers.

Uncovered in internal documents during the lawsuit over the Vista-capable label, issues with Nvidia drivers accounted for 28.8 percent of system crashes, making it the leading reason for Vista instability. Consider the fact that not all machines are equipped with discrete graphic cards, this is an exceptionally high rate of incidence. But in its defence, the method of data collection was not revealed and hence this information is better used as reference rather than gospel. We've contacted Nvidia regarding this issue and are still awaiting a response.

After upgrading our HP desktop equipped with Nvidia GeForce 7500LE graphics card to Vista Service Pack 1, the system does seem to run smoother with fewer crashes. For those with a Vista/Nvidia setup, has Service Pack 1 solved your woes?

Via Arstechnica

Thinnest SSD? Sort of

A solid-state drive maker is claiming its new 256GB drive is the world's thinnest.

While that may be true, it won't fit into the world's thinnest notebooks, which makes the claim less impressive. The SSD from Super Talent measures 12.5mm thick. Sure, that sounds teeny tiny, but that's more like pregnant-Nicole-Richie-thin compared to the 9.5mm drives on the market, which are more like Nicole-Richie-after-Thanksgiving-dinner-thin: Seems like a negligible difference in size, but has major implications. If you haven't noticed, some PC makers are battling over who can create the skinniest notebook. So while packing 256GB into that size is impressive, thinner drives with less storage space are what the market is currently demanding.

In any case, the Super Talent SSD is a 2.5-inch drive that reads data at 65MB per second, writes at 50MB per second, and can withstand up to 16G of vibration. No price yet, but they sell to OEMs anyway.

Almost every hard drive maker is jumping on the solid-state bandwagon since solid state is expected to increase from its current 1 percent share in the memory market to almost 30 percent over the next three years. So expect the competition among them over who's the thinnest, fastest, lightest, and prettiest to continue ratcheting up.

Via Crave CNET

Top 10 obsolete ports

I can still remember my first laptop. It was a Toshiba Pentium II model bought back in 1999. At that time, PS/2, serial and parallel ports were a must-have. There was a lonely USB port in the rear hidden by a sliding cover. For the life of me, I had no idea what it was supposed to be for, and I assumed it was an additional heat vent to be used when the machine was going full blast.

Fast forward to today when the USB port is king and any machine which dares to include only one (with the exception of UMPCs) will be ridiculed no end (MacBook Air, are you listening?). With eSATA just over the horizon and wireless USB on its way to unseat its wired brother, CNET UK took a step back in time to remember the ones which had served us well so many years ago.

Via Crave UK

Fujitsu's 2.5-inch 320GB drive does 7,200rpm

Bigger, faster, thinner is the name of the game in hard drives.

Fujitsu is only the latest drive maker to use superlative adjectives to market its newest product. In this case it's the MHZ2 BJ series of its 2.5-inch harddisk drives, which the company claimed Monday is the "world's first" 320GB drive that rotates at speeds of 7,200 revolutions per minute.

That claim can be a tad misleading since there are drives out there that do the same spin speed, though they're smaller in size. Plus there are higher capacity drives already announced and on the market. Heck, Fujitsu has bigger hard drives--the 500GB 2.5-inch drive announced last month is bigger (half a terabyte!), but spins (reads and writes data) at 4,200rpm. So "world's first" really refers to that specific combination of features.

The 2.5-inch drive is meant for higher-end notebooks and even compact desktops, Fujitsu says. It uses a Serial ATA 3.0 gigabits-per-second interface, which enables high-speed data transfers from the drive to the PC. And on the green front, this Fujitsu drive needs only 2.3 watts of power while it's reading and writing data.

The drives will be available to Fujitsu's customers starting in June.

Via Crave CNET

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