Laptops with solid-state drives took another step forward Tuesday as Toshiba announced the first laptop with a 128GB SSD.

The Portege R500-S5007V is the newest addition to the company’s Portege line and, at 2.4 pounds, is being described as “the world’s lightest laptop.” The unit also contains a DVD SuperMulti drive, a transreflective LED backlit indoor/outdoor viewing display, and Energy Start 4.0 compliance. It has received the highest gold rating from EPEAT, which measures the environmental impact of electronic products.

0.77 Inches Thin

Jeff Barney, a Toshiba vice president, said the Portege R500 series has become a launch pad for technology innovations and “green” attributes. The series was also the first to ship with a 7mm DVD SuperMulti optical drive, which lowered weight by providing an all-in-one solution for storage .

The R500-S5007V comes with Windows Vista Business, although Windows XP Professional is also available, and it uses an Intel Core 2 Duo processor running at 1.33 GHz.

The WXGA, 1280 x 800 LED display is described as the world’s first 12.1-inch transreflective LED backlit display, which accommodates a wide variety of lighting conditions. The backlighting helps when the unit is used indoors. Outdoors, the screen allows light to pass through and reflect back to help show images and allow the backlighting to be turned off.

Like some real-life human models, laptops are in an accelerating battle to be the thinnest. The R500 series comes in at 0.77 inches.

The thinness is, in part, due to Toshiba’s High Density Mounting Technology, which allows dual-sided motherboard component mounting. Toshiba said this kind of mounting means it can produce a motherboard that is one-third the size of a normal 15.4-inch notebook with the same functionality.

SSDs vs Hard Drives

Similarly, Toshiba engineers sought to tweak the energy efficiency so the R500-S5007V could run for eight hours on a single battery charge. In particular, the company noted, low-power technology was used for the SSD and the ultralow-voltage processor.

SSDs are attractive because, with no moving parts, they can be more rugged and quieter than hard drives, have faster startups because no spin-up is needed, can have very low read and write latency times, and, for some models, can be more energy-efficient.

But Richard Shim, an analyst with industry research firm IDC, said that, even as SSDs increase in size and popularity, they will continue to coexist with hard drives “even five years from now.”

While 128GB is acceptable in a laptop for some users, he noted that there are now terabyte laptops, and hard drives will continue for the foreseeable future to beat SSDs in cost per gigabyte and overall capacity.

• No Related Post

Newsweek is profiling Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates as he prepares to retire this week from the company he cofounded.

Ranked as one of the world’s richest men, Gates plans to focus on his $37 billion Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The magazine profiles the successes and failures of Microsoft during his career as well as the difficult transition that Microsoft is expected to have in a world increasingly dominated by the Internet.

Despite Microsoft’s antitrust battles, problems with Windows Vista, and the company’s failure to acquire Yahoo’s search assets, Gates told Newsweek that Microsoft is stronger. He praised Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie, who will continue without Gates.

Gates admitted that if he “had one thing to change,” he would paint out Microsoft’s antitrust struggle. But he emphasized that he thinks the company was simply a tough competitor and added that he loved his job.

Gates said he’ll focus on strategy at the foundation he runs with his wife, and he plans to travel more in Africa and India. He intends to learn more about health and education, and said the controversy about which operating system to use is “a pretty silly, limited thing, compared to starvation and death.”

• No Related Post

So this is really goodbye? Bill Gates’ last day at Microsoft is Friday and tech-watchers around the globe are assessing the impact of the man responsible for the dominance of the PC, DOS, Windows and the “Evil Empire.”

Such an assessment seems almost impossible. Gates and Microsoft have not only dominated the PC industry, they often dictated the computer and software choices for the home and, more importantly, defined the computing environment for businesses around the world.

Read more…

• No Related Post

China’s State Intellectual Property Office has denied a flurry of media reports suggesting the government agency was investigating Microsoft for discriminatory software pricing. In a statement briefly posted at its official Web site, according to media sources, the SIPO noted that it has never undertaken any market-monopoly investigations before, and has no plans to do so because its mandate from Chinese government agencies is “to investigate and research domestic piracy issues.”

The statement was intended to contradict a report by Shanghai Security News in which an unnamed source had suggested to the Chinese financial newspaper that Microsoft would be vulnerable to a lawsuit following the debut of China’s forthcoming anti-monopoly law, which becomes effective Aug. 1. Microsoft quickly responded by telling western media outlets it was unaware of any antitrust investigation by Chinese authorities.

Read more…

• No Related Post

With many business and individual PC users rejecting Windows Vista, Microsoft took an unprecedented step this week by promising support for Windows XP for a full 13 years. That is three years longer than it has allowed for previous Windows operating systems.

In a letter sent to customers this week, Bill Veghte, a Microsoft vice president, also seemed to confirm that Windows 7 will be released in 2010. That OS, Veghte wrote, will ship “approximately three years” after Vista became available in January 2007.

Read more…

• No Related Post