Posted 03/17/10 at 11:28:30 AM by Paul Lilly

Even as early as this morning, industry sources were quoting March 22 as the release date for Acer's revamped Timeline notebooks. Coming in ahead of schedule, however, Acer today officially unveiled its Aspire TimelineX 1830T thin and light laptop, as well as a handful of other models.

Built around Intel's Calpella platform, the TimelineX 1830T sports an 11.6-inch display and weighs 3 pounds. Acer didn't get too specific with the processor, saying only that it feature an Intel Core 2 Solo chip, but reports suggest it will come outfitted with Intel's Core i5 520UM CPU clocked at 1.06GHz.

Other accouterments include Wi-Fi, a pair of memory card slots, HDMI port, optical audio, three USB 2.0 ports, Bluetooth 2.1, and up to 8-hours of run time on the 9-cell battery (a step up from the 6-cell battery found on previous Timeline models).

Other specs are so far unknown, including RAM and hard drive capacity. So too is the price.

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Posted 01/08/10 at 11:02:50 AM by Paul Lilly

Acer Timeline owners can't seem to catch a break. Back in October 2009, Acer recalled a whole bunch of its 13-inch models citing an overheating hazard, and once again, the exact same problem has forced Acer to issue another recall, this time for about 22,000 Timelines.

According ot the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), the problem stems from an internal microphone wire under the palm rest. Just like the last recall, the pesky wire is prone to short circuiting, overheating, and poses a potential burn hazard. There have been no reports of injuries thus far, but three reports of computers short circuiting, each of which resulted in "slight melting" of the notebook chassis.

Models affected include the Acer AS3410, AS3410T, AS3810T, AS3810TG, AS3810TZ, and AS3810TZG. The CPSC says that not all of these models suffer from the cable flaw, and that if you own one, you should contact Acer for more info.

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Posted 05/19/09 at 10:30:00 AM by Paul Lilly

Try to imagine where 3D gaming would be today if not for the graphics processing unit, or GPU. Without it, you wouldn't be tredging through the jungles of Crysis in all its visual splendor, nor would you be fending off endless hordes of fast-moving zombies at high resolutions. For that to happen, it takes a highly specialized chip designed for parallel processing to pull off the kinds of games you see today, the same ones that wouldn't be possible on a CPU alone. Going forward, GPU makers will try to extend the reliance on videocards to also include physics processing, video encoding/decoding, and other tasks that where once handled by the CPU.

It's pretty amazing when you think about how far graphics technology has come. To help you do that, we're going to take a look back at every major GPU release since the infancy of 3D graphics. Join us as we travel back in time and relive releases like 3dfx's Voodoo3 and S3's ViRGE lineup. This is one nostalgiac ride you don't want to miss!

It all starts after the jump!

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Posted 03/02/09 at 11:30:00 AM by Paul Lilly

Your next build may very well come configured with dual-SSD drives in a RAID 0 array for the OS, a gluttonous 2TB SATA HDD for storage duties, and a Blu-ray optical drive for movie watching and HD backups. And for quick transfers from one rig to another, does it get any sweeter than a 64GB USB thumb drive loaded with all of your favorite apps? Such a storage scheme is certainly worthy of dream machine status, but our storage options weren't always as fanciful, fast, and fat as they are today. Some of you may remember toting a 3.5-inch floppy to and from school, while others hearken all the way back to cassette tapes. And if you've lived long enough to remember the IBM Punch Card first hand, just ask and we'll SPEAK LOUDER.

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Posted 01/05/09 at 04:34:06 PM by Andy Salisbury

Previously, Google’s Timeline View was only available to those that opted-in to an experiment with Google Labs, but it appears that several popular searches have been providing timelines in the run-of-the-mill search results.

Searches such as “Book of Revelation,” "Thomas Jefferson," “Albert Einstein” and even everyone’s favorite, “Maximum PC” have their very own timeline setups. The timeline results provide users with historical data about their query that is provided by Google’s News Archive.

According to Google, their News Archive “provides an easy way to search and explore historical archives. Users can search for events, people or ideas and see how they have been described over time. In addition to searching for the most relevant articles for their query, users can also see a historical overview of the results by browsing an automatically generated timeline.”

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