By January 2011, all hard drives must shift from the older 512 bytes blocks to 4K format as an agreement with Idema (International Disk Drive Equipment and Materials Association). Although this change only means good news while producers will deliver more reliable and “greener” hard drives, for Windows XP users might become a problem.
For 30 years, developers format hard drives’ space into blocks sized 512 bytes, this method becoming a standard due to IBM which used it on FDDs. Using this standard was great when hard drives capacities where up to a small amount of megabytes, but lately producers can deliver hardware which seizes 1-2 terabytes and due to this old technology there are is lot of space loss.
Eight times less lost space – that is what producers say moving on to 4K sectors will mean, and also faster, more reliable and less power consuming drives.
Hard drive developers started a promoting campaign for educating people about this move to an advanced standard and to inform about possible conflict problems between this format and older OS like XP.
While Vista, Windows 7, Leopard, X Tiger are all aware about this 4K movement and are prepared to embrace this new technology, Windows XP hit the markets before this decision was taken. Although producers have discovered a method to help XP manage this new standard, performance will take a hit when writing data.
This new drives will simulate that are still using 512 bytes sectors so that when reading data this “trick” will go unobserved, yet when writing data a five milliseconds delay will emerge, producers say.
It is time that will show how this issue will be solved while a lot of Windows XP users are still using this operating system and might encounter problems when this standard will be fully embraced.
According to a BBC report, computer users in UK are buying less PC:
Personal computer (PC) shipments in Western Europe between July and September fell slightly compared with a year earlier, a report has said.
But compared with the previous quarter, shipments increased by almost a third, reflecting “seasonal growth” patterns, computer research group Gartner said.
Acer held on to the top spot, with 28.3% market share, followed by Hewlett-Packard, with a 21.5% share.
PC shipments totalled 16.7 million during the three months.
Germany and France saw shipments increase, while the UK saw shipments decline, but at a slower rate.
You have your brand new shiny PC an the next thing is to connect it to the Internet, how do you go about it? Usually your PC come with some Internet services provider software bundled with it, the most popular ISP on the desktop from brand new computers is AOL, if you do not want to use AOL as you internet service provider, what options do you have?
The list below is not exhaustive but it contains pretty much most of the major boradband providers in UK and some in Ireland:
BT Total Broadband
High speed (up to8Mb/s) ADSL Broadband Internet for home.
AOL Broadband
Broadband and dial up internet packages.
NTL Broadband
TalkTalk Broadband
Telewest Broadband
OnSPEED Broadband Alternative
Bulldog Broadband
Virgin Broadband
Tiscali
AAISP
Abel Internet
High Speed Broadband Internet Access
ADSL-Now
Advance Internet
Albion
Allcomm
AltoHiway
Atlas Internet
BISCit
BoltBlueClara.NET
Community Internet
DataComms
DataNet
Demon
Easynet
Eclipse Internet
EFH Broadband
Entanet
Freedom 2 Surf
The remaining list of UK broadband provider will be continued in part two. Meanwhile here are some useful urls. You can compare broadband at this one, to find out broadband speed test you need that one. And if you need to compare prices this is your option.
The PC industry will see a decline of nearly 12% in 2009, analysts predict.
It would be only the second period of negative growth in the industry, after a slump of 3.2% in 2002.
The news follows an announcement that the semiconductor industry saw a 35% drop in sales of computer chips between 2008 and 2009.
However, analysts say the chip industry will weather the global economic storm better and rebound faster than the rest of the technology sector.
“The outside economic situation that we’ve seen deteriorating over the last few quarters is now directly affecting the PC market and we’re going to see growth slump over the next year,” said Ranjit Atwal, principal research analyst at Gartner.
The shift in the health of the market was a sharp one. European PC sales were at 20% in the third quarter of 2008; the fourth quarter saw a dive to just 4%.
In 2009, Gartner predicts, those numbers will plummet into the negative. They say that the global market will see 257 million PCs sold in 2009, a downward slide of 11.9% on 2008.
The market dive that occurred in 2001-2002, Mr Atwal said, was primarily from the corporate side of the market.
This time, both individuals and businesses are predicted to buy less PCs, hanging on to ageing computers for longer as part of general belt-tightening.
“The PC market is much more mature [as compared to 2002], and the PC is relatively more important to consumers,” Mr Atwal said.
“But nevertheless, it’s still a luxury item, it hasn’t gone all the way
“That means if your PC slows down, doesn’t work well, doesn’t do what you think it should do, you’ll live with it.”
Some facets of the PC industry are clearly on the up – such as mini-laptops and netbooks, which are projected to ship 80% more units in 2009 than 2008.
However, with just 8% of the overall market share they can’t make up for the slide of the PC industry as a whole.
Weather storm
The semiconductor industry is also facing negative growth: from the third to fourth quarters of 2008, the industry slumped by nearly a quarter.
About Author: The article is submitted by guest author. He provides some useful computer optimization tips on his blog. You can fix speed of your computer by downloading best registry cleaner available online.
read full story here: news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7918621 .stm
