The tech industry is characterized by brutal competition. Ongoing patent wars, massive company acquisitions, aggressive marketing strategies, all of these in an effort to get the bigger slice of the marketplace. One recent casualty in this race for supremacy is Hewlett-Packard. Unable to keep up with the “tablet effect,” HP recently killed its line of webOS devices and is also spinning off their PC business. Is there a way that this could have been prevented?

The demand for the PC has been steadily decreasing since the release of the iPad. In response, other companies like Samsung, Motorola, HP, RIM, Asus and LG started producing their own tablets, thinking that the tablet itself as a design is what attracted people to the iPad. They have all since gone back to the drawing board, resizing, increasing, shrinking and tweaking the hardware and software. Now we see tablets in all different shapes and sizes, all claiming to be better than the next. “We run flash!” “We are smaller.” “Our battery lasts longer.” “We are thinner.” Some of these tablets have created a short-lived buzz, but Apple still controls the vast majority of the market, no less than 68.7 percent in 2011. [Read more...]

Buying a supercomputer costs millions of dollars, then thousands more each year to maintain it. That’s not to mention the hefty electric bill to keep the massive system running.

So it goes without saying that average Joes can’t just get themselves a supercomputer. But many scientific researchers also don’t have access to them, even if they work at a university that owns one.

Particularly in the health, meteorology and astrophysics fields, scientists need immense processing to perform complex calculations in a reasonable amount of time. It might take a decade to run a set of modeling experiments on a standard personal computer.

But if you link millions of ordinary PCs together and split the calculations across them, you get a virtual supercomputer. That’s exactly what some people are doing. [Read more...]

Does it feel like you can make a pot of coffee and clean the kitchen all in the time it takes for your computer system to boot up? Do you find yourself daydreaming of dropping it off the top of your office building while you’re waiting for web pages to load? If it seems like your computer is running slower every day, here are some things to do to get your “old reliable” running in tip-top shape. Of course, budget-savvy Nerd Chicks are always looking for ways to save some dough, so we’ve made sure they are all free.

1. Get Rid of the Nasties

Viruses and spyware don’t always break your computer, but they do always slow it down. They’re more common than you may think, and can hang out in your system, gumming up the works, without you even knowing it. Microsoft Security Essentials is a great, easy, all-in-one solution to keep your computer healthy and running in top form. [Read more...]

Hanover – No matter how many high-end components are installed on your PC, its speed is still probably hampered by one component: the hard drive. One way to fix this problem is to replace the traditional hard drive in your PC with a solid state disk (SSD), according to German technology magazine c’t.

There’s just one catch. SSDs currently cost about 1.33 dollars per gigabyte, which is 46 times the cost of a conventional hard drive. So a lower capacity SSD is often the only choice for many consumers. The operating system, standard folders for user data, as well as the key applications can be placed on the SSD to speed things up; all other data can remain on a cheaper traditional hard drive that can be set up as an additional disk to run in parallel with the SSD.

SSDs are next-generation hard drives that use non-volatile memory modules to store data rather than rotating magnetic platters. As an additional benefit, SSD drives are shock- and jar-proof. SSDs with a capacity from 80 to 128 gigabytes cost about 200 dollars. [Read more...]

It is too soon to replace my twice-yearly laptop buyer’s guides with tablet buyer’s guides, but some days it feels like I should. Much of the energy that companies once poured into laptop designs and advances seems to have been drained off into a massive race to create tablet computers.

Still, while tablets are important, they don’t fully replace laptops, at least not yet. There remains huge value in the portable, clamshell-shaped computer with a physical keyboard, lots of ports, plenty of storage and more horsepower than tablets offer. So, here is my annual spring laptop buyers’ guide, a basic cheat sheet to the most important factors in the shopping process.

While I’ve focused on laptops, much of this advice also applies to desktop computers, a fading species. As always, these tips are for average consumers doing the most common tasks. This advice doesn’t apply to businesses or to hard-core gamers or serious media producers. [Read more...]