After being the center of attraction for media, users, Windows enthusiasts and others, Windows 8 will finally be out this year and with this curiosity to know what tablet manufacturing companies will have their names added with it has also increased among all!

So, any idea which companies will be tagged as Windows 8 tablet makers once the new Windows hit the market this year? Well, there are number of popular manufacturers that will get to included in the long list of tablet manufacturing companies, some of these are HP, Dell, Lenovo, Acer and Asus which will come up with their Windows 8 tablet sometimes in October this year.

The other names that came into limelight for working on their own set of Windows 8 tablet to be introduced in the earliest possible part of 2013 happen to be Sony, Toshiba, Samsung, and Lenovo.

Well, as far as Dell is concerned, it has been keeping quiet about its plans for coming up with its tablet. It did launch the Dell Streak 10 tablet based on Android Honeycomb last year but it kind of kissed goodbye to it soon.

There’s a somewhat similar story about HP. It did land up into tablet market but couldn’t taste much success with its HP TouchPad which did gain popularity but it couldn’t last that long.

Interestingly, both the companies got ready to try out their luck in the tablet market once again with Windows 8 tablets.

Lenovo is believed to be the first manufacturer that will be releasing a Tablet based on Windows 8 as per the company insiders. Lenovo is looking forward to release its Windows 8 based tablet soon after the coming up of Windows 8 from Microsoft. And the estimated time is believed to be October 2012.
The tablet has not yet been named. It is said to be sporting a chip powered by Intel however no other specifications of the tablet are known yet. The buzz has it that the first Windows 8 tablet that Lenovo would be releasing would be IdeaPad Yoga, which is a kind of prototype device which was showcased at the CES 2012 that had impressed the viewers of the show. This device sports 13.3 inch display which has a resolution of 1600X900 together with 10 touch points.

It is the flexibility of Yoga that makes it stand unique. It has display that can be flipped over, and you get to either think of using it as a full-blown notebook or instead a full-blown touch screen tablet. Have the device work for you the way you want.

The coming summer will bring second generation high performance Trinity APUs from AMD and along with this there’s another cool presentation from AMD around. The company has plans of expanding its A-series processor range by bringing up some new models that will be based on Llano architecture.

One of these to be released APUs from the series, named as A4-3420 is expected to be hitting the market sometimes in May or June this year. It will be next version of AMD’s A4-3400 APU made faster which was introduced sometimes back in 2011.

The major change that you’ll find in A4-3420 on comparing it with its earlier version include its faster core speed it will work at 2.8GHz in place of 2.7GHz which was A4-3400’s default clock.

To enhance your knowledge regarding AMD’s integrated GPUs, you must know that the 160 shader units that run at 600MHz are featured by the 6410D and Microsoft’s DirectX 11 API is also supported by it.

The updated 3420 will also be including dual channel memory controller quite similar to currently available A4-3400 and similar to this, the new version will also be supporting DDR3-1600 speeds.

You’ll get the TDP of the chip set at 65Watts with compatibility for motherboards that use FM1 socket.

As per the estimations, the A4-3420 will be priced at $65 (equivalent to 50EUR) by AMD which will be make it less expensive compared to A4-3400 and A4-3300 which are priced at $71 and $66 respectively.

A4-3420 is going to be one of the last know Llano APUs to hit the market as AMD will be introducing its latest  processor namely the Trinity accelerated processing units that will be based on Bulldozer architecture.

Gmail is a wonderful medium to exchange files online and most of us trust this medium a lot, this is why we exchange all our files with our friends through Gmail. It is possible to attach almost all kinds of files (except the executable files and folders) up to the size of 25MB and share with your friends by simply sending them the files.

But sometimes you may have to face problem in this kind of sharing like inability in attaching the files into your Gmail account. Here you’ll find an easy solution for this kind of trouble.

You’ll simply need a Gmail Drive – which is a helpful freeware software piece which on installation gets a virtual hard drive created for your Gmail accounts right in your computer.  Once you have this special virtual hard drive, it is possible for you to drag-drop any file or data in this drive and when you can store data here in this drive, you get an E-mail with the file neatly attached. But you need to remember that this Gmail Drive will just be a virtual hard drive and you’ll able to use it only when your internet connection is actively on.

Now the question is how you’re going to create this virtual hard drive? So here is the way to have it done.

Creating the Virtual Hard Drive for GMAIL in your Computer.

Step 1: Download and Install the needed software, i.e. Gmail Drive right in your computer.

Step 2: Once you have installed the software, you’ll find one new hard drive on your PC along with the original one. Simply Right Click on it and choose the Login As option.

Step3:  Now you’ll find that a window has popped up. You’ll simply have to fill your Username and Password to have the Virtually Created hard drive opened.

How to use the Virtual Hard Drive?

It is super simple to use. You’ll simply have to add your Username and Password and click on OK. Once the hard drive gets opened, just copy/paste or drag-drop any of your data that you want to share with your friends in to the Gmail drive.

And once you are done, you can easily log out from your account. For this you’ll simply have to Right Click on the Virtually Created Drive and choose the Log Out option and you’ll be done.

And this is all, isn’t that an easy way to share your files and folders! And the coolest part is that every time when you’ll place a file in this folder, you’ll get an Email from yourself on using which you’ll be able to forward the attachment!

But remember using this simple little trick you’ll only be able to send those files which are allowed by Gmail and not those which aren’t allowed like .exe files or any other of such kind.

Just a fortnight back, AMD introduced two processors namely FX-4170 and FX-6200 right into its Bulldozer CPU range. It has now added the MSRPs of the chips in the company’s official price list. So, it is no more the business of the rumormongers to talk about the prices, instead the prices are the part of the latest breaking news.

FX-4170 and FX-6200 are much faster compared to the FX-4100 and FX-6100 that they have replaced, thus it appears somewhat reasonable that AMD has priced these chips $20 more that their earlier counterparts.

FX-4170 will have a MSRP of $135 which is around 102 EUR and FX-6200 is suggested to cost $165 or about 125 EUR.

FX-4170 is a quad core processor that has a starting speed of 4.2GHz and a maximum Turbo of 4.3GHz which makes it an egression from the original FX-4170 from AMD that works at 3.6/3.8GHz.

This chip consists of only two Bulldozer modules and its L2 cache is also limited at 4MB, however the Level 3 cache has been kept intact, as a result of which FX-4170 gets to pack up 8MB in its last level memory.

FX-6200 also comes packed up with 8MB of Level 3 cache, however its Level 2 cache size got increased to 6MB as it is a six core processor.

FX-6200 is set at 3.8GHz as its base level operating frequency, however this can be made as high as 4.1GHz when you don’t use all its cores. This is possible as a result of the AMD’s Turbo Core dynamic overclocking technology inclusion.

You get 125 Watts of TDP both in FX-4170 and FX-6100 and they have already been delivered as stock to many of the retailer across the US which includes Amazon, Provantage, and Newegg.

It is believed that FX-4100 and FX-6100 will be a part of the new AMD chips for sometime, however it is not sure how long it will be so.

Asus is all set to enter the desktop market in India by launching its two desktop variants tomorrow on March 7, 2012, namely CM (multimedia) and CG (gaming) models. It is estimated that the company  will be targeting about 40% of the feasible market which currently is 1,60,000 to 1,80,000 units each month including both mid and high segment. The upcoming product will be targeted at the beginner as well as professionals in the gaming world together with the SOHO segment.

A total of 7 SKUs, 3 each in the CG and CM along with the product with Asus flagship, Tytan CG8565 which will be offering a button on the clocking option, will be coming up.

The prices of the devices will be ranging from Rs. 23,000 to Rs. 1 lakh which won’t be including the monitors. Intel’s dual Core G630, Core i3 and Core i5 processors will be featured by the multimedia desktops whereas the Intel’s Core i5 and i7 2600k processors will be features by the gaming desktops. RAM offered in them will be ranging from 2GB to 8GB in all the gaming desktops.

The top end ROG Tytan CG8565 will be sporting SSD for caching. The gaming series desktops will be sporting Blu ray writers, and graphic cards from Nvidia GeForce ranging from GT530 to GTX560Ti.

The products will be distributed in India by Rashi Peripherals and will be supported by the Asus India team in the process. The company is also determined at increasing its partner base to 100 by the second quarter of 2012 from its present position of 48 partners across 24 cities.

Asus desktop will be offering an onsite warranty of 2 years. Digicomp will be its authorized service provider for providing after sales support for the desktop. Presently it has got 48 service centers which will be increased to 80 by the second quarter of 2012.

Finally the wait is over, making its customers wait for months, Transformer Prime has now got launched in India. It will be priced at Rs. 49,999 and only one model of Prime (TF201 – 1B014A) will be made available right now. It is believed to be the Wi-Fi version and there appears no chances of 3G version coming up as it the suggested plans are of replacing version with new Transformer 700 which Asus had announced at MWC 2012.

Customers are going to have it with Honeycomb in the beginning; however it will be possible to upgrade it to Ice Cream Sandwich quite soon. Nvidia’s Tegra 3, the first quad core CPU to be used on hand held devices will be run by this tablet. A LED backlit display of 1280X800 resolutions will form the part of the screen. The back will consist of new 8MP snapper together with flash.

The Prime is believed to come with a 3G dongle support, but it is said that SIM card slot will be more convenient in place of the dongle sticking out on to the side of the tablet.

If rumor is to be believed, it isn’t a very good time to have the product launched, Asus already has new tablet range, and this old product being launched at this time doesn’t seem a very profitable move, especially when the company has just announced its replacement. Again, Apple is also expected to bring out its iPad 3, which will be another sales killer for Prime.

It appears that the magic of Netbooks is coming to an end and has lost the kind of power it had earlier.  At least from the move taken by Lenovo, one gets this notion. Lenovo has stopped selling netbooks online, so if you had any online buying plans, you’ll have look for some other place to look for as Lenovo’s website is no more the place for you.  And the company hasn’t decided whether it’d starting the sales in the near future.

Lenovo is not the only company to take such a step; many other companies have taken similar decision on seeing consumers being less interested in netbooks over the time. With the availability of more technically strong tablets and mini-laptops at lower price tags, netbooks have seen dramatic drop in the sales. Dell too had stopped selling netbooks sometimes back, and the companies like HP and Acer have reduced their offerings.

Netbooks were a tremendous success but by the second half of the year 2010, their sales started declining, this actually started little by little after April 2010 when Apple’s iPad kindled the tablet market.

The total shipment of netbooks got reduced to 6.3 million in the fourth quarter of last year which was down by 29 percent or can be said to be just the third of what was sold in the fourth quarter a year back.

All the major netbook producing companies observed around 30% drop in the shipments and Lenovo alone found a shipment drop of 43%. However, netbooks are believed to be doing well in some parts of Latin America and Asia.

Right now the Lenovo’s site lists all its netbooks as “temporarily sold out – more stock is expected”.  But interestingly, Lenovo doesn’t seem to be changing its plan of releasing two of its S series netbooks namely S200 and S206 this June, which it announced last month during the CES 2012 in Las Vegas.

Finally, Samsung has also made its place in the ultrabook segment with the launch of two unltrabooks in India. One of the ultrabooks comes with 13.3 inches sized screen and the other comes with 14 inches. Both will be a part of Samsung’s Series 5 laptops present in the Indian market.

Both the Ultrabooks look smart with slick design offering body made up of aluminum and carbon fiber but the one with 14 inches screen is more successful in catching the attention of the customers as it comes loaded with one terabyte hard disk and doesn’t even miss a DVD drive in its sleek body.

Intel core i5 2467M CPU powers both the ultrabooks. The model with 13-inches screen has 4GB RAM and the one with 14 inches screen comes with a 6GB RAM.  The maximum retail price of 13” model is Rs. 48,990 equivalent to 998.48 USD and that of 14” model is Rs. 54,390 equivalent to 1,108.54 USD. The smaller model weighs 1.42kg whereas the bigger model weighs 1.84kg. The screen resolution of both the Ultrabooks is 1366X768 pixels. Intel’s integrated graphics chip supports the 13-inch model whereas the 14-inch model is packed up with Radeon HD7550 which is an entry level graphics chip from Advanced Micro Devices.

These Ultrabooks from Samsung doesn’t use an SSD for storage like other Ultrabooks in the market and instead depend on traditional hard disk.  But to ensure that they perform well, Intel’s iSSD (integrated SSD) technology is utilized by embedding 16GB flash storage right into the ultrabooks.
The huge storage space provided by these Utrabooks also introduces a slight disadvantage to the consumers as their speed gets marred. SSDs are known for better speed and lesser consumption of power offered by the battery. But these qualities also make them expensive. It is notable that to cut down this expensiveness, most companies in India provide 256GB or lesser storage in their ultrabooks.

Samsung has plans to offer SSD in their ultrabooks in the near future but for now customers will have to manage without that.

Though there’s not much surety whether the next-generation processor architecture from Intel will get delayed or not, it is clear that dual core mobile chips won’t be introduced with the quad core parts which are expected to be made available sometimes in April. The latest news around is that Intel is launching its new range of caching solid state disks along with Ivy Bridge.

25nm process SLC NAND flash memory is being used by Intel’s new 313 Series solid state disks and it has been built with special consideration for caching together with Ivy Bridge lineup. The write latency of SLC flash is much lower compared to MLC and can handle about 20 times more program/erase cycles which makes it absolutely perfect for the cases where continuous read/write caching is involved.

They are believed to be available in 2.5 inch and mSATA form factors quite like the previous 311 Series SSDs. But with the 2.5inch version there is a reduction of the height to 7mm making it 2mm less than the 311 series. However, both will be employing SATA2 3Gbps interface largely as Intel doesn’t have their own SATA3 6Gbps controller.

They will hit the market in their 20GB and 24GB capacities. Company hasn’t clarified the need for the version with larger capacity, however it is assumed that perhaps larger capacity SSD will be to slightly enhance the performance.

The pricing will be kept similar to what was kept for 311 series models. The 20GB model will be available at maximum retail price of $99 and the 24GB model for $119.

The new SSDs are believed to be hitting the market sometimes in the month of April along with Ivy Bridge, but the speculations suggest that there are chances that they may be available a little before the processors are made available for the consumers.