News for Tuesday, 30 May 2006

Barefeats has compared the gaming performances of the MacBook to those of: the 15" and 17" MacBook Pro, a Radeon 9700 Powerbook and Radeon 9550 14" iBook.
Quite unsurprisingly, the MacBook Pro and the PowerBook kick the shit out of the the Macbook. But so do - of course to a lesser extent - the iBook and its age-old GPU.
It's really a pity: had it had a dedicated video card, the MacBook would be the dream laptop instead of the "only" excellent one it nevertheless is.
[Update]: the benchmarks have been removed from the website. It seems the MacBook used for the tests had a problem, thus inducing a bias in the results.

While trying to install Windows on a MacBook, I have been facing a quite common error message:

Winnt_root\System32\Hal.dll missing or corrupt:
Please re-install a copy of the above file.

This can happen when re-installing windows. Looking in Microsoft knowledge databases one can find that the possible reasons for this error message are: • Windows XP is not installed in the location specified in the Boot.ini file.
• The Ntoskrnl.exe file is missing or damaged.
• The partition path in the Boot.ini file is not set correctly.
• General hardware failure.
I will not go into details, but I have tried all the solutions proposed by MS to solve each possible issue, and none worked... I have also tried to re-format the partition using MS Windows installer without success. Finally the solution is:

- Launch BootCamp Assistant in MacOSX
- Merge both partition
- Reboot
- Launch BootCamp Assistant, and create 2 partitions
- Install Windows

Most manufacturers wish to be distributed by leading supermarket companies in order to increase the number of potential customers as well as being visible in shops where most customers go on a weekly basis.
As shown by those photos below, Apple has decided to make deals with some supermarkets (here 'Membership store'), and this is new:


This package includes a Mac mini G4 Superdrive with 512MB of RAM, BT, Airport, A keyboard, a mouse and an AppleCare contract. Its price 699$ in Costcos (USA).
We think it's a good idea, even if it is meant to empty stocks after renewing hardware models, we would really like to see such operations taking place in Europe 'Membership or Discount stores.

According to New York Post, Microsoft is currently discussing with eBay in order to acquire the World's Online Marketplace.
It might be a huge deal for Microsoft, as well as further increasing its monopoly, and for sure not improving the on-going disputes with the European Commission.
But it is also not so surprising, Microsoft has started buying numerous start-up companies for a couple of months already. This is probably a reaction to the growing pressure applied by Google.
It might be the beginning of a new war in the Internet Business field... we all remember how the first war ended up when the bubble blew up...leaving numerous companies in the dust couple of years ago.

The following blog site http://ranex.blogspot.com has posted photos of visitors of the recently opened 5th Avenue AppleStore New-York, they spent some times stuck in the transparent lift...

Let's hope that this problem does not happen too often... not really good for Apple renown.

Frédéric has contacted us directly from Adobe Live to report some freshly released information from Adobe Marketing Director: Adobe has officially decided to discontinue Freehand.
Adobe's solution for web development will be Dreamweaver only. In addition, we will have to wait for a future revision in order to get an Universal Binary version.

JCJ

Quark has started distributing the new version of XPress version 7.
The Passport version costs 1299€ (taxes not included), while the update is available for 359€.
The application can be purchased both on-line or via a official reseller.
Quark is organizing a special events in many European countries to present XPress. Registration is free of charge: http://euro.quark.com/en/about/events/
JCJ

With the release of the Raptor 150, its brothers, aka Raptor 74 and 36 GB were not interesting anymore with their lower performance.
Western Digital has decided to update its entry level models to align them with its recently released Raptor 150.
following features are added:
- Larger cache from 8 to 16 MB.
- NCQ (Native Command Queuing) is now supported. Allowing feaster transfer and disk access if the SATA controller supports this technology.
- Cache data speed improved: from 72 to 84MB/s
- HS access timing reduced by 0.1ms
- noise level improved from 32 to 29 dB.
Reminder: our article concerning the test of the Raptor 150 : here