News for Wednesday, 5 November 2008

Many people on the web have found that the new trackpad on the new portables can in certain cases pose problems.
To start with, it happens that the click is ignored. This is especially the case if one lets trail on the surface many fingers or part of his palm. For others, the problem seems with something already known in the past. There is a time lag of a few second to take into account the actions. But more aggravating certainly is the function of zoom which can be activated by anything, for example while scrolling a page of safari one gets a sudden enlarging of the fonts.
In fact, a feature that one misses more with this trackpad, is the ability to more finely configure it, using the System Preferences.
PS: Anyone who finds how to deactivate the zoom under Safari will have my eternal gratitude.

If the SSD technology is promising, it remains too expensive for most users. While waiting for prices to finally drop enoght to make it a standart consumer electornics product, Sharkoon offers an interesting and opened alternative:

The Flexi-Drive S2S is a SATA SSD featuring 6 SDHC docks designed to hold Compact Flash SDHC cards creating a RAID 0 volume. As current storage capacity of CF SDHC is 32 GB, the maximal capacity currently offered will then be 192 GB. If performance level are not well defined yet, writing and reading speed of SDHC cards could offer an alternative for those willing to have a opened and evolutive solution. However, it remains unclear if such CF cards can stand multiple read/write cycles for a long time period. It might also not be financially interesting if you purchase the most expensive CF available on the market (more than 100 USD for a 32 GB SanDisk Extreme III, 30 MB/s writing speed).

As we reported it earlier, rumors were indicating a potential update of the current Centrino 2 platform before its migration to portable Nehalem. So far the date of this potential refreshment was not known. According to Digitimes, it should be released in March 2009, and should mostly target performance levels.
It seems that the last NVidia chipset integrated in the new MacBook models has forced Intel to speed up development of its IGP solution, a market where Intel is so far an undisputed leader. The GeForce 9400M has changed the draw.