True story: About two months back I was walking through my house with the then-new Viliv S7 convertible netbook. I started babbling to my wife while she was tending to the kids about how much I loved this little netbook. Even though she clearly couldn’t care less, I went on to proclaim that if Apple would have gotten in on the netbook craze, its model probably would have been something a lot like the S7. You can probably guess that at the time I was ready to write a glowing review of the Viliv S7. But then I went to turn it on and discovered it was borked. My wife laughed out loud. Read More

The G-Drive external hard drive line has been out for a bit now. But the latest model is loaded with the Hitachi 2TB 7200RPM 3.5-inch hard drive, which means I had to check it out. Let’s just say, this boy is big, bad, and fast. Read More

Black Friday is almost here. It’s a great time to score some deals, but don’t go at it willy-nilly. Follow these 5 simple Black Friday rules to avoid the scams and wasting time. Read More

Our buddy Kyle at iFixIt.com has just announced a beta version of iFixIt Answers, a collaborative repair community for gadgets. It might be a great resource for friends and family who can’t figure out how to work the TV remote.

How does it work?

You ask a question on Answers and then can follow as folks help out and answer your questions. This also creates a database of answers for multiple devices including MacBooks, iPods, and Sony laptops. It’s a good idea because Kyle has a great following of DIYers and most of them aren’t out to troll the forums with dumb questions or answers.
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Here it comes: Best Buy ran a national Black Friday ad inviting the world to celebrate Thanksgiving and Eid Al-Adha, the Muslim festival of sacrifice. Fair enough, right? Happy Eid! Well, take a gander at the ad up there and brace yourself.

Look closely. You’ll probably miss the good will and wishes, they’re so innocuous.
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Short Version: A universal notebook adapter with retractable cabling that extends to almost ten feet in length, comes with nine adapter tips, and features two USB charging ports.

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The Year of the Netbook. That’s 2009. You can’t walk into a consumer electronics store without seeing netbooks everywhere. Actually you can’t really walk into a consumer electronics store, period, since they’re closing up faster than costume shops the day after Halloween. But that’s another story for another time.

While traditional netbooks sales will almost certainly see a decline in 2010 as they make way for the new class of low-voltage ultraportables, there’s still plenty to choose from this holiday season. Here’s a handful of purchase-worthy netbooks – in no particular order — for your perusal. The only real rule for this list (besides having to be a netbook) is that screen resolution must be greater than 1024×600. Those 1024×600 netbooks are so 2008.

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Short Version: The Deimos is the latest addition to BFG’s new line of computers. Intended as specialist gaming machine, the Deimos is big, beautiful, and very fast. Heat, bulk, and short battery life are to be expected from a gaming laptop, and aside from those it provides an excellent experience.
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Short Version: HP sure knows how to make a Windows Home Server. The company has been at it for years now and the latest model does just about everything better than the previous models. That’s how it’s suppose to be.
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For weeks – months even – analysts have been telling Apple to make a netbook for the masses, a $299 junker designed for those who surf the web on the couch, their Cheeto-stained hands scrabbling for the TiVo remote while they incessantly refresh Reddit and hope against hope that their Craigslist Missed Connection emails them back. The Air, they said, was too expensive, designed for the frou-frou quiche-eaters of Silicon (V)alley while the MacBook Pros were too overpowered for the likes of Flyover Sally and her sad-eyed brood of younglings. They needed to sell something to the masses, something solid, American, and corn-fed.

Well, now Sally, the quiche-eaters, and the Cheeto dude – and the rest of us – have the new MacBook. It offers a bit less power and peformance than the Pro line, a little more of the styling of the Air line, and sells right at $999, a magic marketing number that is neither North of $1000 (before taxes) and South of corporate financial suicide.
[UPDATE - Added battery test.]
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Comparisons have been made by the nattering nabobs of Appleism that the HP Envy 13 is just a knock-off of the Macbook Pro 13-inch. This is the cowards way out and I shan’t stand for it. I will look at HP’s latest notebook – don’t call it a netbook! – as a harbinger of things to come.

The Envy 13 reflects a few trends in Windows hardware. First, consumers are realizing that notebooks are garbage. They are willing to pay a premium for a more powerful computer in a sexier case. Second, Windows 7 is here and it’s ready to kick posterior and jot down identifying information.

The model we tested was running Windows 7 Professional and had an Intel Core Duo 2 L9600 processor running at 2.13 GHz. It also had 3GB of 1067 Mhz memory. Its GeekBench score was 2375. To put this into perspective, this ToughBook scored 1893 and something like the MSI Wind it 837. This is, needless to say, a full-bodied machine. Battery life hit about 3 hours of movie watching.
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The MSI X-Slim X600 tries so hard – so very hard – to be a full-size, Windows MacBook Air. It has the looks, it has the specs, hell, it even has the same shape. But one huge flaw keeps will keep it from becoming the de facto slim Windows notebook: the trackpad. It’s that bad.
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Short Version: Billed by Alienware as “the most powerful laptop in the universe,” the M17x is simply an amazing piece of hardware. It combines the latest in hardware with an extremely high-quality finish to create a laptop that is incredibly fast and well-designed. Unfortunately, it also might be the most expensive laptop in the universe.
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The Averatec N3400 is an ultraportable notebook with a 13-inch screen, “aluminum-clad” shell, external DVD burner, and 3.8-pound body weight. Priced at $799, it’s got a lot to offer.

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Quick Version: The Lenovo IdeaPad S12 represents one of the first netbooks to feature VIA’s Nano platform as a configuration option. You’ll gain some extra horsepower over Intel’s Atom setup while saving about $70 off the total system price, making the Nano a good option for those of you who want to watch 720p video. All that power comes at a price, though: decreased battery life, as the included six-cell battery only manages a little over four hours.

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Quick Version: Gateway’s new student-oriented NV series packs a lot of bang for the buck, although the machine is almost too heavy and bulky to function as a truly portable computer. If it’s going to spend most of its time on a desk, though, you get a fully-featured computer at roughly the price of an expensive netbook.

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Short Version: The $399 Acer Aspire One 751h is an affordable netbook with marathon battery life, a gorgeous screen, and an excellent keyboard. As long as you don’t expect to watch high-quality video clips, this machine makes for a very compelling purchase.

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