Stories about: MSI

For some users, the new generation of ultraportable notebooks comes close to embodying the Holy Grail for road warriors. Their laptop-like keyboards make them more usable for typing tasks than smart phones, but they are lighter and cheaper than traditional laptops. The original Asus Eee PC, for instance, cost about US$400 and weighed about two pounds when it was introduced last October.

No one loves to pay crazy per-user licensing fees, not to mention 15- 22 per cent annual support residuals. (And no one loves the endless, mind-numbing meetings with non-technical financial folks trying to pry budget for these tools from their clenched fists.) So today we're going to discuss tools that are free. However, we are not naming them to this list of "great" tools simply because they cost nothing. These are some of the best lesser-known tools out there.

Small-size laptops are the talk of this year's event and on Tuesday Intel's Sean Maloney unveiled a wall-full of mini machines based on its Atom processor.

The U100 has a 10-inch LCD screen with an LED backlight that should consume less power and provide a better picture than a traditional LCD panel.

Firefox 2.0 has finally slipped into release and while preliminary reviews are running hot and cold, it appears the browser won't have a big impact on corporate users.

PostgreSQL 8.0 is the first major release of the open source database in over a year. Linuxworld talks to two of 8.0's key contributors, Gavin Sherry and Claudio Natoli, who also happen to hail from Australia, about why 8.0 is so significant; porting it to Windows, and reasons why mainstream vendors such as Fujitsu have taken a keen interest in the object-relational database.

Sydney-based components distributor Checksun has thrown its weight behind ASRock, an emerging motherboard vendor that has taken international markets by storm with its aggressive pricing.

Advanced Micro Devices and its hardware partners are taking advantage of the Computex Taipei 2002 exhibition to show off motherboard and chipset support for AMD's upcoming Hammer family of 64-bit processors, with at least one motherboard maker giving a hint as to how fast the desktop version of the chip may run when it ships later this year.