Personal Computer Buyer's Guide Q2 2011

This post gives guide to anyone who's about buying or upgrading to new computer systems. The system only (without monitor and other peripheral) which listed below priced around $1000 (approx. Rp. 9 juta). Quite expensive, yet this is a very excellent starter for home PC with great performance, and suitable for gaming, HD multimedia content, and graphic design.

Intel® Atom™ Processor N450: Radical Changes on Netbook

Intel® Atom™ N270/280 to Intel® Atom™ Processor N450/N470 Architecture

 

The scheme show us the architecture changes from long based Intel FSB to Intel DMI, by integrating Northbridge tasks, such as onboard graphics and memory controller into Processor. This  bring to lower power usage since there’s only 2 chips left. Just like Intel 1156 with P55 chipset. With onboard graphics integrated in the processor, there’s no need for additional onboard graphics chipset such nVidia ION, which surely use more power. Hence, the new onboard graphics GMA3150 seems not getting much better than previous GMA950. the processor does have about 10% increase in performance. But for me the aim of this improvement is only to decrease the bill of material, so to speak this kind of architecture will be getting more cheaper. But by doing so, the user also get benefit by having a less power usage (from 3 to 2 chips) which lead to higher battery life for netbook. It’s almost the same battery performance against the Z520 with US15W (2 chips with Northbridge with Southbridge in one chip) which use a total about 4.5W.

Easter’s PC Guide, Part IB: Processor

Prosessor: atau CPU (Central Processing Unit) berpengaruh pada kecepatan berpikir komputer. Kecepatan berpikir ini pada dasarnya dipengaruhi oleh kecepatan frekuensi CPU, tapi ga Cuma itu aja, masih banyak sih yang mempengaruhi. Saat ini umumnya CPU sudah memiliki dua inti (dual core), hal ini sebenernya buat bikin prosessor bekerja lebih efisien. Dulu Intel sempet eksperimen bikin prosessor diatas 10GHz, tapi ya gitu, ga efisien, lagipula seperti Moore’s Law, bahwa transistor density of integrated circuits doubles every 2 years. Jadi daripada gedein clock mendingan gabungin sejumlah core ke dalam satu CPU. Awalnya sih sempet ga efisien juga, tapi sekarang udah bagus kok.

Selain core, ada juga yang namanya thread. Duh saya sih kurang bisa jelasin, tapi kalo di Intel ada yang namanya HT (Hyper-Threading). Kalo HT di Intel Atom itu cem dual core aja jadinya, meskipun sebenernya Cuma single core. Ciri utama buat tau HT nya jalan adalah dengan liat di Task manager di Tab Performance, kalo grafik cpu usage history nya ada dua, itu artinya HT nya jalan.

MSI Wind U100 Complete Driver Updates For Windows XP

This post is dedicated for all MSI Wind U100 series users. Below is the complete list of driver you have to install to keep your netbook driver up to date. I use the driver on Windows XP and all the drivers below worked fine for me.

You can check the latest driver from MSI Wind U100 driver download page here. But there are some drivers that is not available from the site, so you may want to look for them HERE.