Fujitsu Siemens World Travel Adaptor - 150+ Countries Supported

The Intel Atom is a small, inexpensive, energy-efficient microprocessor that is found in the majority of netbooks shipping today. Designed by Intel Corp. from the grounds-up and to be introduced into a wider range of computing environments, Atom and its derivatives will power many of the low-power computers to be sold in 2009, and beyond. This TekSpek explains what Atom is, and how it's changing the market.

You've probably read the USB Tekspek, and perhaps your intrigue, or product interest, has lead you to look up Firewire as well. The two are similar in some respects, particularly some of the products that use the two technologies. However, Firewire has its differences, which means it has both benefits and drawback when compared to USB. This Tekspek will look at Firewire and also look at it with respect to USB.

The array of joysticks on offer is massive with price varying almost as much as the styles of sticks themselves. The trick is buying a stick suited to your needs and not something that either doesn’t do what you need or has extras that you’ll never use. The reason there are so many sticks on the market is because they each fulfill a particular niche… so let’s take a stroll through the joystick forest and sort out the slender silver birches from the mighty oaks….

So you’re looking for a handheld gaming console, something small and sleek with decent battery life and good games… but what do you go for? There’s more choice out there than you probably realise, especially with some of the new ‘gaming’ phones coming onto the market.

Stating basics, every personal computer that's currently sold requires some form of CPU, motherboard, memory, storage, and graphics that output to a display. These components are common to both desktop and laptop computers.

A motherboard’s main job is to act as a conduit between the various hardware elements that make up a PC. It needs to be able to link the desired CPU(s), system memory, graphics card, hard drive(s), and add-in cards and enable them to work in harmony.

If you've used a computer for any duration of time you'll have come across the terms “kilobyte, megabyte, gigabyte” and so on. Then there's “kilobit, megabit and gigabit” to add a bit of confusion and to top it all off you've maybe heard or read terms like “gibibyte” on occasion.

This TekSpek explains what Green Computing is, what it means to the consumer, and how energy-efficient components can be beneficial in the home.

In computing terms, system buses are used to connect various components to the motherboard’s core logic and, often, to each other. Modern PCs run with a multitude of high-speed buses ranging from the interconnects between, say, the chipset and the CPU, graphics card, memory, and peripherals.

Updating drivers can sometimes be a bit of a gamble. Will the drivers come with an installer? Will you need to uninstall the old drivers first? Many drivers these days do come with an installer, which simplifies the process dramatically.

For many people reading this TekSpek, opening up a desktop PC and upgrading it, or even building one from scratch, isn’t that big a deal. If you know what goes where, it’s not all that hard. However, there seems to be some form of stigma surrounding laptops when it comes to upgrading them. There need not be, though.

Laptop sales are booming, with industry analysts predicting that up to 70-million units will be shipped in 2006. The figure’s seto to rise by over 15% in the next 3 years, so laptops are seriously big business.

This TekSpek explains what netbooks and nettops are, how they work, where you'll find them, and what the future holds for low-cost computers.

There’s a lot more to High Definition than just having the ability to run your screen at the right resolution. With more than one type of connection available, and the thorny subject of signal encryption to contend with, just because your monitor and graphics are capable of 1,920 x 1,080 or better does not necessarily mean they will be able to display HDTV in all its glory.

Whether the broadcasters are going HD or not, TV sets and projectors are arriving thick and fast which claim to support higher resolutions than regular telly. But HDTV is far from just one standard – it incorporates a couple of different resolutions, two different scanning modes, and a number of different frame rates. In this article, we present a guide to what all the terms actually mean.

Home networking let’s you do great things that aren’t possible with standalone PCs. Printers can be shared between PC, so there’s no need to buy one for each machine.

WiFi is a wonderful thing. You can take your laptop anywhere in your house and access the Internet, or access your network from the garden. However, it does introduce the grim possibility of somebody else doing exactly the same, without you ever knowing. This guide seeks to make you aware of various security terms and ideas associated with wireless networking and what you should consider when setting up a wireless network.

After nearly a decade of DVD dominance, optical disc formats are undergoing another revolutionary change. With DVDs offering insufficient storage for high definition content, a new optical format was required. Unfortunately, two competing formats have been developed instead – HD-DVD and Blu-ray. In this article, we explain why we need HD opticals, and the differences between the two competitors.

Conceived back in 2004 and brought to market just a year later, the 80 PLUS initiative is one of many standards introduced in an effort to increase energy efficiency in modern technology. Targeting computer power supplies, it awards PSUs that are able to achieve an energy efficiency of over 80 per cent at varying workloads and a power factor of 0.9 or more at 100 per cent load.

Let's face it, power-supply units (PSUs) are boring. Presented in what's usually a mundane box spitting cables from one end, this is a product that's neither aesthetically pleasing nor technically interesting to the majority of self-builders.

This TekSpek explains the essentials required to run a 64-bit operating system and native 64-bit applications on a modern 64-bit capable PC system.

This TekSpek discusses 2.0 speakers, explains how they have grown in popularity and what the consumer’s choices are.

USB 3.0, also known as SuperSpeed USB, is a buzzword you might have seen popping up repeatedly over the last 12 months or so. In this guide, we'll explain what it is, what it does, and what it could mean for you as the consumer.