For those who are not in the know yet, Santa Rosa in computer parlance does not refer to any city, place, flower or person. Rather, it is the codename used by Intel to refer to its fourth generation of the Centrino platform.

There are actually two types of the Centrino platform that are referred to as the Santa Rosa. One is called Centrino Duo while the other is the Centrino Pro. What is the difference? Centrino Pro makes use of the enhanced security technology that Intel developed for its vPro platform marketing initiative while Centrino Duo does not.

What features make the Santa Rosa so far stand out among the chip offerings of Intel? In summary, according to this review by CNet.com, they are:

• A number of new Core 2 Duo processors. Well, not really so new, because they are still based on the architecture seen in the previous generation of the Centrino platform. What is new about the Santa Rosa Core 2 Duo processors is that the clock speeds can now run as fast as 2.4 GHz.
• A front-side bus that goes up to 800MHz. This means that the components making up the computer will be able to communicate nicely and more efficiently with each other.
• A new integrated Intel GMA X3100 graphic chip that has a larger VRAM allocation at 384 MB. This new graphic chip can support DirectX 10 and will really be helpful in running the resource-hungry Microsoft Vista.
• A new and faster wireless card that is able to support 802.11n networking. This, however, will require the purchase of a Draft-N wireless router.
• An optional dedicated memory cache that will allow for faster booting and loading time.
• A chipset designed for more efficient power management that is better at extending battery life for laptops.

What would these features mean to you as the possible end-user of a Santa Rosa machine? If you would look closely, the listed features of the Santa Rosa platform are good. However, they are not revolutionary; far from that, actually. The steps taken for the Santa Rosa platform to move forward were not that big.

What is the conclusion? If you are not really actively looking into buying a new laptop or desktop and if you are still happy with the way your machine performs for you, stick with your old machine. But if you are already considering replacing your machine long before you even got wind of Santa Rosa, then by all means, check it out.

When we make a list of the top ten must-have peripherals and gadgets for the computer, we always come up with a list of the best monitors, the best scanners and printers, the best mice and whatnot. Frankly speaking, that list can turn out to be a boring list, and nobody really agrees completely on any ten best lists of anything ever made.

So, instead of a list of the top ten must-haves of the usual peripherals, we tried putting a twist into making this list that may prove even mildly interesting. All of them are quite useful, so you may even find yourself considering getting one. Oh, this top-ten list, despite being a list of top ten items, comes in no particular order.

• X7-G100 Gaming Keyboard. If you find the joystick unwieldy and your standard keyboard inconvenient for killing the mobs and monsters and bad guys in your favorite computer games, get yourself an X7-G100 from A4Tech. It has all the handy keys you will ever need for setting your game controls and commands. You only need to plug it to a USB port. What’s more, it is waterproof so you can enjoy your drinks without any worries about possible spills.
• USB Wireless Mouse. For lazy people who would rather lay down in bed with their laptops while doing their work, their gaming or their general idling rather than sit at a desk. It is wireless, and you only need to hold the red button on it to control it. It will work with both the PC and the Mac.
• USB Lava Lamp. This is something you could use not just to jazz up your work station but to act as a focus point for when you need to rest your eyes from the glare of your monitor. It comes in the colors blue, red and white.
• USB Missile Launcher. Bored like heck with work, feeling a touch closed in or really annoyed with your boss? Firing your USB missile launcher makes for an instant cure. These foam missiles can go up to 20 feet in nearly all directions and comes with sound effects software.
• The Armageddon Hub. This gadget is your handy weapon of mass destruction disguised as a four-port USB hub. Whenever someone strolls by your workstation and annoys the crap out of you, you just flip the switches, open the plastic lid and then press the big red button. Soon enough, you will feel relief awash you as the loud “Kaboom” sound effects fill the room.
• Posture Reminder. This is a handy device you can use to help correct your posture. Just put it on your monitor and watch it flash when your head gets too close or too far from it.
• USB Paper Shredder. Papers piling up on your desk? Probably bills and invoices and whatnot? Rid your desk of all that paper clutter with this handy USB paper shredder. It has is own bin, on which you can amuse yourself by watching your shreds pile up. It also has a letter opener.
• Beverage cooler/warmer. Love to keep your coffee hot and your Kool-Aid cool? This nifty USB device can do just that for you.
• Alarm clock/air purifier. Going stir crazy with the fact that the guy on the desk next to yours seems to have not taken a bath for days? This gadget will clean the air for you while reminding you of how many hours you still have to wait before you can go home.
• USB Flower Fan. Keep yourself cool when the air conditioning just conked for the nth time that week, or just get yourself hypnotized by the colorful rotating fan. Your choice.

You can get these devices from online shops like USB Brando, I Want One of Those and USB Geek. Have fun!

Summer is in, so all the kids will be out from school and their parents will be kept busy thinking up ways to keep them occupied. For the grown-up kids at heart, they will also probably be in a summer state of mind.

The advent of summer can only mean a number of things: summer trips, whether to the beach, to camp, to Granny’s house, or even abroad; summer days spent outdoors hanging out with friends; or summer days indoors hosting serious gaming parties. If the case in question for you is the first item or the third item, you would surely need a laptop to augment the summer fun.

Why is that, you may ask. If you’re going on a summer trip, you ought to bring your laptop with you so you could still communicate with your family and friends, whether through email, IM, voice chat, Myspace, Facebook and whatnot. Pictures taken during your trip are a must-share on a personal blog.

However, if you are just staying home, you can use your laptop to entertain yourself this summer. You can start by making your PC your very own home theater system, to play your music and your videos. Or you could simply log into an MMORPG like World of Warcraft, Guild Wars or Final Fantasy XI and spend your summer days beating up monsters. Better yet, you could organize a group of people to play with you over a network. That’s loads of fun.

The question is: what kind of laptop will best serve you this summer? You can easily search the Internet for the answer.

One all-purpose laptop that comes highly recommended is the HP Pavilion dv6500t. This laptop, with its shiny black-and-silver casing, is pretty without being showy. At 6.2 pounds, you can carry it anywhere without much difficulty. You might find yourself wishing that this baby’s screen is wider than 15.4 inches (diagonal), but the portability makes up for the screen size. Performance-wise, it isn’t bad at all. Its 2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T7500 processor, teamed up with a 2GB memory and a 120GB hard drive ensures that you will get your work done on this laptop quickly and happily. Battery life lasts approximately four hours. The one bad thing about this laptop, however, is that you may want to change from the integrated Intel Graphics Media Accelerator X3100 from this laptop and upgrade the graphic card if you want to have some real gaming fun.

PC World ranks the HP Pavilion dv6500t as its number one all-around laptop to date, while CNet.com has given it a score of 6.9 out of 10. It is definitely worth looking at.

Some of the average computer users that I know got overwhelmed when they first got their hands on a machine powered by an Intel Core 2 Duo chip. With the Core 2 Duo, they thought they already saw it all. But hey, I’m looking forward to seeing their faces when they hear about what aces Intel still has up its sleeve.

The second half of this year is when we start to get to see exactly what these aces are. According to this article on PC World, Intel is slated to bring to the masses the most awaited Penryn chips. These Penryn chips would be the first type of chips that will be introducing to the world Intel’s 45mn manufacturing systems, with high-k dialectric and metal gate transistors. This means we will have faster computers that keep raising clock speeds and yet consuming as constant an amount of power as possible. Sounds neat, doesn’t it?

But it does not end there. The article further states that in early 2008, Intel will start shipping its Nehalen family of CPU chips as well as the Tolapai. If the Penryn chips will give us a taste of what Intel’s 45mn manufacturing system can do, the Nehalen chips will give us a full blast of it. Intel said that the Nehalen chips will have as much as eight cores on a single chip, with an integrated DDR3 memory controller. There will be two threads in each core, as well as a dedicated cache memory, though a large and shared cache is also to be expected. On some Nahalen chips, there will be integrated graphics.

We have yet to read of details as to what exactly the Tolapai is, but people from Intel have already revealed that the Tolapai puts together an x86 processor core with an integrated chipset. Add to that an encryption co-processor. The Tolapai design has dedicated servers in mind, servers that take care of virus scanning as well as encryption.

With all these developments, the CPU as we know it will be radically different from what it once was. It will be all power and speed as we have never known it before. As the PC World article put it:

“As the number of cores increases, so does the number of threads that can be processed simultaneously, opening the door to further performance gains.

I don’t know about you, but I am marking my calendar until 2008.

The geeks and the speed demons out there who love to push their hardware to well beyond their limit by constantly overclocking them know very well that in order to keep successfully overclocking their computer systems, one of the things they absolutely must do is to keep their hardware cool. And when we say cool, we mean cool to the touch, with the most minimal presence of heat. Failing to manage the computer’s cooling system is definitely the straight road to literal computer hell. Of course we don’t want that to happen to our beloved machines now, do we?

In the ancient days of the computer, coolers for graphic cards are unheard of. The only people who have them are the geeks. But then again, as these graphic cards evolved and became more powerful, so did their need for an effective cooling system that will keep them from getting fried. Goodness knows how much beating these graphic cards get with the current mode of computer applications nowadays. Running Windows Vista alone gives graphic cards loads of kicks; and we aren’t talking about computer games yet.

So nowadays, it is necessary to provide a separate cooler for your graphic card. The question is, when most graphic card coolers generate the most noise in a computer system, when choosing a graphic card cooler, do you go for silence or do you go for performance?

It is a personal choice, really. People who use computers for work and for fiddling with their computer home theater systems prefer a quiet PC. Most gamers, on the other hand, couldn’t care less about whether their computer is screaming with them or not, as long as their playtime is undeterred by slow-moving or ugly imaging.

Madshrimps came up with this very insightful analysis on what kind of graphic card cooler you should get, depending on whether you are aiming for silence or for performance. Go to that website and check it out. But in summary, if you want silence while keeping your graphic card cool as the breeze, Madshrimps recommends fitting your graphic card with a Zalman 80C-HP, from the computer cooling pioneer Zalman. That is a water cooler, so you can do away with the fan if hearing them hum drives you nuts.

However, if you prefer to up your graphic card’s performance through constant overclocking, Madshrimp says that you are better off with an Arctic Cooling VGA Silencer. It won’t be as silent as a Zalman, but it will still give you the powerful performance that you desire.

All gamers and multimedia enthusiasts out there know that getting the best out of their gaming and multimedia experience rests on the quality of their computer’s graphic cards. A high-grade graphic card means smooth and beautifully rendered images as well as optimum color management. A low-grade graphic card, on the other hand, means… well, we all do not need to dig into what that would mean for us, right?

If you are thinking of upgrading your machine and are searching the market for the newest graphic card releases out there, here is the latest list from CNET.com:

• EVGA e-GeForce 8600 GTS. This latest offering from Nvidia is 256MB 3-D chip that is made to support DirectX 10. With a chip core of 675MHz, this card is actually a lot faster than many models out there in its price range. However, the memory is quite slow and it has only a single-slot PCI Express card. This chip is great for HD multimedia stuff, but not really for gaming, so if your need for your graphic card centers more on multimedia usage rather than really serious playtime with Need for Speed or Elder Scrolls, this GeForce 8600 perfectly answers your needs.
• Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTS. One can say that this is e-GeForce 8600’s higher-end version. It is great and it is powerful; with a core clock of 500 MHz, a memory of 640 MB and a data rate of 800 MHz, it can take a serious beating from a very serious gamer. It promises to work well with DirectX 10 and Windows Vista. The only problem about this chip is that it can be pretty expensive. If you are sold out on the Nvidia GeForce line, this chip is a solid buy.
• ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT. This chip is AMD’s answer to Nvidia’s GeForce 8800 GTS. With nearly similar specs, both capable of supporting the next-generation DirextX 10 games exclusive to Windows Vista, of anti-aliasing and all the good stuff, ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT nonetheless one-ups Nvidia’s chip with its tessellation unit, which gives the appearance of added detail to graphics. The one thing that would truly hurt the race between this newest release from ATI Radeon and Nvidia’s baby is that the HD 2900 XT came six months later than the GeForce 8800 GTS.

We are all still waiting, however, and with bated breath. After all, the new DirectX 10 next-generation games that will truly put these new chips to the test have yet to come.