Featured Laptop: Sony VAIO VGN-AR71M Notebook

Sony's new range of laptops are amoungst the first to boast 4Gb of RAM and Blu-Ray Disc Drives.

Our featured laptop also has a 300Gb hard drive and a built in 1.3 MP camera.

The new Sony also has a clear high definition screen (1440 x 900 Pixels).

The above laptop, and others in the new Sony range are also very reasonably priced.

You can get the above laptop, with 17 inch screen, 300GB hard drive, 4GB RAM and a dual core 2.1GHz processor for £820.

That may seem like a lot, however in the past 2GB RAM laptops would be in the £700 to £800 region, before the recent 'specing up' of nearly all the popular lines of laptops.

Toshiba and a few others have released their 'next-gen' laptops all featuring 3Gb+ memory and 180Gb+ hard drives, in the same price range (Toshiba are slightly better value than Sony).

Dell XPS Gaming laptops are available from around the £850 mark, obviously with Dell you can choose your model specs.

Create Your Own Bot

Many readers may be familar with Bots in MSN and other messanger services, such as SmarterChild.

We found a tutorial, giving information on how to produce your own.

Unfortuantely, you won't be able to make another Smarter Child, however you can try.

This tutorial is for GTalk, find the tutorial at the link below.

Tutorial

Google Dumps Forestle

Google has ended the account of Forestle, an "eco-friendly" search engine - dedicated to planting trees.

Forestle promises to plant 0.1m² per search, because as a member of adsense they are receiving money for each search.

Google have said that Forestle incentivised clicks - or asked members to click in order to generate revenue artificially.

Forestle have no set up Znout.com, which boasts to be even more eco-friendly.

To start with they borrowed an idea from Blackle, another "eco-friendly" search, also using Google to perform searches on their behalf, Google Co-op.

Then they hosted their new website on eco-servers, that use 55% less energy.

www.znout.com
www.blackle.com

Intel's Chinese Competitor

The Godson 3 microprocessor has been developed using Chinese government funding and was unveiled in California.

Whilst the new Chinese chip might not be so popular in Europe or North America - or even released in the continents, expect a large proportion of the Chinese consumer market to have a "Godson" chip in their computers.

Which is the Fastest Browser?

With the release of Chrome, the new open source browser from Google, people are asking "Which is the Fastest Browser?".

Safari make a few big claims on their homepage.

Safari claims to be faster on both javascript and html performances, Safari and Chrome (aswell as other browsers) share the same rendering engine, WebKit.

A rendering engine is the piece of software within the browser that interprets the HTML code behind a webpage and outputs the display.

Chrome therefore, from Google's point of view is only the toolbars, tabs and search box around the page display.

Safari's claims may be true, however according to cnet news, Chrome is much faster than Safari, beating the browser, aswell as IE8 BETA, IE7 and Firefox.

Which is the Fastest Browser?
Google Chrome BETA.

Google Chrome

Google has launched it's new open-source browser, 'Google Chrome'.

The browser is intended as an alternative to Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox - currently the two most popular, and most used browsers.

The move comes from Google becuase users wanting access Google, before the release of Chrome, had to go. through Microsoft of Mozilla first - in either of their browsers.

Internet Explorer 7 and IE8 BETA both come standard with Windows Live Search as the default search engine - Chrome prevents this.

Chrome - as you would expect - comes with Google as the default search engine, though this can be changed.

While the release of Chrome may be good news to many web users, it isn't to web developers - people who make websites.

It is yet another browser to test websites in, as pages are not rendered and displayed the same in all browsers.

Already wemasters will notice problems with their websites in Chrome, the new browser uses a similar engine to Safari, as similar rendering errors occur in both browsers.

In fact, webmasters will not have to code for another browser, as they have used a current rendering engine - see below.

As well as the above similararity, Safari reads javascript very quickly - faster than any other browser in fact (see their webpage), Google Chrome has been launched as a faster alternative to Internet Explorer, and it is.

"So why go to all the effort of creating a rendering engine, when Safaris is pretty good?", being the question someone at Google probably asked.

Actually, Safari cheated a bit to, the rendering engine is WebKit, it is very fast, however issues exist.

Javascript, a form of client side scripting used on many websites (BBC Homepage, YouTube, etc), codes have to be made and tested in all browsers for the result to be the same accross the board - not to mention testing if it will work at all.

If you were to take a quick look a Dynamic Drive (.com), a website offering free javascripts, you will notice they specify which browsers indivdual scripts work in, Safari not amoungst most of the browsers, in fact nearly all are for IE followed closely by Firefox.

The rendering engine aside - Chrome has some new and interesting features.

Firstly, each tab is a different Windows Process, this means you won't get frozen window.

Firefox and Internet Explorer are prone to becoming non-responsive if you have lots of tabs open, as the browser iteslf is one process.

This means that a Google Chrome tab is one process, and while not being viewed uses hardly any processing power.

So you can have potentially hundreds of tabs open and use the memory of one tab (the one you are viewing), where as the same scenario in Firefox or Internet Explorer will cause a huge usage of CPU, and probably the browser to become non-responsive.

You can also 'go incognito', wherby you open a window and the pages viewed do not appear in history, cache folder or on your computer in any other way.

If Google where thinking Chrome would over take Internet Explorer and FireFox, i think they will be dissapionted, however thats not to say there won't be a huge take up rate.