It was a great day, made all the better with the anticipation I had for a particularly nifty piece of hardware waiting for me at the office. Specifically, this collection of circuits and transistors in a 740g rectangular brick is the Gigabyte U60 Ultra Mobile PC (UMPC for short).

                                                This is what they call a "broken keyboard". That's the official name, really.

An old PC is a poor, depressing piece of kit. It probably has been through many hours of mayhem with games, gone through deadlines with you, given you headaches with its idiosyncrasies and whatnot. Yet new life can be had with these old PC’s, if you can be creative with what you put it up for.

I’ve never paid much attention to the going-ons of the big telcos in our country, never noticed, for example, that astounding advances has already been made right under my nose while I was absorbed with computer hardware and consumer electronics.

                                              The old Globe Telecom logo

Going mainstream ain’t what it used to be. There were stark choices to be made back in the late 90’s regarding computer components and even whole computer systems. It was either you had the goods, or you had a poor alternative to “the goods”.

                                             An 8500GT. Looks mid-level doesn't it?

                                  A Classic.

There has been a stigma associated with build-in video on motherboards ever since the (in)famous “Tomato Board” – for those who still remember this particular monstrosity of a brand, don’t raise your hand – It tells everyone here how long we’ve been hardware fans.

Many classifications have been bandied around for things as diverse as food preferences to general movie stereotypes. Hence, being “vegetarian” has replaced your religious orientation in resumes, while you’ll find it difficult to find a teen movie without a jock, a snob, and a geek.

It’s not only J.K. Rowling who has a rabid following around the world, one that waits outside still-closed stores to become the first buyer of a certain book. Intel also has its own groupies, although admittedly smaller in number.

Extreme gamers are a special breed. Not only do they require a steady diet of the latest and most demanding games, they demand (or more often, desire) the latest piece of hot hardware that is available in the market.

                                     The PC is there, somewhere...

I’ve always wondered about the connotation of colors used in a company’s products. In the videocard business, there are only two worthwhile competitors: ATI and Nvidia. One is red, the other green. Strangely, a stoplight keeps popping into my head, but seeing that ATI is such a well-respected company, what color it’s represented with doesn’t seem to matter too much.

                                    Nice, red lettering at the venue...

Windows Mobile 6 was introduced to a small gathering of media and hardware partners recently. It had none of the swagger or pomp that heralded the recently held Vista unveiling – which is about right because what was being introduced after all is a serious piece of software coding, for serious working professionals.

HP’s event was neither an all out, haute couture gathering that left out the teeming masses of geeky sub-culture, nor was it a dry and tedious affair with charts and graphs full of technical details that would have driven off the fashion cognoscenti.