Hardware

The Wi-Fi Alliance has released details about a new Wi-Fi specification which is to take Bluetooth head-on in the battle for short-range wireless communication.

Called Wi-Fi Direct, the standard allows for peer-to-peer connection between devices even if there's no Wi-Fi router present. The new specification which is said to ship sometime in 2010.

Wi-Fi Direct will allow connection between numerous things, like PCs, printers, phone handsets and cameras. Wi-Fi Direct improves speeds with mooted transfer times of up to 250Mbps. Bluetooth currently tops out at just 11Mbps.

We've had a few readers ask recently why wireless network connection icons disappear in Windows sometimes, and how to get them back. Even if your wireless network appears to function, missing icons can be annoying because it makes it hard to enable, disable or view properties due to the missing network icons. It’s a well known problem – so much so that Microsoft actually has an extensive Knowledge Base article dedicated to try various things to fix it – visit http://support.microsoft.com/kb/825826 for the full low down. ... read more »

Follow these PCAnswers tips to set up efficient power management techniques to bring down your carbon footprint or squeeze more battery life from your laptop!

1. Ditch the screensaver
Screensavers look pretty, but modern LCD monitors don’t need them to protect the screen – a better energy saving technique is to set the monitor to switch itself off after the same period you’d normally allow the screensaver to kick in – say five or ten minutes. The added bonus is that you’ll be extending the monitor’s life too. Set this from the Power Options Control Panel.

2. Hard drive use
Excessive use of the hard drive consumes more power as well as affects performance – make sure your drive is regularly defragged, add more RAM to your PC to reduce the load Windows places on your drive and let the drive spin down to conserve energy around the same time as your monitor powers off. ... read more »

One of the keys to a fast and happy PC is having plenty of disk space. However, a huge hard drive won’t help you in the long run – it’s like a bin bag. If you have a bigger-than-usual bin bag then you just put more rubbish in it until it’s full. The only difference between this and a small bag is that it’s a bit harder to struggle out the door with it. As well as having more files to wade through, disk access steadily becomes less efficient as the drive fills up. Furthermore, because the system uses the disk almost constantly for virtual memory among other things, this affects overall system performance. So, to keep disk usage low and manageable a tidy regime works wonders for your system.

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Component manufacturing giant MSI has unveiled its solution to faster computing with a new instant on OS that takes the form of a physical addon for motherboards. Called Winki, it's Linux-based and built into a small module that plugs directly into an MSI motherboard. At first, only select mainboards will come bundled with Winki, but it just might roll out across MSI's line of motherboards in the near future and provide a great way of upgrading older machines. ... read more »

We've finally got Windows 7 running on a laptop after testing on desktops and we're pleased to report that it's a fantastic experience. Microsoft showed off the battery-saving capabilities of Windows 7 to us before Christmas, which proved a bare minimum of 11 per cent better battery life thanks to the software, helping users green up their laptop by using that much less electricity for charging. In our tests we've found that battery life has indeed been extended over Vista, but more like 7 or 8 per cent. A welcome boost none the less.

This is great news for laptop users who barely see 4 or 5 hours of cable-free computing and a lot of improvements can still happen to make Windows 7 computers as efficient as possible.  While we wait for the new software, you can check out a Windows Vista tweak (http://planetgreen.discovery.com/tech-transport/computer-energy-sipper.html?daylife=2) that gets it to run more efficiently, along with other performance enhancing actions. Also check out PCAnswers issue 194 for more PC power management advice.