Over the years Stealth Computer has integrated WD or Western Digital Raptor hard drives into some of our high performance machines. Customers that perform video/audio editing, code compiling and other disk intensive applications easily benefit from the performance gains.

Western Digital is back with a new, ground-up design dubbed the “VelociRaptor.” The drive has a pretty unique and rugged appearance. It is a 2.5 inch drive integrated into a cast metal 3.5” enterprise class mounting frame which acts to dissipate heat. The marketing folks at WD are calling it “the world’s fastest SATA hard drive”. They claim the 300GB drive to be 35% faster then its previous fastest model.

Specs: 10,000 RPM, SATA 3 GB/s interface and a 16 MB cache

We have not had the opportunity to get our hands on one of these babies yet however they are expected to ship later this month.

For the Western Digital Product overview Click Here

Our Stealth High Brightness LCD Monitor products have continued to be one of our most popular peripheral products. Over the past few years we are finding that people want to deploy an LCD into high ambient light environments. Example applications we have been involved with include; public space kiosks, private yachts, oil rigs, digital signs and outdoor advertising.

Stealth high brightness LCD monitors are available with up to 1600 Nits of brightness depending on the model and size of LCD. The high brightness is achieved through CCFL backlight and inverter control. There are some manufactures that promise extraordinary brightness levels through film enhancement. It has been our experience that film can make a significant difference however they fall short when direct sunlight is involved.

For additional product details on Stealth High Bright LCD products please navigate here

Stealth New Product Announcment

Yesterday Microsoft announced it is delaying the release of Windows XP Service Pack 3 due to a newly uncovered glitch.

Microsoft said there is a “compatibility issue” between the XP service pack and Microsoft Dynamics Retail Management System, a retail chain management program for small and midsize businesses.

Microsoft has finalized the code for release for SP3 last week and had planned to make it available starting April 29^th..

“In order to make sure customers have the best possible experience, we have decided to delay releasing Windows XP SP3 to Windows Update and Microsoft Download Center,” the company said in a statement.

The delay is expected to be a very short one; however it does add to the list of delays experienced as far back as 2006.

Seagate announced today that it is the first company to have shipped 1 Billion hard drives. This would equate to about 79 million terabytes or 158 billion hours of digital video or 1.2 trillion hours of tunes. Seagate has said it took 29 years to reach the 1 billion milestone, however its next billion in less than five years away. Digital content has exploded in recent years creating a huge growth in demand for storage.

Well its patch Tuesday, so if you will excuse us we have to download the latest XP updates.

News Release

Rumors have it that Microsoft is releasing Windows XP Service Pack 3 next week. OEMs (that’s us) and business customers will get the service pack first followed by the rest of XP users through Microsoft’s online Windows Update service about a week later.

Microsoft is in a bit of a quandary with XP. The more it improves the OS, the less reason users have to upgrade to Vista, which has failed to catch on with computer users since its debut last year.

The Microsoft Service Pack Overview

In 1999 we purchased the existing Stealth Headquarters, a 15,000 sq ft facility providing us with plenty of room to expand at the time. We have now purchased the adjoining building and have begun to prepare this facility for further expansion. The new building gives us an additional 11,000 sq ft of production space for a total of 27,000 sq ft.

Stealth continues to grow from a basic root philosophy and evolving quietly as the leader in the specialized computers and peripherals market.

Pictured below is a panoramic shot of the new space in transition.

click for bigger size

Billy Gates may have been doing some jive talkin when he mention that we’d see a new version of the OS “Sometime in the next year or so,” (“Or So” being the operative words)

Well don’t get yourself in a tizzy over crazy Bills developer speak. “As is standard with the release of a new product, we will be releasing early builds of Windows 7 prior to its general availability as a means to gain tester feedback,” a spokesman for Microsoft said, downplaying Gates statement.

Microsoft wants everyone to chill with the toned-down news that it’s got no plans to introduce Windows 7 any earlier than January 2010 (three years from the Vista launch). Lets hope the XP cutoff date is pushed out a bit.

And we thought our Stealth LittlePC products were small….

At the recent Intel Developers Forum (IDF) in Shanghai, Intel showed what it considers to be the smallest motherboard on the planet. This motherboard, or mainboard PC circuit board, will go into the company’s next-generation “Moorestown” mobile Internet device (MID) platform due in the 2009-2010 time frame.

“Our engineers have been very hard at work on Moorestown,” Anand Chandrasekher, senior vice president and general manager of Intel’s Ultra Mobility Group, said during an IDF keynote speech Wednesday. “The platform design teams have been hard at work in figuring out what is the smallest form factor that they can actually fit a complete PC motherboard into so they can deliver a great mobile Internet experience.”

“What I’m holding in my hand is what is possibly the world’s smallest PC motherboard,” Chandrasekher said. The Moorestown motherboard houses the processor, chipset (including graphics), and memory, along with silicon for 3G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS, he said. “This is the heart of the new machine.”

Moorestown will be Intel’s impressive system-on-a-chip, combining the processor, graphics, and memory controller on a single die. It will likely be the major launching pad for Intel into the mobile phone market.

Intel announced its ‘Moorestown’ system-on-a-chip platform for UMPCs and internet tablets back in April this year, but it kept the details quiet. Now they’ve leaked out.

Flash based hard drives are being offered on a regular basis now from the top tier notebook manufacturers. There have been lots of recent reports saying that the failure rates have been extremely high with a 20 to 30% return rate.

Stealth has been providing flash based solid state drive solutions for more than 10 years. It has been our experience that the drives we have used have had extremely low failure rates. In fact it is rare that we ever see any returns at all.

So what is happening?

Although we don’t have actual manufacturing data regarding the failures, it is our opinion that the returns are a result of performance versus costs issues. SSD options are not cheap and if your expectation is that your OS will boot up in a few seconds then you are in for a huge disappointment.

Over the years Stealth Computer has supplied many customers with solutions utilizing integrated solid state drive technology. SSD’s are always chosen based on the actual needs and demands of the application itself. Extreme shock and vibration, extended temperature ranges and the ability to operate in strong magnetic fields are ideal reasons on why a Solid State Drives should be specified and deployed. Not because they have become the latest gadget to have.

See the Stealth Computer FAQ on SSD

Microsoft releases SP1 and here are the release notes – that have been anticipated for while now.

They are mostly bug fixes and performance tweaks, but the sheer volume of them is certainly something to behold.

SP1 includes 23 security updates and 550 hotfixes resulting in a 434.5MB download (726.5MB for the 64-bit version).

SP1 is available for download now via Microsoft’s sites, with an auto-update rollout scheduled for next month

Intel says it will ship quad-core chips designed specifically for laptops later this year.

The quad-core chips, most likely for desktop replacement laptops, will be based on the Core 2 Duo architecture and will ship in the third quarter, Intel officials said.

The initial quad-core processors will strain battery life and may first make their way to the high-end gaming and workstation notebooks that require heavy processing power, said Mooly Eden, vice president and general manager, Intel Mobile Platforms Group, earlier this year.

Intel was keen on making this chip consume less battery. In fact, Intel officials had declared that users expecting quad-core mobile processors may have to wait until issues surrounding power consumption are resolved.

Science has just lost one of its greatest creative minds.

Arthur C. Clarke has died in Sri Lanka at the age of 90.

Clarke authored more than 100 science fiction books, including “2001: A Space Odyssey.” He is credited with the idea for geosynchronous communications satellites, space elevators, and predicting space travel before rockets were even test fired.

Quote
Perhaps, as some wit remarked, the best proof that there is Intelligent Life in Outer Space is the fact it hasn’t come here. Well, it can’t hide forever - one day we will overhear it.
Arthur C. Clarke

For more information on Sir Arthur

The Arthur C Clarke Foundation

Arthur C Clarke Wikipedia

GE has unveiled a successful demonstration of the world’s first roll-to-roll manufactured organic light-emitting diode (OLED) lighting devices.

In layman’s terms, the OLED is similar to how a newspaper is printed. This technique should help substantially drive down the cost of OLEDs which is currently reserved for 14″ or smaller television screens costing thousands of dollars.

“Researchers have long dreamed of making OLEDs using a newspaper-printing like roll-to-roll process,” said Anil Duggal, manager of GE’s Advanced Technology Program in Organic Electronics. “Now we’ve shown that it is possible. Commercial applications in lighting require low manufacturing costs, and this demonstration is a major milestone on our way to developing low cost OLED lighting devices.”

Press Release

A little off topic but we enjoyed a few chuckles.

A recent report suggests, human beings are becoming so amazingly stupid that they require cushioned street lamp pole so that when they run into them they don’t mess up their goofy faces.

Apparently, a study in the UK found that 1 in 10 actually managed to injure themselves by walking into a pole while peering down at their mobile phones. The mishaps, called “walking and texting” injuries have spurred the launch of the padded-post-pilot scheme in parts of London. I’m glad these people don’t drive .. or do they?

It is always nice to get noticed in the media. With our recent launch of our latest Little PC, the LPC-450PCI, we received literally hundreds of blog entries and news stories on the product from all around the world.

Here is a recent article published by ConnectIT

Stealth launches mini PC with built-in PCI capability

3 March, 2008
By Chris Talbot

Stealth Computer Corp. has released a new small form factor mini PC with built-in PCI expansion slot capability.

With an aluminum chassis measuring just over two inches tall, the Stealth LPC-450PCI Little PC was designed with a footprint the approximate size of a hardcover novel (10 inches by 5.8 inches by 2.8 inches) and a weight of 10 lbs. (4.5 kgs). Built with Intel’s Core 2 Duo processor, one of the key features of the Little PC, according to Stealth, is the open and available PCI slot.

“Stealth’s small form factor, Little PC products typically fill an application specific requirement,” said Ed Boutilier, president and CEO of Stealth Computer Corp. “A very wide range of product configurations and designs are available that include fanless (noise free) designs, multi-LAN interfaces, expansions slot capable, low-powered, DC input and the degree of ruggedness, etc. The Stealth mini PCs are built to order providing configuration flexibility that can be adapted to the exact application.”

The LPC-450PCI features a multitude of I/O connectivity built into its small design, including LAN, two serial ports, three USB ports, a FireWire port, video, audio, and PS/2 mouse and keyboard ports. It has a built-in 2.5-inch high-shock hard drive with up to 160GB of storage space for archived data. It’s equipped with a DVD/CD-RW optical drive, with optional DVD burner.

“Customers can simply add specialized I/O, video, data acquisition and communications cards, something that cannot be achieved without resorting to larger clunky desk top computers,” Boutilier said.

Additionally, for applications that require extra high-shock, vibration and temperature ranges, Stealth also offers optional solid state drives.

“Stealth’s Little PC products have been used in a myriad of applications where a desktop or notebook PC would not fit. The small form factor has been beneficial where space is limited,” Boutilier said.

He added that some of the applications the LPC-450PCI Little PC has been designed for include interactive kiosks, board room and trade show presentations, embedded machine control, point of sale, digital sign and narrow casting, and various mobile applications. The Little PC model has special mounting brackets so it can be mounted under desks or tables, or on walls, machinery and cabinets.

For channel resellers, Boutilier said there are opportunities for those that serve niche and vertical markets “that cannot be accommodated with the off-the-shelf white box approach.”

“There is a growing demand for applications that require smaller machines that cannot be served with clunky desktops or notebook PCs due to their size and performance limitations,” Boutilier said.

ConnectIT article available here