Intel’s New Core M Processors Will Bring Thin, Fanless Convertible Notebooks This Holiday

Intel has launched its Core M processor line at IFA 2014 this year, and is announcing a number of key launch partners that will be shipping Intel M-based convertible notebooks starting this holiday season. The new M chips allow users to build much thinner designs, since they’re incredibly energy-efficient and can run cool enough that they don’t require a heat-fighting fan in the chassis.

Typically, even in devices designed to be super thin and portable like the Intel Core-powered Surface Pro 3, there’s a fan (no matter how well-engineered, quiet and efficient) that still takes up plenty of room and makes some noise. Acer’s new Chromebook 13 offers a fanless design, but it also runs on an Nvidia Tegra K1 processor that was originally designed for mobile, and it runs Chrome OS, not full-fledged Windows.

New 2-in-1 devices from OEMs including Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo and Toshiba are hitting store shelves beginning this holiday season that offer both full Windows, with performance that, while it isn’t what you’d get out of Intel’s top-of-the-line current generation Core processors, still beats the heck out of the performance on top-level models from just a few years ago.

It also offers a huge advantage in terms of battery draw, delivering up to eight hours of continues video play. Plus, as mentioned, the absence of a need for a fan means that OEMs can build much thinner cases for their devices – some are even thinner than 9mm, which is slimmer than a AAA battery, Intel notes, and small compared to even today’s slimmest laptops, and the MacBook Air at its meatier end.

Slender devices might make it easier for Microsoft to embrace the touch-friendly part of Windows 8, but it also looks to be de-emphasizing that part of the OS with Windows 9, so we’ll see if that affects the design direction of OEM hardware.

How To Hide Text In Microsoft Word 2007, Reveal It & Protect It

Sometimes what we hide is more important than what we reveal. Especially, documents with sensitive information, some things are supposed to be ‘for some eyes only’. Such scenarios are quite common, even for the more un-secretive among us. You want to show someone a letter composed in MS Word, but want to keep some of the content private; or it’s an official letter with some part of it having critical data. As important as these two are, the most common use could involve a normal printing job. Many a time we have to print different versions of a document, one copy for one set of eyes and others for other sets. Rather than creating multiple copies and therefore multiple printing jobs, what if we could just do it from the same document? That too, without the hassle of repeated cut and paste. We can, with a simple feature in MS Word – it’s just called Hidden and let me show you how to use it to hide text in Microsoft Word 2007. It’s a simple single click process. Open the docum...

Build Your Own Awesome Personal 3D Avatar with Avatara

Do you use social networks and want to build your own awesome 3D avatar? Maybe you want to send someone a cute cuddly image of yourself (kind of)? Or maybe you have your own ideas of what you would do with an Avatar… Well look no further than Avatara which I discovered from the MakeUseOf directory . You can create 3d avatars out of pre-set up templates or create your own from scratch. To start, visit Avatara’s homepage . You will see this screen: Click Get Started to umm, get started! That will take you to this screen: You see that you can build your own Avatar using an uploaded head shot like the Obama one above (just an example, guys). Or roll with one of their awesome avatars. I chose to start with a blank avatar by clicking Start with a blank avatar at the bottom of the screen. That takes you to here: I clicked on the filter at the top and told it to filter out everything but male characters and then I saw this: I rolled with Buck and continued. You need to click Select...

Ex-Skypers Launch Virtual Whiteboard Deekit

Although seriously long in the tooth and being disrupted by a plethora of startups, for many years Skype has existed as an almost ubiquitous app in any remote team’s toolkit. So it seems apt that a new startup founded by a team of ex-Skype employees is set to tackle another aspect of online collaboration. Deekit, which exits private beta today, is a virtual and collaborative whiteboard to help remote teams work smarter. The Tallinn, Estonia-based startup is headed up by founder and CEO, Kaili Kleemeier, who was previously a Head of Operations at Skype. She and three colleagues quit the Internet calling giant in 2012 and spent a year researching ideas in the remote team space. They ended up focusing on creating a new virtual whiteboard, born out of Kleemeier’s experience collaborating with technical teams remotely, specifically helping Skype deal with incident management. “Working with remote teams has been a challenge in many ways – cultural differences, language differences, a...

Kiran Upadhyay

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