@pika2000
Building your own PC unfortunately looks like the way to get a good deal on Core i7 so far. In theory, you can do it starting around $600, less if you've got a few components you can keep from your old PC.

@(Unverified) It uses the same LGA1366 socket as Core i7, no need to worry about this one. Although I do agree that there's just no need for LGA1156 - do a cheap socket 775 version if necessary, or do full triple channel LGA1366 for the high end.

Weird but it looks like a UK mains plug being used in the photo. I'd not heard of any significant UK work on electric vehicles.

The dock has a power switch on the back - power down the drive, swap in a new disc and power it back up - the important bit is the PC stays up throughout.

Also one nice touch is that even connected through USB, the drive appears as a proper hard disc, and you can format it etc. Normal external enclosures used as a USB mass storage won't let you do this. (My IcyBox won't anyway...)

I don't have this thing, but I do have their original SATA dock - I use it for backing up my home media server.

A few years back, I expanded my media server from 800GB upto 1.6TB. The RAID card I had at the time didn't support online capacity expansion, so I had to create a new array and load all the data back from DVDs. Swapping nearly 200 DVDs in and out wasn't at all fun.

These days, my server is up to 4TB (and nearly full) and my DVDs are in boxes under the floor. Reloading everything from DVDs just isn't an option. So I've got most of my stuff backed up to old 400GB and 500GB hard discs. There's only a couple of dozen Blu-Ray discs that aren't backed up to HDD now.

The problem is often just plain differences between countries, not necessarily that EU or US is more stringent. The typical car sizes between EU / US are substantially different. A big US car won't even fit in a parking space in the UK and that by itself has a big impact on safety for a small car like this.

RAID5 would be a must for me with 4 hard discs. I've had 3 discs fail in the time I've been running my (custom build) media server, although only 2 proper failures - one just kept dropping out of the array, but worked fine on it's own (Samsung were great and replaced it anyway). You don't need matched drives for RAID5 at all. In fact, because you can only survive one disc failure, I was very paranoid, and didn't buy any matching discs in my setup, to try and minimise the chances of them failing together. I've got 3 brands of drives, and different models within the same brand as well.

That's a ridiculous idea Emor. Technology moves forwards regardless of whether one brand of laptops gets a new model. The Eee 901 doesn't get worse because there's an Eee 1000. Either way there'll still be the MSI Wind out.

As long as they are not replacing the smaller EEE laptops, I don't think they are in any danger of losing their market niche. They just seem to me to be expanding the family into the sub-notebook market.

Their smallest 'normal' notebook is 11.1" screen, so this is still a smaller machine even than that, and the price is nowhere near comparable.

I think a lot of people looking for a small laptop are those needing to have it around, but not really planning to use it for long stretches. I think a lot of people will wonder if 7/9" is still a little too small, and be happier with the new size.

I use a TomTom in the UK, and it's near perfect - substantially better than the Garmin devices I have used here. However I have to drive in Barcelona relatively frequently, and it's a pig there. It frequently says keep left but the screen shows me taking the right hand turning.

There are a couple of ways junctions are built in Spain that don't have any equivalent in the UK / Holland (where I think TomTom is based). The mapping software can't quite handle these properly.