I stumbled across an interesting looking little program called GMA Booster while browsing the MicroPCTalk forums.

Apparently devices which have 945GM/GME/GMS/GSE or 943/940GML/GU Express chipsets are ULV versions of what is normally called the Intel 945 chipset (and can be found in many of the netbooks and UMPCs out there today), and they all feature the same GMA 950 graphics, but for the ULV chipsets, GMA 950 is underclocked to help improve battery life among other things.

A nifty little app called GMA Booster (website no longer exists) steps the GMA 950 graphics back up from 133/166 MHz, to the level that is found in non-ULV version of Intel 945, 400MHz. The nice thing about this is that it seems to be a simple instruction set sent to the chipset; it doesn’t change any voltage levels, and isn’t pushing the clock speed higher than it is designed to go, just up to its regular level.

Interested in knowing if your UMPC/Netbook/MID uses GMA 950 and could benefit from GMA Booster? Just hit up the Portal and navigate to your device, check the Graphics category on your device’s Portal page to see if it uses GMA 950.

I tested GMA Booster on my VAIO UX180 and the HP Mini 1000 [Portal page] to see what difference GMA Booster could make. I ran Crystal Mark and compared the graphical test scores before and after using GMA Booster to push the graphical core up to 400MHz.

Sony VAIO UX180

HP Mini 1000

As you can see, using GMA Booster to put GMA 950 up to 400MHz increased the graphical performance (as rated by Crystal Mark) by a little more than 20% on both devices. While 20% isn’t huge, I think it could be noticeable depending upon what you are doing on your device. It probably won’t translate to a direct 20% performance increase in the graphical applications that you are using as there is more that factors into graphical rendering, but again it could help the performance. Other benchmark programs which more specifically rate graphics capabilities might note a bigger improvement in scores.

GMA Booster is ‘donerware’ as the dev calls it. It is basically free, but you need to download it again after a week to keep using it. If you donate you will receive a serial number to alleviate that hassle.

Download GMA Booster

If you do venture out and give GMA Booster a try, why not comment here and letting us know how it works with your device?

Probably the internet’s most popular deal-a-day website Woot.com seems to be quite found of the Asus Eee 900 [Portal page]. They have offered it several times in past and today you can find it on not just one, but two of their sites.

On Woot.com today you’ll find the Asus Eee 900 featuring the 900 MHz Celeron CPU, 512MB of RAM, 8.9 inch 1024×600 resolution screen, 4GB of SSD storage and Asus’ custom Xandros Linux for Eee PCs.

On Sellout.Woot.com you’ll find a slightly better version of the Eee 900 which has identical specs except it runs Windows XP, includes a webcam, and has double the SSD storage (8GB). Uh-oh looks like this one is already sold out!

Both units are refurbished but can be had for the very reasonable price of $150 and $180 respectively. If you are interested, buy quick! Once they sell out or the day is over, they are gone! (note: Sorry international friends, Woot and Sellout.Woot only ship in the US)

As planned, the Gigabyte T1028M Touchnote turned up from Mobilx today and the unboxing is already done and dusted. I had done quite a lot of homework before unboxing so I’ve not had any surprises or major let-downs yet although I really do like to see more than 3hrs on the working clock with battery life and so far, the T1028M is steady at about 2.5hrs working time. [Update: I’m seeing a regular 3.25hrs now in normal wifi usage and the Gigabyte ‘Normal’ battery mode] The SATA disk is fast (61/56 MB/s R/W max) and the touch is working nicely. The pre-installed 3G (a Mobilx option using the built-in SIM card and antenna) is working really nicely.  Noise and heat is definitely improved over the M912 although some fan noise remains. Keyboard is slightly wider than an MSI Wind U100 / Akoya Mini.

Don’t forget the live overview and Q&A session tonight on the LIVE page. JKK and Sascha will be joining for a podcast at 2030 and then we’ll get into a bit of Touchnote testing at about 2130 (CEST, Berlin time) I’ll have a full hands-on first impressions write up on the 9th April (tomorrow as I write this)

The YouTube version of the unboxing is shown below but if the HQ version isn’t available, the original (and MPEG-4, both downloadable) versions are at Blip.tv.

For more information and links for the Gigabyte Touchnote, see the product information page.

The Gigabyte Touchnote has been provided by Mobilx.eu

Don’t get too excited yet as the T1028M needs a good testing session (planned for Wed or Thursday. Keep watching.) before we mark it up on the shortlist but these early CrystalMark results, just in from Mobilx, indicate a very fast hard drive. It’s a 160G SATA drive.

We saw an impressive 26500 on the Gigabyte M912M so to reach nearly 28000 with the same CPU/GPU platform means the disk is even faster under this test condition.

Full specifications in the product page.

I had a nice update call from Mobilx this morning where we talked about a number of things. MBook, Aigo and Mifi were discussed (more about those later in the week) but top of the list was the Gigabyte Touchnote shipment which has almost reached Mobilx HQ.

Mobilx have already confirmed easy 3G upgrade possibilities and appear to be impressed with the improvement in quality over the M912. Price is set at around 560 Euros.

As soon as the Touchbook hits the ground at Mobilx HQ it’s being forwarded to us for testing so i’ve reserved Thursday and Friday (European) evenings for a live session. Stay tuned to twitter to keep up with the latest info about the live session. I’ll also post an article here with the final announcement.

Keep up to date with specs and links in the Touchnote product page.

P.S. If you’re at TheNextWeb conference in Amsterdam next week, i’ll have the Touchnote with me and will be happy to let you check it over.

When I think back to the M912, Gigabyte’s first touchscreen netbook, I think about fast hard drive speed, a fun form factor and easy upgrade capability. Unfortuinately I also think about the noise and heat. [M912 Video]

Read the full story

Jkk has a great little video showing you how to squeeze the most visible page space out of your Firefox browser. As he mentions, there are lots of add-ons to help reduce the interface size giving you more space for viewing your favorite websites, but jkk’s solutions increase the size by a good deal without the use of any add-ons. He achieves this by moving a lot of the UI elements and getting rid of space stealing bars. All of it can be done in just a minute or two. Now if only Firefox would incorporate tabs into the title bar of the window (like Chrome does) you’d have about as much space as possible within a browser.

Jkk points us to a quick video of the upcoming Samsung N310. Take a look a the video below. As I mentioned when we first saw the N310, I don’t quite see how customers will differentiate this from the N110. Both are running extremely similar specs and the only major differences seem to be aesthetics and a chilet keyboard on the N310 vs. a standard laptop keyboard on the N110 [Portal comparison of N110 and N310]. It seems like some people might be turned off by the single color matte design of the N310 but I think it looks decent. The largely rounded edges and giant Samsung logo on the back make the unit look somewhat fat. If Samsung is really intending for the N310 netbook to be semi-rugged, I don’t understand why they didn’t take additional steps such as fitting it with an SSD.