If Nvidia gets its way, enterprise desktops and games could soon be served off the cloud, thanks to new cloud technologies unveiled by the graphics chip giant this week.

Based on the company’s new Kepler GPU (graphics processing unit) architecture, the new technologies — Nvidia VGX and GeForce Grid — are designed for large-scale data centres and tout virtualisation capabilities that allow GPUs to be simultaneously used by multiple users.

The Nvidia VGX platform can be used by enterprises in remote computing that allows applications to be streamed to notebooks or mobile devices through virtualised desktops, while Nvidia GeForce Grid is targeted at gaming-as-a-service (GaaS) providers for delivering rich gaming experiences. …

Starting a business for the first time can be a daunting task, given the financing, logistics and administration involved. Then, there’s also the IT infrastructure.

What PC to buy? Which networked printer should I install? How should I store and back up my data? Here are some suggestions from the first of our Techgoondu SME Toolbox guides to get your business started with some basic IT gear. …

What if you’re making a thin-and-light laptop that’s just shy of Intel’s ultrabook standard? You come up with another easy-to-remember marketing name, of course! And that’s just what HP has done with its new “Sleekbook”, laptops that look, er, sleek.

Available in 14-inch and 15.6-inch varieties, these Sleekbooks are Envy-branded, and each has its own ultrabook counterpart, adding up to a total of four new Envy notebooks: the Envy Sleekbook and Envy ultrabook with 14-inch screens, and the Envy Sleekbook and Envy ultrabook with 15.6-inch screens. …

In the market for a new laptop? Just hang in there a while longer, as Intel’s newest chip, codenamed “Ivy Bridge” is just starting to roll out in laptops worldwide.

The Ivy Bridge upgrade brings a number of significant improvements, including a 5 to 15 percent increase in CPU performance and a whopping 20 to 50 percent increase in integrated GPU performance.

This means that unless you’re an enthusiastic gamer, the integrated graphics are now powerful enough to handle 3D graphics and many existing games. This in turn translates to better battery life for your laptop.

I’m sure if you wait a while longer, your choices will increase exponentially, but for now, here are three “Ivy Bridge” laptops which caught our attention. …

While all the hype right now is about Diablo 3, one other game that PC buffs might also want to upgrade their machines for may be the much-awaited Company of Heroes 2 unveiled today by publisher THQ.

The followup to the ground-breaking Company of Heroes real-time strategy (RTS) game of 2006 will start firing up in PCs come early 2013, and is expected to feature some of the most eye-catching graphics for its genre. Yup, the perfect excuse to buy a new graphics card! …

Asus is shipping the fastest and possibly sexiest PC graphics card around, the Nvidia GeForce GTX 690, and Techgoondu understands it has already sold out the first batch of pre-orders in Singapore. …

If you had asked just six months ago if you should buy a solid state drive (SSD) for your PC, I’d have said “only if you are using it for a laptop.”

Besides the pure speed of an SSD, the low power consumption, light weight and durability mean that SSDs are a perfect fit in portable machine. So much of our data is stored on the cloud now, be it e-mail or music, that we don’t need all that space onboard after all. There’s always an external hard disk you can call on if you need storage.

So, what about desktops then? Well, I used to think they can do with a hard disk.

But having used SSDs in all the laptops at home now, I have to say, once you get used to the speed of SSDs, it’s hard to go back to hard disks. And that’s what I did this past weekend – I finally relented and bought a Corsair Force GT for my desktop PC.

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Remember how I said the Microsoft Surface was way too expensive for domestic use?

That turns out to not be a problem at all, because Lenovo’s new all-in-one PC the IdeaCentre A720 is the perfect alternative to the Surface for tabletop computing in the home.

What makes the A720 so unique is its sleek 10-point multitouch full HD screen on a articulating support, so that with a single push, the entire PC can collapse neatly into a flat screen on your table.

The support for multitouch means that multiple users can play on its screen at the same time, and to start you off Lenovo is bundling popular games with every A720 sold, including Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja. …

Well, it’s not strictly a complete computer- you’ll still need to stick in an SD card with Linux on it. Yet, the tiny Raspberry Pi, costing just £21.60 (S$43) plus £4.95 for worldwide shipping, has been getting lots of love from the geek community since it went on sale in February.

One of the distributors, RS Components, told reporters in Singapore on Thursday that it had sold the first 700 units in mere hours and has a waiting list no fewer of 200,000 orders.

What’s so hot about this new machine, besides the cost?

For S$43, it has a British-designed Arm-based processor running at 700MHz, a graphics core that can decode 1080p Full HD videos, an HDMI port and a USB port, plus it runs with 256GB RAM and boots from a memory card that you slide into the included SD card slot. …

With the wave of consumer-friendly tablets washing over the market, tablets running Windows have been relegated to niche or vertical markets where they are applied to specialised uses.

But these tablets with a full-blown operating system still have a place, and although you probably won’t be catching up on Korean dramas with the ASUS Eee Slate EP121 during your daily commute, it makes a decent laptop alternative if you purchase an external keyboard.

For those who like the best of both the touch and keyboard worlds, is the slate worth the buy? …