YugaTech | Philippines, Tech Reviews Blog

Acer Philippines brought several dozen members of the media to a 3-day, exhaustive tournament at Pearl Farm. It was all fun and no work (not a single product presentation in the program) but this upcoming Acer ultrabook did not escape our prying eyes. Check out or hands-on first impression of the Acer Aspire S5 after the jump.

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The HDD on my Acer Aspire S3 conked out a couple of days ago. Don’t know what caused it but by the time I booted it up in the morning, the hard drive was already trashing the plates like crazy. This is the first time I’ve had a laptop HDD crashed on me.

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While wandering around Sim Lim Mall here in Singapore this afternoon, we found that almost all of the ultrabooks are already being sold in many of the computer stores here. Among them is the Lenovo IdeaPad U300.

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The Asus UX31 is the bigger half of the Zenbook line-up. With a 13.3″ form factor, it sits right up against the Macbook Air 13″ and the Acer Aspire S3. We already did the comparison between the Zenbook and the MBA at the 11.6″ category so we’ll do another one for the 13-inchers, this time with the UX31 and the Aspire S3.

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Asus Philippines is set to launch the Asus Zenbook (the UX21/UX31 ultrabook) tomorrow at El Nido, Palawan and we’ll be there to cover it. You’ve probably read our latest review of the Acer Aspire S3 here as well. But the question remains — who has the thinnest ultrabook in town?

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We got this Acer Aspire S3 ultrabook this morning. It was a prize from last week’s raffle by Acer Philippines during the launch event of the Aspire S3, one of the first ultrabook to be released in the country.

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Acer’s ultrabook has finally reached the Philippines — the Acer Aspire S3 series. Acer Philippines is the first one to launch the ultrabook in the country today with the Hummingbird.

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In the early days of my internet years when I was still learning how to code HTML (circa 1999), one of the many infos I put up on my personal website was my PC history. I believe that being introduced to the personal computer at a young age was instrumental to what I am doing today.

The summer before high school back in 1991, my cousin urged me to take computer classes at STI (Lotus 1-2-3 and Sidekick). Despite my hesitations (I’d rather go to Nintendo computer shops and play Battle City or Super Mario) I obliged knowing I couldn’t get them to back out of the idea even if I wanted to.

After the summer classes, my uncle brought home an IBM 5151 with him (I think he was working with Texas Instrument in Washington then). It had 2 floppy 5 1/4″ diskettes, green screen monitor which runs on an Intel 8088 4.77 MHz with 64KB of RAM. (That’s the first commercial PC from IBM right?)

It was followed (in 1993) by another IBM PC/AT x286 with 20MB of HDD from Priam, CGA monitor from Packard Bell, a 5 1/4″ floppy drive (640KB) and 3 1/2″ diskette drive (1.44MB). I crashed the hard drive while playing with Stacker which (I didn’t knew) was a compression-drive utility for MS DOS. I used that to do my high school thesis paper while most of my classmates were still using a typewriter. (Wordstar is the best!)

In college (1996), my parents managed to get me an Acer laptop running on a Cyrix 486 DX4 100MHz with 8MB RAM, B&W 640×480 LCD screen and 320HDD. I was able to run MS Windows 95 there although it would hang if I upgraded to Windows Plus!. (RAM Double solved the problem.) I spilt rubbing alcohol on the keyboard so I had to plug an external one to be able use it.

Right after my 1st graduation, my aunt got me a desktop PC as a gift. I still have another year for my other degree so it still proved quite usefull. The Pentium was so popular then that you only buy an AMD if you don’t have enough money. The rig was a Pentium II 350MHz with 6GB HDD, 64MB RAM, 16X CDROM and an S3 Savage 3D 8MB.

From then on, it was just a matter of upgrading each part one at a time — Pentium III 450MHz (2000), AMD Athlon XP 2400+ (2003), AMD Sempron 3100 (2006).

All these time, 15 years after I first encountered a personal computer, I can still remember the excitement I felt when I’m was using Wordstar 6.0 and memorizing all the control shortcuts.