Last weekend I visited CeBIT 2007 in Hannover. We rented a house for the weekend in Steinhude which is not far from CeBIT and can easily be reached by car and train. If you are looking to stay overnight in Steinhude I would recommend this house, all comfort is available (TV, shower, kitchen, etc.).

Like every year, there were lots of brands and new products to discover. One of the cool things at CeBIT, is that you can gather a lot of gadgets :). An eyecatcher was this modding project for the World Cyber Games 2007 which is a 200 hours project! And I found that server rack of IBM also impressive.

    

One of the things that really touched me - a trip down memory lane -, was a working Commodore 64 of the good old days. There was a room that showed some computer history.

    

If I remember correctly, I have had the following computers with which I grew up, and I have to admit, it was mainly for playing games

• Atari 7800
• Sinclair QL (Quantum Leap)
• Commodore 64
• Commodore 128
• Amiga 500
• Amiga 1200

And when I came of age, I switched to the traditional personal computer. But I must say that there is really nothing compared to those old skool arcade games, such as

• Commodore
  • International Karate +
  • Green Beret
  • Commando
  • Ghosts'n Goblins
  • Krakout
  • Bruce Lee
  • Aztec Challenge
  • Operation Wolf
  • etc.
• Amiga
  • Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge
  • Shufflepuck Cafe
  • Battle Squadron
  • Cannon Fodder
  • Lemmings
  • Wings
  • Rick Dangerous
  • etc.

This weekend I visited CeBIT. It was a long trip due to road works and heavy rain, but it was worthwhile. There was a lot of people, but thankfully CeBIT at the Messegeländer in Hannover has about 30 halls. In one of the first halls, there was an exclusive car from Bugatti. Surprisingly there was no pricing indicated

I think it was at the expo from AOpen that a couple of case-mods were shown. One of the most original one was certainly this one:

One of the manufactors that i didn't want to miss was Asus. For me there were 2 things that caught my attention: the new A8N SLI Premium which is the succesor of the A8N SLI Deluxe and of course a DUAL Geforce 6800 Ultra on one board. As you can see the board is huge and I don't think it will fit on every motherboard and/or case, but it's still a prototype of course.

One of the things I focused on, was SATA PCI-Express RAID cards because I am planning to buy one for my system. The most well known RAID card in this category at this very moment is Areca, who were present too. The card that I am planning to buy is the ARC-1220 with 8x SATA ports.

HighPoint showed also their latest products and in particular the RocketRaid 2320, which is an 8 channels PCI-Express to SATA II host adapter. The new products are included in the product guide that I took from the stand at CeBIT. The products they showed are listed here.

I also went to 3Ware, and they told to me that the PCI-Express RAID cards will be released by November of this year.

It was a long weekend, and I spent most of the time in the car but it was fun and interesting. See you at CeBIT 2006

This weekend I visited CeBIT 2004 at Hannover and as usual there was a lot to see. It was a trip of about 450 KM but we had no traffic problems, although there were a lot of road works. We slept in the hotel Montana Lauenau which was perfectly in order and was on the road to Hannover. Finding parking at CeBIT was far from easy, practically all parkings where full but we did find one for only 5 euro for the whole day!

One of the things I have seen a lot at CeBIT were usb-sticks (one seen of 1GB) and mp3 players in all kinds of formats and capacity. An original idea was Lubic where you can create your own PC case with components, like you do with Lego. It goes from an Airplane to a Giraffe, for example:

SOHOTANK Stackable External Box from the company Stardom was exacly what I was searching for. It has a very nice design and it's easily expandable. They offer also RAID solutions!