Personal Computers

Netbook computers remind me of travel toothbrushes and portable air mattresses. You use them only when you need to move a lot, like when you're on the road or camping or running around at a trade show. They're just not nearly as functional or comfortable as the at-home version. But when you're on th...

This was the first chance since Steve Jobs returned to Apple that Microsoft had to slam-dunk Apple. The biggest thing at Macworld was Tony Bennett. Windows 7 was releasing in Beta and reports have been glowing, with a number of the folks I travel with actually living on the pre-beta code and raving ...

Sony introduced its latest entrant to the ultra mobile PC class of computers on Wednesday at the Consumer Electronics Show held in Las Vegas. Billed as the world's lightest 8-inch notebook, the Vaio P Series Lifestyle PC is roughly the size of a business envelope and about as thin as a cell phone. H...

LIVE FROM CES

Asus Fattens Up Its Little Notebook Lines

As of a few nights ago, it was still possible to get a room at a decent place on the Las Vegas strip at a bargain rate. That was a good sign for travelers but a bad sign for the Consumer Electronics Show -- not to mention the city's hospitality industry. When everything falls into place, CES is supp...

As gadget makers gear up to show their wares at the 2009 Consumer Electronics Shows in Las Vegas, Chinese hardware maker Lenovo debuted a host of new laptop PCs, the most striking of which offers users a dual-screen configuration. The ThinkPad W700ds features a 17-inch primary screen with a 10.6-inc...

Just three and a half years after Christina Lampe-Onnerud founded Boston-Power to bring new battery technology to devices large and small, her company forged a deal with PC maker HP, which will be the first computer maker to offer laptops with the new Sonata battery. The Sonata can be charged and re...

OPINION

Will This CES Be the Last?

Well, this is CES week, and I am eagerly waiting to fly to Las Vegas, participate in the Tiger Build Your Own PC race, and spend the following three weeks relearning how to walk. This year should be interesting because I'm getting weekly notices that the hotels are lowering room rates, and one of th...

Acer unveiled its latest notebook PC Tuesday -- the Aspire 8930G-7665, featuring Intel's new powerhouse mobile chip. The chip, the Core 2 Quad Mobile Processor Q9000, makes Acer's new laptop one of the first notebooks to offer users four processing cores. The Core 2 Quad processor offers 6 MB of sha...

This year was likely the last of an era where vendors could afford to shotgun out products and services and hope that buyers would take them. 2009 will be much harsher on practices like this, as funding will be very short and misses will be career limiting, severely for some. Looking back, there wer...

OPINION

Obama's Mac and Fixing the 'OMG Budget'

The new president-elect for the U.S. isn't even in office yet and he is already wrapped in scandal. Fortunately we can live with this one as it had to do with whether he carried a Zune or an iPod, but given some were calling this -- and I'm not kidding -- "Zunegate," I thought the event was interest...

Lithium-ion battery maker Boston-Power and partner HP announced Wednesday the upcoming availability of Boston-Power's next-generation Sonata battery cell. The environmentally friendly and longer-lasting battery will be available as an upgrade option beginning in early 2009. The first product release...

The economic pressure continues to increase and there is a reasonably good chance that we'll be down to one large car company in the U.S. by this time next year -- Ford, which appears to be the only one that isn't saying it won't survive without a massive cash infusion from the U.S. government. In t...

Samsung announced Thursday it has begun mass production of a 256 gigabyte solid state drive designed for use in notebook an desktop PCs. The drives round out Samsung's line of SSDs, which includes 8, 16, and 32 GB SSD models for low-density designs and 64 and 128 GB for higher densities, the company...

Intel's latest high-end desktop processor series, the new Core i7 lineup, has officially hit the sales channels with offerings from computer makers like Dell, Gateway and others. The processors, which were codenamed "Nehalem" by Intel, are based on a new microarchitecture designed to deliver high pe...

More details about Microsoft's upcoming Windows 7 operating system emerged Wednesday. The OS will have a shorter boot time; offer greater reliability; more efficient memory usage and improved battery life for laptops, according to Microsoft's Jon DeVaan, Steven Sinofsky and Mike Anguilo, who spoke a...

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