Business Tech

Windows 7 has spawned a new breed of inexpensive laptops at retailers like Best Buy and Frys.

At many stores on Thursday, Best Buy refreshed almost its entire stock of laptops: all running Windows 7 and all sporting new model numbers. Frys--a megastore electronics retailer with locations throughout California, Arizona, and Texas--also refreshed many of its laptops with new Windows 7 models.

One of the most inexpensive Windows 7 arrivals is the Gateway model EC1410U. This tiny laptop is distinctly Netbook-like in appearance but uses a more powerful Celeron M ULV 743 processor (1.3GHz, 1MB cache) than the Atom-chip fare found in Netbooks. In addition to the Windows 7 Home Premium Edition 64-bit version, other features include 2GB of memory and a 250GB hard disk drive.

Many seductive Windows 7 newcomers are categorized as "ultrathins." These slim designs are typically discernibly bigger than Netbooks (though, as evidenced by the Gateway above, it's now always clear-cut) and pack more processor horsepower. The Toshiba Satellite T-135 (model: T135-S1309), which falls into this category, is priced at $549 at Best Buy and comes with Windows 7 Home Premium Edition 32-bit operating system, a 13.3-inch display, a dual-core power-efficient Pentium processor, 3GB of memory, a 320GB hard disk drive (5400RPM), and built-in Web cam.

The HP dm3 (model: dm3-1035dx), also an ultrathin and also priced at $549, packs 3GB of memory… Read more

Updated on October 23 at 3:00 p.m. PDT: with additional information identifying the person who is talking to the "AMD executive" and additional statements.

An unnamed executive at Advanced Micro Devices is cited repeatedly in the Galleon Funds insider-trading case, presenting a potentially awkward situation for the chipmaker as the case goes forward.

It's not clear if the AMD executive cited in the U.S. Attorney's complaint would be charged or even implicated by name, but government charges of insider trading have rattled Silicon Valley. Rajiv Goel, a managing director of strategic investments for Intel's treasury group, was arrested and charged in the case and put on leave, forcing Intel CEO Paul Otellini to publicly address the case.

And a high-level executive at IBM, senior vice president Robert Moffat, was placed on leave Monday after he was charged. Moffat is accused of supplying details about IBM and Sun Microsystems earnings to Danielle Chiesi, who worked for the New Castle hedge fund.

"If it's the top two (executives at AMD), that would be significant. But it could be anyone. Mid-level executives. We don't know," said David Wu, an analyst at GC Research.

"We are currently reviewing the situation and we have no further comment," AMD spokesman Michael Silverman said.

The case revolves around Raj Rajaratnam, who founded the Galleon Group, a New York-based hedge fund that manages $7 billion in funds. Federal prosecutors charged Rajaratnam and five others on Friday with securities fraud, alleging they were involved in insider trading of well-known tech companies, including Intel, Google, AMD, and IBM.

In the wake of the allegations, the Galleon Group said it will close, though the firm is exploring alternatives for its business that could allow parts of the hedge fund to survive, according to the Wall Street Journal.

AMD was prominent in the complaint, filed by the U.S. Attorney… Read more

EMC Chief Executive Joe Tucci said Thursday that customers are "signaling more comfort spending their IT budgets." The company reported better-than-expected third-quarter results.

The storage giant reported earnings of $298.2 million, or 14 cents a share, down 24 percent from the same period a year ago. Revenue was $3.52 billion, down 5 percent from a year ago. Under a non-GAAP basis, EMC reported earnings of $480.3 million, or 23 cents a share, 2 cents better than Wall Street estimates.

Generally speaking, EMC has been well-positioned in the downturn because of a focus on storage, cloud … Read more

Some businesses midway through upgrades to Vista are asking for Windows 7 instead, a Microsoft executive said at Thursday's launch event in London.

"This is the first time that we have had customers talking about slipstreaming the deployment of one OS into another version," said John Curran, who until recently headed the Windows client group in the U.K.

About 15 percent of business computers in the U.K. have Vista installed.

Ten large companies in the U.K. have already begun deploying Windows 7 on a total of 300,000 machines, according to Microsoft.

"In … Read more

It boggles the mind, but it's apparently true: nearly half of enterprises think a software purchase is successful if the software is installed/deployed, according to a new study. If ever there was reason to believe there's room for improvement in enterprise IT, and billions of dollars to go with it, this is it.

Working software should be the starting point, not an end point.

According to a study recently released by Neochange, Sandhill Group, and the Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA), 45.3 percent of the 353 IT professionals surveyed call a software purchase successful if "… Read more

With the release of its first beta version of Photoshop Lightroom 3.0 on Wednesday night, Adobe Systems is trying to improve the heart of the photographic editing and cataloging software.

"With Lightroom 3, we're looking at a performance and image quality rearchitecture," said Product Manager Tom Hogarty. Those two goals are in opposition, since better image quality demands more computing horsepower. But Hogarty said the software is more responsive when moving among photos, and images look better with new noise reduction and sharpening abilities.

There are other changes, too, though: a revamped import process for importing photos into the software catalog; built-in connections to upload photos to online services and keep them in sync; a more flexible mechanism for laying out photos to be printed; new abilities for stamping watermarks onto photos; and the ability to export photos and music as a video file. … Read more

ORLANDO, Fla.--Watch out, business technology managers, because Google has its eyes on your domain.

If Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt gets his way, the line that separates the computing services used by businesses from those used by consumers will fade fast. And Google, through services such as Google Apps and the new Google Wave, hopes to accelerate the change.

The company has done well so far with services that appeal chiefly to consumers, but Schmidt said at the Gartner Symposium here that Google likes services that become part people's lives regardless of whether they are doing work. And because the company covers its costs by charging enterprise accounts $50 per person per year for those services at work, he said it's just a matter of attaining scale before the business becomes "very profitable" for Google.

I spoke to Schmidt after a Gartner Symposium talk in which he said the enterprise market is Google's next billion-dollar revenue opportunity. Here's an edited transcript of the interview. … Read more

ORLANDO, Fla.--Eric Schmidt runs a company that earns most of its money from consumers, but the Google chief executive believes business customers are the company's next big opportunity for growth after selling ads.

"Enterprise is a huge priority for the management team and me personally," Schmidt said Wednesday in an onstage interview in the belly of the enterprise technology beast, the Gartner Symposium here. "It's the next big billion-dollar opportunity after our display (ad) business."

Google might not be at the core of every company's operations, but Schmidt has some roots in … Read more

CA next week will unveil an integrated sustainability suite designed to track carbon emissions, environmental assessments, metering, and compliance to policies in one dashboard.

CA calls the suite EcoSoftware and will launch it Monday, according to Christopher Thomas, vice president of energy and sustainability. I ran into Thomas at the Gartner IT Symposium, where the carbon-monitoring software caught my eye.

There are other efforts designed to track carbon emissions. For instance, Hara and SAP have various applications and others use metering to measure sustainability efforts.

Read more of "CA jumps into eco software market; Plans to launch carbon tracking suite" … Read more