hp

This week in laptops

More tiny laptops, broken OLPCs, and a factory inferno causes a battery shortage. This week's summary is presented in headline format, a favorite of rushed editors worldwide. (Everyone loves a list, right?)

Second-gen Eee PC will have touch screen, GPS HP readying its own cheap mini-notebook? Taiwanese company introduces Eee PC-branded accessories First Intel netbook identified as 2go PC VIA Technologies preps an x86 chip for small notebooks How much will netbooks disrupt the PC market? Photos of a follow-up to the Classmate PC? OLPC keyboards apparently not childproof Dell announces sub-$1,000 Blu-ray laptop ...and finds a retail partner in India … Read more

Report: HP 2133 Mini-Note PC to ship on April 7

If you're not making a cheap and tiny laptop to compete with the Asus Eee PC, what are you doing? Hewlett Packard's forthcoming mininotebook will use Via processors (not Isiah, however) and start at $549, according to a spec sheet that Engadget got its hands on. The entry-level HP 2133 Mini-Note PC will use Linux (SuSE Enterprise) and have a 1.2GHz Via C7-M processor, 1GB of RAM, a 120GB hard drive, a 3-cell battery, and a 8.9-inch screen with a 1280x768 resolution. Another $50 nets you the same configuration with Windows Vista Home Basic. A $749 … Read more

Factory fire causes laptop battery shortage

Have trouble finding an extra or replacement battery for your laptop? Both Dell and HP say they are experiencing a laptop battery shortage after a March 3 fire knocked out a major supplier of the batteries.

Besides Dell and HP, the fire that gutted a plant owned by South Korea's second-largest battery maker, LG Chem, is also affecting Asus, maker of the popular Eee PC laptop.

"We sell battery packs. The prices of those battery packs for people ordering extra batteries have gone up," Dell spokesman Jess Blackburn told Reuters. "The industry is experiencing battery supply … Read more

OSBC Report: HP's Karl Paetzel on the tools of open-source proliferation

Karl Paetzel, part of HP's Enterprise Storage and Server Division and part of HP's growing open-source business. As he noted in his opening remarks, HP has realized more than $10 billion in open source-related revenue in the past few years.

Customers have far more FOSS than they realize. Customers have far more FOSS license obligations than they realize.

On Point #2, Karl noted that a big issue derives from embedded licenses. OpenOffice, for example, may be licensed under the GPL, but there are hundreds (thousands?) of packages within that program that carry other open-source licenses. HP has therefore … Read more

This week in laptops

Small fries everywhere! A bunch of this week's news focused on tiny laptops of the Eee PC variety: the Intel Classmate PC will reportedly hit U.S. and European retailers; photos of a possible "netbook" surfaced on Flickr; and we saw an Eee PC competitor for the Taiwanese market (release date unknown). Meanwhile, the tiny tablet-smartphone hybrid, the HTC Shift, became available for pre-order on Amazon; we have one in hand and posted a full review today.

Phew! There's no indication of a slowdown, either, if reports of ultra-low-priced Intel Atom CPUs for netbooks are accurate. … Read more

Dell, HP give AMD Phenom boost

Dell is getting set to offer AMD's Phenom processors for the first time in systems, following Hewlett-Packard, giving the chipmaker a boost in its multi-core chip battle with Intel.

AMD is expected to make an announcement related to Phenom in the near future.

In the second quarter, Dell will offer both triple-core and quad-core Phenom processors in its OptiPlex 740 business system, the computer company said. This would be the first instance of Dell using AMD processors with more than two cores. Dell is also slated to use the quad-core "Barcelona" Opteron processor in servers in the … Read more

Novell's big day with Sesame Street and HP

Novell's Brainshare is in full swing, and the company announced two significant deals. The first is that Hewlett-Packard will be preloading Novell's Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop on select laptops and desktops. It's a big coup for Novell after Ubuntu scored with Dell. It's also a big coup for customers who won't have to go through the bother of maintaining Linux on incompatible hardware, as I recently did with Ubuntu on Lenovo's X61 laptop.

Novell also scored with Sesame Street Workshop. This isn't a huge revenue generator but it's a fun deal. Sesame … Read more

HP turns ProLiant up to 8

With the ProLiant DL785 G5 Server, Hewlett-Packard has re-entered the 8-socket x86 server space. This system has twice the computing headroom of the quad-processor servers that are generally considered at the top end of the volume or so-called commodity server space.

HP isn't new to this market segment. In 1997, Intel bought a company by the name of Corollary that was in the process of developing a chipset that effectively "glued together" two standard quad-processor x86 busses into a single 8-way symmetrical multiprocessor (SMP). Intel not only completed development, it also gave the chipset legitimacy by giving … Read more

This week in laptops

We're a little more than 48 hours out from that great holiday whose sacred rites (for me, at least) include tucking into a Dublin Coddle and washing it down with a perfect pint of Guinness. (For strict Catholics, the holiday comes even sooner.) So that you can head out for your preholiday warm-up drinking, here's a summary of this week's laptop-related news. Just remember: Friends don't let friends drink green beer.

Speaking of green, Asus has greened its laptop cases by offering an eco-chic bamboo finish. Also, the Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool released a list … Read more