Archive for October, 2006

Asus today announced “luxury computing options” with the leather bound for this holiday season . “The 13.3-inch widescreen W6 new Leather Collection brings a wide aspect visual satisfaction with the exceptional compact mobility. Meanwhile, the compact S6 Series is now available in fabulous pink, only for a limited number”, Asus published.

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Seagate announced its forthcoming Momentus 5400 FDE.2 laptop-use hard drive with built-in full-disk encryption. Seagate says the Momentus 5400 FDE.2 2.5-inch 5,400rpm drive will transparently perform all cryptographic operations and access control within the drive itself, and that users will need only a password to self-authenticate for full-drive access.

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A group of notebook computer vendors and battery manufacturers plans to announce a standard for making safer lithium ion batteries by June 15, 2007. The battery standard is an attempt to recover from recent massive laptop battery recalls, PC World reports.

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People buying certain Windows Vista certified computers from October 26 2006 until March 26 2007 with Windows XP preinstalled are qualified to get a voucher for a free or discounted upgrade to Windows Vista when the new operating system become available. Details of the Windows XP to Windows Vista upgrade, officially called Express Upgrade to Windows Vista, vary depending on PC manufacturers and retailers.

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The United States based R Cubed Technologies has signed agreement with Novell to distribute PCs pre-loaded with Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 (SLED 10) operating system. “Pre-loading SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 on our PCs and laptops is a natural move, as the market recognizes the advantages of Linux on the desktop and businesses decide to migrate to those advantages,” said Nathan Rockhold, president of R Cubed Technologies.

R Cubed currently offers six notebook models with one of the most popular Linux desktop distributions preinstalled for free, such as Open Suse, Fedora or Ubuntu. The preinstalled Linux operating systems ship with a lot of free desktop applications, including the free OpenOffice with word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, database and drawing applications, the Mozilla Firefox Web browser, free Evolution groupware client, Gaim instant messenger and GIMP photo application as same as with various multimedia applications.

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Acer said it won’t need to make any recall related to a Sony battery cells production glitch, causing laptop batteries to overheat. For the small number of Acer laptops that do use Sony materials in their batteries, Acer’s battery charging mechanism ensures the batteries will not have problems, said Gianfranco Lanci, president of Acer, at an investors conference on Friday.

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The USA based Fujitsu Computer Systems Corporation, a subsidiary of Fujitsu Limited, reported that on October 24, in Japan, a battery pack in a Fujitsu mobile computer (a Japanese market model equivalent to the Fujitsu LifeBook model P7120 notebook PC sold in the United States) overheated and damaged the computer. Japan’s Fujitsu Ltd. said on Friday its laptop with a Sony-made battery overheated and sparked earlier this week in Japan, causing minor burns to the hand of a user, the Reuters reports.

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Geek Patrol has published performance test results of the new MacBook Pro laptops with the latest 64-bit Intel Core 2 Duo processors (Meroms) compared against the 32-bit Core Duo (Yonah) MacBook Pros. Moving from the Core Duo to the Core 2 Duo means 32-bit MacBook Pro performance is up 10% without an increase in processor clock speed. Also, the Core 2 Duo is 20% faster (when executing 64-bit code) than the Core Duo (when executing 32-bit code), the Geek Patrol said.

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Apple has released the MacBook SMC Firmware Update 1.1, that addresses issues with random notebook’s shutdowns and improves the MacBook’s internal monitoring system. Apple recommends this SMC update for all MacBook systems, including those that received warranty repair.

You can use the Software Update feature of System Preferences, or download the MacBook SMC Firmware Update v1.1 from Apple Software Downloads.

MacBook: Shuts down intermittently

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Apple started selling MagSafe Airline Power Adapter, to power MacBook or MacBook Pro laptops throughout airline flight. The MagSafe Airline Power Adapter, which is a regular power adapter without battery recharge capability, costs $59 at Apple’s online store.

The Adapter works with the airline common in-seat DC EmPower ports and 20mm ports with the included adapter. According to the product’s page, Magsafe Airline Power Adapter is not compatible with automobile power ports.

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Dell is set to begin shipping notebooks that feature AMD processors from the last week of October. By the beginning of November, the first batch of 500,000 15.4-inch screen AMD-powered laptops from Dell will officially hit the market with prices ranging from $449 - $499, Digi Times reports according to Taiwan-based notebook makers.

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CompAmerica announced the “immediate availability” of the nVidia GeForce Go 7950GTX graphics card option, when purchasing two of its gaming laptops: the AMD FX-60/X2 Athlon Dual Core based Orca FX-2/7950, and the Intel Core 2 Duo based Dolphin 5724/7950. The company indicated that it will extend all current 7900GTX based offerings in current laptop and desktop models with the 7950GTX and its desktop dual equivalent “within two weeks”. The nVidia GeForce Go 7950GTX comes with 512MB of video memory.

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Apple today introduced, along with 15-inch model, the 17-inch widescreen MacBook Pro laptop computer featuring the new Intel Core 2 Duo (Merom) processor. The 17-inch MacBook Pro comes with Core 2 Duo T7600 CPU at 2.33GHz with 4MB of L2 cache and 2GB of main memory. The two SO-DIMM slots support up to 3GB memory.

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Apple today announced, along with 17-inch model, the 15-inch widescreen MacBook Pro laptop featuring the new Intel Core 2 Duo (codenamed Merom) processor. The 15-inch MacBook Pro features Core 2 Duo T7400 at 2.16GHz or T7600 at 2.33GHz. Both CPUs have 4MB of L2 cache.

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Sony today announced the recall of the additional 250,000 Vaio laptop batteries worldwide, after the company recalled 90,000 Vaio battery units in the Asia Pacific.

In the United States, the affected Sony Vaio batteries were sold from December 2004 through October 2006. In the Vaio FE series, the recalled batteries were sold with Vaio VGN-FE550G and VGN-FE570G notebooks. In T series, Sony recalled battery units sold with VGN-T240P, VGN-T250, VGN-T250P, VGN-T260P, VGN-T270P, VGN-T340P, VGN-T350, VGN-T350P, VGN-T360P, VGN-T370P laptops. It is possible that some of the affected batteries were sold separately.

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