Hardware Archive

Dell, which has scheduled a news announcement for July 13, is expected to reveal a revised PC pricing strategy that will present SMBs and consumers with a more straightforward menu of price options. The move, which doesn't appear to affect large business accounts, comes as Dell attempts to recover from a series of missteps that curbed its growth during the first quarter of 2006. More on this at Ars.

Ars reviews the Dell Inspiron e1405-- a Core Duo laptop priced at USD 800. It concludes: "Taken for what it is, the Dell e1405 performed well in our testing. It's suited to general-purpose use of all kinds, but its integrated video will leave gamers cold and its all-plastic construction might keep true aesthetes at a distance. Still, for general use, it's not clear what others features could possibly be expected at this price point, and the machine is especially recommended to those who need power on a budget."

"Western Digital has settled a class action lawsuit concerning the deceptive labeling of their hard drives. The problem occured when consumers bought hard drives with a stated capacity. As an example, let’s say you purchased a Western Digital 250 gigabyte hard drive. After you install the drive into your computer, you will notice that the drive size has become 231 gigabytes. The reason for this is that Western Digital, along with most hard drive manufacturers, calculates the storage capacity of their hard drives using the decimal system. This in contrast to virtually all operating systems that calculates the capacity of the hard drives with the binary system. As hard drives become larger, this discrepancy grows larger."

"The Cell processor has seemingly picked up a reputation for being incredibly difficult to program. However, this seems to be based entirely on expectation rather than experience. What’s the real story? Is it really that difficult? This article looks at the concepts involved in Cell programming."

At an event put on to honor the top technology innovations from Massachusetts companies, a technology designed for users far from the halls of MIT and Harvard stole all the thunder. At the MITX in Boston, Nicholas Negroponte, the co-founder of the MIT Media Lab, was inducted into the MITX Innovation Hall of Fame. But Negroponte used his time at the podium to talk about his current job as chairman of the One Laptop per Child association and its goal of putting what is commonly referred to as the $100 laptop into the hands of children in developing countries. Negroponte didn't just talk about the association and its goals; he also brought the first working model of the $100 laptop.

Dell launched on Wednesday a new generation of servers with Intel's latest dual-core server processors and new management tools. The new PowerEdge servers make up Dell's second batch of products that use dual-core Xeon chips from Intel. However, the earlier generation of servers, based on a chip code-named Paxville, weren't expected to be mass-market products. The PowerEdge 1950, 2900 and 2950, based on Intel's latest Xeon processor, known as Dempsey, will become the new bedrocks of Dell's server lineup.

Dell has gone mad and designed this really weird portable computer that's not really a laptop. Cnet has a set of pictures of the Dell XPS M2010. "Dell's new XPS M2010, which starts at $3500, includes two hard drives with up to 120GB capacity each, a Core Duo processor and 4GB of dual-channel (667MHz) memory."

Computer maker Lenovo will not install or support the Linux operating system on any of its PCs, including ThinkPads and a series of new notebooks, the company said this week. The company is clearly positioning itself as an exclusive partner of Microsoft, several weeks after the companies announced they were "reaffirming" global market development and cooperation agreements. "We will not have models available for Linux, and we do not have custom order, either," said Frank Kardonski, Lenovo's worldwide product manager for Lenovo 3000 offerings. "What you see is what you get. And at this point, it's Windows."

In this, the 60th anniversary year of the computer, it may be interesting to look back at a couple of key events in the evolution of this very important market. This is a market now amounting to extraordinary numbers of machines. In 2010, the last year for which we have numbers, there were no less than 10 million machines shipped! This growth and penetration is unparalled in the history of industrial products in the last 100 years, and is an amazing success. However, to get to this stage, the industry had to make its way through some issues and decision points. There are generally agreed to have been key turning points. What would have happened if they had gone differently?

The server market was slapped and dropped on its head during the first quarter of 2006. We haven't seen anything quite like it since 2000. What's the big shocker? Well, Sun Microsystems actually enjoyed one of the stronger runs during the first quarter by most metrics, while Dell proved one of the worst performers. Beyond the server vendor rumbles, AMD continued to gain gobs of share on Intel in the x86 processor market.