In its Spanish, French, British and German sites, Dell lists the Ubuntu-preloaded computers it offers. But not all of them! It shows only Ubuntu netbooks and hides the others. For example, the hidden trick to get a Dell XPS laptop with Ubuntu preinstalled is to get in touch with sales representatives and they’ll give you a link to purchase it.
Samsung announced the first line of consumer solid state laptop and drives for handhelds that encrypt all data written to them.
A Microsoft blogger says that the Windows operating system has achieved dominance in the netbook market. The statistics, however, are less definitive. Canonical, the company behind the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution, says that Linux still has strong prospects on little laptops.
Microsoft’s latest installment in its popular series of ripped-from-the-headlines, real-America style ‘puter buying adventures follows a mom and son duo — Lisa and Jackson. They almost buy a Mac, but Lisa notes they’re “popular at this age” (we guess what she meant to say is that they’re for children).
An anonymous reader writes “As an IT administrator did you ever think of replacing disks by SSDs? Or using SSDs as an intermediate caching layer? A recent paper by Microsoft researchers provides detailed cost/benefit analysis for several real workloads. The conclusion is that, for a range of typical enterprise workloads, using SSDs makes no sense in the short to medium future. Their price needs to decrease by 3-3000 times for them to make sense. Note that this paper has nothing to do with laptop workloads, for which SSDs probably make more sense (due to SSDs’ ruggedness).”
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Modern gadgets apart from being stylish are getting smaller day-by-day. And the latest creation to catch our eye is the ‘next gen laptop design’ by Hao Hua. Dubbed “D-roll” or “digital roll,” the new device works like a regular laptop, but rolls up to be a side bag or even a backpack for easy transportation.
avishere writes “People are losing their jobs, but for some execs the economic meltdown seems like the perfect time to get their software into the hands of those who can’t afford their multi-thousand-dollar price tags. Software giants Autodesk and SolidWorks have each latched onto the worst-economic-disaster-since-the-Great-Depression meme and released free versions of their flagship computer-aided-design brands before their potential users are forced to sell their laptops on Craigslist. ‘In these uncertain economic times,’ Autodesk coos sympathetically, it will give away temporary licenses of AutoCAD and other software to those unemployed in the fields of architecture, engineering, and design. (They are also developing a Mac version, two decades after abandoning the platform.) SolidWorks was quick to respond with its subtly titled Engineering Stimulus Package. So if anyone out there has their weekdays free, jumpstart your hardware and design projects for cheap. Legally, too.”
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Upgrading a laptop is very different from upgrading a desktop PC. Here we pass on the tips that we’ve learned from cracking open the shells of numerous notebook computers, from picking the best tools for the job to finding the right guide to help you do things properly.
Personal computers — and the companies that make their crucial components — are about to go through their biggest upheaval since the rise of the laptop. By the end of the year, consumers are likely to see laptops the size of thin paperback books that can run all day on a single charge and are equipped with touch screens or slide-out keyboards.
suolumark writes “The CSIRO has won what could be a landmark settlement from Hewlett Packard over the use of patented wireless technology. The settlement ended HP’s involvement in a four-year lawsuit brought by the CSIRO on a group of technology companies, in which the organisation was seeking royalties for wi-fi technology that is used extensively on laptops and computers worldwide. CSIRO spokesman Luw Morgan earlier said legal action was continuing against 13 companies: Intel, Dell, Toshiba, Asus, Netgear, D-Link, Belkin, SMC, Accton, 3-Com, Buffalo, Microsoft and Nintendo.”
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