As I wrote earlier, the USPTO was on the verge of granting Dell a trademark for the term "cloud computing," when media focus on the issue made them think better of it, and they decide to re-review the application.
Sorry, Dell, looks like they came to their senses.
You'll hear a PC labeled as many things, from "an uber-gaming system" to "budget-minded" and more, but this PC is "eco-friendly," or as Dell calls it, its first "conscientious" desktop. It was announced (though unnamed) at Fortune Brainstorm: Green in Los Angeles on (what else) Earth Day, earlier this year, and launched on Tuesday. The idea of this desktop PC was to put laptop components into it, to reduce size and power consumption.
Last Friday Dell issued a series of BIOS updates designed to alleviate the GPU issues that NVIDIA admitted to earlier in July, when it said it was taking a $150 - $200 million charge to cover (emphasis mine):
... anticipated customer warranty, repair, return, replacement and other consequential costs and expenses arising from a weak die/packaging material set in certain versions of our previous generation MCP and GPU products used in notebook systems.
Earlier this month NVIDIA gave laptop owners with NVIDIA GPUs headaches. The company filed a report with the SEC (.PDF) stating that the company was taking a $150 - $200 million charge to cover (emphasis mine):
"... anticipated customer warranty, repair, return, replacement and other consequential costs and expenses arising from a weak die/packaging material set in certain versions of our previous generation MCP and GPU products used in notebook systems."
Solid-State drives (SSDs) have had a lot of coverage lately, mostly negative. Battery life, performance, reliability, those sorts of things have been under close scrutiny of late. Monday, in Sandisk's earnings call, Sandisk placed the blame for at least one of those issues squarely on the shoulders of everyone's favorite whipping boy: Windows Vista.
On Monday, Dell announced it was matching Toshiba, which had previously announced a notebook with a 128 GB solid-state drive (SSD), by offering a 128 GB SSD for $649. It will be available as an option starting Tuesday in the U.S. on Dell Precision and Latitude systems. Inspiron and Alienware systems will get the drive starting next week.
On Monday AMD unveiled GAME!, its new initiative designed to make it easy for consumers to choose components for gaming systems.
After all, choosing a video game console is easy: there's nothing, component-wise, to pick. But what about a gaming PC? What video card do I want? What processor? How much memory? And on and on.
Responding to reports that first surfaced in the Wall Street Journal, Dell issued a statement late Tuesday night regarding the future of the XPS line of gaming systems. While the WSJ indicated that Dell would be dumping the XPS line in favor of systems developed by Alienware, which Dell purchased in 2006, Dell denied this was the case - although the company did say that Alienware would get the lion's share of resources.
Dell's apparently shipped a number of Vostro 1310 and 1510 laptops to the U.K. with a screwed-up keyboard layout. The issue was first emerged, at least Internet-wise, on a Flickr page, where a disgruntled Vostro owner showed off the funky layout.
