My last two laptops have both been Dell. I had always loved the fact that I could customize my laptop fairly specifically at the same time as getting a great price. At the time, other companies generally could only offer one of those options: a prepackaged bundle with a good price or customization with a premium.
Sony and crapware have a special relationship, so much so that it takes over two minutes for its laptops to boot into Windows (compare that with 30 seconds for a MacBook). The company has even issued press statements explaining its reasoning: “The programs are carefully selected and provide benefits to many consumers, up to 30% of whom act on the offers.”
TechConsumer News is a feature we started out of a hobby of tracking the latest happenings within the consumer related technology sphere. The goal is to provide a concise, compiled overview of the most intriguing stories from the last few days. Feel free to give us feedback or send us tips. If you like what you find, you can subscribe via email or RSS.
Here’s the latest in TechConsumer news:
The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program started at MIT was developed with the intention of getting $100 laptops to kids in developing nations. While the price tag is almost twice that, they’re still working to get it down.
The laptop, currently called the XO Laptop, has had some success with the recently announced “Give One, Get One” program. For just $399, the deal buys both yourself and a child from a developing nation new XOs. The non-profit is reporting about $2 Million worth of donations each day.
Now the latest news has Microsoft coming out with a statement saying it is trying to rework Windows XP to run on XO laptops. The company has outlined the challenges (a good rundown of them can be found here) it faces in this unusual project. The biggest challenge cited is the fact that the XO laptop uses flash memory rather than a traditional hard drive, which is what Windows normally needs.
The big computer companies seem to have one thing in common right now: bring computer gaming to the masses. Last week HP launched the Blackbird 002 desktop PC, the company’s first HP-branded gaming PC. The starting price is $2,500, roughly half the cost of much of the high-end gaming competition.
Then there’s Gateway (soon to be purchased by Acer), which plans to introduce a gaming PC in November called FX540 with a gaming-oriented notebook line planned for release in January. And let’s not forget that both Toshiba and Dell released new, more affordable gaming computers this summer. Toshiba, with its Satellite x205 series of gaming notebooks which start at around $2,000, and Dell with its XPS 720 gaming desktop, which starts at roughly $1,700.
TechConsumer News is a feature we started out of a hobby of tracking the latest happenings within the consumer related technology sphere. The goal is to provide a concise, compiled overview of the most intriguing stories from the last few days. Feel free to give us feedback or send us tips.
Here’s the latest in TechConsumer news:
TechConsumer News is a feature we started out of a hobby of tracking the latest happenings within the consumer related technology sphere. The goal is to provide a concise, compiled overview of the most intriguing stories from the last few days. Feel free to give us feedback or send us tips.
Here’s the latest in TechConsumer news:
Some of us here at Computers.net were lucky enough to attend the OpenCourseWare Consortium Conference in Santander, Spain. Among the attendees, a representative for the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project who let us get a hands on look at the latest iteration. See below for pics and video.
