With news like this, I may actually consider HP for my next PC purchase. HP has unveiled a pair of power-efficient PC’s – called the HP Pavilion Phoenix Special Edition a6655f. and the – HP Pavilion Phoenix Special Edition a6655f, respectively.

What makes them green? Both new models require less power usage, as their AMD processors are specifically designed to use energy more efficiently – as well as power reduction features that apparently save up to 45% energy when compared to other PCs on the market.

Furthermore, the PCs are sold in recyclable packaging – something that I feel, frankly, all PCs should be sold in. Lastly, they also meet the  Silver registration in the Electronic Products Environmental Assessment Tool (EPEAT), and are Energy Star Certified.

Personally, I believe this is a step in the right direction, and one that will hopefully see other PC manufacturers follow suit.

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.

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Mozy, the online backup solution I use and have mentioned a couple times, is responding to HP’s Upline debacle in an interesting way. First, some background information:

Two weeks ago, HP released HP Upline, a service similar to Mozy that provides unlimited storage for $59/year. HP also released free accounts of the service, limited to 1GB and one year (Mozy does free too, but their version is 2GBs and has no expiration date). About a week and a half later, the Upline service went down for several days.

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Last week the Economist (subscription required) had an interesting article about researchers in an HP lab that have been comparing strategies for maximizing readership on Digg via the layout of the front page. They were trying to answer the following question: Should the most recent stories be on top? That’s the way Digg is now, but maybe it should be organized with the most popular on top?

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Starting within the next few weeks, Dell computers (notebooks and desktops) will be for sale in more than 900 Best Buy locations in the U.S. After this move, Dell’s products will be available in almost 10,000 stores worldwide. This seems ironic considering Dell pioneered the low cost, online, skip-the-middleman model. But the company lost the “world’s largest computer maker” trophy to HP, and the retail distribution channel is one area where HP shines.

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div>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.

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div>A new feature we are experimenting with here at TechConsumer is providing a couple posts per week which follow interesting news specific to our sphere of consumer technology. Some of these stories may be a day or two old, heaven forbid. But the idea is to provide a concise, compiled overview of the most intriguing. We also plan to continue with more of our own original content. So without further ado, here’s some TechConsumer news:

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