pcs

Gateway released an all-in-one PC at DigitalLife this week in New York, touting the PC as a fresh page in their efforts to reinvent themselves.

The One part, however, shouldn't be confused for the first.

Gateway has had all-in-on PCs in its lineup since the spring of 1999 when it released the Profile in Japan. That PC, which combined an CRT monitor with a PC, came to the states in June 1999. The company then followed up in the succeeding years with the Profile 2 (similar but different processors), the Profile 3 (a PC married to an LCD screen … Read more

Novatium Solutions, which has come up with a thin-client computer for emerging markets, has landed an investment from New Enterprise Associates (NEA).

The company has mostly installed its computers around Chennai (formerly Madras) in southern India. The systems work on the thin-client model. Most of the actual computing and the Internet connection goes through a central server. Users then tap into the server through desktop units.

With thin clients, updates and security patches are easier to manage, according to Rajesh Jain, one of Novatium's founders. Energy can also be conserved. In a novel twist, Novatium's clients use a … Read more

In baseball, amassing a single, double, triple and home run in the same game is known as hitting for the cycle. AMD will try for the chip industry equivalent next year.

The company announced plans Monday to introduce a desktop PC processor with three cores in the first quarter of 2008. The three-core chip will carry the same Phenom brand name that AMD plans to attach to its quad-core desktop chips due to ship to PC companies by the end of this year.

Bob Brewer, corporate vice president of marketing and strategy, said that AMD's move was made in … Read more

Slimmed-down PCs are hot right now. But most of the innovation in tiny computers is taking place in the notebook and mobile-phone industries, not the stodgy enterprise desktop space.

No matter, Lenovo has announced that it will launch a tiny, 45-watt desktop computer the size of a phone book. It's called the ThinkCentre A61e, or "Blue Sky," and it will be primarily aimed at businesses and customers overseas--where they still buy desktops.

The company has bestowed the "Blue Sky" moniker to denote its green qualities. Lenovo says its power supply is 85 percent efficient, and … Read more

Microsoft made a splash earlier this year with a tabletop PC called Milan. Designers and developers there might have been spared building their 85 early prototypes, however, if they'd just gone shopping at defense contractor Northrop Grumman instead of Ikea.

As it turns out, Northrop Grumman--best known for missile systems and other military gear--for several years has been hawking the similar TouchTable as part of what it calls an "integrated collaboration environment." It'll be showing off the technologies next week at a defense conference in London, and last month delivered a TouchTable to the Federal Aviation … Read more

Regional cell phone operator MetroPCS Communications bid Tuesday to buy competitor Leap Wireless International in a deal worth more than $5 billion in stock.

MetroPCS, which went public in April, said in a press release Tuesday that it would offer 2.75 of its shares for each outstanding common share of Leap. This represents a value of $75.05 based on Friday's closing price and is only 3 percent higher than Leap's closing price on Friday.

MetroPCS also said it would refinance $2 billion of Leap's debt as part of the deal.

"We believe that the … Read more

Dell actually beat analysts' expectations Thursday when it released the preliminary results of its earnings for the second quarter of fiscal year 2008, but again opted against the traditional follow-up conference call with company executives, investors and the media.

Dell has failed to file its last six quarterly earnings reports and its last annual report with the SEC due to the company's internal investigation into its accounting practices. The probe, which was wrapped up earlier this month, found that Dell accountants were regularly fudging quarterly earnings numbers as far back as 2003 to meet or surpass Wall Street expectations. … Read more

Nick Gault apparently just can't get enough of virtualization start-ups.

Gault, who was founding chief executive of XenSource but who was replaced in 2006, now is leading Pano Logic, another virtualization start-up. XenSource was mostly focused on servers, but Pano Logic's emphasis is on desktop PCs, the company said as it announced its strategy Monday.

Virtualization, as most often described these days, enables a single computer to run multiple operating systems at the same time. Ideally, it increases the efficiency of hardware use, eases management burdens and enables a more flexible computing infrastructure in which software can be … Read more

It's no big news that video games are a major, mainstream entertainment force, racking up more than $7 billion in U.S. software and hardware sales last year. Still, it's unusual when pretty much everyone in the industry, as well as the general public, all get behind the same game.

Last year, it was the free-roaming RPG Oblivion. This year, it's the underwater action/adventure BioShock, combining influences from Ayn Rand to Jules Verne. Collecting a spate of rare perfect scores since its release earlier this week, BioShock is a curious commercial hit that's neither a … Read more