notebooks

Sony will give even more of its customers the option to just say no to trial software.

Currently available during the configuration process of the Vaio TZ2200, the Fresh Start option will be available on more of the company's TZ series of notebooks, Sony spokesman Jon Piazza told CNET News.com Wednesday.

Fresh Start will not, however, be available on all Vaios, which is what Gizmodo and others are reporting.

Though, you know, that's not a bad idea.

Update: Piazza clarified and said that the option is now available on Vaio TZ2000 and TZ2500.

If you liked the sound of yesterday's $399 Dell Vostro desktop but wanted something a little more portable, here's your answer: For just $30 more, you can snag the Dell Vostro 1000 notebook.

This well-stocked, 6.25-pound laptop features a dual-core AMD Athlon TK-57 processor, 1GB of RAM, an 80GB hard drive, and a 15.4-inch screen. You also get a discrete graphics processor (ATI's Radeon Xpress 1150) with its own 256MB of RAM, so you could actually fire up a few games on this baby.

Dell provides a 1-year warranty and free shipping. You can order … Read more

Outside China, where it has home field advantage, Lenovo is in no rush to sell volumes of low-end PCs. For its export markets, the company plans to concentrate for some time to come on hawking its high-end models like the newly introduced, and roughly MacBook Air-skinny, X300 notebook--those products that it says show "the spirit of innovation." That thinking will also determine how and when Lenovo might come out with a laptop based on Intel's Atom processor.

Read more at InfoWorld: "Q&A: Lenovo takes the high-end road"

Dell notebooks will be available in retail stores in India for the first time, the company said Tuesday.

The company hinted that it would make this move last week, saying it planned to increase its presence in China and India, two of the world's biggest emerging markets for computers. Dell already has a relationship with one of China's largest retail chains, Gome.

In the announcement, Dell said it plans to offer Inspiron desktops and notebooks, and XPS notebooks through Indian electronics outlet Croma. Dell has a presence in India, but prior to this announcement, only via direct sales … Read more

Bigger, faster, thinner is the name of the game in hard drives.

Fujitsu is only the latest drive maker to use superlative adjectives to market its newest product. In this case it's the MHZ2 BJ series of its 2.5-inch hard disk drives, which the company claimed Monday is the "world's first" 320GB drive that rotates at speeds of 7,200 revolutions per minute.

That claim can be a tad misleading since there are drives out there that do the same spin speed, though they're smaller in size. Plus there are higher capacity drives already announced and on the market. … Read more

We've seen a lot of activity lately around the concept of low-cost laptops powered by Intel's upcoming Centrino 2 and Atom CPUs, which promise decent performance and small sizes. Now DigiTimes is reporting that the CPUs to power these systems will be priced very aggressively by Intel, which means we should see these new systems at a fraction of the prices we're seeing in the current $2,000-plus UMPC market.

According to the DigiTimes report, "The CPUs include the Celeron 585 with a core frequency of 2.16GHz priced at US$107 in thousand-unit tray quantities, … Read more

As the U.S. market becomes increasingly saturated with computers, Dell is looking eastward for new markets in which to sell its wares.

The Texas PC maker said Thursday it plans to increase its presence in China and India, the Associated Press reports.

"This year, we plan to introduce 50 percent more notebook platforms than we introduced last year, including exciting new products aimed exactly at Chinese customer needs," CEO Michael Dell said at a news conference in Beijing. He added that machines meant for needs of Indian customers would also be part of the plan.

Dell is … Read more

Asus is best known these days for the Eee PC, an inexpensive, small, stripped-down notebook. But Asus also operates in the other end of the laptop spectrum, as confirmed by the announcement of the M50 this week.

To begin with, the M50 is fancier than the Eee. It's shiny, with a piano black finish, and is made for the media-obsessed. It has a 15.4-inch screen, an integrated Blu-ray player, an HDMI (high-definition multimedia interface) port, and Dolby Home Theater surround sound technology. The M50's cursor pad also doubles as a multimedia touchpad. Asus also hooks these up … Read more

Dell has crunched its numbers and says there isn't a problem with solid-state drives.

The Round Rock, Texas-based company says that the reliability rates for those notebooks are equal to or better than for notebooks with hard drives and that the return rates are "an order of magnitude lower" than reported in a recent analyst report from Avian Securities. (See more on Dell's full statement here.) We wrote a story on Avian's report.

Avian earlier this week said the return rates for notebooks with solid-state drives has been around 20 percent to 30 percent. A … Read more