hardware

The IT market staged a healthy rebound last year, with global spending on IT products and services rising 8 percent from 2009 to more than $1.5 trillion, according to IDC's Worldwide Black Book report out today.

The market research firm's 2010 numbers showed the fastest growth rate for the IT industry since 2007.

Factoring in the telecommunications segment, the overall ICT (information and communications technology) market saw spending climb to almost $3 trillion, up 6 percent from 2009. Growth was driven by the need and ability among businesses to finally spend money to refresh their hardware and … Read more

Editor's note: This live event has concluded. You can replay our full coverage of the announcement in the Cover It Live module at the bottom of this post. Or, for details, check out our stories on the new Windows 7 tablet, the Latitude laptops, and the updated Optiplex business desktops and Precision workstations.

Dell is holding a business-oriented product unveiling today in San Francisco and CNET will be on the scene to bring you the news as it happens.

The event starts at 10 a.m. PT, and is slated to run an hour in length.

Dell's invitation, … Read more

Our utilities update report is a list of updates for Mac utilities that have been released in the past week. Though a utility can be any tool that helps you perform a routine task (including image manipulation and synchronization), our focus in this column is on bringing you those tools that help in troubleshooting Mac hardware and software problems. For once in a long time there have been no updates to maintenance-related utilities, but luckily others have stepped up in their place.

Hardware In hardware-based utilities, a new S.M.A.R.T. monitor for internal hard drives has been … Read more

Our utilities update report is a list of updates for Mac utilities that have been released in the past week. Though a utility can be any tool that helps you perform a routine task (including image manipulation and synchronization), our focus in this column is on bringing you those tools that help in troubleshooting Mac hardware and software problems. This past week there were updates with a number of maintenance and optimization utilities, in addition to an update for a useful multi-GPU management tool.

Maintenance In maintenance utilities this week, both MacPilot and MacPilot Lite were updated. In the latest … Read more

Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft tonight are taking the covers off four pieces of HP-made hardware that will ship with software, services, and support from both companies as part of their Frontline partnership.

The goal, the companies say, is to reduce the amount of time it takes to deploy new appliances by bundling together pre-configured hardware and software. The hardware has also been designed to cover both small-medium businesses (SMBs) as well as enterprise-size companies.

The four configurations HP and Microsoft are launching to meet that goal are: the HP Business Decision Appliance, the HP Enterprise Data Warehouse Appliance, the HP E5000 … Read more

The Khronos Group today released updates to two interfaces designed to make it easier for programmers to tap into the power of computing hardware.

First is OpenSL ES 1.1, an interface for C programmers to use sound hardware on mobile devices. The interface abstracts technologies such as graphic equalizer processing, reverberation or 3D spatial Doppler effects, playback and volume controls, and audio data recording.

The purpose of the interface is to liberate programmers from having to recraft their applications each time a new device arrives with a different, often proprietary interface. Khronos released profiles tailored for phones, music players, … Read more

Booths were crowded, taxi lines were annoyingly long, and it was near impossible to make a cell phone call in Las Vegas last week, all anecdotal evidence pointing to a well-attended CES 2011.

Today we have hard data that proves attendance at the world's largest gadget trade show is creeping back up. The Consumer Electronics Association released its initial figures on headcount for this year's show, and the numbers are indeed up: CES 2011 saw more than 140,000 attendees flooding the halls of the Las Vegas Convention Center.

There will be an official audit this spring, but … Read more

Our utilities update report is a list of updates for Mac utilities that have been released in the past week. Though a utility can be any tool that helps you perform a routine task (including image manipulation and synchronization), our focus in this column is to bring you those tools that help in troubleshooting Mac hardware and software problems. This week there are updates for maintenance utilities, file recovery and file system management utilities, and some temperature and hardware monitoring tools.

Maintenance

The popular "TinkerTool" utility is a useful option for finding hidden settings in OS X and … Read more

Computer hardware is hot among holiday buyers this season, according to data out yesterday from ComScore.

As online buyers scoop up iPads, e-readers, laptops, and other portable devices, computer hardware is ringing in the holidays as the product category showing the most growth for the season so far, a 25 percent increase compared with last year.

Lower prices on flat-panel TVs is spurring growth in consumer electronics, helping that category grow 22 percent among online buyers over the same period last year, says ComScore. Books and magazines are also proving to be a popular gift item, up 21 percent from … Read more