This sleeve fits any laptop up to 15.4 inches, keeps everything sleek, shiny, and scratch-free. Now you can buy it through ThinkGeek for $29.99 plus shipping. But the word “Document” is missing an s, and it would probably bother a lot of people.

ThinkGeek via Gizmodo

Walmart had a contest to see which company would reduce the most enviromental impact. Walmart’s goal was to make products green-er. HP won and their solution was to cut the boxes and excess materials, and just give the laptop (Pavilion dv6929wm) in a bag. HP’s laptop is going to be sold exclusively in Walmart and Sam’s Club Stores. There is no word on specifications yet but the laptop will sell for $798. Not a bad idea, might just cut down a lot of cardboard use in their factories.

via Engadget

Sony will drop the price of their leading Blu-Ray player (DP-S350) by $100 to $299. A higher end model (BDP-S550) will be coming in October, and selling for $399. The manufactuere, Funai, which produces Blu-Ray players under the brands of hilips/Magnavox, Sylvania and Insignia, will drop their prices to by $50 to $250 in September. If only the prices went to around $100, then it’d really get mainstream.

via HD Guru

The Acer Aspire One laptop packing Windows XP dropped from $399 to $349. The linux version will drop from $379 to $329. And the professional version will become $400 with a 6 cell battery and a 160 GB hard drive.  The Aspire One is only 2.17 pounds, has a Intel Atom Processor, 1 GB of ram, and a 120 GB hard drive. Aspire One>Eee PC, but that’s just me. It all depends on the type of operating system and hardware requirements one prefers.

via Engadget

Quad Core in laptops, already? Intel’s quad core for the mini market will be dubbed the Core 2 Extreme. Using 45 watts, it is currently unclear whether the architecture of the processor will be based on Penryn or the Nahalem. I wonder how they’re going to cool this thing. It might burn a whole through your laptop.

Image courtesy of NY Times

via PC Magazine

Seems like every time a new standard comes out, everything gets doubled nowadays. The Serial ATA International Organization has announced the almost-done specs and plans for SATA 3.0, and that big companies can start to design products for it. It is expected to be completed in the second half of this year. Furthermore, SATA 3.0 will remain backward compatible with current SATA 2.0 configurations.

via SmallNetBuilder

The AMD 64 2000+ (clocked at 1 GHz) has been found to rip the raved-about Atom processor by Intel, (clocked at 1.6 GHz), beating Intel in power and processing benchmarks. The stellar performance is mostly accredited to the very well designed K8 architecture.

AMD seems to be getting back on track, after having lost market share to Intel’s Core 2 Duo processors and Nvidias’s graphics cards. AMD now has the HD 4870 X2, which was deemed the “world’s fastest graphics card”. Go AMD!

Specs:

via Tom’s Hardware

As many have noticed, the iPhone’s GPS is a convenient way of looking up maps but is nowhere close to being a replacement for your TomTom. The main features missing are turn by turn instructions as well as the voice system, both of which are very important when on the road. Several big GPS companies are interested in making the software…but they’ll have to wait for Apple’s blessing.

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Nitteo, a forum user at overclock.net, has posted pictures of his 16 rigs with 51 Nvidia 8800 series cards used for Folding@home, a distributed computing project to simulate and record results of protein folding. If proteins do not fold correctly, cancerous cells and other diseases result. Thus, understanding how proteins fold may eventually lead to the development of cures for diseases caused by protein misfolding.

We thank Nitteo for building and donating CPU/GPU power to help with research that can potentially lead to cures one day. Come to think of it, his electric bill is probably through the roof.

For more pictures and info, visit www.overclock.net.

DotSyntax has released the new test build of Digsby, with numerous fixes to memory leaks. On some systems, RAM usage would reach up to 150mb, and the new architecture reduces it by over 50%. Memory usage should now range from 20-50mb.

Menus and buttons now run up to 2-3 times faster, which is a really good. (It used hang my system whenever I hit the menu to change fonts by accident)

Bugs are still being worked out, of course, and a new build for the public will be released very soon. This should build should provide a huge performance gain over previous build. It’s a shame this isn’t out for Mac and Linux yet. (You can, however, sign up to be notified when it is.)

via Digsby Blog