schools

Fessing up to faulty GPUs: The week in laptops

Hey, remember when Nvidia issued that business update saying it was expecting to lose money repairing or replacing flawed graphics cards, but then declined to state which cards were affected and which manufacturers bought them?

Well, this week, both Dell and HP finally came out with a list of laptops that included the defective cards. Check your laptops, people, or you too may be treated to "multiple images, random characters on the screen, lines on the screen, no video" or even a "notebook (that) does not start."

Moving on, analyst group Gartner says the $100 laptop is a pipe dream, but the $200-$500 laptop is going strong. This week saw Intel's Classmate PC primed for a third-generation release; the MSI Wind started shipping with a 6-cell battery (though that bumps the price to $550); and Asus reportedly prepared an Eee PC 701 powered by Intel Atom chips.

That last item is apparently part of Asus' plan to cook up a total of 23 varieties of Eee PC over the coming months (or years, the timeline isn't clear). It's enough to make me wonder if Asus will continue to manufacture any non-Eee PC computers in the next few years. Or will we soon be receiving a press release announcing that Asus is changing the company name to Eee?

Meanwhile, memory maker Buffalo gets our carpe diem award for recognizing the market opportunity in DIY solid-state drives for the Eee PC. First runner-up is Samsung, which finally recognized business users as a prime market for the UMPC and added a few enterprise features to its Q1 Ultra. … Read more

Return of the little guys: the week in laptops

It was nice while it lasted. After a multi-week break from overwhelming netbook news, we were hit with a second tidal wave of tiny systems from Asus, Acer, and Sylvania. Feeling a little left out of the party, LG is supposedly mulling over a netbook of its own. Rumor has it that HP is contemplating a low-cost version of its 2133 Mini-Note. And Asus, not quite content with its many varieties of Eee PC, is reportedly working toward "whole-day" battery life on its netbooks.

The elderly among us may remember that before there were netbooks, there was the … Read more

Back-to-school laptops: we have a winner (two, actually)

Perhaps if you are doing nothing more than lounging poolside while working at a part-time job this summer, the season may seem to be progressing slowly. To a workaday stiff like myself with precious few summertime weekends and a boatload of back-to-school laptops to review, I see the calendar soon turning to August and Labor Day fast approaching. As I view it, there's little time left before a busy class schedule will replace your lazy days of summer.

To help you find the right laptop before that happens, we here at CNET Reviews have queued up 27 laptops that you'll likely find on big-box store shelves this month and next. We've broken the laptops into four groups, based on price, and have completed our reviews of the systems in the first two groups: Entry-level and Budget.

(Look for the Mainstream $800-$1000 group to be completed by the end of next week, with the High-end group to follow in August; we're still waiting on some Centrino 2 laptops to arrive at CNET Labs.)

After the break, see our recommendations for the Entry-Level and Budget categories. … Read more

Lexmarks offers three new back-to-school multifunction printers

Convergence is the key to staying ahead in the technology game, so it's no surprise that printer vendors are offering more and more printers that do quadruple duty as scanner, copier, and fax machine. Today, Lexmark caters to the back-to-school shoppers with a handful of new All-in-Ones that are competitively priced but include all the features you'd find in their larger counterparts.

The $99 X5650 AiO is a printer, scanner, copier, and fax machine with an auto-document feeder for scanning/copying stacks of paper. It can reportedly print up to 25 black pages per minute and 18 color. … Read more

Back-to-school, MacBook rumors, and pizza metaphors: The week in laptops

My new tagline for This Week in Laptops: The antidote to iPhone fever. Catchy, no?

While our colleagues toiled away on iPhone rumors, iPhone release stories, iPhone reviews, and iPhone software news, the CNET Laptop Reviews team continued to fill out our roundup of back-to-school laptops that will be on retailers' shelves this summer. The latest additions: a $649 Dell Inspiron 1525, the $799 HP Pavilion dv2915nr, and the $799 Gateway T-6836. Keep checking back for more reviews as the first day of classes draws near (already?!). Not wanting to leave gamers out in the cold, we also pulled together … Read more

Attention back-to-school shoppers: Find your laptop reviews here

When people refer to a seasonal business, they usually mean the holiday shopping season that starts with Black Friday. But the real season for laptops has become the summer shopping phenomenon known as "Back to School." For college students, a laptop is virtually required equipment, and even high school and grade school kids are getting in on the act.

To help you pick the perfect system for your academic needs (or to send those Facebook party invites from), we've scoured the retail shelves of big box electronics stores to find the specific configurations and model numbers you'… Read more

Study: U.S. retains lead in science, tech

In sizing up the nation's status as a world leader in science and technology, here's a little good news-bad news from a study released Thursday by the nonprofit think tank Rand.

The U.S. remains the worldwide leader in science and technology, based on R&D spending, the number of Nobel Prize winners who call the U.S. home, and the number of top universities sitting on U.S. turf.

But the bad news is the U.S. educational system, kindergarten through high school, continues to underperform in developing bright minds in math and science. Europe and … Read more

Is technology ruining children's lives in Colorado?

I have never been terribly fond of adults.

Somehow, the older people get, the more venal, calculating and, therefore, swathed in self-denial they become.

I have tried hard to have sympathy with Rochelle Hoins of Castle Rock, Colorado this week. I have struggled.

Ms. Hoins was stunned more swiftly than Mrs. Lot of Sodom when she discovered that eighteen students in a middle school attended by her twin sons had taken photos of themselves using their cell phones. The photos, having been emailed, took on something of a larger life in the ether of the web.

"We did dumb … Read more

Buzz Out Loud 740: iTunes bombing

How to get to the top of the iTunes podcast list--we think. We'll let you know Monday. Also, breaking news! Amazon goes down midshow! Was it something we said? In other news, we attempt to solve issues of global hypercapitalism, the growth imperative, and their inevitable consumer-unfriendly consequences. Plus, we find out why you have to go through voicemail hell when you call customer support, and the answer makes us lose our ever-loving minds. Listen now: Download today's podcast Episode 740

ISP secretly added spy code To Web sessions, crashing browsers http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/06/isp-spying-made.html … Read more

'Biggest drawing' just a big hoax

A Swedish art student who claimed to have created the "biggest drawing in the world" using a GPS device and an international package delivery service has admitted that the drawing is a hoax.

Erik Nordenankar had claimed that he placed a GPS device in a briefcase on March 17 and then sent the case on a 55-day trip around the world with DHL. He originally stated on his Web site that he had given DHL specific travel instructions on the route that the briefcase should take to yield the drawing. After the package allegedly traveled over 6 continents … Read more