Regular or ultra? Consumers will now have at least a couple of performance options when they order solid-state drives on the newest ultraportable notebooks from Dell.

Hard disk drives are getting scarcer by the week in the ultraportable notebook market. Dell has officially started selling its new 2.2-pound Latitude E4200 this week with solid-state drives as the only storage option, accelerating a trend in ultraportables away from hard disk drives.

The popular ThinkPad X301 also comes with solid-state drive options only.

The SSD options on the E4200 come in two flavors, standard or "Ultra".

Dell pre-announced the … Read more

Solid-state drives, if not yet ubiquitous, have arrived. You can find them in laptops big and small and as a high-octane storage option for gaming PCs.

SSDs made their mark by appearing in the trendiest ultraportables like the Apple MacBook Air and Asus Eee PC--typically as stratospherically priced options, fashion statements rarely seen in the real world.

These drives are now coming off their rarefied shelf space and appearing across a wider range of laptops and ultraportable computers.

Any new, lightweight enterprise laptop worth its salt comes with a large-capacity solid-state drive option now. Hewlett-Packard recently introduced the 3-pound EliteBook … Read more

As it kicks off its Nvision conference Monday in San Jose, Calif., chipmaker Nvidia must be hoping that the N stands for "new" and "now"--and not "no thanks."

Nvidia is trying to shake off a tough second quarter and is staring down a slump in earnings tied to chip glitches and stiffer competition from rival Advanced Micro Devices. The home page for the Nvision 08 conference urges interested parties to "join the visual revolution" and promises attendees two days' worth of "jaw-dropping visual wonderment" in the realms of games, movies, and science.

A big chunk of the graphics chip supplier's woes stem from a $196 million second-quarter charge taken for defective graphics processors. Though Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang has said that the "failures are only seen in a small percentage of all the chips," Hewlett-Packard and Dell have listed a number of models affected by the glitch.

A possibly bigger challenge is AMD's resurgent ATI graphics chip unit. Huang said in the second-quarter earnings conference call that his company had "underestimated" the price and performance of AMD's latest graphics chips, leading Nvidia to "to misposition our fall lineup" of chips.

(See: "AMD reclaims the high-end 3D card belt.")

AMD's recently introduced midrange and high-end graphics boards have been well-received and typically come at a discount to Nvidia boards that are roughly equal in performance. This forced Nvidia to cut prices on its performance graphics chips.

What does Nvidia think about AMD's new products? "Our competition has built a nice product but...the nice things that people write about their product is that it's well-priced," according to Huang, speaking during the earnings call.

Analysts confirm that AMD is making inroads. "(It's) pretty discernible. Certainly desktop standalone graphics, they've seen improvement there," said Dean McCarron, the principal and founder of Mercury Research, a company that tracks chip market movements. … Read more

Update on August 10 at 11:00 p.m. with official Intel pricing:

Existing Q9550 drops from $530 to $316. Pricing for new processors: Q9650 priced at $530, Q9400 at $266, E8600 at $266, and E7300 at $133.

The Xeon X3660 is reduced from $530 to $316.

Intel says it plans to roll out a bevy of midrange processors, all built on its new 45-nanometer manufacturing process, on Monday. Game computer vendors, among others, are expected to follow suit with new machines.

The Core 2 Quad Q9650 heads the list of updated chips, according to Intel. It has a core … Read more

Update on July 27 at 10:00 a.m. with additional information

Dell has issued a system update for a well-publicized problem with Nvidia chips.

The company said Friday it has posted BIOS updates for an Nvidia graphics chip glitch affecting laptop computers. Citing Nvidia information, Dell said the "affected GPUs (graphics processing units) are experiencing higher than expected failure rates causing video problems."

"The issue is a weak die/packaging material set, which may fail with GPU temperature fluctuations. If your GPU fails, you may see intermittent symptoms," the Dell blog said.

Dell said the … Read more

Dell will sell you a 128GB solid state drive for an unprecedented $649. But wait. An IDC report claims the performance gap between solid state drives and lower-cost high-performance hard disk drives is not that significant at the system level.

Solid state drives are attracting more scrutiny as they increase in capacity and decrease in price. (Dell's $649 drive is a radical price drop since many drives with half the capacity still sell for more than $700.)

Solid state drives (SSDs) are considered to be generally more power efficient, faster, and in some respects more reliable than hard disk … Read more

Dell shares rose as high as 4.5 percent Wednesday, following reports that founder Michael Dell acquired nearly $100 million in shares in the computer maker.

Dell climbed as high as $23.18 a share in intraday trading, before closing out the session at $22.70 a share, up 2.34 percent.

Dell's founder, according to a report in MarketWatch, purchased 4.5 million shares between June 27 and July 1 at an average price of $22.14 a share.

Dell's buying spree comes after the company reported respectable first-quarter results, which came off a challenging 2007 when … Read more

This blog has been updated with Dell executive and analyst comments.

It's not a blow-out quarter, but Dell investors will likely be pleasantly surprised.

The Round Rock, Texas, PC maker reported its first-quarter earnings Thursday, with revenue of $16 billion, a 9 percent improvement from a year ago, and earnings of 38 cents per share, a 12 percent increase.

Analysts were expecting earnings of 34 cents per share and revenue of $15.4 billion to $16.2 billion. In after-hours trading Thursday, shares of Dell were up 7.5 percent.

Following a turbulent 2007, Thursday's results were a … Read more

A New York State Supreme Court said Tuesday that Dell and its financial services arm misled customers.

Judge Joseph Teresi ruled that the world's second-largest PC maker engaged in fraud, false advertising, deceptive business, and abusive debt collection practices. The company was accused by the state of New York of offering no-interest or no-payment financing options for its products while Dell Financial Services would fail to honor them.

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo filed the suit in May 2007, asking for an injunction against the company's business practices and monetary damages for affected customers.

Further court proceedings … Read more