Martin Wainwright The Guardian, Wednesday February 20 2008

A British company has patented a hi-tech version of the cash boxes which squirt dye or shoot out telescopic poles - in the form of laptop software which photographs the thief, pinpoints his or her whereabouts and quietly destroys sensitive data.

The system has been tested in Yorkshire following the recent spate of high-profile cases involving government laptops taken home or left in staff members' cars against regulations.

A programme available on licence for £10 a month links to a control centre, which takes action if a laptop is used outside designated areas such as a government office or even a specific employee's desk.

Once connected to the internet, which with the latest generation laptops would happen automatically when switched on, the computer takes repeated pictures of its surroundings while sending out its location to the control centre.

"We guarantee to monitor the state and whereabouts of any laptop's electronic 'heartbeat', and to trigger the destruction of any files in the case of unauthorised, or apparently unauthorised, use," said Dean Bates of Virtuity, the Sheffield-based IT firm which has devised the scheme.

"There are millions of laptops out there containing valuable data. Most of them are not stolen because of that, but it's an obvious attraction if the thief wants to sell the computer on to more serious criminals."

The BackStopp programme is claimed to be undetectable to thieves, both when sending identification data and while wiping sensitive files. With the new generation of laptops, which use mobile phones' GSM (Global System for Mobile communications), the mechanisms would be in action as soon as a laptop left a room - even in the stairwell as a thief escaped from someone's home or office.

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Toshiba has announced unveiling of the world's first slim HD DVD rewriteable (RW) drive for laptop PCs at the ongoing Computex 2007 in Taipei, Taiwan.

"SD-L912A" can read from and rewrite to single- and dual-layer HD DVD RW discs, re-recordable HD DVDs, DVDs, and CDs.

According to Toshiba, "SD-L912A" will enable replacing larger desktop systems in homes with laptop PCs having this additional HD functionality.

And, the HD DVD RW functionality will open doors to a wider range of applications that involve storage and rewriting of large volumes of data.

Spotted here

Once upon a time, notebook computers were a specialist's tool, restricted to an exclusive group of heavily traveled workers for whom the deployment of expensive and fragile equipment was cost-effective. No more.

MAY 18, 2007

AMD has detailed on plans for its first chip platform designed specifically for notebook personal computers.

The platform - a collection of microprocessors, graphics chips and other chips - is aimed at improving battery life and enhancing graphics and video processing performance, AMD said.

Tuesday, March 13, 2007 - By Bryan Gardiner

Seagate announced on Monday a new partnership with Fremont-based ASI Computer Technologies to start delivering laptops with the encrypting Momentus 5400 FDE.2 hard drive.

ASI, a company that typically caters to small and medium-sized value added resellers (VARs) and other customers in government, legal, financial, educational, and the health industries, will start selling the C8015 and C8015+ laptops through resellers like Newegg.com starting next month, according to Kent Tibbils, senior director of platform technologies and marketing for ASI.


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By INQUIRER staff: Thursday 08 March 2007, 10:16

THE RACE to market for machines which use hybrid hard drives is well under way as details have emerged of an LG R400 notebook which uses the technology.
According to reports, the LG R400 will be for sale in a week or two and uses flash based non volatile cache to boot machines faster and also to speed up data processing by a factor of three. It also promises big HDD power savings.

Continued here

New notebook shares plenty of common parts with the Latitude D620 but is designed to take a licking and keep on ticking.

By Ben Ames, IDG News Service
January 16, 2007

Dell has launched its first semirugged notebook PC and plans to compete with Hewlett-Packard and Panasonic for customers who need a computer that can cope with abusive vibration, humidity, altitude, and dust.

By Stan Beer 16 January 2007

Dell has been accused in a Canadian class action lawsuit of knowingly selling defective notebook computers. The lawsuit, lodged in the Ontario Superior Court, alleges that Dell Canada sold a range of Inspiron notebooks, knowing that they had defective motherboards.

December 28th 2006 - by Dan Nicolae Alexa

Laptops are known to be extremely sensitive to energy consumption, so the race for finding an (almost) inexhaustible source of energy has always been a main preoccupation for laptop producers. Samsung seems to have taken the lead in this domain.

The laptop, weighing in at just under 2 pounds, will only be sold in Japan.

Japan’s Sony Corp said it plans to start selling the world’s lightest notebook computer in December in Japan, in a bid to boost its presence among business users.

Weighing 898 grams, Sony’s ‘type G’ Vaio computer will be the lightest laptop PC, and comes with a 12.1-inch liquid crystal display (LCD) screen, the electronics and entertainment conglomerate said.

Original article here

According to reports, Dell has gone and quietly launched its first notebooks with chips from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). As of yesterday, these AMD based notebooks appeared for sale on Dell's Web site, sans a formal announcement from the company.

Earlier this year, there was speculation that Dell would add notebooks to its current line of AMD-based desktops and servers. And, looks like Dell has kept up the promise

TechTree

10/30/2006 11:28:54 AM, by Eric Bangeman

Seagate has introduced a new hard drive security platform that it hopes will make data loss problems stemming from stolen and misplaced notebooks a thing of the past. Called DriveTrust, Seagate's new hard drive security platform offers a combination of hardware-based security along with a programming foundation for security software developers to "lock down digital information at rest."

Hard drive encryption is nothing new. However, the recent spate of high-profile laptop losses and thefts has highlighted the issue of data security, especially as it pertains to mobile devices. The US Office of Management and Budget recently issued new data security guidelines that addressed the issue of laptop security along with network and database security, recommending that all data on laptops and other mobile devices be encrypted unless it falls into the "nonsensitive" category.

Original article here

By YURI KAGEYAMA

TOKYO (AP) -- Sony executives apologized Tuesday for a global recall in laptop batteries, acknowledging that the troubles had caused worries and inconvenience to consumers.

The Japanese electronics and entertainment company said improvements in production, design and inspection have been made to prevent a recurrence of laptop overheating problems, which company officials said were caused by microscopic metal particles that mistakenly got inside the battery, causing short-circuiting.

1010WINS

Sony today announced that its new VAIO VGN-TX series of ultraportable notebooks will include integrated broadband-capable wide area network technology.

The company said that the TX laptops will be able to easily connect to Sprint's EvDO Power Vision Network, which the communications company expects to upgrade later this year with EvDO Revision A technology (only in selected markets, however).

Revision A is supposed to greatly increase the speed of broadband uploads, so this service (and perhaps this laptop line) will be of interest to those who will be uploading lots of video, for example.

Story Continues

By Nate Mook, BetaNews - September 19, 2006

Sony's battery woes continued late Monday, as laptop manufacturer Toshiba announced it was recalling 340,000 batteries across its Dynabook and Satellite lines. Unlike the Dell and Apple recalls, however, Toshiba says the defective batteries do not pose a fire risk.

The recall affects laptops manufactured between March and May of this year, 100,000 of which were shipped in the United States. According to the company, the batteries are affected by a glitch that prevents them from properly storing power

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Louisa Hearn

More airlines are cracking down on the use of laptops in the air in the same week that a new incident was reported to have turned an IBM laptop into a "firecracker" at a US airport.

The incident is chronicled on the Engadget website, which picked the story up from a forum post on a site called somethingawful.com written by a person claiming to have seen the fire and photographed its aftermath.

By John P. Mello Jr.

Today Intel officially launched the Core 2 Duo processor for mobile platforms. Based on the Merom core, Core 2 Duo is arguably the industry's most anticipated mobile processor launch of this year.

The Dell Inspiron E1405 offers up a mobile Core 2 Duo processor and the longest battery life I've seen in a laptop.

When I reviewed the Dell Inspiron E1505 last May, I didn't hesitate to give it the Editors' Choice award for offering incredible value at a budget price.

Lenovo Group announced on Tuesday the availability of the ThinkPad T60p, its first laptop computer preloaded with the Linux operating system.

The new laptop is primarily aimed at engineers, the company said.

Linux users will welcome Lenovo’s decision to preload the open-source operating system on its new ThinkPad. Rival Dell supports Linux but does not offer machines preloaded with the operating system software, while Hewlett-Packard reserves Linux for its higher-end workstations.

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