Posts tagged Hewlett Packard
HP acquires 3Com for $2.7 billion
Nov 12th
HP and 3Com Corporation announced that they have signed an agreement under which HP will purchase 3Com, a leading provider of networking switching, routing and security solutions, at a price of approximately $2.7 billion. The terms of the transaction have been approved by the HP and 3Com boards of directors.
This agreement will transform the networking industry and underscore HP’s next-generation data center strategy built on the convergence of servers, storage, networking, management, facilities and services.
The rise of the $299 Wal-Mart laptop
Aug 17th
First Acer, then Hewlett-Packard and now Toshiba. The $299 laptop is a force to be consider with. There’s a new $299 laptop in style at stores and it’s not a Netbook.
These laptops sport big screens, optical drives, plenty of memory, and reasonable graphics horsepower. In simple words, this is nothing like a $299 Netbook.
The $299 Wal-Mart laptop are being sell out so quickly before people can even reach their wallets and the Best Buy $299 Acer laptop vanishes almost overnight.
Best buy appeared again for few days with a $299 Toshiba laptop sporting a 15-inch screen but then bumped the price up to $329. But whether it’s a $298, $299, $309, or $329, it’s a laptop design that has arrived. And it is a real competitor to the 10-inch Netbook, which costs approximately same.
The challenging is NetBook’s demand price. If retailers make something with more robust hardware in the same range of price, these tiny laptops are at the risk of falling back.
The salient specifications of the Toshiba include a 2.2GHz Intel Celeron processor 900, 2GB of memory, DVD-RW/CD-RW drive, 15.4-inch screen, 160GB Serial ATA hard drive (5400 rpm), 802.11b/g wireless, 10/100 Ethernet LAN, Intel‘s Graphics Media Accelerator 4500MHD, and Microsoft Windows Vista Home Basic Edition operating system.
There also appears to be some misunderstanding about the difference between the Atom and Celeron 900 processors. The Celeron 900 is rated at 2.20GHz, integrates 1MB of cache memory, and has an 800MHz bus. By comparison, the widely-used Atom N270 is rated at 1.60GHz, integrates 512KB of cache memory, and has a 533MHz bus.
China requires a porn censorship software
Jun 8th
According to a report, Government of China has plans of enforcing a constraint that requires all PCs sold in the country starting from July be shipped with a software that blocks access to certain websites. This news was collected from a report in The Wall Street Journal. This move is expected to give government a unique control (I say unique because this is the first instance of such nature) and would enable them to control how their people access the Internet.
The Chinese government has informed global PC makers of the requirement but it is yet to make this requirement public. According to the Chinese government, the move is taken with the intentions of protecting young generation from harmful content. According to the main developer of the software, the main target is the pornography. China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology did not respond to requests for comment.
The Chinese name for the software is Green Dam-Youth Escort. The word Green is used in Chinese to describe Web surfing free from pornography and other inappropriate content. The software is intended to link PCs with a database of banned sites and block the access to these addresses. The database is updated on a regular basis.
The software is developed by Jinhui Computer System Engineering Co, while taking input from Beijing Dazheng Human Language Technology Academy Co. Bryan Zhang, founder of Jinhui informed that his company collects, compiles and maintains the list containing the addresses of the blocked sites. The list is only focussed on pornography sites. He added the fact that software will permit blocking other type of content as well. The software can be turned off or uninstalled.
The company will be using an Internet update system to transmit the updated addresses of banned sites to PCs. According to a spokesperson from Hewlett Packard:
The company is working with the government authorities and evaluating the best way to approach this. Obviously we will focus on delivering the best customer experience while ensuring that we meet necessary regulatory requirements.
This requirement has placed PC makers on a hot seat. They have to decide whether to reject a government regulation in a major market or accept the censorship requirement.
HP recalls lithium-ion based batteries
May 16th
According to U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), Hewlett Packard (HP) on Thursday announced that the company has recalled batteries used in some of its laptops. The decision of recalling batteries of lithium-ion nature was made because of existence of a potential fire hazard.
The CPSC went on to say that this announcement covers around 70,000 batteries used in HP and Compaq based laptops. To get more details on the HP and Compaq models that are covered under the recall, you can visit the CPSC site.
HP did not made any comments regarding this issue uptil now. However, the recall decision was made after a couple of reports related to batteries that overheated and ruptured came out. These damaged batteries resulted in fire and caused damages of minor nature.
The affected laptops were sold in computer and electronic stores located in the U.S and also in HP online stores during the duration of August 2007 and March 2008. Besides this a few battery packs were sold separately.
As CPSC says, the batteries were manufactured in China. However the name of the manufacturers was not disclosed and was kept secret.
The commision went on to advise owners to immediately remove the recalled batteries from their laptop. The owners should get in contact with HP to determine whether their batteries are eligible for recall and can be replaced freely. Once removed, users can still use laptops using AC as the power source.
