Tag: LAPTOP

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative is planning to ship nearly 5 million XO model PCs this summer to mostly third world countries. There are rumors floating about that the OLPC folks may offer the laptops for sale to the public as well. Consumers would be able to buy the laptops in pairs, and only receive one of them, with the other one going to a child in a third world country. Sure it is ...

Microsoft wasn't the smartest in the way they handled the blogger laptop give-away, but the debacle will turn out good in one way. One blogger, Scott Beale, is choosing to auction off the laptop he received on eBay and give the proceeds to the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation). The auction will run through January 4th, when Scott will post the results on his blog, the Laughing Squid. If you can ...

It's horrible when truth finally comes out. Microsoft really does want to take over the world. Are we sure that Steve Ballmer isn't just a large suit inhabited by Brain (and Pinky) for just this purpose? All joking aside, Microsoft now wants to put their Windows on the OLPC. I can see why they would want to "educate" the world's children on the finer points of using Windows (the bottom line, ...

The One Laptop Per Child initiative is getting ready to roll out their line of $100 laptops for school children in developing countries in Q2 of 2007. Quanta Computer in Taiwan is the manufacturer that was brought into the project to create the low cost devices, expects that they will produce close to 10 million units in the first year of development. OLPC figured out a way to improve inexpensive ...

So now we have another manufacturer who is recalling Sony batteries for its laptop computer products. Lenovo has issued a voluntary battery recall for over 500,000 batteries. Where does the carnage end? Will Sony still provide batteries for laptops after this, or is this a minor set-back? I know mistakes happen, but I don't know that Sony can afford another big battery catastrophe like this if ...

Battery Eater Pro is an application that exists solely for the purpose of making life hell for your portable computer's battery. Rather than giving you a best case scenario prediction of the battery life in your notebook, Battery Eater Pro uses every power-hungry option to try to drain your battery as fast as possible. This is in many ways a better benchmark, since it's consistently repeatable, ...

Seems like Apple just got hit by the Sony battery fiasco. Safety regulators just asked Apple to recall 1.8 million batteries from older laptops. Just a short while ago it was discovered that Sony batteries in Dell machines were a fire hazard, after a few actually caught fire. Dell's recall totaled 4 million. Sony has estimated that the cost of replacing all of the faulty units could hit close to ...

Getting on a flight is such a hassle these days. There are so many security checks and inspections to go through which is good, but then they hit our mobile devices. Now, we can't even bring our mobile devices on flights! How can we assure that our data is secure? And our laptops don't get stolen? K.C. Jones discovered some advice from security providers on how to travel with electronic devices. ...

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but for those readers that are in school, the new semester is coming up fast. So grab a hold of your laptop and check out stu.dicio.us. stu.dicio.us has the potential to become a students dream. It's an online note taking site. Students can publicly save notes and manage class schedules. It's a dream to use. No thinking required, which comes in handy after late ...

Is it just me, or is the market for novel anti-theft apps for laptops exploding? Undercover is a program for Apple laptops from Orbicule that does a number of things to help you recover your laptop in the event of its theft. When the laptop boots, Undercover checks Orbicule's web server to see if you've reported your laptop missing. Once it knows it's been stole, Undercover begins doing all sorts ...

Your MacBook Pro has a built-in tilt sensor and camera. Since using Apple products for their intended purpose (like, say, running Mac OS X), here's a cool way to repurpose those features: iAlertU is theft alarm software that monitors your MacBook's camera and tilt sensor and, if it thinks your laptop is being manhandled while you've stepped away to grab another latte, sounds a loud alarm. ...

Over at Mac Geekery they've got a cool guide to making your laptop (in this case a Mac) delete your important files in the event that it's stolen. The meat of the thing is a shell script that periodically checks a remote web server for a file called "youve_been_stolen," and if it finds the file it quietly deletes the files in your home directory. You can also make it alert the new owner ...