laptops

You've seen picnic ware and household items made out of biodegradable plastic. Now, here's a notebook with a biodegradable chassis.

This Fujitsu LifeBook sports a chassis made from a plastic made from cornstarch rather than petroleum. It costs more, but it's green. Put the chassis in a landfill and it will go away over the course of months. Real plastic will take decades.

Producing the cornstarch-based plastic, which comes from a supplier, also results in 15 percent less carbon emissions. Those vials (pictured at left) to the side, by the way, show the progress from corn kernels … Read more

Never mind that there's little-to-no software that can take advantage of four processing cores, Xtreme Notebooks has released the first quad-core laptop in the U.S. With no mobile quad-core parts in existence, the Xtreme 917V Accelerator turns to desktop CPUs, giving you a choice between the Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 and the Q6700. Pricing starts at $3,359. Other niceties on this gaming laptop/mobile workstation include: a glossy widescreen 17-inch display (up to 1920x1200 resolution), one or two Nvidia GeForce Go 8700M GT or 7950 GTX graphics cards, and up to three hard drives in RAID … Read more

It dawned on me yesterday that luggage reps have to carry around all their luggage samples in an even larger piece of luggage. When representatives from Targus came to meet with Jasmine and I yesterday to show off their new (and extremely well-designed) line of Apple MacBook bags, they had to roll them up to our office in this absurdly corpulent roller bag.

While their new MacBook-friendly line of Radius bags will soon be available on Amazon, this Targus-emblazoned megabag is made exclusively for marketing reps--and is not sold anywhere. Luckily for us, it's not cost-effective for them to … Read more

If the suspect $150 Swedish laptop I ordered last month fails to materialize, I'm putting those moneys toward another cheap Linux laptop, the Asus Eee PC 701. That's three E's, for easy to learn, easy to work, easy to play. If the Eee is easy to obtain, I'm game.

Take it for what it's worth, but according to a forum post on the Web site EeeUser.com, two Eee PC 701 models will make their way to the U.S. at the end of September priced at $269 and $369. Both models will feature a … Read more

Crave presents this week's laptop news, in digest form.

Cheap laptops got their fair share of headlines this week, starting with the Intel Classmate PC, a low-cost laptop for schools in developing countries that costs $350 with a Microsoft operating system. Also $350 (after a $200 rebate): the Acer Aspire 3680, spotted at Circuit City by Laptoping.com. Maybe we should buy one for Matt Elliott, who is still waiting for his $150 Medison Celebrity laptop, now supposedly scheduled to ship around August 15.

In product news, laptop lovers left out by Apple's iMac announcement directed their obsessive … Read more

Yes, you've seen this headline before. For the third month in a row, Toshiba customers are being urged to exchange potentially dangerous notebook batteries for the nonexploding kind.

This time around, the Consumer Product Safety Commission says 1,400 of the lithium-ion batteries containing Sony-made cells sold with Toshiba laptops pose a fire hazard. There have been three reports of models with those batteries overheating in other countries, but none of the incidents caused injury, according to the CPSC.

Users of Toshiba's Satellite A100, Satellite A105 and Tecra A7, it's your turn. If your notebook was made … Read more

There's probably no greater source of upcoming tech information than the United States Patent and Trademark Office. The USPTO Web site is often the first place we find info on new products and emerging technologies, and now that the whole thing is online and (fairly) easy to search, companies are finding it very hard to keep this usually closely held information away from enterprising bloggers.

Our pals over at Gear Log (or Glog, as we like to call it) have found a new patent filing (actually an extension to an existing patent, but that's splitting hairs) from Apple … Read more

With a black piano finish and a leather wrist rest, the Asus U3 joins the Apple MacBook and the Sony VAIO SZ in the ranks of sleek-looking 13.3-inch laptops. Like the others, the U3's 13.3-inch display size definitely hits a sweet spot between portability and usability; its 3.9-pound weight (granted, that's with the tiny three-cell battery) straddles the line between ultraportable and thin-and-light. The screen is large enough for watching movies or to comfortably make it through a workday without squinting.

The Asus U3 incorporates a boatload of professional-level upgrades, including Intel Turbo Memory, 3G … Read more

There's good news and bad news if you've been dying to get one of those "Cloud of Promise" laptops commemorating the Beijing Olympics, bearing the unique design created for the Olympic torch.

The good news is that some of them will be available through charity auctions benefiting the Lenovo Hope Fund, which is dedicated to sports for children, and many will be autographed by athletes. The bad news is that they won't go on sale until February 8 next year, six months before the summer games begin, according to Tech Digest.

But if you simply … Read more