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Should HP get out of the PC business?

Is Hewlett-Packard's attempt to jettison its PC business really the uber-shrewd strategy of a forward-looking executive? Or just another supremely dubious move in a series of dubious moves by HP in the past year or so?

I lean toward the latter. And analysts I've talked with are mystified. But the Wall Street Journal offers up one of the best quotes yet. Courtesy of Jayson Noland of Robert W. Baird & Co.

It's "like McDonald's getting out of the hamburger business."

Or Boeing suddenly dumping its plane business because it's tired of trying to … Read more

HP's greatest hits: These PCs were good

Hewlett-Packard has been in the PC business for more than 25 years. And, needless to say, it had some good designs. It's worth a quick look at select models that stood the test of time in the wake of the disclosure today that the company is trying to unload its PC business.

Let me preface this with a caveat that was buried in the various HP statements today about its PC business: "There can be no assurance that any transaction regarding PSG (Personal Systems Group) will be pursued or completed." So, it's not a done deal. … Read more

Verizon ships 4G LTE-enabled Netbook

A week after the making the first 4G LTE-enabled notebook available, Verizon today announced that it's about to ship the first Netbook that offers the same built-in superfast cellular Internet access, the Compaq Mini CQ10-688nr.

Like the 4G LTE notebook, the Compaq Mini was initially announced at CES 2011. It's currently the only Netbook on the market that offers built-in 4G LTE and will likely remain that way for a long time, as Netbooks have been consistently losing popularity to tablets.

Equipped with a 1.6GHz Intel Atom N455 processor, a 250GB hard drive, and 1GB of DDR3 … Read more

Ken Olsen, founder of DEC, dead at 84

Ken Olsen, co-founder of the defining technology company of a bygone era, Digital Equipment Corporation, has died. He was 84.

A spokeswoman for Gordon College in Massachusetts, where Olsen was a trustee and prominent donor, confirmed Monday evening Twitter reports of his death on Sunday. Olsen's company dominated the minicomputer era of the tech industry from the 1960s through the 1980s with the PDP and VAX series computers, and was a key part of the famed Route 128 technology corridor just outside Boston, along with companies like Data General and Wang.

"Ken Olsen is in the elite club … Read more

Laptop nightmares: Scary systems with fatal flaws

The Halloween season my be winding down, but that doesn't mean there aren't still plenty of scary laptops out there. Of course, the vast majority of laptops we review are pretty decent examples of technology. After all, there are only a handful of common components used in most systems, and things such as speed and battery life are, if not standardized, at least largely predictable based on the list of what's inside the box.

That said, we occasionally run into a laptop that just rubs us the wrong way. Maybe it's a key missing feature, or terrible design, or an unusable touch pad--or sometimes products simply don't work as advertised. We've compiled our own list of the scariest laptops of 2010, the models that either had one or more frightening flaws, or else were just dogs. … Read more