Stories about: HP

For some users, the new generation of ultraportable notebooks comes close to embodying the Holy Grail for road warriors. Their laptop-like keyboards make them more usable for typing tasks than smart phones, but they are lighter and cheaper than traditional laptops. The original Asus Eee PC, for instance, cost about US$400 and weighed about two pounds when it was introduced last October.

Nvidia took a one-time warranty charge of US$196 million against its second-quarter revenue on Tuesday, saying that amount should cover the cost of replacing bad Nvidia graphics chips used in a range of laptop models from different manufacturers. Chairman and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang stopped short of ruling out additional charges related to this problem in the future, but said Nvidia was not obligated to replace the bad graphics chips.

Hackers, perhaps affiliated with a well-known Russian criminal network, have attacked and hijacked Web sites belonging to Georgia, the former Soviet republic now in the fourth day of war with Russia, a security researcher claimed Sunday.

The Black Hat conference and its post-event, DefCon, promise to be a security funhouse in the coming week, as experts in Las Vegas seek to shock and amaze by poking holes in today's network technologies. The Web, wireless LANs, routers and desktop software may all look different reflected in the Black Hat/DefCon hall of mirrors, where security vendors will be revealing their hacker sides.

Dell is going small - really small.

Hewlett-Packard, Intel and Yahoo are partnering for cloud computing research and education in order to advance the development and adoption of large-scale, data-intensive Internet-hosted applications and related IT infrastructure.

Dell's recent software patch to control heating problems caused by faulty Nvidia graphics cards has attracted a fierce response from unhappy users, who say Dell is shying away from addressing the larger problem of bad hardware.

Security company Finjan Wednesday reported it has found more than 1,000 sites infected by an attack toolkit called "Asprox," which exploits discovered flaws in a vulnerable site's programming to add hidden attack code. The attack code in turn searches for flaws on a browser's PC, and if any such holes are found it will download malware onto the computer.

Hewlett-Packard became the latest vendor to announce a "mini-data center" housed in a shipping container, which can provide a way for companies to add compute capacity when power and cooling systems in their existing data centers are maxed out.

Big Linux systems plot climate change, simulate nuclear explosions, and secure bragging rights. But IT customers are starting to find that high-performance computing technologies make a difference in the real world, from clustered processing to data center greening.

With a skyrocketing stock price, fanboy hysteria and -- most importantly -- really useful products, Google is the prima donna of tech for the new millennium.