July 1 - 9:05am EDT   eMachines today gave a new look to its least expensive ET series desktops along with hardware upgrades to match. Like the recent EL1300 slimline PC, the ET1300 and ET1810 shed the company's previous black-and-silver look for a sleeker, glossy white. They all also make NVIDIA's lower-end graphics standard for slightly faster than usual performance in the category. [full story]

June 25 - 8:30am EDT   Gateway has quickly followed up on its desktop news with the addition of a relatively high-style but more frugal notebook line intended for the back-to-school audience. The NV series has a minimalist, glossy design with a relatively sturdy barrel hinge and touch-sensitive shortcut keys. At the same time, the notebooks keep costs down with a 15.6-inch, 1366x768 (but LED-backlit) display and lower-end AMD or Intel mobile chips. [full story]

June 23 - 8:45am EDT   Gateway this morning chose to follow an unusual tack and launched the LT3100 as its second-generation netbook. The crossover PC is just an inch thick and about 3.1 pounds but uses an 11.6-inch, 1366x768 display and has components closer to a regular notebook's: it uses a low-power, single-core 1.2GHz Athlon 64 with Radeon X1270 graphics and a full 2GB of RAM. Consciously breaking Microsoft's rules for netbooks means the system uses Windows Vista Home Basic instead of XP, but the faster components should support the full Aero Glass interface where Atom netbooks usually struggle. [full story]

June 22 - 9:40am EDT   Acer on Monday added three 16:9 ratio notebooks to its media-centric Gemstone Blue designs that all focus on price over raw performance. The 15.6-inch, LED-backlit Aspire 5739G is the fastest of the trio with a 2.1GHz Core 2 Duo, 4GB of RAM, a 250GB hard drive, an 8X Blu-ray drive and a GeForce GT 130M for video. It comes with a multi-touch trackpad and ships at the end of June for a particularly low $750, making it the least expensive new Blu-ray notebook today. [full story]

June 17 - 4:40pm EDT   Shuttle PC has recently announced a new barebones mini-PC, the SA76G2, which is its first barebones product to support AMD socket AM3 processors using the 760G chipset, including the Phenom II as well as original Phenom, Athlon 64 X2, Athlon 64 and Sempron CPUs. There are also two DDR2 DIMM slots for up to 8GB of RAM. The PC is backwards-compatible with AM2 and AM2+ CPUs. [full story]

June 16 - 4:00pm EDT   BenQ recently announced the upcoming release of its ultra-portable netbook, the 13.3-inch Joybook Lite T131. Weighing in at just under 4lbs, the 13.3-inch T131 sports a 1.6GHz AMD Sempron 200U processor based on the same platform as the Athlon Neo and which should give performance better than netbooks without a major increase in bulk. A minimum of 1GB of RAM is onboard, as is an ATI Mobility Radeon X1270 graphics chipset that can drive HD video playback. The standard 250GB hard drive -- a 320GB drive is an option -- comes preloaded with Windows Vista Home Basic. [full story]

June 11 - 12:10pm EDT   Intel has reached the end of its long-standing market share gains in the global microprocessor industry according to the first quarter results of 2009, says iSuppli. The company's only distant rival, AMD, gained approximately 2.3 percent in the latest quarter, or almost an equal amount to that which Intel lost. AMD has seemingly ended its negative three quarter long trend of declines, while Intel has done the opposite, reversing its year-long positive trend. [full story]

June 10 - 12:05pm EDT   HP today acted on two of its planned system updates by launching them through its online store, including an unannounced processor. The new dv2z costs slightly more than promised at $625 but now has a white color trim option and starts with a single-core 1.6GHz Athlon Neo, 1GB of RAM and a 250GB hard drive with Radeon X1250 integrated video. Adding a dual-core 1.6GHz processor costs $25; in a surprise, an option now exists for a 1.6GHz Turion Neo that likely boosts performance still for an additional $75. [full story]

June 4 - 4:25pm EDT   AMD this afternoon confirmed that its new dual-core Athlon Neo should show in a new version of HP's Pavilion dv2 ultraportable next week. The upgraded system is due on June 10th and, according to CNET, should have the same power use as the present-day single-core model but run much faster in multi-threaded tasks. Integrated graphics will also get a lift through the Radeon HD 3200 chipset, though HP's notebook currently uses dedicated Radeon HD 3450 video. [full story]

June 2 - 2:05pm EDT   Closely following Intel's news of its CULV platform, rival chipmaker AMD at Computex on Tuesday announced its dual-core Athlon Neo chip is now shipping to makers of ultra-thin and light notebooks. The dual-core Neo will be aimed at the same clients as Intel's CULV CPUs. All the specs for the dual-core CPU, which goes by the Conesus codename, are not yet known, however. What is known is that is sports 1MB of L2 cache, a DDR2 memory controller and more power-miserly 45nm construction. [full story]

May 27 - 12:20pm EDT   HP's first ultraportables to use Intel's Consumer Ultra Low Voltage (CULV) processors will at first just conversions of existing models, those building the notebooks in Taiwan said on Wednesday. They claim to DigiTimes that the first models will actually use existing case designs and that a true redesign to take advantage of the platform won't be ready until the fall. The makeshift change is reportedly triggered by pressure to chase after the Acer Timeline as well as reducing the costs of the systems themselves. [full story]

May 19 - 5:15pm EDT   eMachines this afternoon hoped to spark new life in its desktops with both a cosmetic and performance upgrade to its most economic AMD-based models. The EL1300 series switches from the typical black and silver of most PC builders (including eMachines itself) to a glossy white eMachines considers friendlier. They continue to use the small form factor design that most eMachines systems now use without affecting their prices. [full story]

April 29 - 7:15am EDT   AMD has announced the AMD Athlon X2 7850 Black Edition 2.8GHz processor. The 65nm dual-core chip ups the speed of AMD's budget line and, as a Black Edition model, lets owners overclock past the factory settings. The Black Edition processor allows users to select memory controller, HyperTransport, and CPU core frequencies through either Windows software such as OverDrive or through the mainboard’s system BIOS. [full story]

April 21 - 5:05pm EDT   AMD tonight showed slight improvement in its performance by reporting reduced losses for its first quarter of the year. The chip designer managed a net loss of $416 million; while worse than a net loss of $351 million for the first quarter of 2008, the figure is less than a third of the $1.4 billion loss reported just in the fall. It also notes that revenue was "flat" versus the fall and thus that its losses are under better control. [full story]

March 16 - 7:55am EDT   TriGem has announced the latest in its line of Averatec all-in-one desktops, the 18.4-inch D1133 AIO. The system aims to improve on other budget nettops by giving the system desktop-level performance: instead of an Atom chip, it gets a 1.5GHz dual-core Athlon X2 processor and can play HD video courtesy of the AMD platform's integrated Radeon HD 3200 graphics chipset. TriGem sees the D1133 as a low-cost web video station and to that end gives the display a 1680x945 resolution that still keeps the 16:9 aspect ratio. [full story]