June 3 - 10:05am EDT   NVIDIA on Tuesday officially unveiled the next major upgrade to its notebook graphics lineup. The GeForce 9M series is built on a new, multi-core graphics engine that the electronics designer claims is as much as 40 percent faster than earlier 8M chipsets. Video encoding is up to five times faster, the company claims. The new design is also home to the first mobile chipsets with Hybrid SLI; notebooks can switch off the dedicated video and revert to integrated graphics to save power while on battery or when running less demanding tasks. [full story]

March 14 - 10:30am EDT   Computer shipments will still crest above 300 million in 2008 despite an economic slump triggered by the American housing market, according to a new study by IDC. The growth in notebooks is predicted to drive roughly 12.8 percent growth over the course of the year to reach roughly 302 million; of those, just over 45 percent (136.3 million) will account for portables, the research group says. Most of this comes from users either switching to a notebook or buying a computer for the first time because of the form factor and reduced prices, both of which render them more useful to newcomers than desktops. [full story]

March 11 - 2:30pm EDT   Acer will reveal a new concept design for a notebook PC tomorrow, the company has announced today. The computer builder is short on details but says the debut will represent a "worldwide launch" for the new style, suggesting a major update rather than a minor change to an existing design. The introduction is likely to involve the company's new 16- and 18.5-inch media notebooks, both of which will include extra-wide 1080p displays as well as a Blu-ray drive. [full story]

January 8 - 2:05pm EST   Acer took advantage of the immediate wake of CES' opening to revamp one of its larger Aspire notebooks. At 17 inches, the 7720 is intended as a full substitute for a desktop but tries to balance between this and cost: the system uses a new budget Core 2 Duo clocked at 1.66GHz but balances this with 2GB of RAM and a 256MB GeForce 8400M GS that offloads much of the graphics work for games, HD video, and Vista itself from the CPU. It also carries a relatively large 250GB hard drive. [full story]