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Alienware pushes 15-inch gaming with the m15x

Laptop gamers have always had plenty of high-end 17-inch desktop replacement systems to choose from, so we were excited to see that one of Alienware's pushed this year at CES was the Area-51 m15x, a rare 15-inch gaming laptop.

Watch the Alienware Area-51 m15x video on CNET TV.

With this new model, initially announced in December but available starting later in January, Alienware has updated its iconic look, keeping the classic alien-head motif on the back of the lid, but cleaning up the design with a simple, flat look called "Ripley," which removes not only the ridges … Read more

Toshiba jumps on the Penryn bandwagon

With Intel's new Penryn series of laptop CPUs, PC makers, including Toshiba, are revamping their lines to offer the new parts. You'll be able to find the new chips in the Toshiba Qosmio line, the Satellite X205, and select Satellite U305 laptops.

One of the more impressive new Toshibas is the Qosmio G45-AV690, which the company calls the "world's first notebook to feature an HD DVD-R/RW optical drive." Although we admit, that might have been more impressive news before last week's Warner/Blu-ray smackdown.

Toshiba's Qosmio systems are still among our favorite … Read more

GE funding five SunPower solar projects for California

SunPower and General Electric Energy Financial Services are partnering to build solar power installations generating 8 megawatts in California by the end of the year.

The five projects include what could become the nation's largest solar panel installation on one roof, capable of 2.3 megawatts, at Toyota Motor Sales' Parts Center. Construction is set to start next month.

GE Energy Financial Services is acquiring a majority equity interest in the projects for an undisclosed amount. It will own the systems built and run by SunPower, a maker of high-efficiency solar panels.

The San Jose, Calif.-based company, which … Read more

Upgrade your video card for $99.99

BioShock. Crysis. Call of Duty 4. These and other suh-weet new games require a generous helping of video power. If your system is more than a couple years old, or you bought a budget desktop with an integrated graphics processor, you'll have to run your games at low resolutions without any of those dazzling eye-candy effects. That's assuming they'll run at all: Many of them require a video card with at least 128MB of RAM.

I recently upgraded my aging Pentium 4 box with a GeForce 8600 GT-based video card, much like the one currently available from … Read more

New Nvidia 3D cards thin-slice the market, deliver strong performance

It's certainly not a bad thing that the new $349 (give or take, but more likely give) Nvidia Geforce 8800 GTS delivers comparable performance to last year's $500-plus GeForce 8800 GTX. The question is, would you be able to pick it out off the shelf? To do so you'd have to sift through the older (and slower) 640MB and 320MB GeForce 8800 GTS cards, as well as the 512MB and 256MB (introduced today) versions of the GeForce 8800 GT. Then, of course, there's the various overclocked SKUs from ASUS, EVGA, XFX, and Nvidia's other board … Read more

GE to plow $1 billion into clean tech research

NISKAYUNA, New York--General Electric will spend $1 billion in research and development this year on clean energy technologies, part of its Ecomagination environmental initiative.

The industrial giant announced the investment on Tuesday at its Global Research center here, where it also said that it will put $6.8 million of that into plug-in hybrid vehicles as part of a U.S. Department of Energy project.

The company hosted a day-long presentation at its labs to showcase technology developments in solar electricity, plug-in hybrid components, water desalination, high-efficiency lighting and home energy dashboards, and materials for wind turbines and aviation.

GE … Read more

Open or not - innovation remains a fuzzy concept

The Economist has a special report on innovation in this week's issue, and it's good to see the magazine recognizing "open innovation" as the perhaps most important current trend in this space: "Rapid and disruptive change is now happening across new and old businesses. Innovation ... is becoming both more accessible and more global. This is good news because its democratization releases the untapped ingenuity of people everywhere and that could help solve some of the world's weightiest problems."

The report is an expansive tour de force through the entire innovation landscape, covering a … Read more

As remotes multiply, they find each other

It was bound to happen: Two gadgets that act as remotes for each other.

That's right, the cleverly named "Find It" remote will locate your lost keys as long as their attached sensor is within earshot. But the opposite is also true (which, in our case, is far more important)--just click a button on the keychain, OhGizmo says, and your perennially misplaced remote will be magically found.

And it makes perfect sense that this latest invention should come from GE, which is apparently trying to corner the remote market with such creations as its "Flip&… Read more

Live from Hot Chips 19: Session 2, Nvidia

Welcome back to the ongoing Speeds and Feeds coverage of Hot Chips 19 at Stanford. They give us comfy chairs and free Wi-Fi, so blogging about it is the least I can do. By the way, Dean Takahashi of the San Jose Mercury News is also blogging from Hot Chips, so you can get another perspective on the event here.

Session 2 is the first of two sessions of "Multi-Core and Parallelism" presentations. This one happens to be all about Nvidia. Session 3, up next, will include presentations about AMD's ATI Radeon HD 2900, Intel's 80-core "Tera-Scale" processor, the TRIPS project at the University of Texas at Austin, and the Tile Processor from Tilera.

The first presentation in this session, "The Nvidia GeForce 8800 GPU," is an overview of that chip. As I mentioned in my Siggraph coverage, the 8800 includes 128… Read more

When in doubt, fold up the remote

Category: Going from bad to worse.

One of our many standard rants has centered on the tech industry's inability to come up with a truly universal remote that even a Geico caveman could figure out. But some manufacturers insist on going in the opposite direction, creating subcategories or developing remotes that seem to use far more technology than the products they're supposed to control.

The latest act of genius? Making one that closes up like a flip phone. Rather than simplify and actually reduce the size and number of buttons needed (unthinkable!), GE apparently just decided to make … Read more