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This week in laptops

Crave presents the week's laptop news, in digest form.

Michelle Thatcher Former Senior Associate Editor, Laptops
Tech expert Michelle Thatcher grew up surrounded by gadgets and sustained by Tex-Mex cuisine. Life in two major cities--first Chicago, then San Francisco--broadened her culinary horizons beyond meat and cheese, and she's since enjoyed nearly a decade of wining, dining, and cooking up and down the California coast. Though her gadget lust remains, the practicalities of her small kitchen dictate that single-function geegaws never stay around for long.
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Michelle Thatcher
2 min read
The LifeBook A6110 was one of several cheap laptops to launch this week. Fujitsu

This week's product announcements included the sub-$1,000 Fujitsu LifeBook A6110 as well as two new sub-$1,000 Satellite Pros from Toshiba. Asus revealed specs for the sub-$400 Eee PC and promised North America availability within a few weeks. Acme stretched the notion of portable computing with its fold-out gaming computer, which includes three 17-inch screens. And Lenovo seemed to be toying with the idea of bringing fully rugged ThinkPads to the U.S.

In Apple news, Mac OS X Leopard was officially given an October 26 release date. Rumors of a fresh 13-inch Mac laptop persisted, though they should be taken with a grain of salt--or perhaps a whole salt lick. The week brought bad news for anyone who bought a MacBook or MacBook Pro before October 1, the cutoff date for free upgrades. There was bad news for fans of Windows-on-a-Mac, too, as the free beta of Boot Camp vanished from Apple's site; the final version of Boot Camp will be integrated into Leopard.

At CNET Reviews, we continued our fall roundup of laptop accessories with the Logitech QuickCam Pro for Notebooks and the Creative Live Cam Notebook Ultra, as well as the tasseled Targus Cha Cha Women's Tote. We also dished up a handful of laptop bags for business travelers and our favorite laptop stands.

Also worth reading this week: CNET Labs manager Daniel Begun offers his thoughts on the new PCMark Vantage benchmark; Ars Technica reviews the Dell Inspiron 1420n with Ubuntu; and NotebookReview wants you to clean out your filthy laptop. Finally, a brewery in New Zealand offers a creative way to recover your stolen notebook: free beer for life.

Have a great weekend!