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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.
Michelle Thatcher
2 min read
CNET Networks

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

It was a big week for laptop components. Intel officially announced its second mobile Core 2 Extreme processor, the 2.8GHz Core 2 Extreme X7900. Rumors flew about new Intel processors for both the Santa Rosa and yet-to-be-released Montevina platforms, and our News.com team posted additional processor-related stories from the Hot Chips conference at Stanford University. News broke that both Toshiba and Samsung are pushing for massive laptop storage, with Toshiba's hard drives reaching 320GB in size. And Seagate announcedthat it, like, totally wants to release a solid-state drive--as soon as it can find a supplier of flash chips.

It was a big week for mobile gaming, too. Cleo, the OEM whose chassis houses that quad-core laptop we told you about last week, wants to emphasize that it has not approved the chassis for anything more than a dual-core processor. Apparently no one told Xtreme Notebooks, who has promised us a review unit in the next few weeks. Engadget posted more detailson the forthcoming Dell XPS M1730, which reportedly will include the just-announced Ageia PhysX processor for gaming notebooks--the first of its kind for the mobile market. And over in Japan Mouse Computer released a 17-inch gamer, the Nextgear Note M700.

In product news, rugged laptops grabbed a few headlines, first with the announcement of the built-to-military-spec Augmentix XTG630 and then with the regrettably named Victum rugged tablet. We found out that Palm's Foleo laptop-thing has been delayed until late September or early October. And Asus, maker of the Lamborghini-themed and leather laptops, is taking its stylish laptops to the Project Fashion Show in Vegas. Here at CNET Reviews, we looked at a couple of business laptops: the full-featured, 15.4-inch Fujitsu LifeBook E8410 and the 13.3-inch Toshiba Tecra M8.

If you're in the market for laptop accessories, check out the Logitech Alto Cordless laptop stand or the $79 Wi-Fire, which boosts your Wi-Fi reception up to 1,000 feet. Or head over to Gearlog for a hands-on review of the Timbuk2 Hacker laptop bag.

Elsewhere in the news this week: we started a profile-based laptop buying guide; CNET Labs showed you how to test your own network gear; CNET UK is giving away a bunch of gadgets; and some dude in Germany built a desk out of discarded Itanium processors.

Have a great weekend!