Men Free Blog

While not quite as exciting as March’s week of Latitude scoops, we’ve got ourselves some infos on what look to be Dell’s upcoming Inspiron 1435, 1535 and 1735 consumer laptops. Seems they’ll all be sharing the same basic design language, pictured above, and will be privy to some rather expansive aesthetic customization options if you’re into that type of thing. Specs are the typical Dell smorgasbord of options, but all three laptops start at around 1-inch thick and taper up to 1.5 inches thick. All three also sport slot-loading drives, with a Blu-ray option, and processors ramp up to Core 2 Duo T5850 2.16GHz chips. 3G options are also available across the lineup, and just about anything else you might find useful in a mid-range laptop. Apparently the 1435 isn’t due until October, but the 1735 is coming on June 9 and the 1535 on the 26th of this month.

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We’re calling this right now: ASUS’ Eee PC is the new MP3 player. But only in the context of giveaways. Anywho, just days after RBC announced that it would dish out free subnotes if prospective customers joined in, PowerUp Mobile is now offering a similar deal for UKers who sign up for T-Mobile’s Web n Walk mobile broadband package. In short, folks comfortable with inking their name on a two-year contract at £35 per month will net a free USB modem and a Eee PC 2GB Surf. Better hurry — the deal expires on June 15th.

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Hope you weren’t really counting on getting yourself one of those Pegasus 210s. In a sudden announcement made today, Dominic Wong and David Langton of Deloitte & Touche LLP were appointed as Joint Administrators of Rock Group Plc. In layman’s terms, that means those fellows will be attempting to achieve a sale of the now-defunct company. Reportedly, the failure of Rock is “partly attributed to the cash flow difficulties faced as a result of stock misappropriation by a former employee,” though further details were omitted. As it stands, the admins are currently negotiating with potential suitors in order to place the outfit in more capable hands, but there is still a possibility that no one will bite. For more information on how all of this could affect you (you know, things like warranties and whatnot), check out the full release in the read link below. ‘Tis a sad day folks — Rock is dead (at least for the moment).

[Thanks, Peter]

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NVIDIA isn’t joking around when it says it’s after a dominant position in the consumer tech industry, and it’s apparently willing to take some aggressive steps to get there — like totally revamping its product lines. Speaking to Gamesindustry.biz, NVIDIA veep Roy Taylor (the same guy who said Intel was “dead”, you remember him), said that his company needed to “simplify the product line for consumers,” and that if NVIDIA is going to “widen our appeal, there’s no doubt we have to solve that problem.” No specific plans were offered, but might we suggest a moratorium on the random-numbers-and-letters product-naming scheme? Just a thought.

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AMD may be busy sorting out issues with its quad-core Phenoms and hard at work on “completely different” chip architectures, but that isn’t stopping the company from aggressively updating its roadmap, announcing today plans for 6- and 12-core server-grade Opterons. Both the new 6-core chip, codenamed Sao Paulo, and the 12-core unit, codenamed Magny-Cours, are based on a brand-new platform called “Maranello,” and slotting in to replace the planned 8-core Barcelona chip, which appears to have been canceled. According to AMD, 12-core chips are easier to manufacture, so it’s going to skip over 8-core chips and go straight to the good stuff. That must be news to Intel, which is planning on shipping 8-core Nehalem chips later this year, and will probably then hold the coveted “number-of-cores” crown until AMD releases the 12-core chips in 2010. There’s no word on whether any of these chips can make these processor roadmaps comprehensible or even chronological, but we can dream, can’t we?

[Via TG Daily]

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It looks like folks in Brazil are soon going to have a few more low-cost

subnote options to consider, with Mobo announcing two new but curiously familiar-looking models. That includes the Positivo Mobo (pictured above), which appears to almost certainly be a rebadge of Airis’ Kira 740 Eee PC lookalike (or a rebadge of whatever that is a rebadge of). That likelihood is further backed up by the nearly identical specs, including the usual 7-inch display, Via C7-M processor, 1.3-megapixel webcam, and built-in WiFi, although this particular model appears to come with 2GB of flash memory in place of the Kira’s standard 40GB hard drive. Set to be released alongside it is the company’s Mobo Kids laptop, which is just a straight up rebadge of Intel’s Netbook platform (a.k.a. Classmate 2), with it boasting the same Celeron M processor and presumably all the same specs seen in other incarnations like CTL’s 2go PC. Look for both of ‘em to pack the same R$999 price tag (or $590), with the Positivo Mobo hitting stores first on May 23rd and the Mobo Kids following sometime in July.

[Via Zumo Blog, thanks Leoberto]

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Toshiba’s been cranking out a pretty steady stream of laptops since the year began, and it’s making sure no slacking goes on in May. Revealed today, the 13.3-inch Portégé M800 weighs in at 4.3-pounds and will be available with a white pearl finish with silver accents, not to mention the white LEDs within meant to keep things classy. Furthermore, you’ll find a 2GHz Core 2 Duo T5750, 1GB of DDR2 RAM, a WXGA (1,280 x 800) panel, Intel’s GMA X3100 graphics set, a built-in DVD burner, three USB 2.0 ports, FireWire / VGA / headphone sockets, 802.11a/g/n WiFi, 56k modem, gigabit Ethernet, Bluetooth and Vista Home Premium running the show. Regrettably, there’s no word on price, but you won’t see this one arrive in Europe until Q3, anyway.

[Via Tech Digest, thanks to everyone who sent this in]

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You know you’re in for a treat any time your favorite gargantuan Texas-based computer company claims to have captured the “downtown art scene” and “youth culture” on a laptop lid, but we’ve gotta give Dell credit for these new designs courtesy of Mike Ming. Unfortunately, the new “Bunch O Surfers” and “Sea Sky” (pictured) looks have been tacked onto Dell’s boring-as-could-be Inspiron 1525 budget laptop.

But hey, not bad at all for $699, especially considering the 3GB of RAM that comes standard. Another shot after the break.

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At last the moment you’ve been waiting for. Microsoft wants to hit your version of Windows with an update, and this time you don’t have to go rummaging around the internet to find it: just fire up Windows Update and let Microsoft do all the work. After a few false starts XP users get the much-anticipated SP3 update, which promises speed boosts and some of the fancy security features found in Vista. If you’re a Vista user you’re also in luck, since Microsoft has restarted its Vista SP1 distribution after some compatibility problems with Microsoft Dynamics RMS. Sounds like a party.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

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Intel has been boasting of DirectX 10 support for its various integrated graphics options for some time now, but it’s only just recently gotten around to actually releasing a Vista driver that brings its GM965 and G35 Express chipsets up to speed. Of course, NVIDIA just couldn’t help itself from getting a few (more) digs in at Intel’s expense, and it’s now kindly provided a few benchmarks to show just how badly Intel’s integrated DirectX 10 solution stacks up against the bleeding-edge DirectX 10-ready games it now ostensibly supports. They couldn’t find a single game that was able to crank out more than 5 fps, even at a lowly 1280 x 1024 resolution and with the usual graphics intensive settings turned off. Then again, 4.4 fps in Crysis is pretty much par for the course.

Read - Crave, “Intel updates graphics with multimedia capabilities”
Read - Hardware Secrets, “Are Intel chipsets really capable of running DirectX 10 games?”