When is a laptop not a laptop?

Monday, August 11th, 2008

You may have noticed the latest review up on the PC Pro homepage, of HP’s Pavilion HDX9320EA laptop. A gloriously over the top machine, with oodles of style and a price tag that’s certainly not as high as we expected when it was crane-lifted out of the box.

But is it actually a laptop? Could it feasibly be argued that this leviathan will comfortably sit on the average lap? At some point a desktop replacement becomes, well, just a desktop by another name. (more…)

How to drown in “crapware”: buy a printer

Monday, June 23rd, 2008

A few months back Sony was forced to scrap its outrageous plans to charge punters extra to get their brand new laptop clean of “crapware” – the useless bundles of trial software that seem to clog up more and more systems that enter the Labs thse days.

Many of you left comments agreeing that enough is enough, and reader rjp2000 made the point that the printer and camera markets are just as bad as laptop manufacturers. From experience I knew that (s)he was spot on, but this month that point has been rammed home far more irritatingly than I ever imagined.

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Sony invents form factor no one asked for

Wednesday, May 21st, 2008

All-in-one PCs still haven’t quite caught on, despite some great attempts such as Dell’s XPS One, but this one from Sony is verging on the ridiculous.

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