From iconic machines like the IBM PC to the silliness of Sony’s £1,190 netbook, we’ve scoured the darkest corners and blown dust off some of the oldest, oddest and rarest kit we can find – starting with a true icon of the industry.

IBM PC

Introduced on August 12 1981, IBM’s Personal Computer was the first machine to popularise the now-ubiquitous term – and one of these antiques sits at the back of the PC Pro Lab.

Processing grunt was provided by the single-core, 4.77MHz Intel 8088, and floppy disks and cassettes are both supported. There’s a mighty 256KB of RAM, with 64KB of that soldered onto the motherboard. The IBM PC didn’t come cheap, either: a barebones model without any drives cost $1,565 and the top-end model came with bells, whistles and a monitor for $20,000.

The motherboard includes five eight-bit Industry Standard Architecture slots, with three of ours occupied: there’s a floppy disk drive controller card a SixPakPlus memory expansion board packed with 64KB chips, and a multidisplay adapter that’s actually two slabs of PCB stuck together. In the middle of the machine is an IBM 5 ¼in Diskette Drive.

Only one question remains, though, once we’ve blown the dust off this venerable old machine – can it run Crysis?

Apple Macintosh Plus

The Macintosh Plus might be a disturbing shade of yellow but that’s hardly surprising – it first saw the light of day in 1986. Released for £2,599, it was produced until October 1990 – the longest production run of any Macintosh – and was supported by Mac OS up to 1996.

It broke ground in other ways, too. As the first Macintosh to include a SCSI port it paved the way for external devices such as hard disks, tape drives, printers and CD-ROM drives, and this was also the first Macintosh to use SIMMs for its memory – with a massive 1MB of the stuff included as standard across four 256KB sticks.

Our particular model bears the familiar Cupertino, California label on its rear, but the sticker also reveals that this machine was “Assembled in Ireland” – a far cry from today, where most technology seems to be produced in Asia.

Apple Macintosh Colour Classic

Fast forward a few years – and look under a different test-bench – and you’ll find another piece of Apple history. It’s the first compact Macintosh computer to come with a colour display, and we wouldn’t have the iMac – the world’s finest all-in-one PC – without the Colour Classic paving the way.

Originally priced at $1,400 in February 1993, it ran on Mac OS 7.6.1 – the first version of the OS to drop the “System” from its name so the more distinctive moniker could be trademarked and the OS licensed to third-party Macintosh manufacturers.

This ancient all-in-one was more upgradeable than most of today’s models, too. The Processor Direct Slot was used with the Apple IIe Card, and ran software designed for the older Apple II. This backwards compatibility was supposed to entice the education market to upgrade from Apple II machines to fully-fledged Macintoshes, but other upgrades were also available, from CPU accelerators to Ethernet and video cards.

This versatility means the Colour Classic enjoys a cult following today: users have modded the machine with Power Mac parts so its screen runs at 640 x 480 rather than 560 x 384, and others have fitted motherboards from more powerful models.

Casio Cassiopeia E-115

Technical editor Darien Graham-Smith found the Casio Cassiopeia E-115 hiding at the back of his cupboard, but it first arrived back in October 2000 when PDAs, rather than smartphones, were big news.

So, what did you get for £422? There’s the sturdy exterior, which we described as “dull-grey silver” and “resting on its laurels”, alongside a cradle that “feels cheap and doesn’t engage with the Cassiopeia as solidly as we’d like” in its full review.

It wasn’t all bad news, with a 240 x 320 LCD screen that was better than its rivals, and a 131MHz StrongARM processor that was “fast enough to ensure instantaneous contact searches and speedy application switching”, according to us. It also had 16MB of ROM and 32MB of RAM memory – “about as much as you currently need”, at least back then.

Oh, and the software? Microsoft Windows CE 3.0 PocketPC Edition. Our model is old and, presumably, scarred by Darien’s cupboard, so it wouldn’t turn on – although that’s probably for the best, given that we concluded that the Casio simply couldn’t “match the standard” set by Compaq’s iPAQ.

Apple iMac G4

The G4 marked the first major redesign of the iMac, but the forlorn model found in the PC Pro Lab has clearly seen better days. It’s missing its monitor bezel, the distinctive round base is looking grubby, and it wouldn’t turn on – although that chrome, cantilevered arm is as smooth as it was when the G4 was eased from its box in 2002.

We described the G4 as “smooth and elegant design that puts other computer makes to shame”. Even now it stands out in a sea of modern all-in-ones that all look a little too familiar.

Our review also highlighted Apple’s concentration on “excellent design and ease of use”, but that has downsides – a specification we described as “Paleolithic”. It’s the first time we’ve seen computers compared to dinosaurs, but the SDRAM was slow and the GeForce 2 MX graphics chip was a generation behind the curve. It might look nice – as Apple devices are wont to do – but PCs ran our Photoshop 7 benchmark almost twice as quickly.

Dell Latitude

The oldest laptop we managed to find demonstrates the changing of technology. This Dell Latitude isn’t quite as backward as we first thought. It’s either a C540 or C640 – we’re not sure which, as it’s been hidden on a high shelf for far too long – and it’s a mix of old problems and forgotten boons.

It’s running a Pentium 4 chip with Windows XP, but the most striking thing about this machine is its design – or lack of it. Plain plastic is the order of the day, and the lid features the familiar Dell logo, along with the kind of build quality that we’d slate if this machine were reviewed today.

The base doesn’t cover itself in glory, either, with stickers, flaps, screws, feet and even some exposed fans. It’s also obvious where laptops have fallen backwards as companies rush to build slim, snazzy Ultrabooks: we rarely see keyboards with the kind of comfort, responsiveness and travel as this Latitude offers, and the 4:3 screen has a native resolution of 1,600 x 1,200 – a huge amount of desktop real estate compared to the 1,366 x 768 and 1,600 x 900 screens that now seem to be the norm.

Nvidia GeForce 7300 GT, 7600 GS and AMD Radeon HD 2600 XT

We’ve a big plastic tub full of graphics cards in the Labs and, while most of them are recent, a trio of PCBs lurking amid the anti-static bags and DVI to D-SUB adapters come from decidedly older stock. Two Nvidia cards, the GeForce 7300 GT and 7600 GS, are joined by AMD’s Radeon HD 2600 XT.

They were launched in 2006 and 2007, and they handily illustrate the impressive speed at which technology is pushed forward. The first 28nm GPU has just arrived but, back then, Nvidia and AMD were using 90nm and 65nm processes – and the 390 million transistors in the AMD card pales when compared to the 4.3 billion in AMD’s latest.

The bandwidth statistics are telling, too: the Radeon card churns through 35.2GB/sec in its 512MB incarnation, with the 7300 GT and 7600 GS offering 10.67GB/sec and 12.8GB/sec respectively. The latest high-end card, the Radeon HD 7970, chews through 264GB/sec – and even modest boards, such as Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 550 Ti, handle 98.5GB/sec.

Oh, and our benchmarks? The 7600 GS played Call of Duty 2 at 18fps when run at 1,280 x 1,024. Bless.

Sony VAIO P-series

Sony senior vice president Mike Abary famously said his company would never join the “race to the bottom” when netbooks hit the big time, and he wasn’t joking – Sony’s VAIO P-series cost £1,190 inc VAT for the top-end model.

That money paid for radical design, with a base occupied entirely by the keyboard,  that’s still so small and fiddly that you have to peck at the keys, prod at the trackpoint and squint at the 8in 1,600 x 900 screen. The Z-series Atom was decidedly Z-list, too, thanks to performance that couldn’t match £350 rivals.

While the text is basic, it’s accurate enough for beginners. Instead, it’s the image that contains a dangerous chunk of misinformation.

The monitor on the left, labelled as a PC that uses a “standard graphics card”, is displaying a Windows desktop that’s washed out and blurry. The seemingly identical Dell TFT on the right, powered by a “high-end graphics card”, is showing the same desktop – but this time it’s much sharper and more vivid. They’re both outputting at the same resolution.

It’s true that using different screens can alter how a desktop looks, but that’s not the case here: Dell’s page uses two identical monitors that display two identical desktops, with the dramatic change in its appearance apparently caused by the different classes of discrete graphics card being used.

It is, quite simply, rubbish. Any modern discrete graphics card, whether a mid-range model or a more powerful part, is more than capable of displaying a Windows desktop. There’s no chance that by choosing two of the different graphics options available with the Optiplex 790 – let’s say the £86 inc VAT AMD Radeon HD 6350 and the £256 inc VAT dual Radeon HD 6450 option – a desktop will look any different on the cheaper card.

Dell’s page says that its picture is for “demonstrative purposes only”, but it’s not demonstrating anything that’s remotely accurate. Instead, this misleading page appears to suggest that a more expensive graphics card will mean even the Windows desktop will be made brighter and sharper.

That’s especially unfair on a page that’s clearly aimed at novice users – the exact people who will trust this information from a well-known brand, and who’ll fork out extra cash for a graphics card that’s simply unnecessary.

Dell has issued a statement regarding this issue, which we’ve posted in full below. The full story can be read here.

“Thank you for bringing this to our attention. Dell endeavours to help customers to make the best decisions regarding their purchases. It was never our intention to mislead customers, and we apologise for any confusion caused. We have now removed the image from our Global sites. Dell remains committed to delivering the best possible experience to all our customers.”

It’s properly, seriously hot here at Monza. This is, many would say, the most theatrical of the Formula 1 weekends and in the 30-plus degree heat, there’s a vast amount of technology on show. Most of it’s related to making cars go round at over 200mph, and this is the province of items like a solid tungsten nose-weight, or a £200,000 steering wheel — and that’s what you’ll hear about when the big TV stations walk around the pit lanes or chat with the drivers and managers.

I didn’t do that. I went to the quieter truck back in the pit lane and met Anthony, who is the sole IT support man for the whole Team Lotus presence here at Monza. He showed me the calm, unassuming and cool-running short rack that is the heart of the telemetry and on-track analysis system.

It’s 22 VMs and a couple of iSCSI SAN boxes, one SSD and the other spinning disk, and there’s a little rack with colour coded RJ45 cables in it. Such is the pervasive nature of Team Lotus’ WAN that the colour codes aren’t your usual subdivisions between floors or departments: some of them (red, as I recall) lead straight to the car. There is of course a wireless radio somewhere back there, shared antennas servicing all the teams and all the cars — but data flows only inwards. They can’t remap the car out on the back straight on the fly.

What really struck me looking around all the kit on display (when I wasn’t being annoyed by the tyrannosaur snorts of those little car things) was just how ordinary it was. You might imagine that everything is cast from spun unobtanium, suspended on the wings of angels or something, but in reality what is inside the rack and even in the broiling-hot trackside seating for the team owner and team manager (this has a special name but I want Anthony to have a good appraisal this year, so…)  are all standard regular everyday bits of Dell hardware.

Part of the reason for this is that the maintenance of the kit fits into Dell’s mildly elevated service platform, no matter where in the world the team goes. The other part of the reason is that the Optiplexes driving the screens, read by the multimillionaire owner of the Formula 1 team, manage perfectly well in 50-degree heat.

And to prove my point, here’s a screen-snap I wangled out of Anthony, probably against his better judgement, of the entirely regular and normal IP-based network monitoring utility he uses to keep track of all the things on his WAN with an IP address.

The red blob, top right? That’s a Formula 1 car that happens to be turned off at the moment.

For a start, it’s refreshing that Dell is so open to the fact that its support hasn’t always been great. “We’ve obviously not fared too well in your own surveys over the past couple of years,” Griffin said, referring to PC Pro’s annual reliability and service survey, “and it’s something we’re very cognisant of.”

(I’ll interrupt myself here to say that if you haven’t already taken part – and we do rely on a huge number of responses to make our results significant – then you have just over a week to do so. And you’ll be in with a chance of winning one of our £4,500-worth of prizes too.)

I’m not fooling myself. I realise that it took more than a succession of PC Pro surveys to kickstart what Griffin refers to as a “sea change”, and one of those factors was the return of Michael Dell in February 2007.

On his return, Mr Dell seemed none-too-pleased with the drop in customer support – the term Dell Hell became a little too well recognised – and placed renewed emphasis on customer support. So I asked Tim: was Michael happy?

“I think ‘pleased but never satisfied’ would be a reasonable description. He’s pushing me and the team hard as you’d expect [but] this is a company-wide initiative and we’re all on board with it, it’s not something that’s a purely Michael-driven agenda.”

You’d have thought the boss would have been a little bit more than satisfied, because Griffin claims a 90% improvement in customer support. To be precise, he said that Dell’s “net satisfaction score” has increased by “90% in the UK over the last six quarters”.

Now this figure is based on hard facts – Dell receives feedback from 50,000 people a week via online surveys, so it has the data to back it up – and I’m confident it’s true. So how has it achieved such good results?

“One of the things that’s been driving our customers mad is wait times and being transferred,” said Griffin. “We’ve taken out a huge number of transfers in our system and, in that process, obviously delighting the customer with shorter wait times.”

What hasn’t changed is where many of the customer support teams are based. “We use India,” says Griffin, “but they’re not outsourced [contractors] they’re Dell employees [for] warranty-based support.”

Dell employees or not, I pointed out, such call centres are often vilified by customers who have to call them, but Griffin insists they invest in much training. “You’ve got language skills to make sure they’re fully understood, you’ve got technical skills to make sure we can actually fix issues, and then we’ve got customer service training to make sure they’ve got the right empathetic approach.”

But that, said Griffin, isn’t the key. “We find if you fix the issue and fix it fast, and do so with respect, then the ‘where’ becomes a non-issue.”

Of course, this could all be meaningless. If the results of our survey find Dell’s customer support rating lingering in the three-star zone then, so far as we can tell, it’s all talk and no action. And whilst we wait for the results – did I mention you can take part in the survey for another week? – I’d be very interested to hear if your Dell experience matches Tim Griffin’s claims.

Dell brought together a rich mixture of hacks and industry faces for a big announcement recently. It wasn’t a single product – no new laptop, no box to kick – but rather a whole slew of announcements that boil down to the simple statement that Dell wants to be a cloud provider in its own right. It has a huge preconfigured stack of servers, storage, switching and power which it can wheel into your datacenter on demand, called vStart, which takes care of the private cloud.

If that wasn’t quite enough for you then how about splashing out a billion dollars on cloud hosting centres? In the spirit of one of my all-time favourite books (the Tiger That Isn’t), I was minded to ask, almost the instant the announcement came from the lips of Brian Jones, head of public and large enterprise from Dell USA: a billion dollars, wow, but how much is that, really?

The money is going on datacenters. There are at least 10 candidate locations, though the Japanese earthquake has made the location of at least one the subject of one of those rushed sentences you can tell the speaker would rather you didn’t notice.  And some of the decision-making on locations for these centres has been about things that hardcore datacenter techies don’t like to see themselves bothered by, such as the legal position over government or company data and whether it can be moved outside the country it came from. A billion dollars spread across ten centres is $100m a centre (I worked that out on my own you know!) and that set me thinking: how big is a big datacenter these days?

I won’t give you all the research wedged into a few lines in a single blog entry. It’s a minefield out there, because almost nobody can see a clear reason to talk publically about just how big their datacenters are. Then there are the obviously fantastical made-up numbers for the amount of storage used by “them” to keep track of “us”: I heard the term “exabyte” used seriously as a measure of storage just this week, in connection with this kind of paranoid estimation.

Nothing in this world ages faster than investment in a datacenter

Staying away from things that aren’t finished yet, or things that are estimated but undeclared, I have found references from the reasonably recent past that suggest the top ten publicly visible data centres all across the world, are running at a rough average of $500m per location.

I’m sure there are more recent figures, or bigger deals, but the point I want to follow here has two aspects. The first is that nothing in this world ages faster than investment in a datacenter. According to Intel’s Alan Priestley, the new-generation Xeon CPUs coming on stream for rollout within vStart and other equivalent Dell platforms (including servers you can buy in the usual way) are almost 50% more efficient in power draw than their preceding generation, and 93% more efficient than kit from 2006. A funny year to pick, I hear you say – except that 2006 was the last pre-recession year, and represents the last hardware refresh for a hell of a lot of businesses out there.

Power draw

Ninety three per cent is about power draw, not about instructions-per-second or other measures of performance, and I bet it’s more to do with idle power draw than 100% loaded – but it’s also a startling figure. Work done in 8% of the time previously required, or 8% of the electricity needed, produces such a short payback on money spent that it tends to bedazzle finance directors, used to thinking about multiyear waits for the real benefit to emerge. Ninety three per cent, looked at another way, is a fourteen-times saving.

Now, I doubt that the entire of computing has shrunk at the same rate since 2006 as the power demands of an enterprise or cloud-ready server platform. Of course, disks have been getting bigger and memory has been getting cheaper per byte, but look at it like this: let’s meet in the middle and say that the scale-up advantage of starting to build a datacenter made out of all-new kit, in 2011, is seven times – that Dell’s money goes seven times further in 2011 than it would have done in 2006. This means, in terms of the kit they say we are still using in our server rooms – the quad-core, partly-virtualised architectures that the mid-field and trailing edge of the server farms out there are still using – Dell’s spend on cloud datacenters doesn’t look like a billion dollars. It’s more like seven billion.

There were parts of what Dell said which I found jarring: for example, that virtualisation was hard and lots of IT specialists were fighting shy of it. My initial reaction was if you are fighting shy of this technology then possibly you shouldn’t tick the box in the customer survey that says “IT specialist”.

I can find lots of people from each of the great virtualisation tribes who will tell you how easy it all is. Other speakers asserted that small businesses had no case to make for keeping physical servers because there was “no way they could meet the regulatory burden of keeping systems up to date”. Every small business I visit has no problem with this issue because they are frankly, utterly unexposed to whatever “regulatory burden” this speaker had in mind, and are very happy running their servers, sometimes for years without a break. But that’s a diversion.

What woke up my old banker’s mathematical instincts was the size of that investment number (a billion in today’s money: seven billion in 2006 money), and the track record Dell has for responding to customer demands, rather than taking bold and unsupported moves out into the unknown.

Surely, rather in the same way that a giant shopping centre development will advertise itself by the anchor tenants who sign up to being involved, even before the digger’s shifted the first cowpat, Dell must be propping up the $1bn with some big customer partners? Yes, it agreed cautiously, this is all based on existing customer demand. No, Dell’s spokesman said, he couldn’t say who any of those customers were.

All I know is if I had issued a ten-year loan back in 2005 or so to support one of the existing mega datacenters, then this announcement, based on all-new kit, would have me just a little bit worried.

I got an Amazon Kindle for Christmas. I charged it for only the third time yesterday, despite using it almost every day. In fact, my only problem with the Kindle is remembering where I left the charger several weeks ago.

Similarly, I can’t remember the last time I ran out of juice on my laptop. Until a couple of years ago, I could barely complete a train journey home without peering at the Windows battery meter and praying the laptop didn’t abruptly conk out mid-way through a match in Football Manager (I do work on the train sometimes, in case my publisher is reading).

Yet, with the extended battery pack on my Dell XPS M1330, the battery lasts about three or four hours – plenty long enough to get me to and from the office. And by today’s standards, that’s even starting to look pretty feeble. The 13in MacBook Pro lasted for in excess of 10 hours in our light-use battery tests, for example. Like the Kindle, it’s practically reached the point where you barely need to worry about the battery.

I wish I could say the same for my smartphone. I’m about to head up to the Lake District for a photography weekend with some of the PC Pro crew. I’ve charged my iPhone overnight, but with a Bluetooth connection to the satnav and a seven hour drive ahead of me, I’m genuinely concerned that the phone’s battery might not even last all the way to Cumbria. And the last thing you want on a long car journey is to worry about whether the phone will still be alive to call the AA if the exhaust falls off.

I love the iPhone, but part of me also longs for the day when I could sling my Nokia E71 in my pocket and know that I wouldn’t even need to take a charger away with me for the weekend, let alone before we even get to our destination.

So here’s a pledge for Apple, Nokia, HTC and all the other smartphone makers out there: make a modern smartphone that can ease my battery paranoia, and I’ll be the first in the queue for one when my current contract runs out in the summer.

Its biggest selling point is the processor, the dual-core 1GHz Nvidia Tegra T20. We put this to the test in a range of uses – playing Asphalt HD, watching high-definition YouTube clips, even giving Angry Birds a quick spin – and it came through with almost flying colours.

The “almost” stems from a bit of jerkiness in a couple of more intense sections of the driving game, but we’d expect even this to be smoothed out with future updates.

Dell promises just such an update when Android 3.0 comes, with the Streak 7 currently running Android 2.2. That means it includes support for Adobe Flash 10.1, and when we viewed a Flash-based video hosted on www.pcpro.co.uk it worked perfectly.

Unlike the Streak, you can’t easily replace the Streak 7’s battery. However, since this is a massive 2,780mAh unit we suspect this won’t be a problem: we expect the Streak 7 to have excellent battery life.

Its design owes much to the original Dell Streak; looking at it is rather like looking at the original under a magnifying glass. That scaling up doesn’t work perfectly: it somehow feels barren, with only controls such as volume up/down to speak of.

It is possible to quickly replace the SIM and microSD card though: these slots are hidden underneath a small strip of plastic on the right-hand side of the device.

The front is dominated by the 7in screen, which uses Gorilla Glass to protect against the scrapes of life in a bag or family home. While that’s great to see – and the Streak 7 feels well-built as a whole – we’re not fans of the screen itself.

The main reason is the amount of grain on show. While the Dell Streak looks sharp with a 5in diagonal and 800 x 480 display, you can see individual pixels on the Streak 7. And that’s because, very disappointingly, it sticks with the 800 x 480 resolution.

For us, that alone is a reason not get overexcited about the Streak. It’s a missed opportunity.

Key specs:

Operating System

Android 2.2 (Froyo) with Over the Air Upgrade Capability

Processor

Nvidia Tegra T20 – Dual Core @ 1 GHz

Display

7in WVGA 800 x 480 capacitive multitouch screen with Corning Gorilla Glass

Camera

Front: 1.3-megapixel fixed focus
Rear: 5-megapixel auto focus with flash

Video

H.263/H.264, 3GP, MPEG4, WMV

Audio and Speakers

MP3, WMA, AAC, AAC+, eAAC+, AMR, MIDI, WAV

Browser

Full HTML WebKit browser, Adobe Flash 10.1 (Froyo)

Storage

Internal eMMC, available in 16 or 32GB; SD, MMC, SDHC user accessible

Connectivity

Wi-Fi 802.11bgn
Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR

Dimensions

199.9 x 119.8 x 12.4mm

Weight

450g

Battery

2780 mAh

The Duo is a convertible netbook with a twist. Normally, to convert a laptop into a tablet, you rotate the whole screen on a hinge before folding it over the keyboard. Instead, the Duo’s screen swivels inside the lid. This is very quick and easy to do, and there’s a hint of magic about it. The screen has to be connected to the motherboard somehow, but the Duo hides it completely. It’s smoother and quicker than the only similar system I’ve tried, a Vadem Clio smart netbook from 1999.

The Duo also has a third set of capabilities as an entertainment centre. Drop the tablet into its JBL Audio Station dock and it works as a digital picture frame, movie player, Skype video phone and bedside alarm clock. It also would look good in the living room, or on an executive desk. More than anything, the Duo comes across as an attractive and functional appliance, almost to the point where you stop thinking about the electronics inside, or even the price.

Fortunately, the Duo is competitive in both areas.

At heart, the Duo is an Atom-based PC running Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium. It’s a cut above the average netbook in having a 1.5GHz dual-core Intel Atom N550 processor, 2GB of DDR3 memory, and either a 250GB (5,400 RPM) or 320GB (7,200 RPM) hard drive. The 10.1in high-def screen offers capacitive multitouch operation and shows a full 1,366 x 768 pixels, like a typical 13.3in laptop. There’s a built-in 1.3-megapixel webcam and a digital array microphone, so it’s easy to use for video calls. Colour choices are Foggy Night (standard), Fastback Red and Marlin Blue. Yes, someone gets paid to think up these names….

Limitations? The memory isn’t expandable, there’s no optical drive, and the battery isn’t removable. Dell’s Will Koch told me the battery life would be “about 4 hours, based on a range of uses”.

The Duo also has two USB ports hidden under a flap, plus sockets for headphones and a power adaptor. It’s designed to connect via Wi-Fi, and if you want an RJ-45 Ethernet port for wired broadband, there’s one on the optional dock. The dock also has two more USB ports, a 7-in-one card reader, speakers and volume/mute controls, and it works as a charger.

Snappy performance

The Duo that I tried was a pre-production prototype, and therefore not a reliable guide to the final build quality or performance. However, the keyboard was good for its size — much like the Dell Mini 11z — and performance was snappy with Windows 7. The dual-core Atom puts it a step above today’s netbooks, if still slightly short of dual-core CULV chips. It played HD videos without any problems, though it was running pretty much flat out.

Drawbacks, there are a few. Windows 7 has touch capabilities, but that doesn’t mean it works as easily as an Apple iPad. You can use your fingers to operate software designed for the greater precision of a mouse pointer, but it’s not really comfortable on a 10in screen. It’s OK for web browsing in couch-potato mode, but you’ll often want to swivel the screen and use the keyboard instead. That’s why the easy conversion is so important.

We know Microsoft can do multitouch well, because the Microsoft Surface does it, and that runs on top of Windows Vista

The Duo comes with Dell’s Stage interface software, which is also used on the Dell Streak and Inspiron One all-in-one PCs. This provides a touch interface that seems mainly intended for playing music and movies and browsing through photos, though it also includes StickyNotes, YouPaint and Touch Instruments apps. It looks more child-friendly than sophisticated. The prototype also had movies downloaded from CinemaNow, which is a US-based service: Dell hasn’t announced a UK or European equivalent. The prototype lacked the Microsoft Surface software bundle that is sometimes shipped with touchscreen all-in-one PCs.

We know Microsoft can do multitouch well, because the Microsoft Surface does it, and that runs on top of Windows Vista. The Dell Duo really needs something like that to compete with the iPad as a tablet, and it’s not there.

That means the Dell Duo is, at the moment, still more of a convertible with a twist than an iPad replacement. However, it is both functional and chic, and it could therefore attract people who value the functionality of a real computer that offers things such as a physical keyboard, full Microsoft Office, Adobe Flash, multi-tab browsing and fast switching between different user accounts.

And that’s how Dell has priced it in the UK, at £449 including VAT and delivery. It’s competitive with Apple iPad prices that range from £429 (16GB) to £599 (64GB) with Wi-Fi only, plus £55 for a keyboard. The Duo’s relatively modest premium over a high-end netbook buys you the touchscreen and slick conversion to the tablet format, as well as full Windows 7 and a decent hard drive. If you were thinking about buying either a netbook or a tablet, the Duo does both, though it doesn’t do the tablet bit as well as an iPad.

If you were thinking about buying a portable video player, digital picture frame, videophone or bedside entertainment system, the Dell Duo does those as well. The Audio Station dock, at extra cost (to be announced), makes for an unusually attractive and versatile system.

At £999, the Dell Duo would be an innovative and interesting curiosity. At £449, success isn’t guaranteed, but it’s in with a chance. A future version with Surface-like tablet software or a one-button switch that toggled to Android 3.0 might be a killer product.

UPDATE: Dell has now confirmed that the Inspiron duo weighs 1.54kg, and its measurements are 285 x 194 x 26.2-28.7mm (WDH).

The money sloshing around some companies is rather hard to imagine. I can wrap my poverty-stricken mind around £1 million in lottery winnings easy enough, but once you get into the billions I  have no idea what that means.

So the US Security and Exchange Commission’s 61-page document detailing the exclusivity deal between Dell and Intel made for mind-blowing reading (I suggest you start at page 10, that’s when it gets good). At one point, 76% of Dell’s quarterly operating income came from Intel, via lump sum payments and a rebate system designed to keep the PC maker from offering AMD chips in its computers.

That’s a head-turning, “that can’t be right” sort of statistic. That’s $723 million in one quarter alone. One quarter. Three months. That’s more than $8 million a day, just to keep Dell “monogamous.” I’d stay loyal for that much, that’s for sure.

Over the four years this nonsense carried on, Intel paid Dell $4.2 billion, which it used to shore up its results and stashed away into so-called “cookie jar” reserves, according to the SEC. Intel has since paid out a few billion in fines, while Dell itself agreed to a settlement of $100 million, neither admitting nor denying the charges.

The differences between those numbers are rather stark, to say the least. As I’m not really a numbers gal myself, I used a handy and free tool from IBM called Many Eyes, which creates lovely visualisations. In other words, I made a picture (click to enlarge):

The really tiny blobs clinging to the underbelly of the humongous one are the settlements paid by Dell execs, while the slightly less minuscule blob is Dell’s settlement as a company. That huge one is how much Dell made from Intel.

So were these payments a good financial move by Dell? The size difference between those blobs suggest that yes, yes it was.

The two mid-sized blobs show how much Intel paid the EU as a fine and AMD as a settlement — both record-setting amounts, but still not as much as it was willing (and able) to pay Dell to stay onside, and don’t forget that it made such payments to other manufacturers too.

It may be hard to imagine that a fine worth $100 million let alone more than $2.6 billion is a slap on the wrist, but with the money flowing through both companies – Intel posted $10.8bn in revenue and $2.9 billion in profit in the last quarter alone – such charges are small change.

Dell has knocked Apple off one pedestal this week. Last year, we highlighted how an upgrade from 4GB RAM to 8GB RAM on the 17in MacBook Pro would cost a whopping £839 — over £200 a gigabyte.

Dell’s Mobile Precision M6500 manages to top that.

The mobile workstation is the first to offer 32GB of RAM in a laptop, an impressive feat. But the upgrade price from the 16GB to the 32GB edition is a whopping $8,053 (£5,274), or £330 per gigabyte.

To be fair, that last 16GB is where the bulk of the price jump kicks in. The cost difference between the base 2GB version and the epic 32GB edition is $9,234, which translates to a shade over £200 per gigabyte — a charge on a par with expensive Apple, at last year’s prices at least. However, a year on, Apple now charges £80 per gigabyte for that same RAM leap.

Perhaps the extra cost is an investment in the future, as Dell notes on its website: “Adding memory at the time of purchase can be more cost-effective and convenient than upgrading later.”

Convenience sure is expensive, though. Crucial’s 8GB kit rings in at just over £240 — about £30 a gigabyte, leaving £170 per gigabyte in cost for convenience’s sake — although it wouldn’t be possible to easily hit the heights of 32GB.