Acer Aspire One 571 now comes with HD video decoding

One weakness of the current crop of Atom-based Netbooks is their inability to render high-defintion video, a capability which the AMD Neo-based HP Pavilion dv2 proudly trumpets. While the upcoming Intel GN45 chipset is suppose to give minilaptops a proper video-decoding hardware, Acer is not waiting. The Acer Aspire One 571 has a dedicated video-decoding chip in the form of a Quartics Q1721 multimedia coprocessor and is able to playback HD movies with ease.
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Pirated Windows 7 PCs build botnet

A pirated version of Windows 7 Release Candidate (RC) infected with a Trojan horse has created a botnet with tens of thousands of bots under its control, according to researchers at security firm Damballa.

The software, which first appeared on 24 April, spread as quickly as several hundred new bots per hour, and controlled roughly 27,000 bots by the time Damballa took over the network's command and control server on 10 May, the firm said on Tuesday.

The pirated software was spread via popular piracy sites and online forums, Damballa said.

The software is primarily designed to download and install other malicious packages under a "pay-per-install" scheme, under which the botmasters are paid based on the number of other pieces of malware they cause to be installed, Damballa said.
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HP laptop batteries recalled for overheating

After two reports of flaming laptop batteries, the US Consumer Product Safety Commission announced that Hewlett-Packard is voluntarily recalling 70,000 lithium-ion batteries that shipped with several models of its HP and Compaq laptops.

The recall affects nine models of HP Pavilions, nine models of Compaq Presarios, two models of HPs, and one HP Compaq laptop model sold between August 2007 and March 2008. For the full list, see the CPSC's site.

There were two separate reports of batteries that "overheated and ruptured, resulting in flames/fire that caused minor property damage" but no injuries, according to the CPSC report.
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Toshiba announces world's first 512GB SSD laptop

While it's now easy to get a desktop with a terabyte or more of storage, it's still pretty hard to find a laptop with even 300GB. That's why I am very impressed with the new Portege R600 laptop.

The Portege R600 is one of world's first laptops with 512GB of storage and it's definitely the first with that much storage in the form of a solid-state drive (SSD). Until now, most SSDs for laptops have remained in the 32GB to 128GB capacity range.
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Mac OSX 10.5.7: Better for Hackintoshed Netbooks?

Although Apple doesn't have any clear Netbook plans on the horizon, that hasn't exactly stopped anyone from getting their own Apple Netbook the hacky way. Hackintoshes, i.e. PCs with Mac software loaded on them, hadn't truly started stealing the spotlight until the Netbook phenomenon. For as little as US$300 and a copy of Leopard, you too could have the sort of ultraportable that Jobs and Co. would only sneer at.

The downside, besides no official hardware support from Apple, has been battery life, an area where OS X hasn't exactly been Netbook-friendly.

That is, until now.
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