Announced: Averatec 2575

Averatec has added the Averatec 2575 to their ultraportable lineup. It has a 12.1″ widescreen display, and weighs in at just under four pounds. This will probably replace the Averatec 2371. The main upgrade is the CPU, a 2.2GHz AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-64 dual-core … Read more

Solid State Drive (SSD) Failures

This week, both Lenovo and Dell wanted to talk about Solid State Drives, and the numerous articles that have recently been written in regards to failure rates. I’ve read several of them, and was tempted to post a few, but I decided to wait and see what the PC makers response would be, and low and behold we have a couple of major ones from the past few days. For an example of what I’m talking about, you can read this CNET article.

First off, Lionel Menchaca from the Direct2Dell blog:

Recent Opinion on SSD Failure Rates Fails to Include the Facts
Sometimes we have to react to information that has no basis in reality. That’s what we’re dealing with here.

A recent analyst document from Avian Securities incorrectly stated that Dell is seeing high return rates (20 – 30%) due to performance issues and failures on solid state disk drives (SSDs). It has been the basis of conversations in the blogosphere like Crave, Gizmodo, Techcrunch and BloggingStocks.

Here’s the real story: the 20 – 30% failure and return rates cited by Avian Securities don’t even vaguely resemble what’s happening in our business. It’s also true that Avian did not contact us while doing their research. Said another way, it’s just not true.

Our global reliability data shows that SSD drives are equal to or better than traditional hard disk drives we’ve shipped. Beyond that, return rates for SSDs are in line with our expectations for new technology and an order of magnitude better than rates reported in the press.

Next up to bat, Lenovo’s Inside the Box blog:

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HP Pavilion dv3000 Series

Looks like the Dell XPS M1330 is going to get a serious challenge, in the form of the upcoming HP Pavilion dv3000 series. HP.com is listing quite a few models (from the dv3000tx through dv30013tx), however those are probably North America-specific. This is the first … Read more

Dell Latitude XT2 – Leaked?

If Engadget is correct, towards the end of this year (November 2008), Dell will be introducing a sequel to the Dell Latitude XT 12.1″ convertible Tablet PC/laptop. Our view: It’s very plausible – the timing is right. Firewire port is odd/interesting. eSATA makes sense – … Read more

Charlie Rose Loves His MacBook Air. A Lot.

See that battered face to the right? That’s Charlie Rose. Charlie Rose is a journalist, correspondent, and hosts the Charlie Rose show on PBS, an interview-style show. I would say he is very well known. It turns out, he happens to really like his MacBook … Read more