The high definition media war is finally over and Toshiba’s HD-DVD finally raises the white flag. Toshiba said it would stop promoting its HD DVD format for the next-generation DVD after losing the support of key studios and retailers to the Blu-ray technology backed by Sony.

Toshiba’s president, Nishida-san said that they are clearly in a good place until last December and January. Based on Nishida-san statement, it appears that the knock out punch came from Time Warner’s announcement on supporting Blu-ray instead of HD-DVD.

Overall, 730,000 units were sold worldwide and majority is in the US which 300,000 of those are Xbox 360 HD DVD drives. Microsoft’s PR Team already sent out a statement regarding these developments and the rumors about an Xbox 360 Blu-ray add on.

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This is really cool. Someone with a lot of money and time to spare, just bought a new MacBook Air and tear it apart disassemble it. You might want to check it out if you are curious on how Apple was able managed to fit the components on such limited space.

Now, if you are one of those people who own it already, you might want to know that you have to remove almost 20 screws just to get the battery out. Yikes!

As you’d expect with a computer so devoted to aesthetics, getting to the “user-installable” parts is going to be a bit more challenging than usual. If you weren’t counting, that’s 19 screws to remove the battery. Replacing the battery is straightforward, but not something you’ll be doing when your battery dies mid-flight.

Link: iFixit

Nvidia, the leading graphic chip maker is planning to launch the next generation nForce 790i chipset in the second quarter this year. The chipset will adopt Nvidia’s C73 northbridge and MCP55 southbridge, and will support Intel processors with FSB up to 1600MHz.

The chipset will feature 3-way SLI and Hybrid SLI technology and will support DDR3 memory. Now, with these features I guess Nvidia and motherboard makers are targeting high-end gamers who are willing to spend for a new chipset, a 3-way SLI and DDR3 memory.

For the meantime I’m going to stick with my current setup. I’m still happy with my Abit IP-35 with Intel’s P35 chipset and from the benchmark I saw, the difference between a system running DDR2 against DD3 is not the big.

Dell finally listens and in response to feedback from Dell customers who want Linux on more hardware and in more countries, Dell has announced that starting today, customers in Germany, United Kingdom, France and now Spain can purchase Ubuntu Linux 7.10 with built-in DVD playback on the XPS 1330n (in addition to the previously-released Inspiron 530n desktop system).

And if you haven’t heard yet, Dell has plans on entering the local PC market. So, are we going to expect a Ubuntu Pre-installed Dell PC on our shores? I’m hoping that it would be a “yes”.

Link: Dell’s Ubuntu Site

The Athlon X2, which for some time was king of dual core until Intel released their Conroe processors, is being phased-out. AMD is now focusing on the recently released Phenoms and the new Athlon 6000 architecture, they will no longer manufacture or take orders for the X2 series processors.

I guess it will be a good time for me on getting one of these babies for my EE (energy efficient) PC project and I do hope that AMD will have a price drop on their Athlon X2 line since they’re starting to phase it out on the market.

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Asustek’s low cost Eee PC has went on sale in Taiwan, though not at the price that I was expecting. A lot of people maybe dissapointed after reading the announcement since Asus Eee PC now starts at $299 and goes as high as $399 depending on the configuration which is a hundred dollar higher than the previously announced starting price of $199.

The lowest configuration of the Eee PC is dubbed Eee PC 2G Surf and has 256MB RAM, 2GB SSD, small battery and no camera. For power users the Asus Eee PC 8G is anyway the only choice. $399 is not that bad for a 7 inch notebook with 1GB RAM, 8GB SSD, webcam and 3.5h battery life.

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Not much details available about HP’s new system except that it’s been dubbed the Virtus (errr… virus ). A new look and it’s got some fairly slick design.

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