The Wall Street Journal recently published an article stating that Dell were to phase out their XPS range of PC’s in favour of the Alienware brand.

The WSJ went on to say that having both the XPS range and the Alienware brands in the same stable would somehow, to pardon a pun, alienate the Alienware range of products.

Dell countered by stating that they had no idea where the WSJ got such information.

Dell spokesperson Anne Camden stated; “XPS remains an important Dell brand with its heritage of premium performance, look at the XPS One, our first entry into the all-in-one market, the XPS M1330, an industry leading ultraportable or the XPS 420 desktop, designed for multi-media activities”.

Camden went further to state; “We don’t plan an early phase-out of these systems as the WSJ incorrectly stated, and in fact will continue to refresh them to keep them on the front edge of gaming”.

Dell will still have a finger in the Alienware Pie however as these events will have no impact on the company’s upcoming AMD-based Alienware system which will be priced at $1,700.

Source: Daily Tech

So, your computer has been infected with a virus or some spyware, you have tried to remove it and it just isn’t worth the hassle. Instead, you decided to format your computer and reinstall Windows XP to a nice clean slate!

What if you can not find the OEM CD which came with your computer? Using another OEM CD will not work as the Certificate of Authenticity (COA) will not work with other manufacture Windows XP CD-Rom’s.

Seth at Free PC Help provides a great workaround which doesn’t break the law and will leave you with a valid copy of windows.

Source: Free PC Help

The popular free social networking and micro-blogging service twitter seems to be having massive problems this evening. With the majority of the site inaccessible and the server just not responding, users are speculating that it could be overload from the China earthquake. Twitter has told users this;

“Part of our caching service required an unscheduled restart. That means a slow rebuilding of data. You may notice some of the normal browsing related features (such as pagination) are missing while we repopulate the caching service. This is so we can get it done quicker.”

Whilst we love Twitter ourselves, one has to ask why they experience frequent problems. In January they announced they had “finished a major infrastructure project”, “which we’ve been working on for months and that we think is going to help a lot” however it is hard to see how this work has paid off…

Source: Twitter

I know i can…

Some years ago, purchased at the local computer shop i use to work in -at trade price - cost me £25 for a measly 32mb! Nowadays you can pick up a 32gb usb pen prive for a few extra quid!

All of these drives are formatted as either FAT16 or FAT32 and on the surface there does not appear to be a method to format them with NTFS. AdvancedSetup explains a workaround over at Free PC Help on how get your usb stick on NTFS.

Source: Free PC Help And Support Forms

Rumors have sprung up that Ask.com is to buy Lexico Publishing Group, the owners of sites such as Dictionary.com and Reference.com after only 3 months since it announced it was to layoff 8% of it’s workforce.

Acquiring Lexico’s visitor’s traffic will increase Ask.com’s monthly visits by 11 percent according to ComScore statistics, which certantly wont go a miss as Ask.com only had a 4.17 percent share in U.S searches in April.

Source: News.com

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