David Needle

Gamers and others looking for a performance edge have overclocked  their PCs to make programs run faster for a long time. The tweak works, but it’s also a quick way to void the warranty. Neither Intel , AMD  or any of the major PC makers have sanctioned overclocking, which can lead to overheating and other […]

When Internet users in the U.S. need health information, they are far more likely to use search engines as a starting point rather than specific health or medical-related sites such as WebMD. That’s one of the conclusions of a major study just released by the Pew Internet & American Life Project (IALP), a Washington D.C. […]

Gateway has confirmed a request by Firebrand Partners to add three unidentified members to the computer maker’s board of directors. Firebrand is part of a shareholder group that owns 10.7 percent of Gateway’s shares. Firebrand also asked that Gateway redeem its shareholder rights plan and call a special meeting of shareholders to declassify the current […]

AMD’s $5.4 billion acquisition of graphics chipmaker ATI became official today, and it didn’t take long for the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company to go on the offensive with its product plans. In a briefing with internetnews.com, AMD  expressed confidence its plans to integrate ATI’s technology with its CPU line, a project it calls Fusion, will be […]

Tired of pecking out text messages on your phone? Nuance Communications promises help is on the way. At the Conversations Mobile conference today in Orlando, Fla., Nuance showed off a beta of Nuance Mobile Dictation, which lets mobile phone users use speech to create text messages, avoiding the keypad altogether. To highlight the advantages of […]

SAN FRANCISCO — Oracle kicked off a crowded Oracle Open World conference here with product announcements aplenty and a preview of the forthcoming Oracle 11g, now in beta. Oracle SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) Suite 10g Release 3 was unveiled today with immediate availability. SOA Suite 10g, a component of Oracle’s Fusion Middleware, includes an enhanced […]

Building on its sponsorship of the Olympics, Lenovo will trumpet another sports marketing link when it announces a major deal with the National Basketball Association. The multi-year global marketing partnership is scheduled to be made official at an event in New York on Monday at the NBA Store, according to a Lenovo press release obtained […]

SAN FRANCISCO – Intel gave the first public demonstration of a prototype system running on its quad-core “Tigerton” platform at a media briefing here today. Intel already plans to release its first quad-core processor (codenamed Clovertown), the Xeon 5300, next month for mainstream servers and workstations. Multi-core  processors feature more than one computing core or […]

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — The parking lot at the Computer History Museum started filling up before 7 a.m. The buzz inside the sold-out event here was akin to a major product introduction. But it wasn’t a new tech doodad that attracted a hall full of Silicon Valley execs and media; it was former HP CEO […]

AMD today reported a net profit of $134 million, or $0.27 per share, on sales of $1.33 billion for the third quarter of 2006. In the same quarter a year ago, AMD  reported profits of $129 million on sales of $1.52 billion. The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based chip maker’s results improved 17 percent sequentially; last quarter’s profits […]

Fujitsu is juicing up the features in the latest update of its LifeBook notebook series. The new LifeBook N6420 sports a Fujitsu’s “Visual Optimizer,” a special image processing subsystem that amplifies video from any source designed to provide optimum sharpness and color matches. The N6420 also includes an HD DVD-ROM player, and a built-in stereo […]

MENLO PARK, Calif. — Sun not only thought outside the box for its latest datacenter concept, it rethought the box. At an unveiling here on the Sun campus, company officials led media, customers and employees on a tour of Project Blackbox, a kind of portable datacenter contained in a standard 20 foot long, eight feet […]