I came across a number of interesting items of news regarding laptops today while procrastinating on writing an article for work and I thought I would share some of the news with you!

Olympic Laptops

Lenovo the company that I have discussed recently has opened an auction on eBay for a series of special laptops bearing the “Cloud of Promise” theme to commemorate this year’s Bejing Olympics. In the UK the auction has started with a limited-edition Lenovo 3000 V2000, which is one of the new ultra portable editions of Lenovo’s popular consumer notebook. This one is autographed by UK Olympic medalist and badminton star Gail Emms. The proceeds of the auction go to the Lenovo Hope Fund charity, so if you’re interested get bidding.

One Laptop per Child

Other news was regarding the very interesting and in my view very important “One laptop per Child” project. Firstly the announcement that despite the negative position to the project taken by the governments of India and Nigeria, extremely successful pilot projects are now under way in both of these countries. These projects will hopefully show these countries the benefits of getting involved. Interestingly a lot of the testing of the wireless mesh capabilities of the laptop was done on an Australian farm in the outback by a volunteer farmer. His farm was considered ideal as it provided similar conditions to third world countries.

Lost Laptops

The Irish government has recently admitted that around 80 unencrypted laptops, USB drives and blackberries have either been lost or stolen in the last five years. So the UK government is not alone in this ability to lose potentially personal data on behalf of its citizens. This suggests to all of us that we need to think about encryption for our own laptops, and perhaps especially for USB drives which are so easily lost.

Featured Laptop

In the meantime after all that news why don’t you have a look at PriceGrabber’s featured laptop the Acer Aspire 5920 Notebook, just don’t lose it!