AlienWare, a manufacturer of computers and notebooks, has announced the release of a new addition to the Area-51 family of notebooks called the m15x. This laptop sports a 15.4-inch display and an NVIDIA GeForce 8800M GTX GPU. It is also capable of running with either the Intel Core 2 Duo or Core 2 Extreme mobile processors.

Want to know more about AlienWare's Area-15 m15x? Head on over to the full article.

Allow us for a while to postpone your trip to fantasy land so that we can all get real. You are all aware of companies nVidia, AMD and its subsidiary ATI Technologies, right? Okay for the love of God, the three are major suppliers and manufacturers of GPU. As we all know, we can't get any leveling or questing done if not for these graphics processing units.

Interestingly, nVidia and AMD are currently under fire with the Department of Justice slapping them with a barrage of anti-trust actions. In case you are wondering why, the two were recently accused of conspiracy to take control of the graphics market. Here is what the plaintiffs have to say:

The allegation is the defendants and co-conspirators have engaged in a contract combination, trust or conspiracy, the effect of which was to raise the prices at which they sold graphics processing units and cards to artificially inflated levels.

Executives of the company are also alleged to have had meetings and conversations to discuss pricing of graphics processing units and cards in the U.S.

If these allegations are proven to be correct, then the two are guilty of creating a cartel. The latter are definitely a no-no in a country that is back-boned by democracy and free trade. This is rather weird because not so long ago, the two released a GPU compatible with DirectX 10, the only one in the world.

Some people are getting excited over the launching of the newest Microsoft innovation, the Windows Vista. And most probably, if you are one of them, you've already gone over the MS Vista webpage to check out if your PC's specs could handle and run the version of Vista that seems like the panacea for all your needs and woes.

However, the MS Vista webpage that would check out your PC's specs isn't all that accurate. You see, an 800MHz CPU with 512MB of memory, DirectX 9 graphics card, and a TV tuner card gives that would supposedly comprise your ticket to Windows Vista Ultimate are just the minimum requirements and not the recommended ones. We leave it to you to imagine what would happen if you install the Vista on a computer with those specs...

Allegedly, Microsoft is aware of this problem, so to remedy it, they published a hardware list that has a lower than usual limit to put across the message that the Vista won't be a occupy most of your hardware. Then it distributes a far stricter list of hardware to its OEM partners to ensure Vista will run properly on the PCs that will go on sale in the coming months. You gotta admit, that's a smart move on Microsoft's part.

And to add more woes to that, apparently, the terminologies in the Windows Logo Program Requirements aren't that accurate as well. The definition of 'desktop', 'mobile', and 'ultraportable' are also skewed. The definitions are important because your system requirements should match with the ones written in the Windows Logo Program, now if you can't classify your computing device properly, then you'll encounter some problem.

Hopefully, when Vista's released (November 2006 for the Business Edition and January 2007 for consumer editions), this problem will be fixed. Microsoft has a reputation of not backing out and never giving up on a problem.