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We’ve reviewed just about every line of laptops that Dell makes over the years, but we haven’t had a chance to look at the Vostro line until today. Vostro is essentially Dell’s entry-level business laptop brand, with an emphasis on business-class support while maintaining a lower price point than the Latitude line. What that means is you give up some of the performance options of the consumer Inspiron and XPS lines, but you usually get better support and a matte LCD. Build quality is a bit of a question mark, and something we’ll discuss more in the review. The V131 we received for review is also quite thin, nearly at ultrabook levels, which raises an interesting question: how does an 0 (often less) business laptop compare with the upcoming ultrabooks and other thin and light laptops?

We’ve already had our first ultrabook review with the ASUS UX21E, and we expect more ultrabooks in for review in the next month, which makes this review of the Vostro V131 all the more pertinent. It supports full-power Core 2011 dual-core processors and uses integrated graphics, but it also has a standard battery that can easily be swapped out—and a larger battery capacity as well. If you’re interested in seeing how the Vostro V131 stacks up against the recently reviewed XPS 14z and ASUS UX21, or you’re wondering what you give up in moving from Dell’s Latitude line down to the Vostro, we should have all the information you need in this review.

FLOGGER OF EXPENSIVE PRINTER INK HP and its top executives have been accused of misleading investors before a slump in its stock price.

HP is facing a class action lawsuit filed by Robbins Geller Rudman and Down alleging that CEO Leo Apotheker and CFO Cathie Lesjak misled investors before making announcements that included the possible spin-off of its PC business, dumping WebOS devices and the purchase of British software outfit Autonomy.

Those announcements, all made in one afternoon, led to a 20 per cent drop in HP’s share price the following day. That, according to Reuters, was the largest one day decline in HP’s share price since 1987.

The lawsuit against HP does not specify damages but it serves to highlight the growing concern at the way Apotheker is leading HP. The firm’s announcement that it was considering leaving the PC business was a shock to many, but its decision to dump its WebOS devices was perhaps the biggest shock of the lot.

While HP’s PC business was always seen as a low margin operation, WebOS was viewed as a core part of HP’s future strategy. The firm kept banging on about slipping WebOS into as many devices as possible, however all that talk evaporated, just like HP’s Touchpads when it sold them off at fire sale prices for a massive loss.

According to Reuters, shareholder lawsuits are fairly common following large drops in stock prices. With HP typically seen as a safe bet by many investors, in the same league as IBM and Microsoft, a drop of 20 per cent in a single day was too much for investors to take. µ

MAKER OF EXPENSIVE PRINTER INK HP has added to confusion about what it will do with its PC business by now saying that it wants spin off the unit.

According to Reuters, HP is working on understanding the larger implications of separating the PC business from rest of the company.

An HP spokeswoman said, “We prefer a spin-off as a separate company and the working hypotheses is that a spin-off will be in the best interests of HP’s shareholders, customers and employees.

“However, we have to complete the diligence process and validate this assumption, including fully understanding the dis-synergies in separating the PSG business from HP.”

Last Thursday, HP strongly denied saying that it planned to quit its PC business, despite having said the previous week that it planned to spin it off or sell it.

We debated whether spinning something off is the same thing as quitting it and, since we assume that means give it to someone else, we assumed that they meant more or less one and the same.

But Paul Hunter, MD for the HP PC business in the UK and Ireland told us in no uncertain terms that we were wrong.

“I’d like to firstly clear up any misunderstanding that has arisen from the earnings announcement around the future of the Personal Systems Group,” he said in a letter to our editor.

“There have been a number of incorrect stories saying that HP is quitting the PC business. Let me be absolutely clear in saying that at no stage has HP said it is quitting the PC business. Three options are being investigated, and whether the company is spun off, sold or kept in the HP portfolio, the team in the UK remains committed to creating and supporting great products and services.”

HP said the whole process could take 12 months to 18 months, but a final decision about its PC unit is expected by the end of this calendar year. We won’t be holding our breath. µ

MAKER OF EXPENSIVE PRINTER INK HP went wild on the announcement front last night and revealed that it will buy enterprise search firm Autonomy, drop WebOS and look to sell off its PC business.

These announcements, we think, are so huge that HP should have hired a barge, bought a load of fireworks and travelled the waterways of the country shouting about them.

It did not though, and perhaps this was because these massive changes were always on the cards. HP CEO Leo Apotheker came from the German software firm SAP and might rather not deal with hardware, or unpredictable tablet software like WebOS, and be much more comfortable with boring, safe and high margin enterprise software.

In fact, in the conference call announcing these changes, Apotheker stamped his name on the decisions. “I am taking ownership for these decisions and investments,” he said.

“Our TouchPad has not been gaining enough traction in the marketplace. We have made the difficult but necessary decision to shut down the WebOS hardware operations.”

Although this bit of news makes HPs purchase of Palm for its smartphone and tablet designs look like a waste of money, the company presumably expects to get more bang for its buck from Autonomy, for which it will pay £7.1bn.

The intended shift out of HP’s traditional PC business and the lurch away from competing in tablets and smartphones are acknowledgements of how much impact the latter has had on the former’s sales. Apparently unable to compete profitably in either area, it seems that HP has decided to bow out gracefully.

“Today is about transforming HP for the future,” Apotheker said. “The tablet effect is real… Continuing to execute our current device approach in the market space is no longer in the interest of HP.”

Michael Dell, who we can imagine is also not ‘in the interest of HP’ greeted the news with a couple of stingers on his Twitter account.

“If HP spins off their PC business….maybe they will call it Compaq?”, he said, and then, “HP…. They are calling it a separation but it feels like a divorce”. µ

MUCH TO THE SURPRISE of consumers, AMD has quietly launched a very limited range of RAM products for consumers and graphics card manufacturers alike.

Radeon branded, the memory has already been spotted on sale in Japan and listed through several resellers.

The kit is being sold in the streets of Japan at a fairly affordable price – for a 2GB DIMM – and doesn’t really come off as flashy gear that you’d want to stick in your gaming machine. PC Watch snapped photos of some DDR 3 DIMMs on sale in Tokyo’s tech quarter, which you can find here.

The memory shows AMD markings – you can find it listed at several retailers as “AMD Original Retail” – and comes as 2GB DDR3 DIMMs rated at DDR1333 with CAS 9-9-9 timings. There is also another piece of higher-rated memory, as well as a yet unseen “enterprise” product.

AMD has also put up a Memory page to go with this silent launch. The web page is rather devoid of information except some basic specifications on the desktop RAM. The company is also pitching GPU memory, or GDDR5 and DDR3, for its line of Radeon GPUs, and overstating the already obvious advantage of GDDR5 over DDR3.

Despite being populated with references to “gaming” memory and hyperbole about performance, it doesn’t seem quite the kind of thing that will cause rugburns when you slot it into your PC. The Desktop RAM looks like very tame stuff, considering that the 1600MHz rated kit is likely to be the same make and build as the 1333MHz rated kit, only with higher timings, and the GPU memory also shows no features distinguishing it from memory put out by AMD’s other partners Samsung and Hynix, which churn out GDDR5 memory chips in the gazillions.

RAM is a tricky business as it is, with every RAM maker crying a river about how DRAM prices are at a constant low and how it’s hard to pay the bills. AMD, however, seems intent in throwing caution to the wind while pushing its Radeon branding and has silently launched these products. The real manufacturer – AMD has no manufacturing of its own these days – is yet to be discovered, but considering the existence of GDDR5, it narrows down the options to two or three players in the business.

With just one real desktop DRAM product and an unspecified enterprise product in the works, this initiative by AMD looks a bit like going for a dip in shark infested waters. Some have tried it and gotten away with merely some severe scarring, while others haven’t been so lucky. µ

Toshiba won't mind if we say that their previous business class notebooks looked…kind of cheap. They were bulky and unattractive, largely feeling like consumer notebooks with matte instead of glossy plastic. Yet when we visited with Toshiba to talk about their Tecra refresh, we were impressed, and Toshiba's reps were only too happy to put the new Tecras next to the old ones to demonstrate the stunning new weight loss plan the notebooks were put on. And the best part? While the Tecras have gotten a healthy refresh, their prices remain remarkably affordable. Is the 15.6" Tecra R850 the notebook you've been looking for?

We’ve seen more than our fair share of Pine Trail netbooks since their launch late last year. Performance has never been spectacular, but battery life and portability have been strong points. Today we’ve got a look at HP’s Mini 5102, which marks a couple of firsts for our Atom reviews. Not only is this the first “business” netbook we’ve reviewed, but it’s also our first look at what Broadcom’s Crystal HD decoder can do for Atom. Read on to see how HP’s latest compares to the competition.