Price Check: January Sales

In a departure from our usual targeted spot check on prices, we've toured the PC vendor sites to see what's on offer in general for the January sales. PC World has Sony's multiformat DVD burner for ?99 (?30 off), and ?20 off Lexmark's all-in-one multifunction device, at a penny less than ?50. And for the someone in your life that has nothing, you can get ?200 off the PC that has everything: including digicam, printer, scanner and so on, for just under ?900. ...more

Seagate ships 400Gb drive

Hard drive manufacturer Seagate Technology is now shipping what it claims is the world's largest capacity hard drive holding a whopping 400Gb. The Barracuda 7200.8 is fitted with either 8MB or 16MB cache sizes, a 7,200-rpm spin speed, and an 8. ...more

MacUser Awards 2003: winners announced

Apple again was the star at the UK's most prestigious Mac awards, picking up six Maxines, one more than it garnered last year. The 20in Cinema Display, 40GB iPod, Final Cut Pro and Soundtrack all claimed the 'best in their class' gong while the Power Mac G5 was given the Readers' Award for Hardware of the Year and the Special Award for Product of the Year. Canon and Adobe picked up two awards each; Canon for its PowerShot A70 camera and CanoScan LiDE 50 scanner and Adobe for Acrobat 6 Professional and Photoshop. ...more

Sun kick-starts Solaris x86 sales to corporates

Sun Microsystems is making another attempt to kick-start the use of its Solaris x86 operating system by offering deep discounts to corporate buyers. The move is part of the company's attempt to colonise the mid range server market, in particular those based on the AMD Opteron such as Sun's own Sun Fire V20z server. It will also be seen as an attempt to stave off the seemingly inexorable march of Red Hat and Suse Linux into Sun's traditional markets. ...more

Samsung to pay $300m price fixing fine

Korean electronics giant Samsung has agreed to pay a $300 million fine for its part in an international cartel to fix DRAM prices. The fine is the second largest in US history and the biggest penalty since 1999. Samsung has pleaded guilty to the charge that between 1 April 1999 to 15 June 2002, Samsung and its US subsidiary, Samsung Semiconductor, conspired with other DRAM manufacturers to fix the prices of DRAM. ...more