Mac sales slide

A report from research firm IDC states that Mac sales in the US were up 31% in the fourth quarter of 2009, but still fell to fifth place in the US due to sales of cheap Windows PCs, reports Computerworld.

Rival analysts at Gartner put Apple's year-over-year growth at 23%, and also put Apple in fifth place, behind Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Acer and Toshiba. Apple's new position is down one from the same quarter in 2008.

"The US market last quarter continued to be very price-driven," says Mikako Kitagawa, a Gartner analyst. "If a company is not in the low-priced market, it's absolutely difficult for it to increase market share. And Apple did not do as well as others in share because of its prices."

Nvidia has released a range of graphics processors aimed specifically at the notebook market, says Techspot.

The graphics card manufacturer released seven GeForce 300M-series GPUs across the high performance, performance, and mainstream segments, although new chips aren't different from the 200M series parts they are replacing.

Rather, the architecture is exactly the same, with the only difference being they have optimised performance or power consumption levels. The GTS 360M uses the same number of cores (96), the same 128-bit bus width and support for GDDR5 memory clocked up to 2GHz as the GTS 260M, but is capable of processing slightly more gigaflops (413 versus 396).

Hewlett Packard has unveiled a workstation and two small desktops that include the first ever toxin-free Windows PC, according to HTLounge.

The 8000f Elite is touted to be the first Windows desktop free of toxins as it does not use polyvinyl chloride (PVC) or brominated flame retardants (BFRs) in its manufacture design, even down to the mouse and the AC adapter.

Its power supply is reported to be 87% efficient and meets the most severe Energy Star standards for power. The system is small enough to provide significant savings on materials compared to the tower version.