The following symptoms apply to Pavilion dv2000 and Presario v3000 notebooks:

• The notebook does not detect wireless networks and the wireless adapter is not detected in the Device Manager.
• There is no video on the computer LCD panel or external monitor.

The following symptoms apply to the dv6000, dv9000 and v6000 series notebooks:

• The notebook does not detect wireless networks and the wireless adapter is not detected in the Device Manager.
• There is no video on the computer LCD panel or external monitor.
• The notebook has no power and no active LEDs.
• The notebook does not start.
• The battery charge indicator light does not turn on when the battery is installed and the AC adapter is connected.
• The notebook issues a single beep during boot indicating no power.
• The external monitor functions but there is no image on the notebook LCD panel.

The affected models are:

• Inspiron 1420
• Latitude D630
• Latitude D630c
• Dell Precision M2300
• Vostro Notebook 1310
• Vostro Notebook 1400
• Vostro Notebook 1510
• Vostro Notebook 1710
• XPS 1330
• XPS 1530

If the GPU is failing, an unlucky owner of one of these notebooks that features a Nvidia GPU may experience some of these symptoms during early stages of failure :

• Multiple images
• Random characters on the screen
• Lines on the screen
• No video

Dell recommends the owners to update their system BIOS.  It is good to see at last somebody acting on this issue, even if their solution is just to update the fan management to have it started at a lower temperature on a reduced speed.  This will reduce the probability of failure or just postpone it.  It does not solve the real problem as the issue is hardware.  You can imagine that owners are not really happy with this as they do not want to postpone a possible failure so their notebook could crash after the warranty expire term. They would rather prefer it to have it fixed within the warranty period.

In the mean time Nvidia, the one that is to blame in this case, is announcing the new era  of notebook PC gaming, featuring advanced rendering and physics effects that will transform gaming beyond what consumers know today.  This evolution is a new generation of notebook PCs equipped with NVIDIA’s newest GeForce® 9800M and 9700M GPUs and featuring NVIDIA’s PhysX™ physics engine.  I guess we really needed a new era as this one is kind of faulty.

Nvidia has not disclosed yet what chips are affected by the “certain die/packaging material” problem.

““While we have not been able to determine a root cause for these failures, testing suggests a weak material set of die/package combination, system thermal management designs, and customer use patterns are contributing factors.”

Besides not assuming the blame Nvidia sends an invitation for spreading rumours and just drives the customers crazy.  An article published by The Inquirer states that the failure is not generated by overheating and failures occur due to numerous temperature variations : cold-hot-cold-hot and that the affected GPU’s are G84 and G86 (8400 and 8600 Geforce video cards). Due to the power management, laptops throttle down much more than desktops. This makes the affected mobile GPU’s to fail sooner.

On the other hand G84 and G86 are still present in various Dell and Apple notebook models, just to name two big players, so it’s hard to belive they would continue to sell notebooks with a faulty part.  Nvidia just needs to clear all the rumours and to deal with all the mess.

Yahoo! announced the launch of Search BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) making another move with their open strategy . BOSS is a new, open web services platform that offers programmatic access to the entire Yahoo! Search index via an API. BOSS allows developers to take advantage of Yahoo!’s production search infrastructure and technology, combine that with their own unique assets, and create their own search experiences by utilizing the same infrastructure and technology that powers Yahoo! Search.  During this time Microsoft - Yahoo discutions got a new chapter with the same ending, Yahoo rejected the offer again.

Just as a note: iPhone 3G is out, after days of waiting in lines in front of the stores, after the O2 servers crashed due to the high number of requests and lots of stories. I’m already bored of iPhone 3G news.

Linda is the codename for W580’s successor: W595. W959 has the same design as his predecesor and  features the Walkman 3 player, as well as an FM radio. It is based on the A2 software platform, and will come bundled with the location services, including Google Maps. W595 will also feature a fully-specced 3-dimensional accelerometer. It is expected that W595 will be officially announced by the end of July.

Patti is the codename for W902 which is in fact a C902 walkman branded. Dedicated music controls have been added. Also S302 got into the same walkman branding process. The result is W302 (you would never guess) codenamed Feng. Feng features a 2 mega pixel fixed focus camera, 176 x 220 pixels display and it runs the A2 software platform.

An interesting rumor is about the legendary T610. It seems that Sony Ericsson is preparing a remake codenamed Remi. The new T610 would be a HSDPA-enabled, slim candy bar phone based on the W890 hardware platform running the A2 software platform. Parts of the body have to be aluminium, T610-like.

Adobe Systems  announced, on Tuesday, a plan that involves Google and Yahoo and aims to improve search results for dynamic Web content Relevant Products/Services and rich Internet applications (RIAs).  The search engines will be able to index the Flash file format and uncover information currently undiscoverable by robots.

ITunes got a new competitor as Real Networks announced the opening of its MP store, Rhapsody. The new service will allow visitors to listen a full preview of a melody before buying. First 100,000 people who sign up for an account will get $10 credit, that is enough to buy an album.

Just a few days after Bill Gates’s last day at Microsoft, the official blog of the Live Search team at Microsoft announced that they reached an agreement to acquire Powerset. Poweset is a San Francisco-based search and natural language company. According to Microsoft “That shared vision is to take Search to the next level by adding understanding of the intent and meaning behind the words in searches and webpages.”

NVIDIA Second Quarter Fiscal 2009 Business Update revealed a problem that might affect a significant quantity of older mobile GPUs.  “NVIDIA plans to take a one-time charge from $150 million to $200 million against cost of revenue for the second quarter to cover anticipated warranty, repair, return, replacement and other costs and expenses, arising from a weak die/packaging material set in certain versions of its previous generation GPU and MCP products used in notebook systems. Certain notebook configurations with GPUs and MCPs manufactured with a certain die/packaging material set are failing in the field at higher than normal rates.“  There is no information about the series affected by this problem but Nvidia released an updated driver that will start the fan sooner, at a lower temperature , to prevent overheating. Unofficially there was noticed that many customers complained about 8400GS overheating, and after the Nvidia release the  driver update,  Dell updated the driver for 8400GS GPU. This makes 8400GS the prime susspect.

It is official, Mozilla Firefox 3.0 holds the Guinness World Record for the most downloaded software in 24 hours with 8,002,530 downloads.

“With more than 15,000 improvements, Firefox 3 is faster, safer and smarter than before.”

It looks nicer , it seems to be faster, it has some new tricks that makes it smarter and although a possible vulnerability  was reported at a short time after it was releases since it affects also the older version some people think it was discovered before 17th and reported latter to gain more attention  (The Conspiracy Theory against the Download Day)

Sony Ericsson has officially announced its new Cyber-shot top model: C905 that features a 8.1 mega-pixels camera with image stabilization and face recognition. Also F305 the first member of a new portable gaming series that features motion gaming was revealed.
On the other hand it seems that P5 code named Paris and G702 code named BeiBei are canceled. It has been suggested P5 was canceled due to a large volume of criticism as it was based on an old architecture and the specifications were already deprecated .

AMD has launched its new generation of  graphic cards the Radeon HD 4000 series featuring the new RV770 chipset. The first model is HD 4850 that will be followed in a short time by HD 4870.  After first reviews, HD 4850 is quite impressive and  the conclusion is that the landscape of the mid-range to high-end GPU market is going to be shifting dramatically in the coming weeks

But a regular profile does not act as forwarding e-mail address. this means you will not be able to get receive emails sent on your alias instead of your ID. Maybe you have different categories of contacts—like Personal and Business—and you’d like to separate the addresses you use with each. Having two accounts is not comfortable. Maybe you don’t like your old address anymore and you are stuck with it cause you can not change your username and you do not want to start a new account cause you would lose your old contacts. In this case you can create an extra mail address.

An extra mail address is a special kind of profile that you can use specifically with Yahoo! Mail.
It is a second Yahoo! Mail address that you can use with your existing Yahoo! Mail account. It’s not a separate Yahoo! ID, and it’s not a separate Yahoo! Mail account. It’s just another address you can use to send and receive email, and any messages you get go into the same Inbox you already use.

If you already have other profiles set up, you can choose to turn one of them into your extra mail address. At this point the extra address will act as a valid email address and will have all the features of a regular profile. You will have a single inbox for your yahoo email address and the extra address and you will be able to select the from one of them as sender address address when you compose a new email.

To create an extra mail address

• Login into your email account
• Click Options in the upper-right corner of your Mail page and select Mail Options.
• From the list on the left, click Accounts.
• The second section of this page is “Extra Mail Address.” Click Get Started and follow the instructions to create an extra mail address.

After all the rumors in the last two months Sony Ericsson top Cyber-shot C905 is now official : “C905 is Sony Ericsson’s first Cyber-shot slider and its most advanced camera phone yet. With an 8.1 megapixel camera and real camera flash amongst its cutting-edge capabilities, it offers easy photo-taking in a phone that derives its looks from a digital camera and offers the picture quality to match.” It is expected to hit the market on the 4th quarter. Besides the already known features that leaked on web: built-in accelerometer for screen auto rotation, TV-out port, 2.4 inch display, built in GPS, a awesome camera with face detection, image stabilization xenon flash, the standard memory stick micro card support, bluetooth 2.0 with ADP and the radio with RDS, the official announcement manage yet to surprise with the Wi-Fi feature. C905 will be available in Night Black, Ice Silver, Copper Gold.