Best Buy, a large retail chain in the U.S., this week announced trade-in plan under which customers who acquired HD DVD players from one of its stores can bring them back and receive a certain sum for them. While the company claims that the program is in customers’ best interests, in reality the end-users will lose much more than they are going to get. Additionally, Best Buy will provide $50 gift cards to all of its HD DVD customers.

Best Buy will give $50 gift cards to customers who purchased an HD DVD player or Xbox 360 HD DVD add-on drive from its U.S. stores before February 23, 2008. Customers will get a gift card for each HD DVD device that they purchased. Through this program, Best Buy will distribute more than $10 million in gift cards to customers across the country.

(Full article ‘Best Buy Lets Customers to Get Rid of HD DVD or Receive $50 Gift Cards’)

The low-cost PC has found its market not in the developing world but, unexpectedly, in more mature markets, Intel has said.

The devices, often small portables capable of accessing the internet and with basic features, for example Intel’s Classmate PC and OLPC’s XO laptop, have in past years been targeted toward emerging markets in rural countries.

However, Intel thinks mature markets are the device’s next great opportunity.

Navin Shenoy, vice president and general manager at Intel Asia-Pacific, told Asia that the chipmaker is targeting its new line of low-power processors designed for low-cost PCs at both emerging and mature markets.

(Full article ‘Intel sees mature markets embracing low-cost PCs’)

Well-known manufacturer of high-performance desktop, notebook and entertainment systems, Alienware Company, announced that their desktop systems equipped with four GPUs thanks to ATI CrossFireX technology are now available for ordering. The new Alienware ALX CrossFireX desktop computer utilizes two ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 graphics cards, each housing two GPUs and a full 1GB of dedicated graphics memory – that’s 2GB of dedicated GDDR3 graphics memory.AMD recently enabled CrossFireX (Triple- and Quad-CrossFire) technology in its latest Catalyst 8.3 drivers, and Alienware couldn’t help taking advantage of this opportunity. (Full article ‘Alienware Announces Quad-Graphics Desktop’)

Samsung Electronics is the first hard drive manufacturer to ship a 500GB 2.5-inch drive. Samsung announced its drive was shipping in volume to OEMs and PC makers today. As you probably know, Hitachi GST and Fujitsu have also announced their upcoming new solutions already. Hitachi’s drive was supposed to ship in February, but is now expected to ship later this month. Fujitsu says its drive will ship in May.

However, both Hitachi and Fujitsu are taking a different approach to 500GB than Samsung. All three drive makers use three disk platters, but Hitachi and Fujitsu reach 500GB by expanding the height of the drive from 9.5mm – the common standard for most notebooks – to 12.5mm, a height that’s increasingly accommodated on larger, desktop-replacement laptop designs, but not necessarily on more general-use laptops.

(Full article ‘Samsung Ships Half-Terabyte Mobile Hard Drive’)