Dell has commenced shipments of the new addition to its XPS desktop line-up, according to this report from TechConnect Magazine.

The XPS 430, seen above, goes for a striking gloss finish and packs in an Intel X48 motherboard solution, forming the foundation for either a Core 2 Quad or Extreme CPU. 6 or 8 GB of DDR3 RAM and one of a multitude of AMD graphics solutions, also helps in the customisability stakes.

There is nothing like having your Anti Virus decide that a Windows system file is a virus as certain XP users of AVG8 found out on Tuesday.

It seems that when coupled with the Dutch, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish language versions of Windows XP AVG 8 would tell the user that they had a Trojan and recommend removal of the offending bug.

Unfortunately this left most system completely unusable either in a reboot loop or unable to boot at all.

Smooth Creations are known to put together some of the most elite and glorifying PC packages (both in the desktop and notebook realm) out there. Their attention to detail is staggering and pictures on the web showing off some of their many airbrushed designs may be pretty awesome to look at, but after seeing some of their systems in the flesh I can assure you no photo does the quality of their work justice.

With that said, the company is now dabbling in the world of HTPC setups and they're doing it with a hell of gust. Today they launch the Smooth HD SCinema HT package which doesn't just include a HTPC on steroids, but all the other necessary items to fill an empty lounge with top quality home theater gear, should you be needing the speakers and TV as well.

AMD will not be taking any chances against NVIDIA's 55nm GT200 refresh, according to this report from HARDSPELL.

Whilst it was suggested that the Sunnyvale, CA based company planned to unleash its next-generation RV870 solution in Q1 2009, it is now claimed that a refresh of the RV770 GPU shall fill the void and, at the same time, carry AMD's torch against NVIDIA's GT206.

A covert shot of NVIDIA's upcoming 55nm GT206 GPU, has shown up on HARDSPELL, courtesy of INPAI.COM.CN.

The 55nm refresh of NVIDIA's GT200 GPU shall power the company's forthcoming GTX 270 and GTX 290 SKUs and it is claimed, that the GTX 290 shall feature 240SP, just like its 65nm counterpart.

NVIDIA has rolled out another super powered, but also super expensive Quadro series graphics card today, dubbed the Quadro FX 5800. At a price tag just shy of $3,500 U.S. this card is purely for the professional/workstation crowd and boasts some pretty mean specs.

This card is the world's first to feature a whopping 4GB of memory and offers up to 102GB/s of memory bandwidth along with a fill rate of 52 billion texels/sec and 300 million triangles/sec. It also features 240 CUDA parallel processing cores and is ideally suited for oil and gas exploration, medical imaging, styling and design, and scientific visualization.

Seagate has today announced that it has started shipping a new family of Momentus series 2.5-inch hard disks. What's mostly different about these particular drives is that they are self-encrypting and offer an added level of security to notebooks. Seagate has chosen to join forces with McAfee who supply the client side encryption management software that interacts with the embedded hardware encryption on the drives.

There are four drives announced today, with bigger capacity models in the works for early next year. These drives comprise both 5400 and 7200RPM models, both in capacities of 160 and 320GB. The 5400RPM drives have 8MB of cache whilst the 7200RPM drives have 16.

You can learn more about the new Momentus 5400 FDE.3 and 7200 FDE (full-disk encryption) hard disks within Seagate's official announcement here folks.

Since the entrance of Gainward (and Palit) into the realm of AMD graphics solutions, we've seen a positive increase in the creativity levels displayed by the Sunnyvale, CA based company's AIBs.

As this report from TechConnect Magazine conveys, PowerColor has been hard at work to bring GDDR4 memory to an HD 4850 offering near you. Whilst the HD 4850 was relegated to GDDR3 memory and not, the GDDR5 brethren bestowed on the HD 4870, PowerColor has worked to partially readdress the balance.

This is Bill, he is my virtual friend. See Bill on his virtual Cell Phone? Boy when I was a kid they kept telling me to live in the real world. But I guess no one gave the gang over at VMWare that talk.

VMWare (an EMC Company) have added another platform to their virtual list. Now they are going to virtualize the mobile phone platform. That is right, you will be able to run multiple OSes on your smart phone now. The new technology is called MVP (Mobile Virtualization Platform).

MVP information here

The Inquirer has some interesting news up about the possibility of Google opening up its development platform. It seems they listened to a speech given by Dave Girouard a Google Big Wig at the Web 2.0 conference and came away all bubbly and warm inside.

The wax on enthusiastically about how this move (if real) will change the world of the web. Although I am not convinced that they (Google) will truly ever completely open up the development stack to outside developers it will be interesting to see what they do now that this comment is on the table.

Read more here