The acquisition will enable Stone to offer a larger range of specialist high-end Notebook products to its public sector customers.

I’m not quite sure why public sector workers need high end gaming laptops though?

The aquisition is good news for Rock customers (like me) as Nick Boardman, former Rock Chief Executive commented:

I am delighted that Stone’s backing gives us a tremendous opportunity to build on our market leading credentials in the sector from a much stronger financial base. In particular, for me, it is vital that customers’ historic warranties will be supported going forward. Everyone can continue to buy Rock products with confidence.

Rock had been put into administration on the 8th May.

To manage this Dell is apparently planning to cut four XPS gaming desktops, and update the Alienware lineup with new designs. Which casts doubt over the future of the XPS M1730 gaming laptop (the first to feature the Ageia PhysX PPU), which could also recieve the chop.

The laptop features a 17-inch display with a native 1920-by-1200-resolution, a 2.4-GHz Core 2 Duo T8300 Intel CPU, 4GB of RAM, a 320GB hard drive, and nVidia’s GeForce Go 8800M GTS graphics board.

Overall they didn’t seem to like it, complaining about the sound in particular. The frame rates aren’t that hot either (at top resolution on the latest games), but at just $2,000 it’s reasonably priced for a gaming laptop.

Toshiba’s management said it will put its SpursEngine SE1000 chip into multimedia-oriented notebooks - probably the company’s flagship Qosmio G40 - during 2008. The SpursEngine SE1000 packs in four of Cell’s Synergistic Processing Element (SPE) cores. Cell has up to eight SPEs to handle vector data, along with a PowerPC-based general purpose computing core for everything else.

Each SPE is a SIMD RISC processor specialising in single- and double-precision floating point maths. The SE1000 also has a memory controller on board that links the SPEs to 128MB of Rambus XDR memory over a bus capable of pushing data at 12.8GB/s.

The chip is capable of MPEG 2 and H.264 encoding and decoding at 1080p full HD resolution, and those are the applications it’s pitching the product at rather than 3D graphics. Toshiba has previously announced it’s partnering with the likes of CyberLink, Leadtek and Corel - all makes of widely used PC-oriented video playback apps - to add support for the SE1000 to their software.

The drive connects across a SATA 3Gb/s interface, or alternatively 1.5Gb/s for the models that feature on-board automatic data encryption technology (not really something you need in a gaming laptop).

The Travelstar 7k320 is expected to cost around $220 (roughly £110).

The official announcement explains:

The failure of Rock is partly attributed to the cash flow difficulties faced as a result of stock misappropriation by a former employee. This led to suppliers reducing credit limits, further adversely impacting upon cash flows. As a result of the recent difficulties faced by Rock in obtaining regular supplies of key components, Rock had effectively ceased to trade prior to the Administrators appointment.

You can read the rest on their website here. It’s a great shame as I’m very happy with my Rock laptop (I’m writing this post on it).

By default it ships with a version of Linux, but the supplied driver CD includes all the drivers you need to install and run Windows XP. Also included is everything you’d need access the Internet on the move.

This is the first manufacture we’ve heard of offering it as standard, it’ll be interesting to see if this helps it take off.

Still might be just what you want if you’re into platform gaming, me I prefer quake so I’ll stick to my trusted mouse.

I’m not really aware of any games that support it yet though, are you?