Quad-core processors have not yet been combined with 4G LTE in smartphones, but that could change soon.

Sony said Thursday it will pull out of its over three-year LCD TV panel joint venture with Sharp, part of Sony's ongoing attempts to reform its foundering TV business.

It's official. Hewlett-Packard will cut 27,000 employees as part of its long-term restructuring plan, the company said when it announced quarterly financial results.

Touchscreen laptops and tablets with the upcoming Windows 8 OS will be priced higher than their non-touchscreen counterparts, according to Dell's CEO, Michael Dell.

The number of options available for Mac users to buy Thunderbolt cables from outside Apple is growing, with companies announcing longer and competitively priced cables that will also work with upcoming Windows PCs with Thunderbolt ports.

In case you haven't noticed, memory prices have dropped through the floor. As such, I've been busily upgrading every computer I can get my hands on. For example, my 2009 MacBook Pro has been maxed-out to 8GB, which involved buying two 4GB SODIMM modules. The cost? Just US$97. I dare say I could have got them even cheaper if I'd shopped around.

QUESTION: My Windows 7 Home Premium computer has a quad-core processor and 4GB of RAM. I've not found any advantage to using four cores. How can I use the processor more effectively and allocate different processes to the individual cores?

Since the advent of the first modern smartphone--arguably the original Apple iPhone in 2007--the power of these mobile computing devices that also happen to make phone calls has advanced by leaps and bounds.

If multitouch display technology is proliferating, haptic feedback is helping to fuel the trend. Haptics provide tactile feedback to your fingers as you touch a display by vibrating all or part of the display surface.

Chip design firm ARM grabbed the spotlight at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week when Microsoft announced that its new Windows OS would work on the ARM architecture. ARM processors go into most of the world's smartphones and tablets, and with Windows support, the company can now focus on the wider market for PCs, where it has virtually no presence. Nvidia also announced that it was building its first ARM-based chip, code-named Denver, for PCs and servers.

The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) isn't just all tablet, cameras, and laptops; there's plenty of news for the PC component geek, too, ranging from tiny flash drives that pack a lot of heat to the hand-held gaming console.

Cringely here, reporting from CES in Vegas, where rude beasts walk the earth (at least, the ones that don't crawl or slither), impeded in their forward progress only by hip-deep mounds of tablet PCs. Everyone appears to be tapping, swiping, and gesturing on some kind of sleek black touch-sensitive device, when they're not squinting at blurry 3D screens waiting for their turn with the polarized glasses.