For awhile there batteries were getting recalled fairly often, but now it’s been quite awhile since we’ve seen a major recall involving laptop batteries. Sadly, its back in the news. Today, the US Consumer Product Safety Commission and Health Canada, in cooperation with Hewlett-Packard, has issued a voluntary recall of about 70,000 Li-ion batteries.

Apparently, these cells can “overheat, posing a fire and burn hazard to consumers,”. Thus far, the firm and CPSC have received two separate reports of batteries overheating and rupturing. The result is “flames/fire that caused minor property damage.”

I have never really understood why companies like Dell and HP never made a business notebook that was cool looking. Major computer markers always try to make consumer notebooks attractive, but the business machines were stodgy black boxes with the sex appeal of a tube sock.

HP is changing that with the introduction of its new HP ProBook series of notebook computers. The line has attractive colors with a choice of merlot or glossy finishes. The machines can be had in 14-inch, 15.6-inch, and 17-inch form factors. All of the machines can be fitted with HP Mobile Broadband using Gobi technology to allow the modem to operate on several broadband networks from different providers.

Just in time to compete with Dell’s Studio 15, HP is offering the Pavilion dv3t. It’s a 16:9 widescreen 13.3-inch, with a Core 2 Duo T6400, a Blu-ray option and a optional 9-cell battery that will give you up to 7 hours of battery life.

Some other features are a webcam, up to 500GB of hard drive space, and it comes in two flavors: Espresso black and Moonlight white. Prices start at $799.

Patent disputes are so common that many of us just overlook them today. It seems like each week a new dispute is filed between two companies. HP and Cornell University have been fighting it out in court over a patent infringement suit for a while now.

Cornell filed the suit alleging that HP was infringing on Cornell patents by selling HP PA-8000 microprocessors along with workstations and servers using the processors. A jury awarded Cornell $53 million to $184 million in damages.

At CES 2009 I spent some time in meetings with the guys from AMD. One of the products they were showing off at the time was the HP Pavilion DV2 ultra-portable notebook. The machine was the showpiece for a new AMD processor aimed at the ultra-portable market.

The DV2 uses the AMD Athlon Neo MV-40 CPU and has a 12.1-inch LED backlit LCD with a 1280 x 800 screen resolution. The little DV2 is not MacBook Air thin, but it is a svelte little beast. Measurements are 11.5-inches L x 9.5-inches D x 0.93 to 1.29-inches H and weighs 3.95 pounds.

Office workers who work in certain industries need special computers to get their work done. A standard desktop that is used for checking email and writing word documents in a normal office just won’t cut it in a graphics design or CAD department. For this type of environment, a powerful workstation computer is needed.

HP has announced its new Z series workstations today that use the new Intel Xeon 5500 series processors. The new series includes the Z800, Z600, and Z400 workstations that are aimed at the CAD, engineering, medical imaging, finance and oil/gas industries.

HP just debuted its new Pavilion Elite m9600 series with Core i7 processors. HP gives you a decent amount of power for the price. The base configuration gets you a Core i7 920 2.66Ghz processor, 4GB of RAM, 500GB hard drive, NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GS graphics and a DVD burner, all for $950.

You can kick that up to a Core i7 940 2.93GHz processor, 12GB of RAM, a couple of 1TB hard drives, 1GB ATI Radeon HD 4850 graphics and a Blu-ray burner. HP also has four new 16:9 monitors, the 18.5-inch w1858, 20-inch 2009m, 21.5-inch 2159m and 23-inch w2338h. The latter two include HDMI inputs, and the prices range from $170 to $300.

Boston-Power isn’t really a household name at this point, but the company has some very cool battery tech that promises to make the battery in your laptop work for three times as long before you need to get a new battery. The average laptop battery starts to storage capacity in only a year, yet the Boston-Power Sonata battery promises to last for 3 years with full charge capacity.

I mentioned in December 2008 that HP would be the first computer maker to offer the Sonata batteries for sale. At the time, HP didn’t offer any pricing information for the upgraded battery packs.

Netbooks are one of the hottest items in the computer market right now. According to a recent report from Pricegrabber.com one in ten Internet users owns a netbook. Many users have found that a netbook provides the performance they need for normal computing tasks and is cheaper than many normal notebooks.

HP has one of the popular netbooks on the market called the HP Mini 1000. If you are in the market for a HP netbook, this may be the time to buy. The HP Mini 1000 model 1010NR is available at Staples with a coupon for $75 off.

HP intros the new all-in-one PC. The HP DX9000 is actually a business version of the HP TouchSmart IQ506 PC. The computer comes equipped with the HP Power Manager, an energy-savings tool that allows you to manage the energy used by computers, which sets it apart from it’s predecessor.

It also comes with HP Total Care Advisor, a diagnostic tool that may reduce IT requests and CarePack Services and aftermarket warranty.

There are some things that virtually all gaming notebooks have in common, one of them being the placement of the track pad. Laptop Magazine got its hands on a new concept notebook form HP called the Firefly with Voodoo DNA.

The gaming machine is very slick and offers up some interesting firsts in the notebook and gaming notebook genre. One of the most notable features is the 17-inch primary display and the 4.3-inch secondary display under it. How useful a 4.3-inch LCD with a resolution of 800 x 480 can be is a big question mark. The main LCD has a 1920 x 1200 resolution.

With all of the digital content in the average home today from digital photos to digital home movies shot with a camcorder there is lots of content that users want to watch and enjoy around the home. The catch is that the digital content is often stuck inside of one computer on the network with no easy method of accessing the content from elsewhere.

HP has introduced a pair of new home servers for Mac and PC users. The HP MediaSmart Server will be offered in two models including the ex485 and ex487. HP says that the server will automatically organize files across the network and stream media across the home network and the Internet.

It seems like every time I go to a party or an event where people are taking pictures more and more folks are taking pictures with their mobile phones. The iPhone is one of the most popular devices on the market and as such, many of these mobile phone photos are taken on the iPhone.

HP has announced a new app for the iPhone that is available now on the App Store for free. The app is called HP iPrint Photo and allows users to print images directly from their iPhone to Wi-Fi equipped HP printers.

HP has announced the TouchSmart tx2. The laptop will be able to distinguish between voluntary pinching with two fingers and any accidental input. You can also use the bundled stylus to enter data. The tx2’s 12.1-inch screen is fully multi-touched up, but not in the iPhone/iPod touch way. It uses capacitive touch, which enables more accurate input, also brushes and swipes and two-handed gestures. You can use two hands to crop photos for instance.

Some other features are: integrated digital TV tuner, dual core AMD Turion X2 processor and ATI Radeon 3200 graphics. The screen can be twisted and folded all the way around; converting the standard notebook into a tablet PC. With a digital pen you can make notes and your writing will be converted to editable text. The HP TouchSmart tx2 will be available in January 2009 for about $1,150.

The notebook market is booming right now despite the bad economy. Netbooks are one of the hottest sellers in the notebook category thanks to the typically lower selling price. The netbook has come a long way since Asus pioneered the genre with its Eee and today most PC makers have a netbook of their own.

One of the newest netbooks on the market comes from HP. HP announced today that it has added three new netbook models to its Mini 1000 line. The Mini 1000 weighs slightly more than two pounds and is less than one inch thick. Two screen sizes are now available including an 8.9-inch and a 10.2-inch LCD, The screen resolution is 1024 x 600 and uses LED backlighting.