HP just unveiled its ProBook 4310s, making it available for purchase. This one is aimed squarely at business users. Under the hood you’ll find an Intel Core 2 Duo processor, Up to 8GB RAM, Intel GMA 4500MHD integrated/ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4330 graphics chip, Up to 500GB of hard drive space, DVD burner/Blu-ray combo, 4 or 8 cell battery, 13.3″ LED backlight display at 1,366 × 768 pixels, Optional 2-megapixel webcam and Wi-Fi.

The ProBook 4310s is powered by Windows Vista and prices start at $779 and go up from there, after you’ve thrown in the additional fingerprint reader, Bluetooth etc.

HP has unveiled their latest line of xw9400 workstations packing AMD’s six-core Opteron 2400 series. These processors are capable of giving a system as many as 12 cores. According to HP, the chips offer about 34% more performance per watt compared to earlier quad-cores, despite using a similar amount of energy.

Which Opterons are used isn’t mentioned, but clock speeds for the Opteron 2400 line range from 2.2GHz to 2.6GHz. The systems can also be outfitted with a high-end FirePro V7750 workstation-class graphics card from AMD.

HP announced a new range of desktop PCs, along with an update to their MediaSmart Server software for TouchSmart PCs. Slimline, Pavilion and Elite desktops have all been announced, together with a new Compaq Presario desktop.

AMD and Intel processors are available across the ranges, and Blu-ray is an option on some models. The Pavilion Slimline features an AMD Athlon single-core LE1660 CPU, 2GB of RAM and 320GB hard-drive, up to a Pentium dual-core CPU, with twice the RAM and a 500GB drive. The Pavilion has an AMD Sempron LE1300, while the Pavilion Elite starts with a dual-core AMD Phenom II X2 and goes all the way to an Intel Core i7-920 with 6GB of DDR3 RAM, 750GB storage and a 1GB ATI Radeon HD 4650 graphics card.

HP may have been late getting into the netbook party. However, it is making up for lost time by introducing all sorts of new models. HP announced this week a new netbook called the Mini 5101 series offered through its small and medium business site.

The machine has an Intel Atom N280 processor running at 1.66GHz and uses the Intel 945GSE chipset. Memory options include 1GB or 2GB of 533MHz DDR2 SDRAM. Storage options include 160GB, 250GB, and 320GB 7200 rpm HDDs or a 128GB SSD.

Summer has only just started for most students. Some students only got out of school this week. Despite that HP is already announced its back to school line up. Back to school isn’t something that students will want to think about right now, but most parents are already counting the days.

Among the offerings is the HP Pavilion dv6z Artist Edition notebook. The machine starts at $949 and includes all the features found in the dv6z plus and the machine sports the design that won the HP MTV notebook design contest.

HP just announced its new range of Electronic Skins, aka eSkins. eSkins will function as a new display technology to personalize consumer electronics. It’s a flexible and reflective color film that can be used on a wide range of devices. Anything from cellphones to digital cameras, MP3 players, netbooks, notebooks, you name it.

eSkins is capable of reflectively displaying icons and alpha-numeric characters to personalize nearly any device. It’s compatible with roll-to-roll plastic circuits, allowing it to merge with proprietary, electrically controllable “inks” to achieve print-like color performance and transparency. Visibility is said to be excellent, even under direct sunlight, and it can also turn transparent, to reveal the surface below.

HP was late getting in on the netbook game. There were a number of netbooks already on the market before HP debuted its first machine. HP is now adding several more netbooks to its lineup in an effort to grab a larger portion of the booming netbook market.

Among the new HP Mini models being added to the lineup today are the HP Mini 110 XP Edition, the Mini 110 Mi Edition, and the HP Mini 1101. The Mini 110 is available in pink chic, black swirl, and white swirl colors. The Mini 1101 is available in black swirl only.

A few weeks ago HP recalled 70,000 laptop batteries, but they aren’t done yet. They are recalling another 15,000 batteries sold in China. There aren’t any reports of actual fire or flames this time, but the batteries are prone to overheating, and can pose a fire hazard.

At the moment, details about the models affected are scarce, but the batteries were used in laptops manufactured between late 2007 and early 2008, and include models sold under the HP Pavilion and Compaq Presario brands.

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.