Intel mislays its mail, ASUS batteries fail

AMD says Intel loves the delete key a little too much. Several hundred e-mails from top Intel insiders have gone missing due to “inadvertent mistakes,” which, the company assures us, have nothing to do with AMD's antitrust suit against it. Sounds like Intel is stealing — I mean, inadvertently borrowing — a page from Microsoft, which mislaid 35 weeks' worth of e-mails after being sued by Burst.com in 2002. Intel spokesficials told The Wall Street Journal “there is no evidence … any relevant e-mails or documents have been lost.” Isn’t evidence supposed to disappear when you destroy it?

Kicking ASUS and taking names: John M. was quite taken with his ASUS Z71V laptop until its battery went belly up after six months and ASUS (rhymes with “snafus”) told him no replacements were available. He says his Z71V works fine on AC power; unplugged, it’s a $2,000 doorstop — and so are the ones he has recommended to his clients. ASUS admits it got a bad batch of batteries and says it will replace them gratis, after its shipment of replacement units arrives at the end of the month. The good news? So far, no explosions have been reported.

Je suis avec stupide: Brave souls who upgraded to Office 2007 may be hip deep in merde — at least when they try to check their spelling inside Outlook Express. Office 2K7 nukes all of OE's spell-check libraries, save the one for la belle Francaise. However, there’s no truth Microsoft did this in exchange for the French government harassing Apple about iTunes.

Unnatural hacks: After 12 years, convicted “hacker” Randal Lee Schwartz has been cleared. In 1995 the security consultant installed a password cracker on computers at Intel to demonstrate how lax its internal security was; instead he was convicted under Oregon's Computer Crime Law. Now that Schwartz is a non-felon again, maybe Intel will hire him to manage its e-mail.

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