“The PC market in Western Europe suffered from weak demand in both the professional and consumer sectors, a market which also faced inventory issues caused by overstocking in 2010,” said Meike Escherich, principal analyst at Gartner. “The much anticipated uptake in the professional segment, in the wake of migration to Windows 7, was subdued by the negative economic outlook. PC shipments in the professional segment declined 9 percent in the second quarter of 2011. The biggest decline continued to come from the consumer segment which decreased 27 percent year-on-year.”

PC shipments in the UK totaled 2.5 million units in the second quarter of 2011, a decline of 15 percent compared with the same period in 2010. The professional market remained weak with a decline of 13.5 percent. The migration to Windows 7 and replacement of aging PCs continued to be muted by the negative economic outlook.

“PCs are not attracting consumers' disposable income, particularly in light of alternative devices. While remaining an important device to consumers, there are few compelling technological reasons to drive PC replacements,” said Isabelle Durand, principal analyst at Gartner.

PC shipments in France totaled 2.3 million units in the second quarter of 2011, a decline of 17.8 percent compared with the same period a year ago. It performed below expectations and remained weak due to slow consumer demand and lower PC shipments.

“For the fourth consecutive quarter, the PC market in France showed decline,” said Durand. “It also exhibited the weakest PC growth of the three major countries in Western Europe in the second quarter of 2011.”

The consumer market declined 33 percent partly due to the rise in popularity of media tablets and smartphones, which impacted PC purchases. The professional market increased 9 percent in the second quarter of 2011 but volumes were not significant enough to compensate for the drop in consumer demand. The mobile PC market accounted for 67 percent of total PC shipments, with volumes declining 18 percent. Desktop PCs declined 18 percent year-on-year. Of the total mobile segment, mini-notebook sales declined 49 percent in the second quarter of 2011. Apple made its entry in the top five PC vendors ranking in the second quarter, and it was the only top five vendors to exhibit shipment growth.

“The French PC market is expected to improve in the second half of 2011, with more attractive back-to-school promotions compared to a year ago and product refreshes,” said Durand. “However, the availability of new media tablet models will lead to a price battle in the mobile market. Some level of government austerity measures due to the recent economic issues could also impact consumer confidence and spending in France.”

PC shipments in Germany totaled 2.4 million units in the second quarter of 2011, a decrease of 13.3 percent compared with the same period in 2010. This marks the second consecutive quarter of double-digit shipment decline. The PC market continued to be hit by poor mobile PC sales that decreased 14 percent. Desktop PC shipments declined 12 percent in the quarter. The double-digit fall in mobile PC sales was mainly caused by a steep decline in mini-notebook shipments, which decreased 43 percent.

HP continued to lead in the German PC market as it accounted for 13.3 percent of PC shipments in the second quarter of 2011. Demand in the professional PC market has improved as organizations released budgets to migrate aging PCs to Windows 7. HP in particular seemed to benefit from this upturn in the professional market.

“Given the hype around media tablets such as the iPad, retailers were very conservative in placing orders for PCs,” said Escherich. “Instead, many of them wanted to secure space for media tablets.”

PC shipments in the second quarter of 2011 declined in Western Europe. The only real bright spot was Apple. The company made its entry in the top five PC vendors ranking. Photo: www.imagine-your-world.com

Windows 7 will become the leading operating system worldwide in the PC installed base, running on 42 percent of PCs in use by the end of 2011. Gartner's latest PC OS forecast shows 94 percent of new PCs will be shipped with Windows 7 in 2011.

"Steady improvements in IT budgets in 2010 and 2011 are helping to accelerate the deployment of Windows 7 in enterprise markets in the U.S. and Asia/Pacific, where Windows 7 migrations started in large volume from 4Q10," said Annette Jump, research director at Gartner. "However, the economic uncertainties in Western Europe, political instability in selected Middle East and Africa (MEA) countries and the economic slowdown in Japan after the earthquake and tsunami in March 2011 will likely lead to slightly late and slow deployment for Windows 7 across those regions."

The forecast assumes that Windows 7 is likely to be the last version of Microsoft OS that gets deployed to everybody through big corporate wide migration. In the future, many organizations will also use alternative client computing architectures for standard PCs with Windows OS, and move toward virtualization and cloud computing in the next five years.

"By the end of 2011, nearly 635 million new PCs worldwide are expected to be shipped with Windows 7. Many enterprises have been planning their deployment of Windows 7 for the last 12 to 18 months, and are now moving rapidly to Windows 7," Jump said.

Shipments of Apple iMacs and Mac OS share on new PCs have seen increases in the last 12 months. The Mac OS was shipped with 4 percent of new PCs worldwide in 2010 versus 3.3 percent in 2008. Mac OS is forecast to be on 4.5 percent of PCs in 2011, and grow to 5.2 percent of new PCs in 2015. Shipments will grow stronger in mature markets where consumers are buying into the Apple product ecosystem.

"The adoption of Mac PCs and Mac OS is a result of Apple's ability to grow well above the market average in the last 12 to 24 months, thanks to its ease of use from the user interface (UI) point of view and ease of integration with other Apple devices, such as the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch," Jump said.

The Mac OS share still varies greatly by region, as Apple has much stronger presence in North America and Western Europe. The fastest growth is expected to happen in selected emerging countries, where Apple and Mac OS are growing from a small base.

Gartner does not expect Chrome OS, Android or webOS to get any significant market share on PCs in the next few years. Analysts believe that to get any consideration as an alternative for a traditional PC, lighter OSs will first need to get strong positions on emerging client devices such as Web books and media tablets. Even then, it is unlikely that they will have any impact on Microsoft and Windows OS's hold on positions on traditional professional PCs in the time frame of the current forecast. This is because of application compatibility issues and the high proportion of Windows-specific applications within many enterprises.

Gartner estimates that only in 2012 will the market reach the point of crossover between Windows-specific and OS-agnostic applications for enterprises, as 50 percent of the applications will be OS-agnostic. In the consumer space, the company believes that the proportion of OS-agnostic applications is already above the Windows-specific applications. This could help Chrome OS and Android make inroads into the consumer space in the next three to five years.

“As we work to protect our users and their information, we sometimes discover unusual patterns of activity. Recently, we found some unusual search traffic while performing routine maintenance on one of our data centers. After collaborating with security engineers at several companies that were sending this modified traffic, we determined that the computers exhibiting this behavior were infected with a particular strain of malicious software, or malware,” says Damian Menscher on the Google security blog. “This particular malware causes infected computers to send traffic to Google through a small number of intermediary servers called “proxies.” We hope that by taking steps to notify users whose traffic is coming through these proxies, we can help them update their antivirus software and remove the infections.”

A fake antivirus program that has been in circulation for a while seems to be the source of the infection. A couple million computers are affected by the malware, Google says. About 15 percent of all malware in circulation today is based on fake antivirus software, according to Cnet.com.

“By its nature, cybercriminals are depending upon a computer-using public that knows enough to realize they need antivirus software to help keep their computers safe, but ignorant enough to not understand how malware works,” Symantec says on its antivirus blog. “For instance, there’s absolutely no way a paid advertisement on a Web site (whether a display ad or a pop-up ad) can determine if a single computer has a virus. However, people will still click on an ad that says ‘Your computer needs to run a scan immediately! Click here to download our antivirus software!’ This type of social engineering is known as scareware.”

Google will continue putting warning messages at the top of search results if it suspects that the computer has been infected. A link connects the user to a Google page that can help people to update their antivirus software and clean their machine.

“In the meantime, we've been able to successfully warn hundreds of thousands of users that their computer is infected,” Google says. “These are people who otherwise may never have known.”

Symantec is also offering free antivirus scans through the Norton Security Scanner. The Norton Power Eraser can detect and eliminate deeply embedded and difficult to remove crimeware that traditional virus scanning doesn’t always detect. Since the program uses aggressive methods to detect these threats, there is a risk that it can select some legitimate programs for removal. Users should use the tool only after they have exhausted other options. More information is available on our download page here.

The illustration shows a physician visiting patients in medieval times in a copperplate engraving by J. Ch. Thiemen. Photo: Public Domain

NVMM technologies, such as phase-change memory, hold great promise to replace conventional dynamic random access memory (DRAM) in the main memory of computers. NVMM would allow computers to start instantly, and can fit more memory into the same amount of space used by existing technologies. However, NVMM poses a security risk.

Conventional DRAM main memory does not store data once the computer is turned off. That means, for example, that it doesn’t store your credit card number and password after an online shopping spree. NVMM, on the other hand, retains all user data in main memory even years after the computer is turned off. This feature could give criminals access to your personal information or other data if your laptop or smart phone were stolen. And, because the data in the NVMM is stored in main memory, it cannot be encrypted using software. Software cannot manage main memory functions, because software itself operates in main memory.

“We could use hardware to encrypt everything,” explains Dr. Yan Solihin, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at NC State, describing hardware encryption system called i-NVMM, “but then the system would run very slowly - because it would constantly be encrypting and decrypting data. Instead, we developed an algorithm to detect data that is likely not needed by the processor. This allows us to keep 78 percent of main memory encrypted during typical operation, and only slows the system’s performance by 3.7 percent.”

The i-NVMM tool has two additional benefits. First, its algorithm also detects idleness. That means any data not currently in use is automatically encrypted. This makes i-NVMM even more secure than DRAM. Second, while 78 percent of the main memory is encrypted when the computer is in use, the remaining 22 percent is encrypted when the computer is powered down.

“Basically, unless someone accesses your computer while you’re using it, all of your data is protected,” Solihin says. i-NVMM relies on a self-contained encryption engine that is incorporated into a computer’s memory module – and does not require changes to the computer’s processors. That means it can be used with different processors and different systems. “We’re now seeking industry partners who are interested in this technology,” Solihin says.

The paper, “i-NVMM: A Secure Non-Volatile Main Memory System with Incremental Encryption,” will be presented June 6 at the International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA) in San Jose.

Advanced Credit Cards with smart-card capabilities use an embedded chip to compute cryptographic algorithms. Photo: www.imagine-your-world.com

Over the course of several years, Dell shipped almost 12 million OptiPlex desktop computers with leaky capacitors on motherboards. Web hosting company Advanced Internet Technologies (AIT) informed Dell about the issues in 2007 and subsequently filed a lawsuit. According to court documents obtained, "Dell salespeople were told 'don't bring this to customer's attention proactively,' in an effort to conceal system problems", the paper reports. An internal review by Dell found that 97 percent of the PCs in question were likely to fail over a three year period.

Dell started to ship its products to major retailers in the U.S. in 2007, starting with Sam's Club and Wal-Mart. Staples and Best Buy became Dell retail partners later in the year. Dell briefly sold its products through Sears in 2003.

The company has been in hot waters before. After an internal investigation into its accounting practices, Dell announced on August 17, 2007 that it would restate and reduce earnings from 2003 through the first quarter of 2007. The New York Supreme Court ruled in May 2008 that Dell and Dell Financial Services "engaged in fraud, false advertising, deceptive business practices, and abusive debt collection practices."

Photo: www.imagine-your-world.com