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HP redesigns its ProBook laptops for small businesses, prices start at $499
Last fall, HP took a small step toward refreshing its ProBook business notebooks when it started offering some of them with AMD Trinity chips. Eight months later, it's time for a real makeover: the company just announced a handful of new models with a thinner, lighter design and a fresh look. The ProBook 430, 440, 455 and 470 range in size from 13.3 inches to 17.3, and are made of aluminum, with spill-resistant keyboards and a soft-touch paint job. With the exception of the 430, which ships in July with Haswell, they'll arrive this month with a mix of Ivy Bridge CPUs and AMD Richland chips. (Specifically, only the 14- and 15-inch models will be offered with AMD.) Other particulars: they all have 1,366 x 768 matte displays, with the 17-inch model stepping up to 1,600 x 900. All but the 430 can be had with an optional optical drive; if you skip it, there's a weighted placeholder sitting where the DVD burner would be. Additionally, the 440, 450 and 470 can be used with a six- or nine-cell user-replaceable battery. Everything comes standard with a hybrid hard drive, but the 430 also has an SSD option. Again, all but the 13-incher will be available this month, for $499 and up. So, you can bide your time until then, or you can tide yourself over with that handful of photos below.%Gallery-187547%
Google: 450,000 Android Apps now available to 300 million devices
If you hadn't noticed, it's Mobile World Congress this week and Google's showing off its enormous booth packed to the gills with smiling green Androids. Andy Rubin insouciantly added that the Android Marketplace has reached its latest milestone: there are now 450,000 apps available for the platform. Other pertinent stats are that over a billion apps are downloaded every month and that 850,000 Android devices are activated each day -- meaning that there's more than 300 million of them worldwide. Of course, that's not the real story here at MWC, it's that the company have brought along a bedazzling booth for guests to glue as many false jewels to their Galaxy Nexus back-plate as their self-respect can handle.
Cooking is a little easier, but only a little
I've been holding off on leveling up my cooking until 3.1 in the hopes that the tweaks Blizzard was making would give me an easier go of it, but I probably shouldn't have bothered waiting. While they have given us a few more recipes that stay green later, that's pretty much all we got. Anyone expecting more yellow recipes or even (gasp) orange to get the skill points rolling faster will be sorely disappointed. I cooked some of those Salmon you see above, and got a pretty good rate of about one point for every three cooks (which is normal for green on any profession), but 420-450 is still a slightly uphill battle.The good news is that you no longer need flint and tinder (though if, like me, you bought a Gnomish Army Knife, you didn't have to worry about that anyway), and you should make sure to stop and talk to the cooking trainer next time you run the daily, as they'll now teach you the Black Jelly recipe. And of course that ugly Chef's Hat is in the game -- I considered it for a moment, but at 100 Dalaran Cooking awards, you're going to be doing at least a few weeks of grinding just to wear that hat. Still, if people will fish up the turtle mount, I guess there's no end to what they'll chase in game.Update: We're also told the level required for the cooking dailies may have been raised to 80 -- one tipster says one faction can do them and the other can't. May be a bug -- we'll keep an eye out on this one.
Poaching for skins
I have to thank you, other players on my realm. If it wasn't for you, I probably wouldn't have reached 450 Skinning already. Yes, the garbage of dead mobs that you leave behind becomes my profit -- when you leave that worg corpse or the dead drakonid behind, I'm all too happy to run over, skin it, and clean up that little mess you've made, while sticking a little gold in my pocket as well. Matthew is right there with me -- he calls it poaching, though we're both referring not to stealing, but to simply skinning the leftover mobs of all those players before us.Truth be told, I probably poached more than ever down in the mines of Netherwing Ledge -- there were always players killing down there, and what they didn't skin, I did, both for the quest skins and for my own Knothide. But in the expansion, things are even better -- everywhere I go, there are fields of leftover mobs, and even when someone is able to kill a mob before I get there, I hover over them to pick up the skin afterwards.Matthew has put together a list of all the great places to pick up extra skins -- I'll agree that Coldarra is full of poaching options right now, as is Kamagua on the other side of the continent. Grizzly Hills, also, is not only full of creatures to skin, but lots of leftover corpses as people quest across the zone (though odds are that if you keep up on skinning, you'll be 450 by then anyway). Think of it as a service -- we're the garbagemen of the realms, cleaning up your kills so the next can spawn and the circle of loot can go on.
