CNET published a story today on the sustainability of the big-time PC manufacturers. They postulate that there will be fewer people shopping for new PCs, and fewer businesses making the leap as well.

CNET decided that HP would be best to survive the coming digital recession, citing that a full third of their revenue comes from software and enterprise storage. These mediums won’t be taking as big of a hit as consumer hardware, apparantly.

Dell is also in clear, having recently made a large move to services and software. The company also recently moved to China and India to cut costs, which should also help them survive.

CNET claims that Lenovo is in dire shape, having recently reported a quarterly loss of 78%. The company is doing well in China but not so well in the United States.

Click here for the full story.

Lenovo has announced their ThinkPad USB Portable Secure hard drive. It features a passcode system that uses a physical keypad. This should be useful for those who store sensitive information. The unit is just 3 x 5-inches, and is designed to pair up with ThinkPad laptops. It can have up to 10 unique user IDs and an admin account. The unit should be available by the end of the month. The 160GB model will cost $180 and the 320GB model will run $219.

The Sony laptop battery recall has hit 100,000, tripling in size since yesterday’s announcement that 35,000 were being recalled due to overheating problems. The recall now includes Li-ion batteries used in some Lenovo and Acer laptops as well as the original list of Dells, HPs and Toshibas. All of the recalled models were sold between 2004 and 2005, with two-thirds being sold outside of the US. Sony also noted that the faulty batteries were made by the same factory that produced a batch of recalled batteries two years ago.

Google and Intel are teaming up to introduce more energy-efficient personal computers and server systems to save energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. More efficient computing would reduce electricity consumption by eliminating wasted heat produced by computers and increased air conditioning to battle the heat problem.

Climate Savers Computing Initiative has alreadey signed ion Dell Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co., IBM, Lenovo Group Ltd., software maker Microsoft Corp., the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

The program will set new efficiency goals for computers and software tools that manage power consumption, namely, a 90 percent efficiency standard for power supplies, said Urs Holzle, senior vice president of operations at Google.

"Today, the average desktop PC wastes nearly half of its power and the average server wastes one-third of its power," he added.

A 90 percent standard would cut greenhouse gas emissions by 54 million tons a year and save more than $5.5 billion in energy costs.