Michael Dell's been up on stage here at D for a solid 45 minutes and has yet to say anything particularly interesting (unless you consider rattling off numbers about unit growth, margins, etc. fascinating), but the man got his chance during the audience Q&A. Someone asked if he could take Steve Jobs in a fight, and Dell flatly replied, "Yeah, I could take him." Now there's a fight we'd pay good money to see.

[Thanks Seenew for Jobs' Mii]

We already knew that AMD had its Puma and Griffin-based Turion line coming, but a June 3 launch at Computex is all but confirmed now. The Puma platform will be based on the Turion Ultra processor with an integrated Mobility Radeon 3200 graphics chip along with as WiFi. Discrete graphic chip options will include the ATI Mobility Radeon 3450, 3650, and 3850. SSDs will make a limited appearance due to what AMD is citing as a prohibitive high cost. Nonetheless, it looks like AMD is doing whatever it can to take the spotlight away from Intel, especially now that the Centrino 2 has been delayed.

Dell's been squarely situated on the green bandwagon for years now, and just as it did with the OptiPlex 755, Round Rock is making quite a fuss about the all new Vostro 410 desktop. The mini-tower features Intel's Core 2 Quad processors, an optional 512MB NVIDIA GeForce 8800GT, room for four internal hard drives / six PCIe or PCI cards, gigabit Ethernet, up to 4GB of RAM, dual-layer DVD burner and a rather run-of-the-mill port assortment. Potentially best of all, however, isn't the 47-percent energy savings it's purported to deliver -- oh no, it's the complete absence of bloatware, as Dell looks to fit the machine "with only the software you want" for your business. Check it out now in North / South America and the UK starting at $599, while Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Africa will have access before the end of next week.

For the legions of Mac users out there annoyed with Leopard niggles, some possible relief is now available, as Apple has made version 10.5.3 available to users via software update. The new version has a slew of minor adjustments, including fixes for AirPort and networking reliability issues, Time Machine and Time Capsule updates (including improved compatibility with Aperture), and improved Spaces usability. Anyone out there taken the plunge yet? Let us know how it's going.

A general review is fine and dandy when you're lookin' at Hello Kitty laptops, but this is Dell's XPS 730 H2C we're talking about. A rig this big demands to be benchmarked, and the mad scientists over at Hot Hardware did that and a whole lot more after it arrived in their lab. Here's the highlights: reviewers were able to hit 4.25GHz (though not for long), the unit itself walked all over its rivals and it was deemed "an absolute monster in any productivity and multimedia task." Sadly, gaming performance was seen as "less decisive but still extremely impressive," but it nevertheless managed to "blaze" through every title tossed at it. Grab your cup of joe and head on down, as you'll be reading for quite some time before seeing that coveted Editor's Choice award there at the end.

According to a state judge in Albany, New York, Dell and its financing arm "engaged in deceptive business practices related to financing promotions for its computers and technical support." The decision, which was just released yesterday, contained quotes from NY State Supreme Court Justice Joseph C. Teresi stating that the Round Rock mega-corp dabbled in "repeated misleading, deceptive and unlawful business conduct, including false and deceptive advertising of financing promotions and the terms of warranties, fraudulent, misleading and deceptive practices in credit financing and failure to provide warranty service and rebates." The ruling stemmed from a lawsuit filed by NY Attorney General Andrew Cuomo last year, and while Mr. Cuomo was understandably delighted with the outcome, a Dell spokesman made clear that it didn't agree with the decision and it would be "defending its position vigorously." As for potential restitution for NYers, we won't know any of that until further proceedings are held.

[Thanks, Nate]

Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer got on stage at D6 with Walt and Kara to talk... Microsoft, of course. While the company is still being rather coy about Windows 7 -- some have blamed loose lips early on in Vista development for saddling the OS with too high of expectations and making things difficult for developers -- they were nice enough to show off what Ballmer called "the smallest snippet" of Windows 7. The big reveal was multi-touch support, which utilizes technology developed by the Surface team. The taskbar seems to have been reworked a bit, and the demo was running live on a Dell Latitude XT tablet. Apparently Microsoft is reworking the whole user interface with a multitouch experience in mind. Steve reiterated the "three years after Vista" mantra for availability. Not exactly earth-shattering, but we'll take what we can get at this point.

Update: Video added after the break. Enjoy! [Thanks, Dan Z.]

Gates and Ballmer are down at the WSJ's All Things Digital conference to talk tech with Mossberg and Swisher, and it looks like tonight they'll be unveiling the first (official) glimpses of Vista's successor, currently known as Windows 7. We'll be posting live from the event, so be sure to check back at 6:15pm PT (9:15 Eastern) as things kick off.

Whatever you do, don't push the red button. MSI has pimped out its new GeForce 9600 GT Diamond graphics card with dual DVI, dual HDMI, optical audio and a shiny red button. The button bumps the clock speed of the graphics core and the memory, as well as increasing voltage to world-destroying levels. Unfortunately you'll have to reach around the back of your dusty machine to click it, but we're sure 30 minutes and a soldering iron can re-route the button to this little doomsday-inspired puppy.

We weren't terribly impressed with Psystar's Open Computer the first time around, but hopefully this new revision will perk things up a bit -- along with dealing with that insufferable fan noise. Psystar is making no such promises, but it has quietly rolled out a new case design, along with tossing in a NVIDIA GeForce 7200GS 256MB graphics card -- a decent bump over the original's integrated graphics. The price is still $399, and it still costs $155 extra to get Leopard pre-installed on the system.

[Thanks, iPod Macman]

MSI has been teasing us with its Atom-based laptops and desktops for some time now, so it's only right that they finally give it up and let some journalist rip open a Wind for some straight-up circuit porn. Confirmed on the board are the aforementioned Atom 230 processor, 1GB DDR2-533 RAM, a 160GB SATA drive, gigabit ethernet, a DVD combo drive, 65-watt power supply, and passive cooling with that gargantuan heatsink. As for performance, testers say the machine was capable of playing 720P video without much ado, but wouldn't deal with 1080P. On the laptop side of things, it looks as though the U100 will come in a whole rainbow of colors beyond the red, black, white, and pink we've already seen. Nothing new on that side other than the usual "is it still $399?"

Read - Up close with MSI desktop in Taipei
Read - Extreme closeup with MSI Wind notebooks

There aren't many ways to hop in the time machine and enjoy old-school hardware the way it was meant to be enjoyed, and that's what makes virgin unboxings of vintage equipment so very special. If even for just a few moments, it's an opportunity to pretend that you're in a bygone era where computers, portables, and miscellaneous gizmos held a mystique that has long since been replaced by the monotony of modern ubiquity. We want to emphasize that "just for a few moments" part, a phrase clearly lost on the proud recipient of a new-in-box 20th Anniversary Macintosh -- an aberration in the Apple family tree that cost a staggering $7,500 back in 1997, so we imagine there weren't many tycoons sitting around with enough cash, tech savvy, and collector mentality to buy one and leave it sitting untouched in its cardboard for ten-plus years. Despite the rarity and coolness of this gentleman's find, we found ourselves screaming "just get to the [obscene] unboxing already," "Batman & Robin is the movie you're trying to think of, now can we please continue for the love of all that's good and holy," and "are you ever going to turn it on, or should I just go ahead and gouge my eyes out now?" by the time the 23-minute marathon had reached its anticlimactic conclusion. Word to the wise: if you're going to take your life into your hands and click through to the movie, do yourself a favor and fast-forward liberally. Meanwhile, we're cool going another 20 years without seeing one of these things.

So news is making its way around the internets that at the Wedbush Morgan Securities Management Access Conference, Atari founder Nolan Bushnell proclaimed the end of PC gaming piracy as we know it, thanks to a "stealth encryption chip." The magic chip he's referring to that "will, in fact, absolutely stop piracy of gameplay"? The TPM chip -- what's been on motherboards for years, that apparently Bushnell just found out about. While the tinfoil hats in the house will likely attribute TPM (Trusted Platform Module) and other onboard crypto-chips to the eventual downfall of privacy and personal computing, to date we've yet to see piracy stunted or civil liberties breached because of the little bugger. FUD you later, Nolan.

[Thanks, Carl]