The Central government has permitted techies of all IT firms to work from home till July 31 to protect them from the coronavirus spread and ensure social distancing, an official said on Tuesday. This was announced by Union Minister for Information Technology Ravi Shankar Prasad in a video conference with the concerned ministers and officials of different states.

Publication: Hindustan Times  

A report released on Tuesday by edtech firm upGrad and industry body FICCI said business leaders are looking to re-skill their existing talent pool, over new hirings. The findings of the report ‘High-Impact Online Learning at Scale’ said 87% of the business leaders upGrad interviewed during the Covid-19 crisis said that they are looking to reskill over hiring.

Publication: Livemint

When Microsoft Corp reports earnings on Wednesday, analysts expect some areas of its business to take a hit from the novel coronavirus pandemic, with lower-than-expected sales in areas like advertising on its LinkedIn social network.  But analysts also expect a surge in the use of Microsoft’s cloud computing services and collaboration tools such as the Teams app “as more companies are effectively forced into the cloud” by stay-home orders, as Macquarie Capital analysts Sarah Hindlian-Bowler and Calvin Patel wrote in a research note.

Publication: Moneycontrol

In another fillip to Make in India in the tough COVID-19 times, PC and printing major HP Inc on Monday announced it is expanding its manufacturing footprint in India by setting up a new facility in Chennai with electronics giant Flex Ltd.

Publication: YourStory

For purely gaming-centric workloads, the Core i7-9700K is hands down the best processor. You can expect as much as 300 FPS in all modern games provided there are no GPU bottlenecks. With eight cores running at a base clock of 3.6GHz and a boost of 4.9GHz, you’re basically getting an i9 without hyperthreading and a slightly lower operating frequency.  The AMD alternative, the Ryzen 7 3700X costs $269. For $69 less, you get markedly higher multi-threaded and slightly worse gaming performance.

Publication: Hardware Times 

Lenovo has joined the ranks of OEMs offering the 15W Ryzen 4000 mobile processors on retail, with an MSRP of just $689. The new IdeaPad 15 featuring the entry-level Ryzen 5 4500U is now available on Lenovo’s web store. It’s a hex-core part lacking SMT with a base and boost clock of 2.30GHz and 4.0GHz, respectively. The graphics responsibilities are handled by the Radeon RX Vega 6 iGPU which has already proven to be a capable option.

Publication: Hardware Times 

An increasing number of consumer durables and technology brands have been extending product warranty because of the nationwide lockdown due to the impact of COVID-19. The latest one to join the league is MSI, Taiwan headquartered leading gaming brand. The company is offering an extension of three months across the laptop product portfolio whose warranty expires between March 15 and May 31, 2020.

Publication: Business Today

When it comes to business laptops, chances are you wouldn’t look much beyond the iconic Lenovo ThinkPad machines. Users swear by them and wouldn’t trade these rock-solid computing devices for anything else. To their credit, Lenovo left these untouched over the years, in the sense that the core strengths remained the same—longevity, military grade strength, security features for enterprise users, good battery life and a keyboard that is a delight to type on.

Publication: News18

Intel announced a positive first-quarter earnings conference call recently. Talking about the non-GAAP financial measures when reporting the consolidated results, Intel’s leadership said the company had an excellent Q1 in the middle of astonishingly challenging times. During the conference call, Intel’s CEO, Bob Swan and our CFO, George Davis, talked about what went right for the company despite such challenging times.

Publication: Analytics India Magazine 

Xiaomi has been expanding its presence in India at a rapid rate and after making itself felt in the smart TV and home appliance segments, the company is now looking to enter the laptop segment. There have been rumours floating about Xiaomi bringing its RedmiBook series of laptops to India later in 2020 but according to a fresh report, it now seems that Xiaomi may be hurrying up to bring the laptops as soon as possible.

Publication: India Today