Just two weeks after expanding its relationship with Best Buy, Lenovo Group said it will try to win even more U.S. small business customers by selling its notebook PCs at Circuit City’s retail shops.

In both deals, customers will be able to buy Lenovo’s ThinkPad T60 widescreen and Lenovo N100 notebook PCs. Circuit City will also sell extra variations of those models in its stores, and the C200 notebook over its Web site and the phone.

A federal jury in San Diego has ordered Microsoft to pay $1.5 billion to Alcatel-Lucent in a patent dispute over MP3 audio technology used in Windows.

In its verdict, the jury assessed damages based on each Windows PC sold since May 2003. The case could have broader implications, should Alcatel-Lucent pursue claims against other companies that use the widespread MP3 technology.

The new team of leaders at Dell is weighing a request to give customers the option to purchase PCs with the Linux OS, instead of the default Windows, after thousands of users voted for that idea on a company blog.

The idea appeared Friday on a company-hosted blog called Dell Idea Storm. CEO Michael Dell unveiled the blog Feb. 16 as part of his effort to reinvigorate the struggling company. Dell said he hoped to use the blog to collect users’ feedback and improve customer service.

The most popular threads on Wednesday included demands for Linux-based laptops, consumer PCs that are not pre-loaded with unsolicited applications and requests for Sun Microsystems’ OpenOffice applications instead of Microsoft’s Office suite. Popular requests also included a preference for Mozilla’s Firefox Web browser instead of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, and pleas for Dell to stop routing service calls to operators in overseas countries such as India.

Novel Concepts announced its new IsoSkin heat spreader material, a technology that the company says could eventually render the fans that cool notebooks and PCs obsolete.

IsoSkin spreaders could eventually be used to replace the outer “skin” of portable electronics, thereby eliminating the need for heat sinks and fans, according to Novel Concepts. The material dissipates heat 20 times more effectively than copper, the company said.

IsoSkin heat spreaders could also being used to complement or improve overall heat sink performance by reducing the likelihood of circuits in microprocessors and semiconductors overheating or melting.

Motion Computing and Intel are looking to carve out a spot in the health care market with a new tablet PC.

The tablet PC maker announced that it has teamed with Intel to produce a new mobile computer, dubbed the C5 MCA (mobile clinical assistant), that will be targeted strictly at health care professionals, such as doctors, nurses and other hospital workers.

In addition to its Intel-based architecture and tablet design, the C5 will include a number of features specifically geared toward the health care market.

Inside, the C5 uses Intel’s Centrino mobile technology platform with a Core Solo U1400 processor, which runs at 1.2GHz and offers 2MB of L2 cache memory and a 533MHz front side bus. The tablet also offers an Intel 945GM chip set with an Extreme Graphics controller, which allows the image to rotate with the screen, a 10.4-inch LCD display, 512MB of DDR2 (double data rate) memory and a hard disk drive with a maximum memory of 60GB.

Palm and Claro announced the availability of the Treo 680 smartphone in El Salvador. The Treo 680 GSM/GPRS/EDGE quad-band world phone, running on the Palm OS, boasts Palm’s hallmark ease of use. Slim, compact, and packed with features beyond its stellar phone capability–such as email, Web browsing, messaging, multimedia, calendar, contacts and more.

Palm announced that the San Diego Police Department has deployed Palm Treo 700w smartphones throughout its workforce. SDPD’s Treo smartphone solution puts more officers in the field, reduces time spent at subdivisions on desktop computers accessing information, lightens device load and keeps dispersed field officers connected. The beaming feature lets technology officers load all the applications and complete setup in just three minutes.

Kids in middle school send one another a steady stream of instant messages through the day. But there’s a problem.

“Kids will say things to each other in their messages that are too embarrassing to say in person,” says 14-year-old Jett Lucas, “Then when they actually meet up, they are too shy to bring up what they said in the message. It makes things tense.”

Jett’s complaint seems to be part of a larger pattern plaguing the world of virtual communications, a problem recognized since the earliest days of the Internet: flaming, or sending a message that is taken as offensive, embarrassing or downright rude.

The hallmark of the flame is precisely what Jett lamented: thoughts expressed while sitting alone at the keyboard would be put more diplomatically–or go unmentioned–face to face.

Ryan Patrick Halligan was bullied for months online. Classmates sent the 13-year-old boy instant messages calling him gay. He was threatened, taunted and insulted incessantly by so-called cyberbullies. In 2003, Ryan killed himself.

States from Oregon to Rhode Island are considering crackdowns to curb or outlaw the behavior in which kids taunt or insult peers on social Web sites like MySpace or via instant messages. Still, there is some disagreement over how effective crackdowns will be and how to do it.

Network equipment maker Cisco Systems and Apple said they have reached an agreement that allow both to use the “iPhone” name, after Cisco sued the iPod maker for using it for a new multimedia phone. In a joint statement, they said both companies are free to use the “iPhone” trademark on their products throughout the world, and each side will dismiss any pending actions regarding the trademark.