Patentseed

Your printer/scanner/photocopier goes through the daily grind, collecting dust particles (especially from paper fiber).  This can clearly effect the quality whatever you’re scanning or copying.  You could wipe it with a cleaner, but why do so when you can count on Dell’s invention: “System and Method for Contactless Automatic Dust Removal Froma Glass Surface.”  Dell  achieves though through “an electrostatic particle removal system associated with the glass layer.  The electrostatic particle removal system may include an induction layer configured to induce a charge to a particle located between the glass layer and the electrostatic particle removal system, a field grid layer configured to provide an electric field for moving the charged particle, and a collector configured to collect the charged particle moved by the electric field.”  Makes complete sense to us.  Contactless dust removal is all we needed to hear.

We all love getting new computers, but we all hate the process of having to personalize everything all over again.  Your documents.  Your music.  Your bookmarks.  Your OS preferences.  The list goes on and on.  It can take months to personalize your new computer to the way you like it.

Dell wants to eliminate this issue and ship your next computer pre-personalized for you.  Imagine receiving your next PC with most of the same settings and all your old docs just as you left them on your old PC?  That sounds pretty convenient to us.  I’m sure Dell is hoping that this will encourage all of us to upgrade more frequently.  It just may.  The drawback?  Well, you’d have to give Dell access to all of your data.  With all the corporate hacking in the news, that could take a huge leap of faith.  To get all the details, follow the link to Dell’s patent application 11/962,408.

It looks like Dell is trying to do some good for the environment.  In doing so, Dell may gain a competitive edge in the printer market with patent application 11/962,843, aptly named “Used Media Printing.”

This patent application states that “substantial waste of used media may occur when the used media is discarded as, after the printing, there will typically be a printed side and an unprinted side on the used media.”  We’re all guilty of it.  We print on one side of the paper and end up tossing that sheet of paper into the waste bin once we’re done with it.  As the patent application points out, we’re all capable of putting that used paper back in the printer and printing in the unused side, but we don’t.  Why?  Because “such a solution is time and labor intensive and prone to errors that may result in the waste of printing material when a previously printed side of the used media is printed upon. Such problems discourage the use, and encourage the waste, of used media.”  So true.

Dell’s solution is a printer with a scan module that will detect the “printable side” (i.e. the unused side of the paper), and print on that side of the paper.  This takes the onerous of loading the paper properly away from the user and onto the printer.  We love it.

And to throw in our 2 cents, it would be convenient if the printer also marked the unused side so we know which side the second side is.  Perhaps just a dot in the corner somewhere.  It will be useful for the user to quickly distinguish between the previously printed side and the newly printed side.

Tired of having a single display on your laptop?  Attaching an LCD monitor is an option, but defeats the mobility of your laptop.  Dell provides some relief with the current patent application. 

The patent application illustrates an ExpressCard with an LCD display on its face.  When inserted into the laptop, the display on the ExpressCard is made visible to the user through a window in the laptop chassis.  Do we smell a hint of Microsoft Sideshow?  However, because it’s on the inside of the laptop, it doesn’t completely work the way Microsoft Sideshow is intended to.  Apparently, it designed for use in tandem with your primary display.  It’ll be up to individual applications to figure out how best they can use this secondary display.

Dell’s patent application 11/936,895 is for a lighting control framework, which creates a standardized way for software applications to control lighting attached to your computer, laptop, DAP, and the like.  As Dell states, “the lights may be used by a variety of applications for a variety of purposes such as, for example, gaming environments, ambience, video accompaniment, audio accompaniment, and/or a variety of other purposes known in the art. The lights may be utilized by software to change states of the lights. The changing of states may include, for example, turning on, turning off, changing color, changing brightness, and/or a variety of other state changes known in the art.” 

So the next time you’re fragging, it may be complemented by flashing white lights.  Or perhaps you can enjoy some ambient lighting the next time you’re ready to get cozy with your word processor.

We’re happy to see that Dell is working on making laptops cooler, without increasing the bulk.  Patent application 11/933,671 is titled “Gas Assisted Thixotropic Molded Chassis For Cooling A Computer Chassis.”  We’ll try our best to describe this in plain English.  It looks like Dell’s patent application allows them to make the housing portion with a “reinforcing rib including a cylindrical cross-section.”  The rib section is a pathway for water cooling.  So it would appear that Dell is fabricating a housing and cooling passage together.  They form this “in a novel manner in that the gas assist molding process has not been used with the thixotropic molding process. This is because the thixotropic magnesium molding has less of an issue with cosmetic sink that plastic injection molding, which commonly is used with a gas assist.”  And the thixotropic magnesium is not chilled, thus can be expelled from the housing portion resulting in the formation of the elongated passageway.  Got that?