Toshiba were in my good books this week for hosting an interesting launch event for their new ultra-portable PC which was based around explorer David Hempleman-Adams plans to take one of the machines on a crazy ballooning adventure. All interesting stuff and I was suitable impressed by one, if not the, lightest laptop ever made – the R500.

Toshiba launches world's lightest laptop

However – my admiration for all things Tosh was shattered on Friday when during a very busy morning of furious content posting – my new Toshiba Satellite Pro U200 packed up on me – again. The cursed machine just freezes up – something that I have not experienced since the bad old days of Windows NT. I wouldn't mind but it has already been back to Toshiba once to have its motherboard replaced but the problems still persist. And I am not the only one, two or three other journos in CNET Networks UK have had the same model U200 and had the same problems – not the best piece of PR for Toshiba it has to be said.

Eric Schmidt may have suffered a sense of humour failure last year when a reporter from ZDNet UK’s sister site CNET News.com Google’d some supposedly personal information about him and published the results- but he was on fine form today – almost jolly. To illustrate the point that as advanced as Google is, there is still a long way for the company to go – he used the example of someone typing “Paris is hot “ into his firm’s search engine:

“We are trying to close the gap between what we want and what we type. If I type ‘Paris is hot’ am I talking about the fact its hot here or the lady in California?”

In a press conference that lasted over an hour – including a very extensive QA – Schmidt said the Google wanted to get closer to being able to answer theoretical questions such as “Where should I go to college? Or What should I do today”. These depend on Google knowing more about the time and context of question – something that Schmidt claimed that it is currently weak at.

Google has hinted that it may get around some of the privacy restrictions imposed by the EC by allowing user to explicitly request that that their personal information be held longer than the 18 month limits laid down by regulators.

Speaking at an event in Paris, Google vice president of search products and user experience Marissa Mayer, responded to a question regarding the possibility of whether users would be given the choice about how long their details are held by the search specialist by claiming that the company was considering such a move.

"We have declared that we will keep records for 18 months and we think that is a good compromise - 18 months of history is enough to do a good job and even if we anonymise the logs after 18 months then the information is still useful for spell checking and other applications," she said. "Explicitly allowing users to have their data stored for longer then that is something that we could look at in 18 months."

YouTube founder Steven Chen has admitted at a Google press event in Paris on Tuesday that the video sharing site has a lot more work to do when it comes to make its service usable.

Talking about the process of posting content - particularly to mobile devices such as phones - Chen admitted that the company has some work to do on its posting interface.

"What we want to do is take this content and take it to more devices and it’s a challenge to upload this content - it's still a clumsy process - so easier uploads to the site is one of our targets. The guiding principle is that we want to create the best service for video and continue to innovate."

Google owned video sharing site Youtube has announced that is launching localised versions of its site in nine counties as part of a wider international roll-out.

Launched on Tuesday at an event in Paris, the company announced that local versions of Youtube will now be available in Brazil, France, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Poland, Spain and the UK.

The announcement drew some criticism from German journalists as a translated version of the site will not be part of the initial roll-out due to some technical issues that the company would not elaborate on.