Hewlett-Packard and Dell not surprisingly led worldwide PC shipments during the second quarter of 2011 according to preliminary research from Framingham-Mass.-based IDC.

The IDC report noted that HP saw good growth in key emerging markets and EMEA, but also had a slight drop in volume compared to the previous quarter.   Dell, on the other hand, managed to slow the pace of its decline in key markets compared to the first quarter, with good gains in key emerging markets.

According to IDC’s U.S. PC tracker, HP, Dell and Apple held the top three spots, followed by Toshiba and Acer Group. Of the five, only Apple and Toshiba posted gains compared with 2Q10, with a 14.7 percent and 3.7 percent boost, respectively.

“The U.S. PC market continued to contract in 2Q11, largely as a result of three factors. The first is an ongoing contraction in the netbook market and related inventories. The second is the impact of 2Q10’s difficult-to-sustain 12 percent growth. And third, demand has softened as corporate buyers continue to focus on increasing share of their IT budget in new IT solutions such as cloud and virtualization, and consumer interest shifts to media tablets,” said Rajani Singh, research analyst for IDC’s U.S. Quarterly PC Tracker.

“Given the weakness of 2H10, we expect a better market environment in 2H11 with mid-single digit growth rates in the third quarter’s back to school and fourth quarter’s holiday season.”

With the constant change of technology, Dell is remedying that situation for some of its Latitude-branded notebooks. Dell’s Latitude E6420 computer with 4G LTE mobile broadband technology will make a difference. The partners have gone a step further to optimize the Latitude’s video, voice and data technology, which are promised to be up to 10 times faster.  It can be configured to support 4G. Additionally, the rugged E6420 ATG and E6420 XFR notebooks will be able to make use of 4G speeds as well by the end of the year.

For years Dell has worked with the world’s largest cloud computing providers to design custom servers for their clouds. The Dell PowerEdge C-Series servers are focused on hyperscale capability. Rather than emphasizing gigahertz and gigabytes, these servers help you maximize density, memory and serviceability while minimizing total cost of ownership.