PC World Business

Microsoft has extended the availability of Windows XP on new PCs by six months, the company confirmed Friday.

The rumor mills have been running at full capacity to figure out the mystery behind a new Apple product called the MacBook Brick. Over at 9to5mac an (undisclosed and unspecified) Apple insider revealed that the Brick is in fact a new manufacturing process. This new manufacturing process is based around using lasers and water-jets to carve a single block of aluminum into a MacBook chassis.

Lawyers in the "Windows Vista Capable" class-action lawsuit against Microsoft have asked a federal judge to force the company to use its Windows Update service to notify potential class members, court documents filed Thursday revealed.

The only thing CEO Steve Ballmer knew about Microsoft's Windows Vista Capable marketing campaign was what he was told by subordinates, and he should not have to testify in the class-action lawsuit that accuses the firm of deceiving customers, the company said Friday.

Investing in desktop virtualisation systems can save organisations swathes of money, according to a recent IDC case study.

Companies are finding themselves embroiled in a power crisis as they struggle to find ways to rein in soaring energy costs -- as well as do their part to address global climate change. However, how can you be certain that the power-saving strategies your company has adopted are, in fact, the best ones? After all, there are plenty of myths out there about saving energy that are patently false. In this report, we examine 10 such myths and bring the truth to light.

It's the afternoon of September 30th and for reasons beyond my understanding the NYSE (New York Stock Exchange) is up more than 3.5 percent after yesterday's financial fiasco. Hello, Wall Street, what part of "No one has a new bailout deal; the House hated the old deal, and it's the week of Rosh Hashanah so it won't be a full week at Congress anyway" do you not understand? Even if you believe the bailout will magically work wonders for the economy -- I don't -- it's not going to happen this week.

Faced with a massive PC refresh at a price tag of US$1.8 million, Jack Wilson instead rolled the dice on virtual desktops three years ago. The enterprise architect at Amerisure Insurance didn't just dabble in the nascent technology, he enacted a sweeping change, replacing all 800 PCs with Wyse thin clients and a server infrastructure that hosts 800 Windows workspaces -- a feat that took eight months and, critically, struck at the heart of worker productivity in a services-dependent industry.

I spend an inordinate amount of time working in huge Excel spreadsheets that represent data about the worldwide PC monitor market. Excel's pivot tables and charts are useful, but sometimes I still struggle to find the trends buried in all those numbers.

Have you heard this story?

Motivated to help the environment as well as their businesses, SMBs are increasingly embracing green practices. One of their primary approaches: employing green technology, according to recently released survey results from KRC Research.

Now that I know for certain I'll be receiving a pre-beta build of Windows 7 at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in November, it's time to start thinking about some of the performance-related characteristics I'll be looking for in the new OS.

The world's richest and most powerful 10-year-old says it can handle far more of your technology needs than you think. Google started almost exactly 10 years ago, and it is making big noise about invigorated Apps and some Googlers called to tell me about the improvements.

Abbott and Costello, Burns and Allen, Siegfried and Roy, Gates and Seinfeld. Years from now, they will be remembered as the some of the great comic duos of all time.

It's hardly news these days when RHEL or Suse Linux boots Windows or Unix off a server. And we know that commercial software vendors are paying plenty of attention to commercial open source.

September is usually too early to draw year-end conclusions, but I'll go out on a limb to say that 2008 will be remembered as a key year for SSDs (solid-state drives) -- not so much for sales figures, which won't likely reflect the hype surrounding flash SSDs this year, but for the technology itself, which remains one of the most controversial to hit storage in recent times.

In one of the final scenes of the movie, "Charlie Wilson's War," the story of America's part in Afghanistan's victory over the Soviet Union, Congressman Wilson is shown asking for more funding to rebuild Afghanistan, a request that is denied.

Patrick Gelsinger is an electrical engineer. He joined Intel in 1979, worked on the design of the 80286 and 80386 microprocessors, and was the chief architect for the 80486 chip.

When a British study recently showed the average computer keyboard is dirtier than a toilet seat, Jacqueline Miller's worst suspicions were confirmed.

Mary Lou Jepsen stirred up a controversy when she left the struggling One Laptop Per Child nonprofit effort in December to start her own for-profit company, Pixel Qi, with the goal to create a US$75 laptop using technologies she invented at OLPC.

Microsoft tried to make the simple task of addressing a message easier in Windows Mail. They succeeded in making it less intuitive.

Virtually all commercially-sold PCs come with some sort of recovery tool--an alternate way to boot your system (either a CD, a DVD, or a special key combination to press shortly after turning on your PC) that can return your hard drive to its factory condition. Thus, with just a few keystrokes, you can once again have a working copy of Windows, along with all the bundled junk you studiously removed, and none of your own files.

If you click Start, type cookies, and press ENTER, Vista tries to do what XP did: Take you to your Cookies folder, located at C:\Users\your logon\cookies. Except that the Cookies folder isn't there. What is there is a pointer that tells Vista where the real cookies folder can be found. Since Vista doesn't believe you should be privy to this information, it tells you it's not accessible.

Admit it: You've lusted after the giant 30-inch desktop monitors you've seen in stores. Imagine what you could do with all that screen real estate, and all those pixels! But hold on a minute--those giant displays aren't necessarily all they're cracked up to be.

Just ask anyone who's seen Spiderman 3: good ideas seldom survive bad execution.

This PC World Buying Guide aims to take the complexity out of buying a PC by providing the information that will help make your final decision.

Are you one of the many thousands of people who are predicted to buy a notebook (laptop) this year? If yes, then this PC World buying guide is for you.

There are three integral components to a desktop PC that can 'make or break' your system: the motherboard, the memory and the central processing unit, or CPU.

Everyone needs a good monitor to get the most out of a PC. But which monitor you need depends on several factors - what applications you use, how much room you have on your desk, how much screen space you need to comfortably view your programs, and of course how much you want to spend. From standard issue 19in to 27in monsters, here's how to sort out what you need.

Print, scan or copy, consumer and home office needs call for many different solutions, that's why God made multi-function devices.