Taiwanese manufacturer launches dual Opteron motherboard

Motherboard manufacturer MSI has announced the release of the MS-9130 board capable of supporting dual AMD Opteron processors. Aimed at the workstation and server markets, the ATX sized board is based around the VIA K8T800 chipset and supports AGP8X and up to 8GB of DDR333 memory. The board is supplied with two serial ports, two ATA-133 IDE ports, an AGP Pro slot, four USB ports and four PCI slots. ...more

Microsoft declares war on Sony DRM

Microsoft plans to issue detection and removal signatures to Sony's controversial DRM code through its anti spyware software programme. The software has been heavily criticised for using techniques more associated with hackers rather than corporate giants. Declaring war on the rootkit in the company's malware blog, Jason Garms Architect & Group PM of the Anti-Malware Technology Team said that Microsoft regards the Sony DRM as malicious code and planed to treat it as such. ...more

Parallels updates Desktop virtualisation

Parallels has released an update to its Desktop virtualisation software that enables Mac users to run Windows, Linux and other operating systems alongside OS X. The update adds: USB improvements, including USB support for Windows Mobile 5 and Web cameras and a much broader list of supported devices; substantially improved OS X performance with the option to switch off Mac hard disk cache for a virtual machine, improved graphic performance; complete keyboard support, including the Eject button and right and left shift mapping for non-English layouts; and Unicode path support that lets users name files and paths in any language. Parallels also gave its thoughts on this weeks' two major announcements regarding virtualisation software, namely VMWare's announcement of the imminent release of its eponymous emulator and Microsoft's decision to drop Virtual PC. ...more

Apple admits mini over-spec

Apple has confirmed that some Mac minis have shipped with a better-than-advertised spec. However the company would not also confirm whether the reported specs - including 1.5GHz processor, extra video RAM and Bluetooth 2. ...more

Google inks deal with Dell

Google has signed a deal with Dell that would see Google software pre-installed on millions of Dell PCs over the next few years. The announcement was made by CEO Eric Schmidt at the Goldman Sachs Internet conference in Las Vegas. Although the financial terms of the arrangement have not been disclosed, the assumption is that Google has paid Dell to put its software on its PCs. ...more