Laura DiDio

IBM on Monday unveiled high-capacity servers that are the first to be based on its new, multi-core POWER7 chip. The company said the new product line is designed "to manage the most demanding emerging applications," including high-capacity smart electrical grids and real-time analytics for financial markets.

The servers are optimized for processing huge workloads of simultaneous transactions, data handling, and analysis. IBM said they offer "dramatic improvements" in price versus performance, energy savings, and server virtualization.

Energy Efficiency

IBM on Monday unveiled high-capacity servers that are the first to be based on its new, multi-core POWER7 chip. The company said the new product line is designed "to manage the most demanding emerging applications," including high-capacity smart electrical grids and real-time analytics for financial markets.

The servers are optimized for processing huge workloads of simultaneous transactions, data handling, and analysis. IBM said they offer "dramatic improvements" in price versus performance, energy savings, and server virtualization.

Energy Efficiency

Some owners of Windows 7 machines are complaining that the newest Microsoft operating system may be causing battery problems. Microsoft said it's investigating the issue.

On the Microsoft support site and elsewhere, there are a variety of battery-related complaints, and many commenters believe the cause is Windows 7.

'Related to System Firmware'

The problems include batteries that are prematurely drained or reported to be so, batteries unable to hold a charge, warning lights indicating a battery needs to be replaced before it should need to, and more.

If a new product unveiled this week by Freescale Semiconductor is any indication, 2010 could be "the year of the tablet computer." Just in time for the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) opening Thursday in Las Vegas, the company has launched a seven-inch touchscreen tablet computer that it described as "the future of the smartbook category."

PayPal everywhere. That could be the slogan of the online payment company's expanded Global Payments Platform, following an announcement Tuesday of new application programming interfaces (APIs) that make it easier to integrate PayPal into third-party applications. The announcement at the PayPal X Innovate 2009 conference in San Francisco also included a new portal and introductory pricing for developers.

The updated Adaptive Payment APIs expand payment capabilities for multiple recipients and multiple platforms, including mobile devices.

Funds Transferred in Seconds

Microsoft appears to have hit a home run with Windows 7. The launch event was well received. The software reviews are mostly positive. The memories of Vista may be fading away. But can Windows 7 live up to the launch hype over the long haul?

Now that the dust has settled on the introduction of the much-anticipated operating system, Windows 7 has to pass the performance, reliability and compatibility tests that spur sales and drive upgrades. With the complexity and cost of upgrading, Microsoft may still have some convincing to do before the enterprise market adopts the software.

Microsoft is set to release Windows 7 on Thursday. But will enterprises migrate to the latest platform this year? Or will they delay upgrading until they are convinced Microsoft has all the kinks worked out?

According to a new ITIC/Sunbelt Software survey of more than 1,600 companies worldwide, nearly 60 percent will deploy Windows 7 in the near term. Another 30 percent said they will transition to the new Microsoft operating system within the first six months. And 11 percent of the respondents plan to wait for the first service pack to ship.

The e-book wars are heating up with Google's announcement this week that it's backing the EPUB e-book publishing standard. The move puts Google on Sony's side, against Amazon.

On the Inside Google Books blog, Project Manager Brandon Badger wrote that the company will offer free downloads of more than a million public-domain books in the EPUB format, as well as in other formats.

Not 'Locked' to a Device

With its release scheduled for Friday, Snow Leopard's spots are beginning to come into focus. The newest update to the Mac OS X operating system is getting reactions across the Web -- including a tip on how to save money if you want to upgrade from the older Tiger version.

Snow Leopard, version 10.6 of Mac OS X, will cost $29 to upgrade from Leopard, version 10.5, first released in 2007. But if you have Tiger, the 2005 version 10.4, you can avoid Apple's upgrade charge of $169, according to Walt Mossberg of The Wall Street Journal and others.

Only Tiger on Intel

Makers of glass tables or highly polished desks don't worry about the traction of computer mice with laser beams, but computer users know the problem. Now new mouse-tracking technology from Logitech promises to make the mouse-on-glass issue a thing of the past.

The Logitech Darkfield Laser Tracking technology, announced Tuesday, allows the company's mouse products to be used "virtually anywhere you want," including on clear glass -- at least four millimeters thick -- or on any high-gloss surface.

Performance or Anywhere Mouse