Tom Krazit

A new company thinks it has the answer to the complaints of scientists and engineers looking for high-performance computing (HPC) on the desktop. The Orion Cluster Workstation packs the power of a PC cluster into a desktop-size package using low-power chips and an innovative motherboard design.

The PC industry is doing a better job of satisfying its U.S. customers than in recent years, and improvements to technical support seem to have done the trick, according to the results of a study released Tuesday by the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

Imagine a golf course that can sense rainfall, and adjust the automatic sprinkler system to delay a scheduled watering session or focus on parts of the course that didn't get as much rain as others. Or a hotel that can detect when a room is vacant, and turn off the heating or cooling systems in that room to save energy.

IBM Corp. bolstered the new eServer i5 server lineup with the i5 550, a new system based on the Power 5 chip that can run multiple operating systems.

The PC market won't grow as fast in 2004 as originally predicted by Gartner Inc. analysts, as concerns about the overall health of the U.S. economy weigh on the market, the market research company said Monday.

The top two PC vendors worldwide, Dell Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co., released this week new notebooks designed to be attractive for mobile users such as business travelers and students, as the vendors compete for the attention of buyers heading into the most important selling seasons of the year for PC companies.

The notebook memory-module flaw that Hewlett-Packard Co. identified last week as having the potential to cause problems for all notebook manufacturers has thus far shown up only in HP notebooks, according to PC vendors, memory manufacturers, and industry analysts.

The sheer number of worms and viruses directed at Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating system and Internet Explorer browser have many in the computer industry wondering whether we would all be more secure if more users relied on alternatives to Microsoft's products. That description appeared to fit about two thirds of attendees at a debate between two prominent security experts at the Usenix 2004 conference in Boston.