Microsoft will be sharing details on Windows 7 next week, but there will also be news around Vista, with the company planning to distribute a beta of Service Pack 2 to a small group of Technology Adoption Program members. Some of the features to be included with SP2 are native Blu-ray recording in Vista, a revised search feature, Bluetooth 2.1 support and more.
This should be the last service pack for Vista, with Microsoft now shifting its focus to Windows 7 and its planned release date either in the first half …

If you’re itching for Fallout 3 but don’t feel like standing in line for hours or would rather download it than get a hard copy, you can now officially get the game as a pre-purchase through Steam, for the same price tag that the PC version has in stores.
Digital distribution will definitely boost sales, as we’ve already seen how well Steam has been received. There isn’t any mention on how DRM or copy protection will be different from the DVD version sold in stores compared to the version on Steam, …

In addition to Intel planning to shortly discontinue several of their processors, the company is also preparing to make several new low-power Core 2 Duo CPUs available before the end of this year.
Five new models, including the T9800, Q9000, P9600, T9550 and the T8700 are planned, all of which will have a TDP of only 35W, fairly low as far as desktop processors go. All the units are dual-core. It’s unlikely that these CPUs are intended specifically to be paired with the upcoming P55 chipsets, as the release date is …

Earlier this week Google announced it had detected a problem that prevented Gmail users from accessing their accounts. Although Google said the bug affected only “a small number of users,” that was little comfort for Google Apps administrators who were fielding angry complaints from business users who actually pay for Google’s email system.
The outage lasted about 30 hours and has since been fixed, but the company offered no explanation as to what caused the problem nor as to why it took them so long to repair. This is just the …