Roxio, subsidiary of Sonic Solutions, today announced the latest version of its RecordNow CD/DVD burner software. The new software adds a handful of features for music editing and management.

Making an early mark in the green electronics market for the new year, NEC today announced the availability of a solar-powered system that uses energy from the sun with a reduced amount of regular electricity, and is compatible with the entire line of its desktop monitors.

Thermaltake Technology announced the launched of its new line of Purepower RX series ultra-low noise power supplies incorporating the ultra-silent 140 mm fan found on Thermaltake's high-end Toughpower Series power supplies.

Longmont (CO) - Having shipped an apparently small number of holographic storage systems in late 2006 and in the first days of 2007, Inphase today said that it has signed Germany-based DSM as original equipment manufacturer (OEM) of its Tapestry drives.

Seoul (Korea) - Samsung said that it has begun sampling of 50 nm NAND flash memory chips that are required to build the long announced 32 GB 2.5" solid state disk (SSD). The flash drive is expected to replace traditional hard drives in higher end notebooks and offer significant advantages in data transfer rates as well as power consumption.

PC component manufacturer Diamond Multimedia today announced that it has begun shipping the HDTV100, a USB PC TV tuner that can receive HD signals, in addition to UHF/VHF and analog cable channels.

Chicago (IL) - Graphics card vendor Sparkle today said that it has released the "world's first overclocked Geforce 8800 GTX and GTS graphics cards." Compared to the specifications of Nvidia's reference card with core clocks of 575 MHz (GTX) and 500 MHz (GTS) as well as memory clocks of 1800 MHz (GTX) and 1600 MHz (GTS), the Sparkle cards arrive with 630 MHz and 560 MHz cores and 1960 MHz and 1720 MHz memory. Pricing has not been announced.

As much of a sign of the new year as the big ball in New York City is the sighting of the first spread of a computer worm. In this case, it hit users in the form of an e-mail with the subject line "Happy New Year!"

VIA Technologies, seeing that adoption of its self-developed C7 processor by industrial PC (IPC) makers in Taiwan has been short of expectation, is seeking to deploy its processor in other markets such as digital consumer electronics, entry-level notebook PCs and thin-client PCs, according to industry sources.

  It is our final processor price/performance article of the year - and what a year it was! 2006 not only saw dual-core processors entering the mainstream, it was also a year of new milestone releases and fierce price battles. In short, the heart of your computer deserves your attention again. As our last installment for 2006, we're going to take a look at the big shifts that happened this year, how we got to where we are today and what we can expect for 2007.

Sunnyvale (CA) - OCZ announced that it will expand its product portfolio from enthusiast memory into the graphics card space. The first device is a card based on Nvidia's 8800 GTX graphics processor with G80 core. Nvidia's Geforce 8800 GTX and GTS in pictures ...

VIA Technologies has announced VIA EPIA EX-Series Mini-ITX motherboards, the company's first series of platforms featuring the new VIA CX700M2 system media processor.

According to industry sources, plans to produce CPUs for the Microsoft Xbox 360 game console on 65nm at Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing will be pushed back until the middle of 2007, at least one quarter behind the original schedule.

In its first introduction to Microsoft's new operating system, Kaspersky Lab has announced support for Windows Vista in its Anti-Virus 6.0 and Internet Security 6.0 personal software products.

Hitachi Displays started mass production of 800 x 480 2.9" LCD panels for use in mobile phones, which the company claims is "the industry's first 800 x 480 product as a mobile phone display panel."

On the heels of the first full year of the HD DVD/Blu-ray battle, a new wrinkle has appeared, as a hacker has claimed to have dug into the high-definition format's encoding and decrypt the security measures that prevent the video from being copied.

Art Lebedev, developer and designer of the Optimus-103 keyboard, indicated in a recent post on the Optimus project blog that the OLED keyboard could be shipping in the first half of 2007.

AMD Live! will start supporting Blu-ray and HD DVD in the third quarter of 2007 in line with AMD's hopes to take a bigger share of the multimedia market, according to industry sources.

VMware recently released a new beta version of its virtualization software Workstation 6.0. According to the release notes, the current build 36983 includes support for Windows Vista and multi-monitor systems.