Stories by: Robert L. Mitchell

If, like me, you travel regularly with your laptop between different locations, you know how annoying it can be to get even a simple document printed to the right device and in the right format. And if you forget to choose the right printer when you come into a new location? Everything disappears into the wrong queue, only to spit out in a torrent when you connect at the other location.

OK, it's not perfect. But Windows Vista on a new PC is perfectly serviceable for many users. In some ways, in fact, Vista is a better operating system than Windows XP. Unfortunately, XP's heir apparent is also the most derided and discounted Microsoft operating system since Windows Me.

It may look like Windows Vista. It shares the same code base as Vista. It even rolls in Vista's first Service Pack. But in terms of customer adoption plans, Windows Server 2008 is no Vista.

Don't say you weren't warned. Your 32-bit Windows applications are going the way of analog television: Unless they're upgraded, in the next few years they'll go dark.

Windows Vista has been slow to catch on in business. Could Windows Server 2008 ride to the rescue? The new server operating system shares the same code base as Windows Vista and includes some features that are optimized to work with Vista.

As Microsoft readies Hyper-V, the new hypervisor software that forms the foundation for virtualization in Windows Server 2008, VMware is finally facing some real competition in the Windows server virtualization market. Unfortunately, Microsoft has followed in VMware's footsteps by creating its own, proprietary way of doing things, and VMware doesn't want to play along. The result: IT faces a choice between two virtualization options that are incompatible.

First, the data center dialed back its power consumption. Now it's the front office's turn.

Nikola Tesla must be rolling over in his grave. More than 100 years ago, he invented the alternating current network, which trumped Thomas Edison's direct current design to become the standard for electric power distribution networks. AC won because it was more practical. It was the more efficient and economical way to transmit power over long distances. Now the debate has risen anew, and passions are again running high. But this time, the battleground is over which is most energy efficient - and practical - as the distribution network for increasingly power-constrained datacentres.

For engineers developing the next generation of servers, the CPU is no longer the biggest design obstacle to controlling power and cooling costs, which is a major issue for many data centers. "It used to be that the processor was our main concern," says Roger Schmidt, chief thermal architect and distinguished engineer in IBM's server and workstations division.

Liquid cooling is coming to the data centre whether you want it or not.

Your next Windows laptop could run faster and last longer on a single battery charge thanks to a new generation of hybrid hard disk drives and a feature in the Windows Vista operating system that leverages NAND flash memory as a disk cache.