Office Starter 2010 is a reduced-functionality, advertising-supported version of Office 2010, available exclusively on new PCs. Office Starter 2010 will provide new PC owners with immediate exposure to the Office 2010 experience on new PCs right out of the box.

Office Starter 2010 will include Office Word Starter 2010 and Office Excel Starter 2010, with the basic functionality for creating, viewing and editing documents. Office Starter 2010 will replace Microsoft Works, offering a consistent Office user experience, such as the Ribbon, with a simple path to upgrade to a fully-featured version of Office 2010 directly from within the product.

Microsoft also noted that Office 2007 Home and Student edition has been the top selling PC software title at US retail for the last two years.

The entire Office 2010 Home & Student suite will be installed with new OEM Windows 7 machines, however the suite will be crippled to the ad supported Starter version until you purchase a key card that will be available in retail market.

So I see two things here:

1. The software is there so a crack will be out in no time…
2. If Starter is all a person needs, there is a waste of storage space used by the remainder of the installation files.

Sources [Microsoft Technet Blog, CNet]

Thermaltake has released information about their latest computer case designed in conjunction with BMW DesignWorks.  It’s got room for three optical drives, six hot-swappable SATA drives, and each modular component has its own cooling. Check out Maximum PC, they got their hands on one and has it unboxed.  Oh, I should mention that it’ll cost you around $700 USD…

“Thermaltake Level 10 : The latest high-end gaming tower show piece…”

Check out the Thermaltake Press Release here

Source [Thermaltake, Maximum PC]

Shanzai is reporting that an insider has informed them that Chrome OS will start to appear in mid October.

Google Chome is an open source and light-weight operating system that is designed to load within few seconds after you have pressed the power button. Google says that their upcoming OS is designed to run on both x86 as-well-as ARM chips. So expect to makes its debut on MIDs too along with netbooks. Google Chrome OS is using Linux kernel underneath and thus their OS is not prone to viruses and trojans.

Source [Shanzai]

HSN is selling Vipre’s protection for life for a mere $99.90. Plus $6.95 shipping and handling, of course. You can even cover the tab in three equal installments of $33.30.

Click Here to purchase now.

Source [Sunbelt Blog]

ATI keeps it coming. Not only do they currently have the most powerful GPU on the market today, now they are putting 2 of those GPUs on a single card.  Introducing the ATI Radeon HD 5870 x2 and the HD 5850 x2.  Images of these huge graphics cards have been leaked through Hardware Canucks.

Sources [Hardware Canucks, CrunchGear]

Yesterday, Gizmodo released details about the Microsoft Courier tablet.  It is reported to be dual 7″ multi-touch screens with a hinge to make it resemble a book.

Video by: Gizmodo

Ina Fried with cnet says:

“My sources say it’s legit, but I’m hearing that it’s just one of several prototypes that has been cooked up as part of a skunkworks project being led by executive J. Allard and a small team of ‘Softies.”

EDIT: Added following video

Courier User Interface from Gizmodo on Vimeo.

Sources [Gizmodo, CNet]

ATI has introduced two new players to the GPU market.  Powered by the latest Radeon 5800 Series GPU: the Radeon 5850 and Radeon 5870.  Compared to the Radeon HD 4890, it has twice the number of stream processors, twice the transistors, twice the texture and pixel blending power and is worth twice as much. The 5870 is very competitive at a price of $379 and being as fast as the GeForce GTX 295 with 2 GPUs.

ATI Claims:

ATI Radeon™ HD 5800 Series graphics processors are the most technologically advanced and feature rich GPUs AMD has ever created.

Sources [Ubergizmo, Engadget, HardOCP, ]

I don’t see this technology being much help in your everyday desktop.  However, in a laptop/netbook hybrid… The Hybrid P45-ION-T2A2 motherboard can actually house a complete Atom / Ion-based system on one side, while handling a traditional Socket 775 CPU system on the other.  So with this you can run a power-hungry game machine or an energy sipping net-top.   With a price tag at $399, I doubt this will be on high-demand.

Sources [Engadget, Neoseeker, TweekTown]

Seagate has announced their new contribution to the latest data speed hardware.  The new Seagate 2TB Barracuda XT has a massive 64MB cache and 4×500GB platters spinning at 7200RPM.  This is the first hard-drive to use the latest SATA 3.0 6Gbps connection which was officially released on May 27, 2009.  Releasing some time this week, the drive will be priced at $299 USD.

Sources [Engadget, Gizmodo, TG Daily, Seagate]

Windows 7 for $119.99 $29.99!

For a limited time, eligible college students can get the sweetest deal on Windows 7 – for only $29.99 USD. That’s less than most of your textbooks! Hurry — offer ends January 3, 2010 at 12:00 am CST.

Also mentioned is Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007 for $59.95

Source [Microsoft]