Seagate Technology on Monday launched its first combination disk storage and flash memory hard drive, joining rival Samsung Electronics in offering hybrid drives that manufacturers say quicken the boot up time of PCs and significantly boost battery life.

The Seagate Momentus 5400 PSD, which stands for "power savings drive," offers 160 Gbytes of traditional rotating disk storage and 256 Mbytes of flash memory. Sony is the first PC maker to offer the new product, making it available in its Vaio SZ650, Melissa Johnson, product-marketing manager for Seagate, said. Three other PC manufacturers also plan to offer products with the new drive, but Johnson declined to name them.

The Momentus sells for $190, which is almost a 30% premium over a traditional drive of equal storage. The higher price, however, gets the buyer technology that Seagate claims can quicken the time it takes to boot a PC by 20%, and uses half as much power as a traditional hard drive. The Sony Vaio gets 25% more battery life from using the hybrid drive, Johnson said. "There's good value across the board for this hybrid technology."

Samsung started shipping its hybrid flash/hard drive in March. Samsung and Seagate offer the same size drive, but Samsung also sells models of 80 Gbytes and 120 Gbytes. Over the next 10 years, Seagate plans to offer hybrid drives as an option across its entire line of disk drives for notebooks, desktops, and ultra mobile PCs, Johnson said.

Seagate and Samsung have been working with Microsoft(MSFT) to take advantage of technology in Vista that can leverage their hybrid drives. ReadyDrive in Vista treats flash and disk as one memory space, so it can be used for caching frequently needed data, or as a disk-write cache when the disk is spun down in order to save battery power.

Vista's ReadyBoot technology speeds up the processes of booting the system and recovering from hibernation by keeping track of the files most often needed when the system boots and building a temporary cache when the system starts.

Despite the enhancements in Vista, however, PC buyers won't get full advantage of hybrid drives until other makers of PC components jump onboard in a big way. BIOS makers and manufacturers of device drivers have yet to take advantage of the flash memory in hybrid drives. BIOS, or basic input/output system, is the firmware code in a PC that identifies and initiates component hardware, such as hard drives, and CD drives. Device drivers run everything from printers and scanners to digital cameras.

Makers of hard disk drives, however, have banded together to promote hybrid drives for notebooks and to work with PC makers in helping them adopt the technology. Founding member of the Hybrid Storage Alliance include Fujitsu, Hitachi, Samsung, Seagate and Toshiba.

Besides Sony, Dell(Dell) offers hybrid drives in its Latitude line of corporate PCs. The computer maker plans to eventually offer the same drives in consumer PCs, a spokeswoman said.

The number of new notebook computers using some form of flash memory for data storage will soar from a negligible number today to more than 50% in two years, according to iSuppli. The research firm sees three approaches to flash data storage evolving over the next couple of years: Intel(INTC)'s Robson, hybrid hard-disk drives, and solid-state drives. Robson is the code name for a platform technology that uses flash memory to increase system responsiveness, make multitasking faster, and extend battery life.

Microsoft expects to release seven security patches with four "Critical" and three "Important" bulletins as part of its upcoming Patch Tuesday release.

The critical patches affect Windows Server Service Packs for 2000 and 2003 versions as well as Internet Explorer, versions 5 through 7 and Outlook Express for Windows 2000, 2003 and Windows XP.

The common thread of the four "critical" patches is their remote code execution (RCE) implications, a risk consideration that has been pretty consistent over the last few patch release announcements. Microsoft suggests using Baseline Security Analyzer to flesh out any potential bugs or problems.

Meanwhile, the three "important" issues are more varied in nature, with two bulletins affecting almost all Windows OS and server versions, including multiple service pack releases of Windows 2000 and 2003, XP and Vista. A third patch is related to Windows SharePoint Services.

The first important bulletin, given its breadth in affecting every Windows OS program, bears watching. That bulletin pertains to the prospect of denial of service attacks, which are attempts to make IT resources unavailable, locking users out of programs and applications.

The second important item deals with spoofs, also known in techie world as "masquerade ball" attacks, where a hacker as a user or malicious program passes his/itself off as another user/program using erroneous data and gaining unwarranted Read and/or Write access. This would affect all OSes except XP and Vista.

The last important patch affects all versions of SharePoint services and remedies concerns over potential elevation of privilege attacks, where malicious users can change profile settings, usurp access configurations and gain greater entry into the system than intended.

Of the total seven bulletins, three will require restarts.

As it does most months, Redmond will also release another update to the Microsoft Windows Malicious Software Removal tool and has plans to release three non-security, high-priority updates on Microsoft Update and Windows Server Update Services and one non-security, high-priority update for Windows on Windows Update.

Although things can still change, Thursday's advance notification points to a pretty busy Tuesday.

VMware Inc. said Monday it will release three software packages by the end of the year to help small and medium-size businesses take on virtualization projects.

The packages, which VMware calls "acceleration kits," are based on VMware Infrastructure 3, its virtualization suite for servers and storage networks. VMware, a subsidiary of EMC Corp., said between 60 to 70 percent of its customers are SMBs.

The packages offer varying levels of features depending on price. At the core of all three is either VMware's ESX Server or ESX Server 3i, a product released last month whose hypervisor is embedded in flash memory in the server hardware. The hypervisor enables multiple OSes to run on one machine.

VMware hopes the ESX Server 3i, which the company says has a small, 32M-byte footprint and is easy to use, will keep it ahead of competitors such as XenSource, which was bought by Citrix Systems Inc. in August for US$500 million, and Microsoft Corp.'s Viridian project. VMware holds more than 80 percent of the market for virtualization products.

Also in the acceleration kits are tools such as an Update Manager, which handles patch management, and Guided Consolidation, a tool to shift tasks from physical servers to virtual machines. The company published a full list of features of the three VMware acceleration kits on its Web site.

The cheapest kit, called Infrastructure 3 Foundation, is priced at US$2,995 for three two-processor licenses. The Infrastructure 3 Standard High Availability kit lists for $5,995, for two, two-processor nodes. The Infrastructure 3 Midsize Acceleration Kit accommodates three, two-processor nodes and sells for $14,495.

Users running pirated or counterfeit copies of Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 can now download Internet Explorer 7, Microsoft announced Thursday.

From the moment it released IE7 almost a year ago, Microsoft has restricted the browser to users who can prove they own a legitimate copy of the operating system. Before Microsoft allows the browser to download, it runs the user's PC through a Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) validation test, a prime part of XP's antipiracy software.

When it instituted the requirement in 2006, Microsoft said rights to IE7 was one of the rewards for being legal. It changed its mind Thursday, saying the move is in users' best interest.

"Because Microsoft takes its commitment to help protect the entire Windows ecosystem seriously, we're updating the IE7 installation experience to make it available as broadly as possible to all Windows users," said Steve Reynolds, an IE program manager in a posting to a Microsoft company blog. "With today's 'Installation and Availability Update,' Internet Explorer 7 installation will no longer require Windows Genuine Advantage validation and will be available to all Windows XP users."

Microsoft has consistently touted IE7 as a more secure browser, and post-launch patch counts back that up. In the past 11 months, IE6 for Windows XP SP2 has been patched for 22 vulnerabilities, 20 of them rated critical. IE7 for XP SP2, however, has been patched only 13 times; 10 of those fixes were ranked critical. In fact, when Microsoft announced that IE7 would not be offered to users running illegal copies of XP, some analysts questioned the company's commitment to security.

Windows Server 2008 is on its way. With the first release candidate in the pipeline, it shouldn't be long before release to manufacturing and general availability.

With such a long development time (it's the first new Windows Server OS since 2003,) the show stopping new features have been well publicized: Most IT pros are familiar with at least some of the details of Server Core, PowerShell and Windows Server Virtualization (codenamed Viridian). But Windows 2008 includes a lot more than those headliners.

To that end, we're presenting the most overlooked features of Windows 2008. We spoke with Ward Ralston, senior technical product manager for Windows Server, to help us build our list. These items haven't garnered the same kind of press attention, hype and word-of-mouth as the others, but they're nonetheless important -- maybe very important -- to your network.

The Print Management Console (PMC). This was originally released with Windows Server 2003 R2. But unlike the R2 release, it's a native function in Windows 2008, and available to everyone. PMC is a snap-in for the Microsoft Management Console (MMC), which lets an admin see every printer in an entire organization, from one console. In addition, you can use Group Policy to map printers to specific user groups, so that the Accounting folks won't be hogging printers that Engineering needs.

Auditpol. This is a verbose logging tool that allows you to configure, create, back up and restore audit policies on any computer in your organization. In these days of regulatory compliance, auditing is more important than ever, and Auditpol may eliminate the need for a third-party auditing program. It includes a greatly expanded list of auditing counters from the simple tools available in Windows 2003, and hundreds of different categories that let you "create a paper trail of what's going on inside your OS," Ralston says.

Windows Remote Shell (WinRS). To connect to a command prompt on a remote computer in Windows 2003, an admin needed to use Terminal Services. TS worked well but wasn't scalable, requiring a connection to a console on each remote computer. WinRS makes secure connections to as many remote computers as necessary, all from a single console. That could be a significant time-saver for admins.

Event forwarding. This benefit is available to organizations that run Vista on their desktops. Event forwarding aggregates and forwards logs of chosen computers back to a central console, making management much more efficient. Say you're an admin and you start getting calls from users who are seeing the dreaded "Event 51" pop up on their screens, indicating a logon problem. Instead of employing sneakernet technology -- running from machine to machine to comb through security events or other problems -- you simply "subscribe" Vista computers through your console, and they send whatever information you ask for right to your door.

Active Directory Rights Management Services (AD RMS). In Windows 2003, this was known as Windows Rights Management Services. It was available in Windows 2003, but only as an add-on product for purchase. It's built into Windows 2008, and includes some upgrades. AD RMS assists in the creation of rights-protected files, licensing rights-protected information, and checking to make sure that only authorized users have access to rights-protected data. Some of the enhancements for Windows 2008 include the ability to administer AD RMS through the MMC, and delegate AD RMS tasks through "administrative roles."