PC Magazine has posted a Windows XP guide designed to walk non-experts through some of the alternate settings and add-ons that make XP work better. It has compiled various tips from its past issues into one guide for easy reference. Even Windows power-users may find something of interest.

The operating system company makes a further move into the hardware business, offering Linux on a desktop computer with flat-panel monitor for $449. The computer has a 1.2GHz Duron processor, 256MB of SDRAM and a 20GB hard drive.

Contiki OS, "a highly portable, modern, open source, Internet-enabled operating system and desktop environment for very constrained systems," has been ported to the x86 platform. Previously able to run on only much smaller platforms, such as Atari, Gameboy, and Commodore, this is good news for developers interested in researching the OS.

The European Union says Microsoft is still abusing its monopoly with Windows Media Player. The press release can be found here.

KernelTrap has an interesting article about a recent benchmark conducted to compare five journaling filesystems available with the current 2.6.0-test2 Linux development kernel. The tests were conducted with a very simple shell script, mainly timing how long it takes to copy, tar, and remove directories. Looks like reiser4 is the fastest filesystem at the expense of consuming much more CPU, with ext3 trailing a ways behind.

"This week, however, Linux was also awarded with CC security certification, and as one might expect, this announcement greeted with cheers from the open source community. There's just one catch: Linux got a lower security rating than Windows 2000 did last year." Read it at WinInformant. Update: The WinInformant article is a little slanted in its reporting, since the ratings discussed have little to do with how secure either OS is in real-world use. Keep in mind that to achieve the higher rating, the computer is not allowed to be connected to any network, since network-connected computers are inherently vulnerable. A CNN article shoots a little straighter on the subject. The certification is not a contest to see which is more secure, simply a test to see if the OS matches a certain objective set of criteria. You have to severely cripple a modern OS to make it meet government high security certification.