Microsoft Corp. today announced the release to manufacturing (RTM) of Microsoft Windows XP 64-Bit Edition Version 2003. Windows XP 64-Bit Edition Version 2003 is optimized to enable customers to take advantage of the performance enhancements in the Intel Itanium 2 processor.

This week it seems to be the week of anniversaries: Two years of Mac OS X, ten years from the Pentium launch, ten years of Red Hat, three years of OS/2 World.

Changes to core packages in Red Hat Linux 9 can potentially impact thousands of applications, says eWeek in their review of Red Hat Linux 9. OSNews also featured a Red Hat Linux 9 review recently, and we have one more coming up soon.

Microsoft on Friday is expected to reveal release of finished Windows Server 2003 code, as the company prepares for the April 24 launch in San Francisco.

MacCritic are writing down their opinion on the rumors that say that Mac OS X 10.3 Panther will use the "Metal" interface system-wide.

Linux is gaining market share in the retail industry. Use of the open-source operating system to run point-of-sale terminals in North America increased 185 percent last year, IHL Consulting Group said in a study released Wednesday.

Ville Turjanmaa put up two new screenshots from his recently released 0.73 MenuetOS. The taskbar seems more refined now. In other OS news, the Syllable guys are reporting on the new drivers that their OS will feature in the next release, while YellowTAB posted an update about their status and what they are working on. Also, hobby OS TriangleOS has some news too.

Continuing down the path of evolutionary development, release time for OpenBSD 3.3 grows near. Pre-orders of CD sets are now being accepted and new t-shirt designs are up. More at OpenBSD Journal.

With the release of version 9.1, MandrakeSoft once again attempts to raise the bar for desktop Linux distributions. Ease of use for newbies and configurability and stability for power users have always been the focus of Mandrake Linux. TinyMinds.org investigates if that trend continues with this latest (Download Edition) release. OSNews posted the first review of Mandrake 9.1-Standard a few days ago.

In a statement given to MacCentral in response to the recent page posted on Adobe's site showing that Adobe After Effects performs better on a PC than on a Mac, Apple states that After Effects is slower on the Mac compared to Apple's own Final Cut Express, and that comparable effects in FCE perform better than After Effects on a PC or a Mac.

SuSE Linux today announced the general availability of the SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 for the Intel Itanium Processor Family, and that it has been chosen to drive parts of the "TeraGrid," a scientific computing system accessible to researchers across the United States. eWeek also covers this release as part of a Linux-special article regarding the SuSE, Red Hat and Mandrake upcoming releases.

Virtual PC 5.2 for Windows released recently and fixes a number of issues, but it will now only work on the NT/2k/XP/2003 Windows versions. In the meantime, next week, VMWare will begin shipping the 4.0 version of its desktop virtualization software, VMWare Workstation.

Late last month, Sun held a press conference detailing its microprocessor roadmap, featuring a range of chips including the current UltraSPARC III, the dual-core UltraSPARC IV, the SMT-based UltraSPARC V, and the highly multithreaded Niagara processor. Last week Ace's Hardware had the chance to sit down with Dr. Marc Tremblay and discuss some of the new processors and technologies on Sun's roadmap for the future.

I installed Red Hat Linux 9 (Shrike) to see what has changed between it and the previous major version of Red Hat (8.0). The article features some installation screenshots and of course some post-install screenshots showing Bluecurve in Gnome and KDE (more shots here), user experience and discussion of whether you should upgrade or not.