In previous OS News articles, I described how mature computers up to ten years old can be refurbished and made useful. One article identified and evaluated different approaches to refurbishing. This article tells how to performance tune a mature Windows computer to make it serviceable again. I hope it will interest anyone who wants to tune Windows.

HP/Palm has officially released HP webOS 2.0 and the Pre 2, and Engadget has the first review of webOS 2.0 (not of the Pre 2, their device was a pre-production model). "Despite some issues, webOS 2.0 is probably neck and neck with iOS4 when it comes to polish and ease of use, and that's a pretty huge thing for Palm. This isn't just a good OS, it's a great OS, and the updates in this version have made it even better. It's obvious that when combined with even slightly better hardware, it's also a fast experience that makes it easy to get real work done."

Steve Jobs' rant against Android, RIM, and 7" tablets couldn't go by unnoticed, of course. We already had the rather dry response from Google's Andy Rubin, but Mountain View isn't the only one who responded. TweetDeck's CEO wasn't particularly pleased by Jobs distorting TweetDeck's story on developing for Android, and now we have RIM's co-CEO Jim Balsillie who slammed Cupertino pretty hard.

Catfight! Get out your mobile phones and start filming, because two important personalities in the mobile world just got into a catfight. After the presentation of Apple's (once again) stellar quarterly results (what's with the low iPad sales, though?), Apple's CEO Steve Jobs went on a bit of a tangent regarding Android (among other things). Google's Andy Rubin, the father of Android, responded in a pretty fun way via Twitter.

Well, it's been a while since we've opened this particular jar (box is not historically accurate) owned by Pandora. Desktop Linux... Yes, that ever elusive readiness of the desktop that is Linux-powered. Some story on ComputerWorld argues that the desktop Linux dream is dead, and apparently, the story is causing some stir on the web. Well, paint me pink and call me a lightbulb, but of course desktop Linux is dead. However - who gives a flying monkey? Linux is being used by more people than ever!

Britain's Attorney General has said that website owners should be made legally responsible for comments made by visitors. According to a report on Out-law.com, Dominic Grieve told members of the Criminal Bar Association that the spiralling number of internet news web sites meant it was becoming more and more difficult for courts to ensure that trials were fair, and that juries were not exposed to material that could prejudice a hearing.

Microsoft has joined the wave of companies betting that 3-D is the next big thing for computing. At a recent talk at MIT, chief research and strategy officer Craig Mundie said he sees the technology as an innovation that "will get people out of treating a computer as a tool" and into treating the device as a natural extension of how they interact with the world around them. Microsoft plans to introduce consumers to the change through its gaming products, but Mundie outlined a vision that would eventually have people shopping and searching in 3-D as well.

Microsoft has released a free tool to help programmers test their regular expressions for vulnerability to denial of service attacks. The JSDL Regex Fuzzer, released by the software giant earlier this week, is designed to test programmers' regular expressions - a ubiquitous formal language for matching strings of text - for clauses that execute in exponential time and which stand the chance of being exploited for nefarious means.

And we have another interesting development in the ongoing and ever-expanding idiocy that is the War of the High-Fiving Lawyers Mobile Patent World War. Motorola, now a central player in this worldwide conflict that is hurting consumers' wallets and clogging legal systems all over the world, has come to HTC's rescue by seeking to invalidate the patents Apple sued HTC with earlier this year.

For its upcoming Firefox 4.0 release, Mozilla has been concentrating a great deal on what is often cited as the main shortcoming of Firefox ... its speed. For example, Firefox 4.0 will include GPU acceleration for both rendering and compositing on Windows 7/Vista, OSX and Linux, and it will have GPU acceleration for compositing only for Windows XP.

Nokia. The smartphone business is booming, and yet, the Finnish company - the quintessential phone maker - is getting pretty much none of the glitz and glamour. Their latest the device, the Nokia N8, is supposed to turn the tide, and Engadget has a thorough review of the device. Conclusion? It's getting repetitive, but hardware - awesome, software - not so much.

Opera Extensions have been confirmed as a feature of Opera 11. "Extensions in Opera is a way for you to easily add new functionality to your Opera browser experience. Developers can easily create extensions using open standards (HTML5, CSS, JavaScript) and supported APIs. Extensions will be based on the W3C Widget specifications and this is being considered for an Open Standard effort."

In this day and age of iOS this and iPad that you'd nearly forget it, but the gadget maker from Cupertino actually makes personal computers and an accompanying operating system as well. It's been nearly three years since the last substantial release, so it's about time: Apple has just announced a press event titled 'Back to Mac', with a lion on the invite.

Well, this is quite interesting. This is one of those items where I have to make sure everybody realises I'm no developer as to not make myself look like an idiot. Having said that - LinSched. It's a user-space program that hosts the Linux kernel scheduler, so you can create and test scheduling policies on arbitrary hardware topologies - without actually having to work with the real hardware.