End of the Road for Yahoo Briefcase

Yahoo's Briefcase online storage service is finally being shut down.Users of the free service, which soldiered on for almost 10 years with a distinctly Web 1.0 capacity of 30MB, are being greeted by a message that says they have to download or delete their files by March 30. After that, the accounts will be closed and files deleted.

Yahoo Briefcase lets people upload files as big as 5MB and organise them in folders. But Yahoo is discontinuing Briefcase because users outgrew it.

Other services, such as Yahoo Mail and Flickr, offer far greater storage capacity, and the use of Briefcase has fallen in recent years, the company said. The move will help it to focus on services that are more widely used, according to Yahoo.

As it battles Google and Microsoft in the search arena and struggles to bring in more revenue from its array of other services, Yahoo is being driven toward tighter focus. The company announced layoffs last year and has seen its stock price plunge since a proposed acquisition by Microsoft fell apart in May 2008.

Time may have passed Briefcase by, but the idea of internet-based file storage is alive and well. Microsoft last year announced Live Mesh, a service now in beta testing that lets users store files online, keep them synchronised across mobile devices and PCs, and access them on the road. The free DropBox application offers similar capabilities. And Google is rumored to be near introducing an online storage service called GDrive.

First Intel Core i7 Laptops Set for Release

PC retailer Eurocom plans to ship Intel Core i7 laptops, which the chip maker has dubbed the "fastest processor on this planet".

The Eurocom D900F Phantom i7 will include Intel's Nehalem-based quad-core Core i7 chips, which are typically put in servers and high-end gaming desktops. The laptops will ship on May 1, according to the Canadian PC retailer's website.

The laptop's Core i7 920, 940 and 965 processors will run at speeds from 2.66GHz to 3.2GHz and include 8MB of L2 cache. Intel launched the Core i7 chips in November and since then the chip has been praised for its speedy performance.

Calling it the "world's first notebook with i7 processor", Eurocom is targeting the laptop workstation as a desktop workstation replacement. It will include the X58 chipset and an Nvidia graphics processing unit (GPU) to boost graphics performance.

It will have a 17in screen and support up to 1.5TB of storage, 8GB of DDR3 memory and 1GB of graphics memory. It will also include wireless 802.11a/b/g/n technology and a webcam. It will ship with either the Windows Vista or Linux OS.

The laptop will weigh a whopping 5.4kg and it will come with a 12-cell battery. Pricing was not immediately available, though users can expect to dig deep into their wallets considering the use of new technologies in the laptop.

If Eurocom indeed ships the laptop, it could be the fastest Intel-based x86 laptop on the planet. Core i7 chips are built on the Nehalem microarchitecture, which includes the QuickPath Interconnect (QPI) technology. QPI integrates a memory controller and provides a faster pipe for the CPU to communicate with system components like a graphics card and other chips.

Each core will be able to execute two software threads simultaneously, so a laptop with four processor cores could simultaneously run eight threads for quicker application performance.

Nehalem chips are a significant upgrade over Intel's Core 2 chips, which are currently used in desktops and laptops. The new chips cut bottlenecks of Intel's earlier Core microarchitecture to improve system speed and performance-per-watt.

Though Core i7 isn't targeted at laptops, Intel intends to scale down the Nehalem architecture for other chips that will go in mainstream desktops and laptops. Intel will also integrate graphics capabilities in the CPU down the line, which should bring more power-efficiency to laptops. However, gamers might need a separate graphics card for better graphics performance.

Intel has said it will release laptop-specific Nehalem chips in the second half of this year.

Many companies including Lenovo and Dell offer laptop workstations. Last month Lenovo launched the ThinkPad W700DS mobile workstation that has two LCD screens.