WarMouse, in collaboration with the OpenOffice.org community, revealed on Friday a new open-source mouse developed specifically for users of the OpenOffice suite.

The corded pointing device, memorably dubbed the OpenOfficeMouse, features an unconventional amount of buttons, and will undoubtedly be more than welcome in the lineup of the world's weirdest mice. The OpenOfficeMouse packs in a massive 18 programmable buttons, all of which can be double-clicked, in addition to a scrollwheel, 512KB of built-in flash memory, and support for over 60 separate configurations. With that many buttons, let's just hope the OpenOfficeMouse's target users are incredibly dexterous.

It's becoming increasingly easier to make your PC setup more eco-friendly, thanks to a wide range of both software and hardware solutions available to help you go green.

The green-computing movement, which begin with the Energy Star program back in 1992, strives to ensure that the computer industry adopts various environmentally sustainable practices, such as creating more environmentally sound products and ensuring that those products' manufacturing processes, overall design, everyday use and eventual disposal have as small an environmental impact as possible.

Chip-maker Intel has promised to supply a fix for a recently released firmware update, which once applied, bricked certain users' solid-state drives (SSD).

The firmware, dubbed the SSD Optimizer update, was made available late last month, but was quickly pulled by Intel. The decision by Intel to stop the firmware's availability was due to various reports, including several disgruntled forum posts, that the software was bricking certain users drives.

Maingear is no stranger to custom high-power gaming PCs and notebooks. For some time now, you've been able to order quite powerful systems from the company. The latest from Maingear is the SHIFT, just announced in a press release and now available for order at the company's site. It's a good-looking computer, but I think they're going a bit too far in marketing this new rig as a "personal supercomputer."

The press release gushes:

Microsoft has long said, and we have reminded users, that DirectX 11 is not just a Windows 7 technology. The company promised that DirectX 11 will be availalbe for Vista around the same time as the release of its latest and greatest operating system.

And so it has come to pass. Vista users who check Windows Update should see a rather generic "Platform Update" with the reference KB971644. The update is available for Windows Server 2008 as well. In addition to adding DirectX 11, this update adds and XPS document printing library, the Windows Automation API, and an update to the Windows Portable Devices Platform.

It has been just over a week since Microsoft's low-key Windows 7 launch, and rumors are already circulating around the operating systems first service pack (SP).

Of course, as with any Windows release, the engineers at Microsoft get to work mending a variety of bug fixes immediately after it's retail debut. So reports that the OS' first service pack is on the way comes as no major surprise. Today's rumors regarding Service Pack 1 (SP1) come courtesy of Wzor, who detailed that a beta release of SP1 is expected to arrive sometime in January of 2010, possibly around the same time as the annual trade show CES.

Asus debuted the world's first SuperSpeed USB 3.0 motherboard this Wednesday, branded with the highly memorable moniker of Asus Xtreme Design P7DP55DE-E Premium. Catchy, I'm sure you'll agree.

The new hybrid motherboard is based around Intel's P55 Express Chipset, which does not support the new faster USB 3.0 standard. As a workaround, Asus makes use of an unnamed third-party USB 3.0 controller to make everything play nicely. This move turns a blind eye to the recent rumours that Intel's very own USB 3.0 friendly chipsets will be delayed, potentially slowing down overall SuperSpeed adoption rates. So this product announcement comes as a welcome offering, despite Asus' disappointing failed dabble with USB 3.0 motherboards earlier this year.

Intel released a new firmware update Monday specifically for its current range of 32-nanometer solid-state drives (SSD), the update assures that Intels X25-M series of products will receive a significant increase in performance.

The firmware, known as the SSD Optimizer update, makes use of the SSD TRIM command, which identifies which blocks of data aren't in use and uses that information to stop unnecessary disk rewriting. Through using this command the drives gain an impressive write-speed increase of up-to 40%. However, Intel have claimed that the improvements in speed can vary depending on the drive capacity. The 160GB unit sees write speeds jump from 70MB per second to 100MB per second.

Memory-maker Kingston Digital announced Monday a new addition to its range of solid-state drives. The latest addition, dubbed the SDDNow V Series 40GB Boot Drive, aims to offer an effective and competitively-priced SSD to serve as a boot-drive that supplements your existing hard drive.

Kingston positions the new 2.5-inch drive exclusively as a boot-drive. The idea is for you to store your operating system and applications on the SSD to improve load speeds, while keeping all other data--such as music, photos and videos--on a more capacious hard disk drive. This approach makes some sense; it offers desktop users a quick and easy way to gain additional performance from their existing systems, in addition to potentially accelerating the PC start-up and shutdown, and the load time of applications. The 40GB Boot Drive is rated at 170MB per second read speed, with write speeds at 40MB per second.

When is a Windows PC not a Windows PC? When you toss out the Windows and replace it with Apple’s Mac OS X Snow Leopard or any other major operating system.

That’s what you can do--at least for the moment--with Rebel EFI from Psystar Corp., a $50 application suite that allows standard PC boxes with Intel Core 2 Duo, Core 2 Quad, Core i7 or Xeon Nehalem processors to install and run multiple operating systems. This capability had been built into Psystar’s computers in the past, but now the software that enables it is available as a standalone, user-installable product.

Earlier this week Apple rolled out a metric ton of new products, including updated iMacs, a unibody Macbook, a new Apple remote, and a particularly unique mouse. The latter, dubbed the Magic Mouse, has already gotten the teardown treatment from iFixit, despite being out only a matter of days .

The new Magic Mouse replaces the much-maligned Mighty Mouse, which annoyed users with its problematic roller ball and touch-sensitive side buttons (activated by squeezing the mouse). Apple also recently ran into legal issues over the Mighty Mouse's name (it's now simply the "Apple Mouse") According to various early reviews, Apple's Magic Mouse is a big improvement over the old mouse.

Active Media Products announced Tuesday its new Predator-X7 line of 2.5-inch solid-state drives.

These new low-power drives are all designed around JMicron's JM612 controller, which makes use of an ARM9 core and include caches of up to 128MB, allowing the new SSD drives to easily clone data, and do it fast. Sequential read speeds of up to 230MBps can be expected, with write speeds coming in at 180MBps.