PCs: Vista news expected at CES

Both Microsoft, which makes the operating systems used in most personal computers, and Apple, which provides its own OS for its Mac computers, will be rolling out new operating systems this year. CR's Tom Olson will be sharing his expectations for Apple's upcoming OS X 10.5 Leopard, which will likely be a centerpiece of MacWorld next week.

Here's what I'll be watching for at CES, where Windows Vista, the new Microsoft OS, promises to be among the big stories:

• Hybrid hard drives (planned by Hitachi, Seagate and Samsung), which will be required for laptops to be certified for use with Vista Home Premium. These use a flash-memory buffer, so the hard drive only needs to work when that buffer is full. The idea is to better control power consumption and save battery life while maintaining fast data access.
• Sideshow, a small display built into your laptop's case or another location that lets you view certain items like a calendar, address book and instant messages.
• Quad processors, which are already showing up in high-end gaming PCs for about $4,000.
• More powerful integrated graphics to accommodate Vista's Aero interface.
• Vista's improved security features, and how security software vendors will be accommodating them. Vista will have a two-way firewall, better control over software installation, Service Hardening to block malicious software, and BitLocker to encrypt the hard drive. Microsoft was also recently looking into several reported security flaws in Vista.
• New consumer entertainment devices that work closely with Vista's features or with Intel's "Viiv" features that are preinstalled on some new PCs.

Aside from Vista, I'll be looking at the newest products for networking computers in your home wirelessly, and for interacting with your computer. Stay tuned.

— Dean Gallea, program leader in computer testing

—Paul Eng