Microsoft is making headway toward the RTM of Windows Live Essentials 2011 / Wave 4. And the Redmond company is reportedly gearing up to release a new development milestone following the two Beta Builds it has already provided to early adopters for testing.

Before it can be released to manufacturing, Windows Live Essentials 2011 needs to jump through the Release Candidate (RC) hoop, which is just around the corner.

Windows Live Essentials 2011 RC is apparently planned for availability next week, on September 9th, 2010, according to an anonymous source from Russia close to Microsoft, cited by GeekSmack.

Acer has now taken the veil off its LUMiReader e-reader, and confirmed previous reports that the lightweight (250 grams) device will be released in Germany next month, paired up with access to the Libri.de ebook store.

Acer's ereader comes equipped with a 6-inch monochrome (800 x 600) E-Ink display, 2GB of storage space (enough for over 1,500 books), and has a QWERTY keyboard, a microSD card slot, an ISBN scanner that lets you scan book codes, an USB port, and WiFi connectivity. All this will cost you €199.

Though the UHS-I specification, which described the means to create SD memory cards that can work at speeds of up to 104 MB/s, wasn't released overly long ago, the SD Association has revealed that the SD 4.0 specification will describe a new design capable of reaching all  the way up to 300 MB/s.

According to the official press release issued by the SD Association, the SD 4.0 specification is promising much higher speeds than those currently achievable.

The main asset that will enable the aforementioned data rates of 300 MB/s will be a new, dual-row pin memory card design.

This new design will be applicable to SDHC and SDXC cards, as well as their microSDHC and microSDXC variations.

Novosoft LLC, a software development and IT consulting company providing complete backupsolutions for home and small/medium business, today announced the release of a new utility - Handy Backup Disaster Recovery. When installed on an external Flash or USB drive, the program can perform easy backup and disaster recovery of compter data even in case of a system failure.

Novosoft LLC, one of the leading providers of professional software solutions for home and business, today released a brand new product that enhances their famous series of home and business backup solutions Handy Backup™ with one more powerful system-independent backup and recovery solution. Handy Backup Disaster Recovery is an innovative Java-driven program providing a convenient means of backing up hard disk drives and their recovery after a major failure.

As promised at the end of July 2010, when Microsoft announced the next iteration of a security toolkit designed to help customers bulletproof arbitrary applications, Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit 2.0 is now available for download.

EMET 2.0 is obviously the successor of version 1.0 of the tool, but evolved, guaranteed to bring a little extra kick to customers’ security game.

When talking about the tool, the Redmond company always emphasized that the release is designed to enable users to easily add security mitigation technologies to arbitrary applications.

Nvidia is obviously the GeForce 400M series update but another thing worth mentioning is the stealthy introduction of the company's first low-end DirectX 11 desktop graphics card, the GeForce GT 420.

Officially shipping only to system manufacturers, the GT 420 is a low-profile card that's likely powered by the GF108 40nm GPU, and has a single-slot active cooler, 48 CUDA Cores, a GPU clock of 700 MHz, a shader frequency of 1400 MHz, a 128-bit memory interface and 2GB of DDR3 memory set to 1800 MHz.

Sticking to its development schedule as usual, the Ubuntu team has now made available the public beta version of its next Ubuntu release, which is known as Ubuntu 10.10 or Maverick Meerkat.

The beta includes the 2.6.35-19.28 kernel and comes with GNOME 2.32 Beta (Kubuntu boasts KDE 4.5.0), updated software packages, Shotwell as the default photo manager (previously Ubuntu used F-Spot), a polished Software Center, an improved installer, new themes and wallpapers, better desktop integration for Ubuntu One and more.

Later this month Asus is promising to introduce a new, feature-rich Bamboo Collection mobile machine, the U53JC-XX127V 15.6-inch laptop which boasts USB 3.0 connectivity and the Intel Wireless Display Technology which enables easy, wire-free sharing of laptop content on TVs.

Seen below, Asus' upcoming notebook measures 386 x 259 x 34 mm and weights 2.8 kg, and (also) has a 15.6-inch (1366 x 768) LED-backlit display, a 2.4 GHz Core i5-450M processor, 4GB of RAM, a 320GB hard drive, a 4x Blu-ray combo drive, and a GeForce 310M graphics card with 1GB of dedicated memory (Optimus is present). Moreover, it packs a 5-in-1 card reader, Gigabit Ethernet, 802.11n WiFi, SRS Premium Surround Sound speakers, the Express Gate instant-on OS, and an 8-cell battery.