Hamburg - Laptop buyers should pay special attention to the amount of RAM installed in the computer. Two gigabytes (GB) is the rock-bottom threshold, recommends Hamburg-based Computerbild magazine, as that is enough to work with Windows Vista.

Those who must satisfy "memory hungry" applications like photo editors are best advised to go for a model with 3 GB of RAM. The magazine tested eight current laptops costing around 500 dollars each.

Hamburg -Looking into the future is easy to do at autumn bicycle trade shows when manufacturers highlight their new products.

A new trend is now emerging - the retro look is honing in on bicycle design.

"The retro trend in bicycle design so far has been on the fringes, but you can certainly assume that it will continue and gain impetus," said Andre Glaeser of Germany's bicycle club. Siegfried Neuberger, director of Germany's two-wheeler industry association, agrees.

Hamburg - The healthy properties of water is ancient knowledge that goes back at least to the Romans.

Vestiges of their thermal baths can be found all over Europe, and people today are rediscovering the meaning of the Latin phrase "sanus per aquam" (health through water).

Wellness travel accounts for 60 per cent of all trips taken primarily for health reasons, according to the European spas association in Brussels. Trips to spas and rehabilitation centres comprise the remainder.

More than any other age group, 35- to 50-year-olds or people who find themselves in the middle of their most difficult work years - increasingly are part of the boom.

Hamburg  - HSH Nordbank, a troubled German public-owned bank, confirmed Wednesday that the world financial crisis had wiped 500 million euros (700 million dollars) off the value of its assets.

The Hamburg-based bank said the third-quarter write-down would include 120 million euros that vanished in last week's collapse of Wall Street investment banking firm Lehman Brothers.

After a 2007 write-down of 1.3 billion euros and a first-half-2008 write-down of 511 million euros, the new setback increases the HSH Nordbank loss to 2.3 billion euros.

Hamburg  - The shooting spree at a school in western Finland on Tuesday added to the growing list of bloodshed committed by students at schools and universities over the past decade. Following is a list of the bloodiest incidents:

-- September 23, 2008: Police report nine killed in a shooting spree by a gunman at a trade school in Kauhajoki, some 300 kilometres north-west of the Finnish capital Helsinki.

-- February 14, 2008: Seven people, including the gunman who shot himself dead, are killed and some 20 wounded when the former sociology student goes on a shooting rampage at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Illinois.

Hamburg - Most computer programs are usually bought in a store stored on a CD or DVD-ROM and packed in a box.

But the ways of shopping are changing and computer users are finding more offers to download software directly from the internet. Experts see many pros to the switch, but also a few cons.

Commercial software downloads were fairly rare until a few years ago, says Daniel Rasch, an editor at the Hamburg-based Computer Bild magazine. Many people did not have fast-enough internet connections to make downloading new applications practical.

"But the variety is definitely picking up now."