Wellington  - A New Zealand judge has "opened the legal floodgates" by approving the use of the social-networking website Facebook to serve court papers, according to a Wellington lawyer quoted Tuesday.

"Who would have thought Facebook would become part of the legal process?" Barbara Buckett told the Dominion Post newspaper.

"It took a long time for the courts to even look at faxes as a substitution for service of documents," she said. "Emails took a long time to come on board."

San Francisco  - Intel warned rival chip maker AMD Monday that its license to make personal-computer chips could be revoked because it spun out its manufacturing unit into a separate company.

Intel dominates the market for PC-compatible chips, which are based on the ubiquitous x86 architecture, first introduced by Intel in 1978 and later licensed to other companies.

Barcelona  - Microsoft used the recent Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, to unveil the latest generation of Windows Mobile, its operating system for cell phones. Version 6.5 can be expected for Smartphones before the end of 2009, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced.

The company claims that the OS will provide convenient mobile surfing through improved representation of pages. A newly redesigned Start screen is also intended to provide simpler access to frequently used functions like email, telephone, and music.

Berlin  - Laptops have made leaps and bounds in speed and memory capacity in recent years, threatening the desktop PC's dominance. As an additional blow to the PC's supremacy, they might also prove to be more energy efficient.

Laptops use about 70 per cent less energy than PCs, said Dena, the German Energy Agency, mainly because notebook manufacturers have had to emphasize energy efficiency in the name of boosting battery lifetimes.

Cupertino, California - Changes are in store for Apple's line-up of desktop Macs, the computer manufacturer has announced.

A new Mac mini will sport processor speeds of 2 gigahertz (GHz) and sell for 599 euros (755 dollars). It comes equipped with an integrated NVIDIA GeForce-9400M graphics processor, while its DDR3 SDRAM random access memory comes with 1 gigabyte (GB) of storage and a processing speed of 1,066 megahertz (MHz).

Additionally, the new mini comes with a 120 GB S-ATA hard drive and a multi-format disc burner.

Hamburg  - The principle of "higher, faster, further" seems to have been taken very much to heart by computer game developers. They strive valiantly in a never-ending quest for titles with better graphics, "never before seen" game play and everything else ratcheted up a notch over the last generation - at least in theory.