Hanover - Deutsche Telekom is to sub-let its costly optical-fibre data network to other telecoms companies, the German telephone giant said Monday in Hanover just before the CeBIT computer show.

Telekom had originally refused to let business rivals pipe traffic through the high-speed VDSL network which it built in main German cities, forcing them to route internet traffic through slower Telekom copper cables.

The European Union reluctantly agreed to Telekom having a head start as sole user because of the enormous construction costs.

Hanover  - Users of home networks may want to consider a networked hard drive to provide communal access to music, photos, videos and data. Also known as Network Attached Storage (NAS), these compact devices work quietly, are simple to set up, and use only 10 watts on average, reports the Hanover-based c't magazine.

By comparison, a PC left running around the clock uses at least 60 watts, even if only rarely used to call up data.

As NAS hard drives generally offer incredibly large amounts of storage space, they are well equipped to serve as a backup space for a PC or laptop's hard drive. Almost all operating systems can now handle daily backups of this type.

Hanover, Germany  - It's that geeky time of the year, as the world's biggest three computing, mobiles and digital fairs get "early adopters", as the industry calls them, excited about the latest trends in electronic devices.

At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, tech writers went into raptures last month over the Palm Pre, a touch-screen phone, which - like the Apple iPhone - may one day turn us into a species that commands computers by twisting and flicking our fingers.

While humans have been writing with keyboards for 135 years and clicking with a mouse for 25 years, the idea of pinching to zoom in and out of images is still new enough to be surprising to many users.

Hanover, Germany  - While a few eccentric products always grab the spotlight at CeBIT computing trade shows, the bread-and- butter devices of the annual expo in Germany are personal computers and laptops.

This year's March 3-8 CeBIT features California, the place where personal computing began, as special partner.

The German organizers say today's World Wide Web society, which they shorten to "webciety," will be a key theme.

Hanover  - Setting up a home internet network may not be your idea of fun, but there's one consolation. If you set it up from scratch, you can set up a system best suited for transmitting pictures, music and other computer data from inside your own four walls.

If you're building a brand new home or undertaking a complete renovation, laying local area network (LAN) cables and network boxes is advisable. If you're adding a network to an existing home, your choice is between LAN, wireless LAN, an optical fibre network or making use of the house's existing power network to transmit information.

Hanover  - Microsoft has released a beta version of Windows 7 for consumers, but computer experts recommend trying it out only in controlled environments.

"Checking it out is fun," says Axel Vahldiek of c', a German computer magazine. But since it still has security gaps, use of the beta version should be limited to controlled environments. That means users should not store any vital data on computers using the test version of Windows 7.