London, Jan. 26 : A computer data disk containing personal details of around 2,000 members of British Council staff has been lost.

According to a report in The Mirror, the lost disc contains names, national insurance numbers, salary and bank account details of the Council''s UK staff, and is the latest in a string of cases of official information going astray in recent months.

The British Council says that the missing disk was securely encrypted to keep its contents safe if it falls into the wrong hands.

San Francisco  - Apple's final appearance at the Macworld Expo in San Francisco in early January was a mixture of heightened expectations, bittersweet farewells and a few titbits about new Apple products.

Michael Gartenberg, an expert from Jupitermedia, said expectations of a major announcement, as usual, were unrealistic. He noted that Mac enthusiasts have grown used to Steve Jobs, the head of Apple, using the keynote speech at the event to unveil yet another breakthrough product.

Germering, Germany  - Logitech plans to produce a computing keyboard especially for gamers.

The G19 keyboard was designed with input from the gaming community, meaning it is designed to meet the needs of passionate computer and online gamers, said the company. The new keyboard is due out in March.

The features include 12 programmable buttons, two high-speed USB ports and a colour LCD display. The 320x340 pixel display shows information relevant to the game being played.

Washington  - Move over, Core 2 Duo. Move over, Core 2 Quad. Intel's new i7 processor is showing up in new computers around the world. Intel is billing the i7 as "the best desktop processor in the world," and indeed it offers some substantial improvements - in both speed and architecture - over previous models. But is the i7 worth your money? Will it make help you get your work done faster? And will it make your current PC obsolete? Read on for some answers.

Q: What's new about the i7?

Munich  - It's hard to be 100 per cent consistent. Computer operating systems are no different. The Mac OS tends to be very easy to use, particularly for users who don't need to make major changes to their system. Yet, some programme types just aren't often made for the Mac. One way to circumvent this is virtualisation.

"Virtualisation involves one computer with additional virtual computers running on it, each independent of one another," explains Sven Ahnert, an IT expert and technical book author. The interesting aspect is that no additional hardware is required. With the right software, one standard Mac OS X machine can also run Windows XP.

There's a bit of a dearth of tax and finance programs like Quicken for the Mac OS, for example.

Hamburg  - WLAN USB sticks that sport the newest N transmission standard can retrieve data from the internet up to four times faster than those working with the prior G standard.

They can also broadcast across longer distances and require up to 50 per cent less energy, reports Hamburg-based Computer Bild.

While devices working with the G standard could reach an effective transfer rate of maximally 23 megabits per second, WLAN sticks with the new N standard achieve up to