The world’s cheapest laptop has been unveiled in India, a touch screen device that costs just $35.

India’s Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal revealed that it had been in talks with manufacturers around the globe to create the device.

Dubbed, the ‘Sakshat’ laptop, it is aimed at students and Sibal expects it to be their hands from 2011. Despite the price, users will get a touch-screen, a PDF reader and a webcam for video conferencing. There has been no confirmation of its specifications but reports suggest 2GB of memory, Wi-Fi and Ethernet and power consumption at just 2W. Naturally, the device will run Linux.

Sibal even claimed that his department hopes to lower the cost to $20 or $10 – that’s what we call, commodity computing.

Microsoft Forefront Endpoint Protection 2010 Beta is now available!

Forefront Endpoint Protection simplifies and improves endpoint protection while greatly reducing infrastructure costs. It builds on System Center Configuration Manager 2007 R2, allowing customers to use their existing client management infrastructure to deploy and manage endpoint protection. This shared infrastructure lowers ownership costs while providing improved visibility and control over endpoint management and security.

Download available at: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/ff182914.aspx

IT professionals can now download Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 (SP1) Beta through the TechNet Evaluation Center. This combined service pack includes changes to both Windows platforms. The beta release is not available to home users.

Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 Beta helps keep your PCs and servers on the latest support level, provides ongoing improvements to the Windows Operating System (OS), by including previous updates delivered over Windows Update as well as continuing incremental updates to the Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 platforms based on customer and partner feedback, and is easy for organizations to deploy a single set of updates.

The download is available from http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/ff183870.aspx