The tech sites are all excited today over the news that Microsoft has made the second beta version of their upcoming Internet Explorer 7 web browser public. You can download your beta copy here.

Things to look forward to in this new browser include tabbed browsing, increased speed and better compatibility with advanced website design standards.

In my current occupation of in-home and on-site technical support, I’ve come across just enough service calls involving an Apple computer that I wish I had more experience with the platform.

In many ways, Macs will always be involved in a chicken and egg scenario when it comes to support as there aren’t as many qualified support people who to bring those kind of customers to our service, yet if there’s never a large enough number of those people calling us up, it’s hard to justify having those specially qualified agents.

An opportunity came up yesterday, however, when a surplus Apple Mac mini came up in our inventory at a price that’s less than I’ve paid for some video cards. I snatched the unit up and now have it connected up via a USB KVM switch to my existing setup.

It’s not a powerful unit by any means, only sporting a 1.25GHz G4 processor, 256MB of DDR ram and a 40GB notebook harddrive, but at least it will provide a nice little self-training platform for Apple’s OSX operating system.

C|net is reporting that Federal prosecutors are attempting to defend the 1998 Child Online Protection Act by demanding millions of search records from popular online search engines such as Yahoo, MSN and Google.

According to the article, America Online, Yahoo and Microsoft have already supplied what they claim anonymous samples of millions of search terms and the websites they return. Google, on the other hand, has declared that they will vigorously defend the privacy rights of their users through all possible legal means before handing over logs of how people use their site to the government.

Needless to say, work’s been interesting lately …

If you’ve been concerned over the recent WMF security exploit for the Microsoft Windows XP operating system, you’ll probably want to bring up windowsupdate.microsoft.com in your web browser.

The software company has released a security fix (KB912919) that’s available earlier than anticipated through their automated update system.

As always, be sure that your computer has been configured for automatic updates and that you’re running a current antivirus and antispyware program with updated detection updates.

I like a little computer case modding as much as the next geek, but Western Digital has taken it perhaps a bit too far.

The harddrive manufacturer is set to release their WD Raptor X, a 150GB, 10,000RPM SATA hard drive with a clear polycarbonate window set into the top of the drive in order to allow viewing of the storage device’s internal workings.

The suggested retail price for the drive will be $349 and is currently available for preorder from the WD Store.

For users of the popular blogging back-end software Wordpress, the project team has made available version 2.0 today.