IBM Corp this week is expected to put announce that it is putting all its decision support offerings from its various systems including AS/400, RS/6000 SP and mainframes into a single new unit that will offer a one-stop shop for decision support, not only on its own machines but on alien ones as well.

Hewlett-Packard Co cut prices on its NetServer line and accessories in the US as part of its strategy to lead the market in affordable, top-performance network servers: NetServer prices fall up to 11% and some NetServer accessories are been cut as much as 31%; a NetServer 5/75 LC now is available at $2,420, while the NetServer 5/100 LC and HP NetServer 5/133 LC now start at $3,302 and $4,094 respectively; the high-end NetServer LS Series now starts at $7,650 for the NetServer 5/100 LS and range up to $17,980 for the HP NetServer 5/133 LS array model that offers dual processors.

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Packard Bell Electronics Inc has finally broken its silence over the gossip that it is the company in hock to Intel Corp for several hundred million dollars, but still does not address the issue of the loan directly: the Sacramento company says it has no excess of models equipped with 75MHz Pentiums and that its current inventory in the retail channel is evenly balanced; it also denied it is having financial difficulties and said recent rumours about the companyare unfounded and totally groundless and that it suspects these may be driven by our competitors or made by people who do not understand the ebb and flow of computer inventory; it said it is having a great year and that its 1995 turnover will exceed $4,600m, up about 45% compared with a year ago.

The thing should be called Scrooge – killjoys at Irvine, California-based DVD Software Inc have come out with the first Windows version of their nasty little snoop of a program, UnGame: the Gestaprogram wakes up everybody’s partition on the server and deletes any of the 3,100 games programs it can recognise; once it has trashed all the shared ones, it invades each user’s private space and deletes any games it finds on the client machines – justifying its officious existence with the wonderfully spurious statistic that the annual cost of games at work in terms of lost productivity in the US alone is estimated at $50,000m – c’mon fellahs, why not be really extravagant and set the figure at $500,000m a week?