Fresh off their increased numbers in Congress, the GOP is setting its sights in the FCC controversial net neutrality rules as its next target. Forty Republican senators led by Commerce committee ranking member Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson of Texas as well as two Republican House members are spearheading a repeal effort.

The Congressional Review Act, passed in 1996, allows Congress to review the rulemakings of government agencies and overturn them if need be. Of course since this is a legislative procedure, any effort would require President Obama's signature or lacking that a two-thirds majority in either legislative body to override a veto.

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Does your computer feel tired, slow -- is a poor performer? Or have you tweaked, tuned and optimized your system so much that you're sure it's delivering the best possible speeds? Whatever you think of your PC's performance, there's only one way to get a solid and objective view of its speed, and that's by using an excellent benchmarking tool like Geekbench.

Launch the program, click the "Run Benchmarks" button, and Geekbench will run some exhaustive tests on your CPU and RAM's performance, before producing a detailed report with all the figures you need.

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WinZip has released version 1.0 of a new all-in-one system suite, comprising of no less than 20 separate tools covering most aspects of system maintenance, including fixing problems, cleaning out redundant files, providing improved privacy and security, and optimising performance. The tools are brought together under a single front end that includes a tool that quickly scans and fixes problems that it finds.

WinZip System Utilities Suite starts with the Smart PC Care tool, which scans your PC for problems and issues. These can then be fixed with a single click, and the tool scheduled to run at set intervals ensuring your PC remains in tip-top condition.

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Last week, I asked about $800, and most Betanews readers answering the question said emphatically "No!" Today, Reuters is reporting some potentially exciting news from Mobile World Congress: A WiFi-only version of the XOOM tablet will be available for $600. Is the price low enough for you? You know how to answer -- in comments or by emailing joewilcox at gmail dot com.

Surprisingly, Verizon, which will carry the 3G/4G model, is doing so unsubsidized -- so that previously leaked $800 price still applies. The Verizon model does WiFi, too, but based on leaked Best Buy documents buyers must use at least one month of data service first; then WiFi is enabled. How whacked out is that?

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Raw first-week sales numbers are often used to indicate the efficacy of a product's launch. But really, the thing these numbers best represent is the level of user excitement. Today, Microsoft revealed that users were very excited about Internet Explorer 9 RC, which launched last week.

According to Microsoft, IE9 RC was downloaded 2 million times in the six days following its launch. While a big number, it's doubly significant because these were users who actively downloaded the software without a Windows Update auto update, or a system alert telling them an update was available. These users knew the update was there and went out and got it.

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Well, that didn't take long. One day after Apple dropped its subscription plan bomb on suspicious publishers, Google officially countered with One Pass. Google strips out the onerous restrictions Apple imposes. It's a brilliant marketing response, and aptly timed with new Android tablets like the HTC Flyer, Motorola XOOM and Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 going on sale within weeks. More significantly, the program isn't restricted to mobile devices. Can you say Internet?

Apple's subscription plan places many restrictions on publishers. Apple takes a 30-percent commission on all sales, requiring publishers to offer prices the same or lower in-app as elsewhere; that hugely limits promotions, for example. Apple's plan would prevent publishers from making in-app subscriptions free as a benefit to existing subscribers elsewhere (e.g., consumers pay more because of Apple policies). Publishers will likely loose access to vital customer data, since Apple is requiring an option that lets subscribers opt-in to this disclosure.

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NPD's DisplaySearch has joined Canalys as labeling iPad as PC, pushing Apple to the top spot in global mobile PC shipments during fourth-quarter 2010. According to DisplaySearch, Apple shipped 10.2 million mobile PCs, including iPad, compared to second-ranked HP's 9.3 million. Apple's market share: 17.2 percent. It's noteworthy that Apple shipped considerably more smartphones, exceeding 16 million units, during the same quarter.

The findings pit Canalys and DisplaySearch against Gartner and IDC, which categorize iPad as a media tablet. IDC makes puzzling demarcation: Media tablets range in size from 5 inches to as much as 14 inches and run so-called lightweight operating systems, such as Apple's iOS and Google's Android OS, on ARM processors. However, IDC classifies tablets running Windows on x86 processors as PCs.

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Noted tech industry analyst Ross Rubin posed a fun question Wednesday morning on Twitter at which I thought I'd take a Quora-like stab. He asked, "So when does this deluge of low-end Android handsets start and from which OEMs?"

It's really one of the most important questions about Android, because it has long been presumed that Android will be the operating system that finally puts smartphones in the hands of every consumer. Rubin's timing is also impeccable, because for everything we're seeing, the deluge has already begun.

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Yesterday, I decided to buy the Galaxy Tab, even though Samsung announced its successor hours earlier. I like the 7-inch form factor, and the Tab seems plenty fast to me, even without those extra cores coming to the Galaxy Tab 10.1. The price is appealing, just $250 after $50 rebate. But the sales process ended abruptly, without a purchase -- not because of last-minute qualms about iPad or worries there wouldn't be enough Android apps. The problem: T-Mobile, like other US carriers, charges too much for the data plans, and they're mandatory.

Tech blogger and Rackspace employee Robert Scoble claims that iPad will win the tablet wars because of mobile applications. "The only thing that matters is the apps," he asserts. Scoble most certainly is wrong about that. What matters more is the price -- how much more people pay for one product compared to the other. As for the apps, Android has huge momentum and plenty of great apps to compete with Apple's App Store -- and more are coming. But that's a separate topic.

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Market research group In-Stat has published the results of its annual assessment of U.S. broadband speeds, which found that the nation's average downstream speed increased by 34% over the course of 2010.

In-Stat says the average downlink speed for broadband subscribers is 9.54 Mbps, up from the 2009 average 7.12 Mbps, which was itself up from 2008 average of 3.8 Mbps. The price of fixed broadband, by comparison, rose by only 4% among the 518 households surveyed.

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Who doesn't like a cool avatar? What better for an Android user than you personalized as Google's droid mascot? Yesterday, Google released Androidify to the Android Marketplace, which I downloaded last night. The app starts with the typical green droid, which users can customize to suit their fancies. My first effort, and most certainly not my last, is above. I replaced my Facebook and Twitter avatars last night.

The app is easy enough to use, and it's hugely finger friendly. Just touch and drag to resize head, torso or limbs. Google lets users choose attire, hairstyle and other attributes. But Androidify isn't what I expected. For no particular reason, I imagined that Google's app would use the phone's camera to take a photo and Androidify the image. So much for my imagination.

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Here's the rub: you can only afford one monitor, and you frequently find yourself wading through window after window trying to find the right document. Or worse still, you need to switch between two or three windows but keep selecting the wrong one because of the dozens of other open apps and windows cluttering up your desktop.

You could close all these down, or you could try a virtual desktop manager. This effectively takes one desktop and multiplies it a number of times, allowing you to organize your open windows into different virtual desktops: one for your work, another for browsing the web and a third for doing your accounts, for example. And when it comes to choosing the right tool for the job, look no further than Finestra Virtual Desktops.

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In its annual public report on conditions at its overseas suppliers, Apple said it had noted an increase in child labor as well as tackling the issue of suicides at Foxconn, one of its biggest overseas partners. It also said that it had continued efforts to improve workplace safety and morale, two issues the company had taken heat for ignoring in the past.

Apple said that poor checks had resulted in the increases in child labor over the past year, and it had instituted efforts to assist its suppliers in preventing it from occurring. One case was especially severe, and the company found the supplier was doing little to fix the problem, or appeared willing to.

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Nokia is coming under increasing criticism for its partnership with Microsoft, with shareholders looking for the removal of CEO Stephen Elop, and a Finnish union looking for severance pay for workers laid off as a result of the deal. It seems to point to a coming showdown that may rear its ugly head at its annual meeting in July in Helsinki.

The shareholder group calls itself Plan B, and is comprised of nine anonymous "small" shareholders of the company that were also former employees. Among their demands is the firing of Elop, restructuring of the Microsoft deal to limit it to the North American market, and adoption of MeeGo as the company's primary smartphone platform.

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Among an announcement of half a dozen new mobile devices, Taiwanese smartphone maker HTC debuted its first Android tablet, called the Flyer. HTC was the first company to release an Android smartphone of any sort and its presence in the Android tablet market could be imposing.

The HTC Flyer is similar to Samsung's Galaxy Tab in a number of ways. Firstly in its size, it has a 7" screen with 1024 x 600 resolution. Secondly, in its OS. It is not running Android 3.0 (Honeycomb), the tablet-optimized version of Google's mobile operating system, and will instead run on Android 2.4 (Gingerbread). However it does offer a slightly more powerful processor, running at 1.5 GHz, compared to the Galaxy Tab's 1 GHz.

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