The first edition of the Windows operating system came out in 1985, but maybe there’s hope for Microsoft’s classic operating system to have some credibility and future as the world moves into what’s often called “the post-PC era.” Microsoft’s quarterly earnings beat expectations and Verizon has announced that it has faith in the Windows Phone platform and will put some muscle behind marketing it in the months ahead. Also, another edition of our non-award-winning Tech Report Theater.

We’ve all heard about cloud computing being the wave of the future, but Greenpeace says some companies running cloud services are doing better than others from an environmental stewardship point of view. It has issued a report card on energy and gives Amazon and Apple Fs. Google achieved higher scores for its use of renewable energy sources. The facilities that house cloud computing use a lot of energy, and dropping the coal to plug in something else is much easier said than done. Plus, a look at a new PC game, the highly bleak “Legend of Grimrock.”

It used to be that Hulu.com was a perfectly predictable place where you could go and catch up on episodes of “30 Rock” that you may have missed when they aired. Lately, however, the company has been expanding into original programming, and it will be announcing other new shows this week at a TV industry event referred to as “upfronts.” By creating original content as well as continuing to work with its TV network owners, Hulu is trying to carve out a brand new space and be something no one has ever seen before. Plus, we recover from the Gmail outage.

The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, or CISPA, is either a welcome resource in preventing cyber attacks or a troubling invasion of privacy, depending who you ask. Criticism of the bill is beginning to mount as several free speech and civil liberties groups are lining up against CISPA and encouraging their supporters to do the same. We look at what CISPA would actually do. Plus, what are the hippest music cities in the world? You’ll never guess.

April 17 is tax day — so all you procrastinators out there better get going. While it’s easy to dwell on just how much we pay over to the government this time of year, we’re actually paying taxes all the time — when we buy things, when we fill up our gas tank and when we pay our cell phone bills. Those phone bills are the focus of proposed legislation in Congress that would freeze cell phone taxes for five years. But why do the cell phone companies care how much we pay in taxes?

So we know that Facebook gathers our personal information. It knows our friends, our significant others, the music we like, where we work. It’s enough to raise a lot of privacy concerns for a lot of people. But the social media site is trying to calm some of those worries. Facebook has just announced it’ll roll out a feature that will let users check out more of the information it has gathered. Still, that’s still only a fraction of the information Facebook has.

Energy and where to find it for an increasingly energy-hungry world is going to be an issue in the future, and so will be the management of the energy we have. A lot of smart people in America are going to need to address the ongoing issue of energy in a really smart way. That means getting serious about building a smart grid, a power grid that is constantly gathering and processing information. Maggie Koerth-Baker, the author of a new book on energy, says if we don’t smarten up our grid, we’ll see more blackouts, more headaches. Plus, Shakespeare broken down and 3D chocolate printing.

Happy National Robotics Week! Today is Robot Block Party day, and it’s just part of a weeklong series of events in all 50 states put on by major universities and private businesses. The goal? Pretty much to show off how neat robots are. But it also for recruiting the next generation of roboticists. Also, a new app says it can guide you to the dreams you want to have.

Tens of millions of iPads have been sold since the product first went on sale two years ago. It’s hard to peg an exact number since a bunch more have been sold in the time it’s taken you to read this sentence. They’re flying off the shelves, if they ever manage to get to the shelves. But despite the device’s cultural ubiquity, few Americans have been inside a Foxconn facility to see how it’s actually constructed. Rob Schmitz, China correspondent for Marketplace, is one of them. Rob was the second journalist to be allowed inside an Appe production line at the facility. We spoke to him about what he saw and heard.