Microsoft Corp. has finished development on Windows Vista and expects to ship the product by the end of the year, around the same time venerated Windows development leader Jim Allchin said he will retire from the company. But Allchin said Friday he is willing to put off both of those events if Windows Vista doesn't reach a standard of quality with which he is comfortable.

Microsoft Corp. on Thursday reported the highest quarterly revenue in company history for its fiscal 2006 second quarter on the strength of its Windows OS and a series of highly anticipated product releases. Still, the company fell slightly shy of analysts' revenue expectations.

Antivirus vendors are warning of a rapidly-spreading worm that is carrying a potentially destructive set of instructions. The Nyxem worm - also nicknamed the Kama Sutra worm - is programmed to overwrite all of the files on computers it infects on Feb. 3, said Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at F-Secure Corp.

Authorities in Bulgaria arrested eight people last week who allegedly stole financial information using a variety of fake Web pages carrying Microsoft Corp. logos, netting the group at least US$50,000.

Adobe Systems Inc. Monday is releasing software that will allow designers and engineers to save 3D images as PDF (Portable Document Format) files and share those files with anyone who has the free Adobe Acrobat reader, the company said.

Dutch electronics giant Koninklijke Philips Electronics NV reported Monday a drop in fourth-quarter profit due to one-off charges.

Sony Corp. is on track to launch its first digital SLR (single-lens reflex) camera in the middle of this year, a company executive said Friday.

The U.S. government is asking a California court to force Google Inc. to turn over information about usage of the company's search engine for finding pornography on the Internet.

Intel Corp.'s poor performance in the last three months of 2005 turned out to be good news for rival chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices Inc., (AMD) which on Wednesday reported better-than-expected financial results for the period. With sales of AMD's microprocessor division increasing nearly 80 percent from the previous year, the company reported revenue of US$1.84 billion.

A design flaw in Windows XP and Windows 2003 systems with built-in wireless capabilities could be exploited by hackers to lure Wi-Fi users into connecting to malicious wireless networks, according to Microsoft Corp., which recently completed an investigation of the issue.

A Delaware judge has lifted a stay in an ongoing lawsuit between Rambus Inc. and Micron Technologies Inc., allowing Rambus to file new claims and to proceed in its patent infringement suit against the Boise, Idaho, memory chip maker.

IBM Corp. plans to unveil a server, storage, networking and software bundle based on its BladeCenter servers targeting the retail market Monday. Known as the Systems Solutions for Retail Stores, the bundle follows similar packages IBM has already announced for the banking industry and small to midsize businesses.

Seagate Technology LLC has begun shipping a 160G-byte hard-disk drive for use in laptop computers, it said Monday.

Microsoft Corp. has issued a patch for a preliminary version of its Vista OS for the same graphics-rendering problem that raised concerns about current versions of the Windows OS earlier this month.

Taiwan's legislature has passed a resolution asking the government to reduce its purchases of Microsoft Corp. products by 25 percent this year, a further sign the world's largest software company is running into resistance in Asia.

As consumer demand for online video swells, America Online Inc. (AOL) announced Tuesday that it has acquired Truveo Inc., a provider of video search, to boost its capabilities in this area, considered one of the hottest segments of the search engine market.

As part of its monthly security updates, Microsoft Corp. Tuesday released patches for two critical vulnerabilities in its products. The more serious of the two flaws is a remote code execution vulnerability affecting Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Exchange Server products.

When 21-year-old British student Alex Tew needed to raise money to pay for his university, he came up with an idea many might dismiss as wishful thinking: raise US$1 million by selling 1 million pixels worth of advertising space on his Web site for $1 each.

Sharp Corp. is planning to increase production at its two LCD (liquid crystal display) factories in Japan in response to anticipated soaring demand for flat-panel LCD televisions over the next few years, it said Wednesday. The company also expects to report record sales in 2006.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is praising a U.S. District Court judge's preliminary approval Friday of a settlement with Sony BMG Music Entertainment over two widely-criticized copy protection programs found on an estimated 15 million music CDs.