Apple Computer Inc. is facing a lawsuit over technology within its popular iPod digital music player and two related applications.

Fujitsu Ltd. hasn't taken sides in the next-generation DVD format battle, and as such it plans to launch in late June a desktop PC with a Blu-ray Disc drive and a laptop PC with an HD-DVD drive, the company said Tuesday.

McAfee Inc. has jazzed up its Web site with a new online portal designed to help users research a wide range of security problems. Called the McAfee Threat Center, the portal was launched Monday as part of a redesign of the McAfee.com Web site.

Toshiba Corp. plans to put on sale in Japan in May its first laptop computer with a built-in HD-DVD drive, the company said Monday. The Qosmio G30 is expected to be the first computer available from any vendor with an HD-DVD drive.

Microsoft Corp. is quietly adding services to its Windows Live portfolio to compete with services Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. already have in place.

Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. is showing several new cell phone handsets at the CTIA Wireless show in Las Vegas, including models with support for the Blackberry service and with Wi-Fi connectivity, it said Thursday.

Microsoft Corp. faces more problems in South Korea after a company sued the U.S. software giant over its bundling of Windows Media Player with the Windows operating system.

Multimedia developer Jered Cuenco calls it the "gray-box application" phenomenon: A Web developer, befuddled by a graphic designer's computer-drawn mock-ups, delivers a prototype full of generic gray buttons, plain white backgrounds, oversized headlines and other crimes against visually interesting user interfaces.

With corporate uptake of Windows Vista likely to be "sluggish", news last week that the general release of Windows Vista has been delayed until January 2007 left many IT managers unfazed. Few companies said they planned urgent rollouts of Vista and were happy with the stability of their XP fleet.

The delay in Windows Vista will affect the next version of Office, too. Microsoft Corp. said Thursday it will put off the consumer release of Office 2007 so it is in line with the new release schedule for Vista.

Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. has begun mass production of 512M-bit DDR (double data rate 2) DRAM (dynamic RAM) chips using an 80-nanometer production process, the company said Monday.

Via Technologies Inc. is a company that takes pride in bursting illusions, such as the idea the new ultramobile PCs would only come equipped with Intel Corp. microprocessors. Instead, it appears that any x86-based processor will do.

Intel Corp. will roll out a succession of computing platforms that build on the efficiency gains it achieved with a new family of dual-core processors, company executives announced at their trade show this week.

Never mind worrying about hackers stealing your password. A security researcher with the Finnish military has shown how they could steal your fingerprint, by taking advantage of an omission in Microsoft Corp.'s Fingerprint Reader, a PC authentication device that Microsoft has been shipping since September 2004.

Hewlett-Packard Co. on Monday beefed up its line of business notebooks with two new series using dual-core processors from Intel Corp.

Advanced Micro Devices Inc. on Monday announced three additions to its family of dual-core Opteron processors for servers and workstations, boosting the speed of the chips to 2.6GHz.

Symantec Corp. Friday said it has reached an out-of-court agreement in its adware lawsuit against New York-based Hotbar.com Inc. The deal calls for Symantec to dismiss its suit, but continue to classify Hotbar's program files as low-risk adware.

IBM Corp. has collaborated with two universities to develop several speech-enabled Web applications for mobile phones, the company said Friday.

A new preview version of Microsoft's Internet Explorer, with tabbed browsing, an integrated search box, and RSS support -all features long taken for granted by Firefox users -is now available.

Vyatta, an open-source router company, released the first beta version of its WAN router code this week, with the goal of becoming the networking equivalent of Linux or Firefox, but taking aim at Cisco instead of Microsoft.