After experimenting with ads featuring Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates, Microsoft has now decided to go straight for the Jobsular with its next set of ads for Windows. Directly targeting Apple’s ‘I’m a Mac, and I’m a PC’ series of ads, Microsoft’s new adverts are all introduced by a man who looks like John Hodgman (the PC in the Mac ads).

When we first heard about EFiX—a simple USB dongle that’ll let you magically install Leopard on your PC—it sounded too fantastic to be true. Well, I used it to turn my gaming PC into a Mac Pro over the weekend, and I’m somewhat amazed to say this, but it works perfectly

Hewlett-Packard, the world’s No. 1 PC maker, has quietly assembled a group of engineers to develop software that will let customers bypass certain features of Vista, the latest version of Windows. Employees on a separate skunk works team are even angling to replace Windows with an HP-assembled operating system.

As soon as an iPod or iPhone is plugged into the PC, Windows Vista crashes and shows the “blue screen of death” (BSOD), the critical error screen on a blue background that requires a reboot to recover, users said. The errors began showing up immediately after customers updated iTunes to Version 8.0, which Apple released Tuesday as part of its iPod refresh.

When Microsoft unveiled Vista in January last year it was plagued by frequent crashes, compatibility problems with both software and hardware, missing features and sluggish performance (as much as 20 per cent slower than Windows XP). But despite Microsoft fixing many of the issues through software patches, Vista is still regarded by many as a faulty operating system, which sparked the need for Microsoft’s $US300 million ad campaign.

Apple has lured NBC Universal back into the iTunes fold after a yearlong pricing dispute that flared last summer, when Apple declined to sell new ‘Peacock’ episodes because its deal with NBC was set to expire in a few months.

Apple has admitted that a British man played a part in developing the iconic and extremely profitable iPod, although he has so far received no money for his invention. In 1979 Kane Kramer from Hertfordshire filed a patent for a digital music player that stored just three and a half minutes of music to a solid state chip.

Reactions to the television advertisement, which barely mentioned Microsoft, were mostly negative, and focused on the failure to promote the company’s Vista operating system as a better alternative to increasingly popular alternatives from Apple. However, Microsoft said the public debate over the ad signalled its success.

The public trial of the Google browser will be available in 43 languages in 100 countries, Sundar Pichai, Google’s vice president of product management said at a news conference at the company’s Mountain View, California headquarters. Google Chrome relies on Apple’s WebKit software for rendering web pages, he said. It also has taken advantage of features of community-developed browser Firefox from Mozilla.

The perils of music riddled with Digital Rights Management (DRM) software that we’ve been buying for years are now starting to come to light. With vinyl or CD you knew where you stood: you bought the music and, accidents aside, it would still play in ten years’ time. In the digital download age, however, that can’t be taken for granted.