New HP boss plays down rumours of imaging group spin off

Industry giant HP has named Mark Hurd as the company's new chief executive officer and president. The appointment follows the recent sacking of HP's previous high profile CEO Carly Fiorina. Hurd, 48 was formerly the president and chief executive officer of NCR with overall responsibility for its five business units. ...more

Microsoft 'talking to publishers over new music service'

More rumours have surfaced that Microsoft is planning to create a rival to Apple's iPod/iTunes downloads service. According to Reuters, which quotes un-named 'sources', the software giant is already having discussions with the big music publishers on licensing their tunes for the new service. Robbie Bach, who led the development of Microsoft's Xbox video game business, is allegedly in charge of the new project. ...more

MSN to beta new contextual advertising

In a week that has already seen the search engine marketing business shaken up with announcements by Ask Jeeves and Yahoo!, now Microsoft is accelerating the roll out of its entry in the booming search engine advertising business. According to the Wall Street Journal, MSN is to begin testing a new 'MSN Keywords' contextual advertising service in the US as early as this October. The beta programme, which will be part of MSN adCenter, will consist of around 500 of MSN's key advertisers selected by invitation only. ...more

GeForce 8800 GTX blows away graphics card rivals

We've been warning against buying a top-end graphics for a few months now, and the GeForce 8800 GTX is the reason why. In the latest issue of PC Pro, on sale 16 November, we test it against the previous holder of the performance crown - the GeForce 7950 GX2 - and see frame rate increases of up to 250%. The breakneck speed comes from a totally new GPU architecture, based around the capabilities of Microsoft's forthcoming DirectX 10, and the new Shader Model 4. ...more

Sun Connection aligned for one-stop technology updates

Sun is planning to deliver system updates for its own and partner technologies through a single system: Sun Connection. The first step was made today at its Network Computing '05 event, launching the Sun Update Connection service to support Solaris 10 running on any platform. The service scans the system and compares it against a database of more than a million Solaris configurations and decides how it should be updated. ...more