According to a Reuters story, Sony has announced plans to introduce what it's calling the world's lightest notebook computer to Japanese consumers some time in December, in an attempt to bring back some positive attention to Sony after the huge notebook battery recall disaster that continues to have an impact on the company.

Today, Panasonic announced that for all of the new Plasma Display Panels (PDPs) released in 2006, none of them contained lead oxide, claiming it has become the world's first company to achieve such a milestone. The electronics manufacturer says that with the elimination of lead, the displays don't weigh as much, and are more environmentally friendly, without compromising picture quality.

Barely meeting the announced November release date for the business versions of Office 2007 and the operating system Windows Vista, Microsoft has confirmed that the two software products will be released on 30 November.

While Lite-On IT is expected to start shipping 18x DVD burners to Hewlett-Packard (HP) this month, the growing tension in competition between Lite-On IT, Hitachi-LG Data Storage (HLDS) and Toshiba-Samsung Storage Technology (TSST) facilitated OEM prices to further drop, according to sources at Taiwan-based optical disk drive (ODD) makers.

Culver City (CA) - You can expect a flood of benchmarks for Intel's quad-core 'Kentsfield' processor to hit the Internet in the next day. Intel's latest chip is officially called the Core 2 Extreme QX6700 and is an enthusiast chip aimed at high-end gamers, graphical artists and others who run multi-threaded applications. Early benchmarks from Tom's Hardware Guide show the chip easily beating previous generation Core 2 Duo processors in some benchmarks, but the new chip is only marginally better in other tests.

Dell, long known for their Intel-powered laptops, is now selling laptops with AMD chips inside. The new Inspiron 1501 line of laptops will have either AMD Turion 64 or the less powerful Mobile AMD Sempron processors. An integrated ATI Radeon Xpress 1150 graphics chip will power the laptop's 15.4" screen.

Flash memory continues to expand its memory capacity on a fast pace. Samsung said that it has developed a way to mass-produce a multi-chip flash package that could soon bring compact 16 GB devices for a variety of portable products, including MP3 players and cellphones.

Hitachi will be rolling out several high-capacity laptop drives next year and one will reach 250GB. The 2.5" hard drives will be based on perpendicular technology where the magnetic bits are aligned side-by-side, standing up instead of lengthwise. The drives will also have integrated flash memory along with hardware encryption.

Quanta Computer confirmed that sample production and test runs for the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) have already kicked off this quarter, and the company expects mass production to commence in the second quarter of 2007.

Not everyone can be James Bond, but at least you can buy his laptop. Sony is offering a new line of James Bond 007-branded Vaio TX and Vaio UX laptop packages. Along with a laptop, Sony is through in a Cyber-shot digital camera, display privacy filter and aluminum attaché case.

Semiconductor inventories remained high in the third quarter, according to market firm iSuppli. Inventories for global electronic companies, including AMD and Intel, are hovering at $3.9 billion dollars and could linger on until after the holiday season.

Adding to its expansive line of products sporting the Office name, Microsoft today announced that it will launch Office Live, a robust Web hosting service, on 15 November. The service will be available in both a free, ad-supported version as well as a premium, fee-based package.

ATI today released version 6.10 of its Catalyst driver package for Radeon graphics cards. The company claims that the tenth installment of this year has received Crossfire D3D driver improvements and got better at handling large vertex meshes. According to ATI, the changes will result in a 6.7 - 15.8% gain in 3DMark2006 scores, 9.7-10.5% in 3DMark2005 and up to 7.1% in 3DMark2003.

Redmond (WA) - Security researchers have discovered a new Windows flaw that could allow hackers to crash the built-in firewall. By sending malformed DNS packets to vulnerable machines, hackers could disable and eventually bypass the operating system firewall. So far only Windows XP computers with the Internet Connection Sharing (ICS) service turned on are affected by the attack.

Retail packaging has never been anything special for previous versions of Microsoft's market-dominating operating system and business application suites of software, but Microsoft is changing that convention with the packaging for Office 2007 and its Vista operating system.

Apple today anounced that the new version of its Ipod shuffle, which it is calling the "most wearable Ipod ever", will be available in stores throughout the country this Friday, 3 November.

Tul, a Taiwan-based graphics card supplier, has announced the PowerColor X1650 XT, its second graphics card to include a chipset manufactured at 80nm process and to feature the new CrossFire Bridge Interconnect.

Sharp Microelectronics has introduced a new 12.1" TFT LCD for outdoor and bright ambient applications in transportation, industrial, retail, medical and other markets.

Kingston expanded its "Value RAM" mainstream notebook memory with 2 GB modules. The SO-DIMMs are available in 533 MHz (CAS 4, 5) and 667 MHz (CAS 4, 5) versions.