The long-awaited update to Microsoft's virtualization software was released Monday. Virtual PC 2007 brings support for Windows Vista -- as both a guest and host operating system -- and takes advantage of new hardware virtualization technology from both Intel and AMD. Virtual PC enables users to run multiple operating systems on a single computer by creating "virtual machines."

Both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Virtual PC 2007 are available free of charge; Microsoft made Virtual PC 2004 SP1 freeware last July and promised to release 2007 for no cost. The move to freeware ups the ante with rival virtualization companies such as VMware and new market entrant Parallels. Download Virtual PC 2007 from FileForum.

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As expected, Adobe on Monday began shipping Photoshop Lightroom 1.0, the company's image processing application for professional photographers. Until April 30, 2007 the software will cost $199 USD, after which the price will be raised to $299 USD. A trial download is available here.

Alongside Lightroom 1.0, Adobe additionally released Camera Raw 3.7, the image processing technology for Photoshop CS2, Elements 4.0 and 5.0, and Premiere Elements 5.0. The update now supports over 150 cameras, including the recently released Nikon D40 and Pentax K10D, as well as support for default image settings.

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An IBM employee who was dismissed by the company for visiting an adult-themed chat room while at work has decided to sue the company for $5 million. He claims he has become addicted to the Internet.

James Pacenza says his problems began after his stint in Vietnam in 1969. After his tour he developed post-traumatic stress disorder, and he frequented chat rooms to seek help for his condition.

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Rumors of a marriage between satellite radio companies XM and Sirius again are at the forefront thanks to an article in the New York Post that claims the two sides are close to announcing a merger.

Both sides were meeting in Washington, DC to finalize an agreement, with an announcement coming as soon as Monday, the Post claims. Neither company could be immediately reached for comment.

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In an announcement strategically timed to lessen its impact, SanDisk admits that it must cut prices to stay competitive in a tougher NAND memory chip market. Layoffs and salary cuts for executives are also planned.

News of SanDisk's troubles came after the market close, and at the beginning of a three-day weekend for most. Much of the trouble comes in NAND component pricing, which is one of the company's biggest industries.

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The lead analyst of last week's JupiterResearch report showing a majority of music industry executives in the EU agreeing that a world without digital rights management would be a world with greater revenues, told BetaNews in an exclusive interview this afternoon that his firm believes the interim solution supported by 70% of executives polled - a single, open, interoperable, standard DRM scheme - would still be rejected by consumers in a market where Apple's iTunes continues to reign supreme.

JupiterResearch vice president and research director Mark Mulligan told us he feels the problem surrounding DRM concerns whether the consumer of digital music feels trusted by an industry that seemed to trust him well enough in previous years. When the right to use music as one wishes is impeded technologically, consumers reject the technology. In fact, this could be why the downloadable segment of the overall music industry is not growing as fast as it could.

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Dell has hired the former head of Motorola's cell phone division to head its new global consumer division beginning on Monday. Ron Garriques will resign immediately from the cell phone manufacturer and will temporarily be replaced by Ray Roman and Terry Vega, who are Motorola's vice presidents of both global sales and global devices.

Since returning to Dell as CEO at the end of last month, Michael Dell has taken a hard look at both its product line as well as the executive staff. The company has lost the first place spot in market share to competitor HP, and the company has been criticized for its slow growth and slim profits. Garriques' hiring follows that of Solectron CEO Michael Cannon, who now head's Dells global operations.

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Earlier this week, engineers at nVidia put the finishing touches on version 0.8 of its Compute Unified Device Architecture system for Windows and Red Hat Linux. CUDA's objective is to enable C programmers to utilize the high-throughput pipelining architecture of an nVidia graphics processor - pipelines that are typically reserved for high-quality 3D rendering, but which often sit unused by everyday applications - for compute-intensive tasks that may have nothing to do with graphics.

Today, the company announced its first C compiler - part of the CUDA SDK, which will enable scientific application developers for the first time to develop stand-alone libraries that are executed by the graphics processor, through function calls placed in standard applications run on the central processor.

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A new study out by Nielsen seems to indicate that DVR owners watch far more commercials than some may think.

On average, owners of DVRs still end up watching about two-thirds of ads. A big reason for this is even through many use it to record shows, most still end up watching the show at its normal start time, which means the commercials cannot be fast-forwarded through.

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Those who have not changed the default passwords on their home routers may be putting themselves at risk of attack, researchers at Indiana University and Symantec are warning.

Attackers are apparently using JavaScript code to rewrite the configuration of vulnerable routers, the two groups said. The DNS information within the router could be altered to change it to another server that could direct users to pages intended to steal personal data.

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Jeff Pulver, co-founder of VoIP service Vonage is offering a total of 40,000 of his own dollars to aspiring Internet TV producers and Video Bloggers who can best explain "How to Watch Internet TV."

The contest is to rally interest around Pulver's Network2 Internet TV site, which is dedicated to aggregating the best in longer-form, episodic video that the Internet has to offer.

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This morning, NPD marketing manager David Riley offered to clear up some potential discrepancies with regard to how previous NPD launch week data for Windows operating systems has been reported, and how it's currently stated. Accounting for a change in tabulation strategies, what yesterday looked like a 58.9% decline in first-week retail sales for Windows Vista over Windows XP, might actually even out.

The problem, Riley said, is that over the years some retailers surveyed provided NPD with monthly sales data rather than weekly. As a result, NPD decided to no longer extrapolate weekly volume numbers, though for comparison's sake, the company continues to calculate weekly trend numbers, which is what NPD reported yesterday.

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For the second time since it filed suit against Apple last month, Cisco said late Thursday that it had agreed to give the Cupertino company another week to respond to the suit over the iPhone name.

Cisco sued Apple a day after it introduced the iPhone device, even though it had initially appeared as if the two sides were prepared to work out a deal. The networking equipment company acquired the trademark through its purchase of Infogear in 2000.

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Now that Vista and Office 2007 are officially out the door, Windows enthusiasts have been busy scrounging up what they can about the next versions of both products. Not much has turned up besides code-names and potential features, but a number of blog posts prompted Microsoft to say publicly that it's not saying anything.

The commotion largely began at the RSA Security conference last week, where Windows Core Operating System Division Corporate Vice President Ben Fathi told an audience that the next major release of Windows is about two to two-and-a-half years out, indicating a 2009 timeframe.

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One of the country's most well-known tech analysts has a new gig: evangelizing Microsoft.

Michael Gartenberg, who for the past five years worked for JupiterResearch, and prior to that had a seven year stint with Gartner, will join the Redmond company as an "enthusiast evangelist."

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