The same company whose board of directors now faces the prospects of civil lawsuits from shareholders regarding their recent conduct in investigating the source of boardroom leaks, is now the world’s leading PC producer in both shipments and sales, according to hardware analysis firm iSuppli.

You wouldn’t think it was the same company. According to the latest iSuppli report released this morning, HP’s worldwide unit shipment growth over the third quarter of this year was 16.7%, to 9.86 million units. This gives HP a 16.5% market share in shipments versus Dell’s 16.3% share, with 9.78 million units shipped.

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While TiVo has managed to cut its losses and show some strength in subscribers, a lack of progress in its deals with Cox and Comcast combined with declining DirecTV subscribers are putting a drag on the company.

In addition, the need for the company to begin to generate real subscriber growth will cause it to swing to a much wider loss in the holiday quarter, it admitted.

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Microsoft's oft-maligned and much-delayed next-generation operating system is no longer just a talking point for the Redmond company, it's now a reality - at least for businesses.

At an event at the NASDAQ MarketSite in New York City, CEO Steve Ballmer announced the business availability of Windows Vista, Office 2007, and Exchange Server 2007. In addition, several other business-centric applications were also launched on Thursday.

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A laser capable of being focused to a spot on a rotating disk just 80 nanometers across is what Fujitsu needed to be able to beat competitors Toshiba and Seagate in the race toward terabit areal densities. Yesterday, Fujitsu announced they'd achieved that goal.

While Toshiba and Seagate have been in competition with one another to drive up the areal density of hard drives using new perpendicular recording technology, the scientists at Fujitsu -- whose own consumer drives have had to play catch-up recently in the quality department -- have been planning to leap-frog their competitors in one fell swoop. There's a physical maximum, they found, to how densely data can be packed even with perpendicular mechanisms.

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While overall sales may not be all that impressive, there is still a rabid enthusiast community looking to snag some 100 special edition pink-colored Microsoft Zunes, which have begun appearing on eBay.

Although it was unannounced, Microsoft apparently released 100 limited edition Zunes into the initial shipment of the players after its launch earlier this month. While some may question the company's choice of the color pink, the only others to have these players are the Zune team themselves.

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Symantec has released a patch for its Veritas NetBackup software, saying it had discovered a buffer overflow vulnerability in the application. The flaw exists in the web programming language PHP, which NetBackup is partially written in. Successful exploitation would result in the attacker being able to take control of the affected system remotely.

This is the second time the NetBackup application has been found to have a buffer overflow issue. The last one was discovered in January, and was made worse when a security firm publicly disclosed exploit code for the issue. In this case, no known exploit is yet available, Symantec said in an advisory.

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Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime painted a rosy picture for the Wii Wednesday, saying it should easily meet its target of shipping four million consoles worldwide by years end.

Fils-Aime said there was some opportunity for Wii shipments to end up coming above company estimates, but that would be limited by manufacturing. He gave no indication of how many more consoles could be potentially produced above the four million currently projected, but called such a prospect "challenging."

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Microsoft has rolled out an update to its Windows Genuine Advantage Notifications component, which pops up a notice on the desktop informing users that their operating system is not legitimate. The revision introduces a wizard to improve the installation and validation experience.

WGA is a controversial part of Microsoft's new approach to battle counterfeiting and illegal copying of Windows. The first piece of this initiative, WGA Validation, was launched in July 2005. Microsoft later expanded the program with WGA Notifications.

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In its continuing effort to rout out North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il, the United States government is now trying a new tactic: banning the sale of iPods and other high-tech items to the country.

Kim has an apparent sweet tooth for high-tech items, which he gives as gifts to families that support or run his communist government. It will be the first time that the US has used sanctions for the specific purpose of frustrating the leader, the Associated Press says.

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The company behind one of the most prominent P2P file-sharing protocols is partnering with more movie studios today, in an effort to make its service commercially viable. Meanwhile, its CEO states he's not leaving the company.

Whether the movie industry is prepared to finally "embrace" P2P technology is yet to be seen, but it certainly can't ever do so if it doesn't take the first steps. Today, Paramount, 20th Century-Fox, and the MTV Networks unit of Viacom were among the list of major content producers joining Warner Bros. in backing the BitTorrent protocol, in partnerships that will apparently to the development of a new commercial service around P2P downloading.

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Later this week, Google will stop accepting new questions on its Answers service, one of many search-related products the company has rolled out over the years. Google says that part of being an innovator means "reconsidering our goals."

Google Answers provided a way for users to pose questions and set a price for how much the answer would be worth to them. Others from around the world could then answer the question, and receive payment, with Google taking 50 cents as a listing fee.

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Nokia will expand its line of Yahoo-capable handsets to include those operating on the Series 40 platform, the operating system used by many of the Finnish phone maker's non-smartphone devices.

Initially, the service will be offered on the recently announced Nokia 6300, as well as Nokia 5200 and 5300 XpressMusic. The phones would be able to access Yahoo Mail and Messenger, as well as have the capability to sync Yahoo contacts, tasks and calendar data.

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Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo told attendees of the Nokia World 2006 Conference that Internet functionality will be the driving force in the next phase of mobile phone industry growth.

Kallasvuo also dismissed speculation by some industry analysts that the market is mature, and said the Internet would provide new avenues for growth in the industry. He said that Nokia's intended to be "at the forefront of this new era."

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AT&T said Wednesday that it had reached a deal with Wal-Mart to offer its high speed Internet service in 570 stores across 13 states. Consumers would be able to learn about and purchase services from Wal-Mart's "Connection Center" kiosks. AT&T pointed to the potential reach of up to 150 million customers who shop in the nation's largest retailer each week as a reason for working with Wal-Mart.

AT&T will also offer Wal-Mart gift cards of $25 for ordering the company's Express service, and $75 cards for ordering Pro and Elite Service. Service fees would begin at $14.99 per month, with no term commitment. "We offer the fastest Internet speeds in the market for the price, which fits perfectly with the Wal-Mart everyday-low-price model," AT&T Consumer chief marketing officer Rick Welday said.

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Online shopping traffic certainly increased on Monday over the previous Friday, according to sources directly involved in generating that traffic, though surveys show shoppers may not be spenders.

UPDATE 7:15 pm ET November 29, 2006: This afternoon, comScore Networks made it official: Cyber Monday lives! US online retail holiday spending last Monday was 26% higher than for the Monday after Thanksgiving 2005, totalling $608 million versus $484 million. Earlier, comScore had predicted US online consumers could spend as much as $2.74 billion this week alone, and it looks now like we're well on our way to achieving that figure.

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