ATI Technologies has agreed an extension to a patent cross-license agreement it has with Intel Corp. giving the right to build graphics processors that support Intel's Pentium4 800-MHz bus.

Microsoft is starting to shift U.S.-based jobs to India as it seeks to lower technical support and development costs, the company said Wednesday.

Hewlett-Packard announced that only those retailers who sell their consumer PCs will be able to service them. The move will winnow the number of authorized service providers from about 1,000 to just 40, though HP notes that those 40 partners have more than 6,000 locations.

MSI is about to give a new dimension to videocard bundles, its GeForceFX line will come bundled with an optical mouse (looks very similar to this Logitech laptop mice) and three popular games: Battlefield 1942, C&C Generals and Unreal II.

And on the software side, saw at Neowin that the popular Messenger Plus plug in has a new version that supports beta releases of MSN 6.