For some inexplicable reason, people treat Apple differently from other PC manufacturers, and as such, it's common to look at the company's well-being separately from others. Yesterday, we reported on the overall state of the PC market, and Apple didn't really make an appearance there. Thanks to the various Apple rumour websites digging through the IDC and Gartner figures, we can still give you all the latest figures on Apple.

Microsoft on Wednesday confirmed a report that it had received a one-week extension from European antitrust regulators to respond to charges that it had sought to thwart rivals by bundling its web browser with Windows systems. "Microsoft confirms that the new deadline for the company to respond to the Commission's statement of objections is 28 April," a spokeswoman said, referring to an unsourced reference to a new deadline reported on the website of the Financial Times. A spokeswoman for the European Commission said she could not immediately comment.

Now that Windows 7 is more or less finalised on the feature side of things, with the release candidate around the corner, I thought it would be interesting to look back upon what we thought Windows 7 would be - and what we actually hoped Windows 7 would be. So, I dove into our article and comment archive to see how many of our hopes, dreams, and predictions came true.

With a volatile economy, a lot of people are keeping close tabs on computer shipments to see if maybe, just maybe, they've finally hit rock bottom. IDC published its latest quarterly worldwide PC shipments tracker, and while PC shipments still shrunk, it wasn't as bad as forecast. Paul Otellini, Intel's CEO, believes the bottom has been hit.

Whenever the Conficker worm comes up here on OSNews (or any other site for that matter) there are always a number of people who point their fingers towards Redmond, stating that it's their fault Conifcker got out. While Microsoft has had some pretty lax responses to security threats in the past, it handled the whole Conficker thing perfectly, releasing a patch even before Conficker existed, and pushing it through Windows Update. In any case, this made me wonder about Linux distributions and security. What if a big security hole pops up in a Linux distribution - who will the Redmond-finger-pointing people hold responsible?

PulseAudio 0.9.15 has been released with many new features. Phoronix covers the changes: "PulseAudio 0.9.15 introduces native support of Bluetooth audio devices using BlueZ, Apple Airport Express support, flat volume support (similar to Vista's audio controls), on-the-fly reconfiguration of audio devices, and native support for 24-bit samples. The on-the-fly reconfiguration of audio devices is great and as a result there is now proper S/PDIF support. With the release of PulseAudio 0.9.15 also comes an update to the PulseAudio Volume Control program. The PulseAudio Volume Control 0.9.8 update brings support for configuring sound card profiles and various other updates."

"Microsoft retired mainstream support for Windows XP and Office 2003 today - but that doesn’t necessarily mean anyone should be in a hurry to upgrade to Vista yet. The firm will continue to offer extended support packages on both products through to 8 April 2014, allowing businesses and individuals plenty of time to consider their options before plumping for a new operating system. From today Redmond will charge XP and Office 2003 customers who need assistance on a per-incident, per hour, or alternative basis. The changes apply to all editions of the Office suite as well as all versions of XP with the exception of Embedded. Non-security critical fixes will be available to those punters who signed up to Microsoft’s Extended Hotfix Support program 90 days before mainstream support was killed off. Security updates will be pumped out free of charge for Office 2003 and XP until 4 August 2014."

"Google launched their Google App Engine (GAE) a year ago. The free hosting in App Engine is allocated 500 MB of persistent storage and enough CPU and bandwidth for about 5 million page views a month. Also, if you really want more you can see pricing plans. GAE will support Java going forward. Unfortunately PHP support on the App Engine is still left as the top item in the wishlist. So until Google announces their official PHP support we have a workaround to run PHP using Quercus. Quercus is basically a 100% Java implementation of the PHP language (requires JDK 1.5). Since the App Engine now supports Java this means we can use Quercus to run PHP scripts on the App Engine."

The Conficker worm, which spreads by infecting Windows computers who are not properly kept up-to-date, was supposed to make a big splash on April 1, but that day passed with a deafening silence on the Conficker front. Since then, there has been some movement by the worm, and data gathered from enterprise users of Sophos' Endpoint Assessment Test indicates that 10% of Windows machines have still not been properly patched, leaving them wide open to a Conficker infection.

After the rather unexpected success of the netbook, manufacturers started looking for more ways to capitalise on the cheaper end of the market. Many of them are now putting netbook internals (the Atom platform) in desktop computers, such as nettops and cheaper all-in-one solutions. According to several analysts, this is going to be one of the few places where the desktop market can grow. And while we're on the subject of hardware, TechRepublic took the Dell Adamo apart to see its internals.

Microsoft will soon start encouraging users running old versions of Internet Explorer to upgrade to the latest edition of its browser. People running IE 6 and 7 on Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 will in the third week of April receive a notification through the Automate Update service that encourages them to upgrade their system to IE 8, Microsoft has said. This is not a hard sell, though. IE 8, released last month, won't start automatically installing itself on your machine - you'll have to opt in, by clicking the install button itself on the update message's accompanying screen.

Because of this whole Easter thing, news is kind of slow today. So, yes, we are going to talk about a charger and a rumoured release date for the Palm Pre. The Palm Touchstone is a charger that uses magnets to keep the phone in place, while charging it through induction; there's no plugs or anything. Palm has let out more details on this new type of charger, and there have also been a number of hints that the Pre might be released on Queen's Day (April 30 for all of our non-Dutch readers).

LinuxFund and the Open Graphics Project are teaming up to raise funds and supply 10 Open Graphics Development boards to open source developers. After several years in development the Open Graphics project is offering pre-orders of development boards. The Open Graphics Project aims to design an open source hardware/open architecture and standard for graphics cards, primarily targeting free software/open source operating systems. LinuxFund is accepting donations on their website to help fund the project. Additionally you can pre-order an OGD1 board for yourself through Traversal Technology.

Kroc Camen meets Thom Holwerda for another attempt at interpreting the stories currently on the OSNews.com homepage. Thom's sound issues have been solved, but as you will find out I had some mic difficulties. GarageBand crashed half way through - again. The show keeps up it's 'unscripted' style! "Read More" for the links and show-notes.