Newly published data from the American Customer Satisfaction Index show that Apple leads other personal computer manufacturers, beating out Dell, HP and others. On a 100 point scale, Apple merited a score of 83, according to the ACSI, a 2.5 percent year-over-year increase and a 7.8 percent increase from 1995, the first year the ACSI measured the PC industry. The annual ACSI is sponsored by the American Society for Quality and University of Michigan's M. Ross School of Business. It's derived from phone interviews with customers contacted by using digital-dial telephone samples. More than 70000 consumers are identified and interviewed annually.

After pushing the launch of Windows Vista to late 2006 for corporate customers and early 2007 for consumers, Microsoft insisted that quality, not timing, would dictate the product's release schedule. The company's loyalty to that guiding principle is soon going to be put to the test.

KDE has released a development snapshot of KDE 4, ironically named "Krash". Nothing much to see for users, but should help kickstart porting and development.

LinuxForums has a review of Freespire 1.0 (screenshots): "I was very pleased and impressed by the quality of this distribution. It is a pity that Freespire isn't completely "free" though, as you have to pay to use its preferred package manager. I really liked the fact that the distribution released an OSS version which didn't include the proprietary and restricted pieces of software. This should help Freespire in getting a better reputation among Linux users. Freespire is a nice distribution with a lot of handy tools and great ideas. It is comfortable and easy to use. In its non-OSS version it comes pre-installed with Java, flash plugins, multimedia support and even spell checkers within its web and email applications."

"Another LinuxWorld Conference & Expo has come and gone. More than 10000 attendees and 175 exhibitors passed through the Moscone Center in San Francisco. The show ended yesterday after a shorter schedule of talks and exhibits, including a session by kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman. Here's our final report, including more video goodness."

Ars' Hannibal takes a look at the announcements concerning quad-core processors from Intel and AMD. "The past few days have seen a burst of quad-core-related news items from both AMD and Intel. In this post, I'll take a look at announcements from both companies and try to put them in the larger context of the Intel-AMD rivalry." He concludes by saying: "This is a tough one to call, but don't expect a blow-out on either end. Also, the performance of the K8L core is the big wildcard, since it could go either way."