Microsoft has announced that major players such as Electronic Arts and Facebook will be selling applications for Windows Mobile through the firm’s answer to the iPhone App Store. It’s also announced refund and purchasing policies which are more flexible than its rivals.

Microsoft Encarta filled the void for encyclopedic content between the print editions losing favor and Web sites such as Wikipedia, Encyclopaedia Britannica, and Google Knol becoming essential tools. But it’s time has now come to an end, and after being seriously injured by those sites previously listed, Microsoft is killing Encarta dead.

Security researchers have discovered a simple way of hunting down machines which have been infected by the Conficker virus. It’s not a cure but may speed up the process of isolating such machines which is all the more urgent given an April 1 deadline for Conficker’s next actions.

Windows 7 is almost finished. The news that the Release Candidate (RC) would be published in May came as a result of an accidentally-on-purpose slip-up by the company itself. So with the RC due in May, when will we be able to get our hands on the final, ready-to-use, bug-free (uh-huh) version of Windows 7?

If there is one thing that annoys me about Windows-based PCs, it is the amount of time it takes for them to start up and shutdown every day. Both Windows XP and Vista suffer this “twiddle your thumbs” fate. Could Windows 7 change things? No, not by the looks of it.

The man who won a security contest by hacking a Macbook in just seconds says Macs are still safer to run than Windows PCs. Charlie Miller says its down to the difference between theoretical security and real world safety.

I hate to have to state the obvious here but Apple Macs are too expensive. Seriously. Why on earth would anyone pay the stupidly high asking price of Mr. Jobs’s latest piece of hardware when there are numerous Windows-based alternatives just waiting to be snapped up? Oh yeah, I forgot, some people like the shiny logo.

The good news is that the Conficker virus probably won’t do anything too damaging when a deadline triggers next week. The bad news is that the network of infected machines has taken another step beyond the reaches of security researchers.

Microsoft’s lawyers are being kept busy at the moment. In the immediate aftermath of the Microsoft versus TomTom lawsuit and counter suit debacle (otherwise known as ‘Our lawyers are more expensive than yours’) comes another lawsuit. This time it has been served by BackWeb and concerns Windows Update.

Software developers planning to create products for Windows Mobile devices had better triple-check their work before submitting it. It’s emerged that correcting a single typo could cost $99.

The man in charge of Microsoft’s Live Search says the service would perform well against rivals in a blind-search test. And he argues that Microsoft is much better placed to be develop new ideas than Google.

Fans of Twitter will no doubt be aware of the trouble the micro-blogging service has had instigating a viable business plan. Although the company is valued at around $250 million, it hasn’t actually made a cent in revenue. Until now.

We’ve heard plenty of words about Internet Explorer 8, but now some numbers are starting to appear. And while it may not be true that numbers don’t lie, they are certainly making some unwelcome insinuations.

Microsoft has finally seen fit to release Surface in the UK, a year after it was first launched in the U.S. and Canada. One-hundred-twenty partner companies have already signed up to take delivery of the devices, including Tesco and Carphone Warehouse.

Is anyone capable of taking on the might of Google? Microsoft would seem to be the most obvious contender but its latest venture, trying to compete with Street View, could be a lost cause before it even launches.