Microsoft has just released Service Pack 2 for Office 2007 - get your downloading engines ready to go.

Besides the long list of fixes and performance improvements, Microsoft Office 2007 now even includes file format support for OpenDocument Format (ODF) and much more.

Here is just some of it:

AMD seems to have hit a home run with its latest Black Edition processor, the Phenom II X4 955. The 3.2GHz processor has been overclocked to an amazing 6696MHz after being on the market just a short period of time.

(Click the above image for the large version)

AMD may have the sub zero overclocking record for now, but the latest Intel Core i7 975XE looks set to grab that crown back from them.

The new CPU is not yet officially out yet but as always some of the top overclockers managed to get their hands on a couple. They managed to get a D0 Stepping i7 975 XE up to an incredible 5015MHz on nothing but air.

With everyone fighting for a piece of the netbook market it is not surprising to see ARM and Android finally enter the fray.

The Alpha 680, as it will be called is going to have some minimal specs including an ARM11 CPU running at 533MHz this is the same CPU that is used in the iPhone and many other smart phones. The display will be 7-inches and have a resolution of 800x480. RAM ahd HDD space will be in short supply with a maximum of 256MB of DDR2 and only a 1GB SSD for storage.

The Alpha 680 should retail at around $250 and is expected to hit the channel in roughly three months.

Today brings news that Apple was actually found guilty of willful patent infringement. Given the company's aggressive stance towards its own IP it does come as a shock that they are guilty of taking someone else's.

The suit was brought by Opi, Inc. and was over Opi'd patented Predictive Snooping of cached memory. Opti obtained the patent in 2002 and filed the suit in 2007.

Apple had argued that the Opti patent was based on prior art and obvious. They asked that the case be thrown out but the jury did not feel the same way and found Apple guilty in the end.

Well the first Core i7 Laptops might be available in the EU in May. The new mobile behemoth will have a Core i7 920, a GTX 280M with 1GB of DDR3 memory all its own, 2GB of DDR3 1066 memory for the CPU (why they did not go for triple channel I do not know) and a 12 cell battery.

It is going to be a rather thick book as well measuring 397 x 298 x 51-60 mm (15.6 x 11.7 x 2 - 2.3 Inches). Still if you are looking for the most power you can carry around with you, or bragging rights this is the book to look for.

Read more here the page is in German but the details are all in English.

CNN is reporting that the mega software company Microsoft saw its first decline in sales for the first time in 23 years.

Rather unsurprisingly, Microsoft put the decline in sales down to a drop in the amount of new PC computer systems being sold around world, in these tough economic times.

To be exact, sales dropped by 6% from a year earlier to $13.7 billion, which missed analysts' expectations of $14.1 billion.

Reminiscing of Fusion-io's ioDrive that we were graced with for preview late last year, OCZ have now stepped up alongside them with a PCI-Express based Solid State Disk solution of their own.

Dubbed the Z-Drive series, these come in three capacities of 250GB, 500GB and 1 Terabyte, each being MLC based with a 256MB on-board data buffer, in-built RAID on the 500GB and 1TB models and all operating via a PCI-Express x4 interface.

During the currently running Hack in the Box security conference in Dubai on Thursday, researchers Vipin Kumar and Nitin Kumar have said that they have created a method of hacking Windows 7 that is unfixable by the folks over in Redmond.

According to the report by Electronista, VBootkit 2.0 was used to show how Windows 7 could be compromised during boot up. The exploit is said to be suited only to the upcoming Microsoft operating system and according to the makers, probably won't be fixable.

According to an article at PCGamesHardware it looks like MS is learning to play the game with game developers. DirectX 11 will be easy for devs to port their existing DX10 and 10.1 game engines over to.

A developer at DICE said that the porting of the Frostbite Engine was done in about three hours with very little effort. About the only thing needed was search for and replace relevant code in the engine.

They also noted that CPU load should be decreased

In some funny news today it seems the judge in the trial of The Pirate Bay might not have been fair and impartial.

According to a report from P3, a Swedish radio show the (dis)honorable judge Tomas Norström belongs to several IP and Copyright protection groups, in fact the same organizations that the persons that represented the entertainment industry sat on.

This could be a rather large break for The Pirate Bay, as in many legal experts opinions it is clearly a conflict of interests. If Judge Norstrom's decision is overturned a completely new trial will have to be conducted.

For years many have complained about high fees for cable internet and television service from large providers with little changes being made while the the cable companies reclined in their chairs and milked consumers for all they could.

It looks like the small town of Wilson, North Carolina had enough of the shenanigans and after requests for more bandwidth failed, the city government listened to its people and launched their own company that delivers better features than the cable company. To top it all off, the city is offering the service to its residence for basically what is the city's cost.

Those that chose to get involved in the high definition format war of yesteryear knew that they were taking a gamble. In the end it was inevitible that either one format would win redering the other obsolete, exactly like the Betamax/VHS war of the late 1970's and early 1980's

For those that took the gamble with HD DVD and lost, it seems that Warner Bros is giving you just a little bit of hope. No, HD DVD isn't coming back out for another fight, but Warner has announced a new program to trade in your HD DVD's for a Blu-ray copy, for a small fee of course.

HIS and TechPowerUp are holding a pretty cool contest. You get to design an HD4890 Add-in-card manufactured by HIS. The contest is pretty simple, you need to head over to TechPowerUp and register[https://forums.techpowerup.com/showthread.php?t=89891] once there you can submit your designs and also view the competition.

This has got to be one of the coolest contests I have ever read about. If you think you have what it takes to make this one yours I would head over there and sign up.

Read more here.

Yesterday we told you about D-Link's new Coaxial networking system and how it allows you to use existing Coax cable to feed your long range HD needs without using the power lines in the house.

Today we find that Netgear has shoved their version out the door. I have to wonder, after playing with a few different powerline kits if these new Coaxial kits will all be the same technology under the hood and all work together (and at the same level of performance) on the same software.

There is also a rather interesting cartoon to explain the whole Media Over Coax deal included at the link.

Intel has some price cuts in the works for their solid state drives and this will make it the second time that they have dropped the price of their SSD's in just a two month window.

For the 2.5" drives, the 160GB model will drop $100 in price, bringing it down to $660 while the 80GB model will slide down $50 for $385. The X18-M 1.8" drives will receive the exact same price cuts with the 80GB model being $385 and the 160GB model being $660.

A report that comes to us from Ars Technia through CNet states that Apple may finally catch up to Smart Phones from 2007.

I know you are wondering what I am talking about, why the iPhone is miles ahead of the other smartphones right? Well yes and no; the iPhone is a good product but even 2 and half iterations from the original it still lacks some basic features found in many other phones.

One of these is voice command and voice synthesis. But if the anonymous sources that tipped of Ars are accurate that long awaited feature will arrive with the iPhone Software 3.0.

Bluetooth 3.0 officially hit the streets today as the new specification becomes official.

The new version will be BT3.0 + HS it should be considerably faster due to the inclusion of the 802.11 PAL (Protocol Application Layer). This is the same protocol used by WiFi Devices. With the inclusion of this new factor Bluetooth can potentially be sued to stream HD content from a camera directly to an HD TV or from a PC to a Personal Media Player.

Other rumors state that the next generation of iPhone will have this new standard to add to the features of the media-centric phone.

Looks like Zotac is really going to jump on the ION bandwagon after all. EXpreview brings us news that Zotac is hard at work on their new Mini-ITX Ion based mainboard.

The new board looks like it will have everything needed for the small ION Based Nettops that could be cluttering the shelves soon. Wireless, the nVidia 9400M G, Three SATA ports, Two RAM slots and HDMI/DVI/VGA ports.

The interesting thing is no expansion slots, not even a single PCI-e 1x port. Makes for a very closed system. Many have asked if this is really a feasible platform as you can get a full C2D E6350 on a Mini-ITX board with a lower (and half-height) GPU with more power and for less than these initial ION systems will cost.

D-Link is kicking out its answer to the growing need to stream HD content around the house. But instead of looking to the power lines they are attacking the coax cabling that is present in many modern homes and apartments.

Dubbed the DXN-221 HD MediaBridge Coax Network Starter Kit (boy that is a mouthful) this new system allows for the use of existing coax cabling to transfer HD and other network content at high speed (100Mbps).

The DXN-221 uses encryption to protect your data from external intrusion with a user changeable password. The pricing on the DXN-221 is more than your average powerline kit at $239.99