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It's been almost a year since Microsoft moved its newly acquired Skype for Linux out of beta with the release of version 4.0, surprising more than a few Linux fans with its apparent commitment to maintaining a telephony client for the free and open source operating system.

After coming out swinging a few days back with a Surface ad that focused on Office, Microsoft has a new ad that confronts the iPad head-on. And here’s the crazy part: it’s surprisingly amusing.

When Nvidia announced its graphical powerhouse, the $999 GeForce GTX Titan, in February, eyeballs widened. Fortunately Nvidia now offers the lower-performance GeForce GTX 780, which also cuts the price by a third, to $649.

AMD hopes to have a big second half in 2013, launching three new CPUs featuring integrated graphics that perform on par with the company’s discrete GPUs. On Thursday, AMD revealed key details of these next-generation mobile chips, code-named Temash, Kabini, and Richland.

On the same day that HP had to admit to lackluster consumer PC sales, the company is announcing a new raft of consumer notebook computers. Touchscreens will be available even on a lower-end models, a key move for HP to stay on-trend.

HP’s consumer PC sales continue to languish, but the game’s not over yet--certainly not on the company’s new Envy Rove, a 20-inch all-in-one that can lay flat for multiplayer games. The company also announced a raft of other all-in-ones and desktops today.

AMD hopes to have a big second half in 2013, launching three new CPUs featuring integrated graphics that perform on par with the company’s discrete GPUs. On Thursday, AMD revealed key details of these next-generation mobile chips, code-named Temash, Kabini, and Richland.

Seeing a “404 error” or the Twitter “Fail Whale” can really kill a good online buzz. Those kinds of service outages, though, occur on the Internet on a daily basis, as the latest numbers from Outage Analyzer illustrate.

Apple, that darling of the tech world, has been in the news this week, not because of any new hardware it's releasing, but because of the way it's been handling its foreign earnings.

Still confused about Microsoft’s policy on Xbox One game rentals and used games? You’re not alone. Companies like Gamestop and Gamefly, whose businesses partially depend on used games, don’t have answers for you, either.

Avid gamers pay attention: MSI's newly announced GX70 gaming laptop packs a pair of potentially powerful firsts from AMD. The notebook sports AMD's fresh new "Richland" A10-5750M accelerated processing unit, along with the recently unveiled flagship Radeon HD 8970M mobile GPU.

If you were going to sum up Windows 8 in a single sentence, “It’s all about the apps” would do the trick. And that’s why a new study from Soluto, a company that offers a remote troubleshooting tool for Windows PCs, suggests a somewhat stark reality for Microsoft's new-look operating system.

Since it launched in late 2012, Microsoft has positioned its Surface tablet as a fun, hip alternative tablet, emphasizing its construction and form factor. That failed. So with its latest commercial, Microsoft has returned to its corporate roots: productivity.