Microsoft says that a problem with its Windows operating system, dubbed the 'Black Screen of Death' is not due to its latest security update.

Some Windows users are confronted by a totally black screen after they log on to their system.

It was thought that a security update on 10 November had been the cause, although this has now been discounted.

Reports suggest the problem also affects Windows Vista and XP, which experts are putting down to malware.

When Microsoft announced that it wanted to use hardware based acceleration for its next flavor of Internet Explorer, the tech mags were quick to praise the outfit for being jolly clever.

However it turns out that the world + dog is doing the same thing and it is not particularly clever or original. Mozilla has been on the blower to us saying that it is planning to do the same with Firefox. Already its developers have posted a prototype demonstrating the ability to take advantage of Direct2D and DirectWrite.

Firefox has a CPU usage issue and, consequently, can cause overheating problems in some laptops, particularly ultraportables. That's what I've found over the last couple of years.

But don't take my word for it. This is documented on a Mozilla support page entitled "Firefox consumes a lot of CPU resources." The page states: "At times, Firefox may require significant CPU [central processing unit] resources in order to download, process, and display Web content." And forum postings like this one about a Dell Netbook are not uncommon: "Mini9 would get way too hot."

ATI just had to release the 9.11 driver on the day the HD 5970 launch. Honestly, as if I wasn't busy enough already. The whole release was also a bit more nightmarish than usual due to the fact that I had just re-set up my testbed and needed to re-test a bunch of new cards for the article.

Normally what would happen is the new drivers would come in, I pull up my graphs from the month before, I delete the 9.9s, move the 9.10s there and add the 9.11s. Because there was no data from the new testbed in regards to the HD 5850 and HD 5770, those cards had to be tested at the same time.

The next version of Internet Explorer will gain speed by off-loading as much as it can way from the browser and onto the machine. IE9 will speed up the browser's overall performance by sending image and text rendering chores to the PC's graphic processor.

The idea to use a computer's graphics processor unit (GPU) to accelerate their browsers is also being looked at by Mozilla, which makes Firefox, and Norwegian developer Opera. Steven Sinofsky, Microsoft's president of Windows and Windows Live, said that early work on IE9 had already shown significant performance strides.

Microsoft has unveiled the first details of Internet Explorer 9, promising that it will close the performance gap on rival browsers.

Although Microsoft admitted it only started working on IE9 three weeks ago, the company still felt confident enough to share details of the next-generation browser with attendees at its Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles.

The major newcomer is a revamped rendering engine that will tap the power of the PC's graphics card to accelerate text and graphics performance.

In July we announced that we were working on Google Chrome OS, an open source operating system for people who spend most of their time on the web.

Today we are open-sourcing the project as Chromium OS. We are doing this early, a year before Google Chrome OS will be ready for users, because we are eager to engage with partners, the open source community and developers. As with the Google Chrome browser, development will be done in the open from this point on. This means the code is free, accessible to anyone and open for contributions. The Chromium OS project includes our current code base, user interface experiments and some initial designs for ongoing development. This is the initial sketch and we will color it in over the course of the next year.

Microsoft today denied that it has built a backdoor into Windows 7, a concern that surfaced yesterday after a senior National Security Agency (NSA) official testified before Congress that the agency had worked on the operating system.

"Microsoft has not and will not put 'backdoors' into Windows," a company spokeswoman said, reacting to a Computerworld story Wednesday.

In addition to claiming support for Adobe Flash Player 10.1 Beta, ATI has released a new version of its Catalyst drivers in order to fully support that same feature. The new driver supports Radeon HD 2000, 3000, 4000 and 5000 series graphics cards as well as Radeon HD 4200 and 3000 series IGPs.

The new Catalyst 9.11 features 8.671 display drivers and should bring GPU acceleration of H.264 video content using Adobe Flash Player 10.1 Beta. This features is limited to HD 5800, 5700 and HD 4000 series of products. The new driver also comes with high quality downscaling for video transcoding MSE and a bunch of other minor fixes.

The new driver can be found here.

Earlier this week, Office 2010 Beta was made available to MSDN and TechNet Subscribers and without wasting the time, Microsoft has done same for general public. Office 2010 public beta is available now at Microsoft Download Center.