Microsoft Corp.

A video for the title track on hip-hop veteran Common's forthcoming album, "Universal Mind Control," begins with a digital music player pulsing to the beat. The viewer is pulled through the screen into the gadget's guts, where the cool, collected rapper lets loose an easy stream of lyrics.

It takes hitting rewind a few times to notice that the music player isn't one of Apple's slim new iPods. It's a Zune, and it's made by Microsoft Corp.

Many of the problems facing Advanced Micro Devices Inc. are of its own making. But the limited choices the chip maker has for solving its troubles are symptoms of an affliction sweeping through Silicon Valley.

Slumping sales, big layoffs and devastated stock prices are becoming the norm, resurrecting memories of the malaise that gripped the Valley for years after the dot-com meltdown in 2000.

In its latest move to increase Internet search traffic, Microsoft Corp. has turned to an old rival, Sun Microsystems Inc., for marketing help.

Under the terms of a deal being announced Monday, Sun will promote a Microsoft toolbar for the Internet Explorer browser to U.S.-based Web surfers as they download Sun's Java software -- which is required to view some Web sites. The toolbar has a built-in box for queries to Microsoft's Live Search and buttons that give people access to MSN content.

Perhaps the biggest threat to Google Inc.'s increasing dominance of Internet search and advertising is the rising fear, justified or not, that Google's broadening reach is giving it unchecked power.

This scrutiny goes deeper than the skeptical eye that lawmakers and the Justice Department have given to Google's proposed ad partnership with Yahoo Inc. Many objections to that deal are financial, and surround whether Google and Yahoo could unfairly drive up online ad prices.

The top Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Committee is joining a chorus of lawmakers urging the Justice Department to scrutinize the planned Internet advertising partnership between Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc.

Texas Republican Joe Barton also accuses Yahoo of resisting congressional inquiries into the deal. He said that many of the company's answers to his questions "seemed designed to obscure rather than clarify how the Google-Yahoo partnership would work."

Eight members of Congress are calling on the Federal Communications Commission to delay a planned Nov. 4 vote on a proposal to open up unused portions of the television airwaves known as "white spaces" in order to deliver wireless broadband services.

The proposal by FCC Chairman Kevin Martin is a high priority for public interest groups and many of the nation's biggest technology companies, including Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp., which hope it will bring universal, affordable broadband service to rural America and other underserved parts of the country.

Now that Sony Corp. and Bertelsmann AG have broken off their troubled relationship, known as Sony BMG, the Japanese company hopes to harmonize its consumer electronics and its music, a duo that was badly out of sync.

The music business combination four years ago made Sony BMG the world's No. 2 record label, generating savings and pre-empting other industry consolidation. But the venture's cost-cutting didn't keep pace with falling CD sales, and the two companies' digital strategies didn't jibe.

Microsoft Corp. does not have to pay $1.5 billion in damages to Alcatel-Lucent SA, a panel of federal appeals judges has ruled in what may be the last word on a long-running digital music patent lawsuit.

In February 2007, a jury in U.S. District Court in San Diego determined Microsoft infringed on two patents that cover the encoding and decoding of audio into the digital MP3 format, a popular way to convert music from CDs into files on computers and vice versa.

We've never met, but I already know you're a lot like Sarah Palin.

You're not the Republican vice presidential candidate and the governor of Alaska, but you've almost certainly got a free Web-based e-mail address, one of the millions doled out by Yahoo Inc., Google Inc., Microsoft Corp., and many Internet companies.

Chaos in the money markets gave Microsoft Corp. an opening Monday to announce it would take on debt for the first time, launch a new $40 billion stock buyback plan and raise its dividend.

The moves indicate that for all the credit problems plaguing the financial sector, cash-laden technology companies with good credit ratings are still borrowing money on favorable terms and otherwise enjoying flexibility.