Ahmed Mahdy

 Just in time for last-minute holiday shoppers, Microsoft has extended the Xbox 360’s warranty from 90 days to one year, bringing it in line with the warranty lengths of rival game consoles from Sony and Nintendo. The extension is retroactive, meaning that someone who bought an Xbox 360 in the United States or Canada and paid for repairs within the last year is eligible for reimbursement. In many other countries, a one-year warranty already is standard. “Customer satisfaction is a central focus and priority for the Xbox 360 system,” Jeff Bell, a marketing vice president at Microsoft, said in a statement Friday.

Microsoft also said reimbursement checks for repairs done in the last 12 months will be sent out automatically in about 10 weeks. Contact information for warranty questions is available on the Xbox support site. Nintendo’s Wii comes with a standard one-year warranty, with a free 90-day extension if customers register their consoles on the company’s Web site. Sony’s PlayStation 3 comes with a one-year warranty. Some credit cards, including American Express and Visa, extend the manufacturer’s warranty if a product is bought using that card.

 Microsoft has released a fix for Internet Explorer 7 that should stop the browser’s built-in phishing filter from slowing Web surfing. According to the Redmond, Wash., developer, IE 7 users may see their PCs bog down as the filter evaluates multi-frame pages for fraud indicators. On pages with a large number of frames, or when the user browses several frames in a short time, IE 7’s processor appetite spikes.

“When you use Windows Internet Explorer 7 to visit a Web page, the computer may respond very slowly as the Phishing Filter evaluates Web page contents,” Microsoft said in a support document it posted Tuesday. IE 7’s anti-phishing filter was touted by Microsoft as one of several security enhancements to the new browser. The filter checks each site against a list of known or likely fraudulent pages kept on a Microsoft-run server. Mozilla Corp.’s Firefox 2.0, on the other hand, checks visited sites against a list of potentially dangerous sites kept on the PC. Microsoft and Mozilla have made conflicting claims that their anti-phishing tool is the best in the business. The patch, which was not automatically pushed to IE 7 users running Windows XP SP2 or Windows Server 2003, or posted on the list of possible fixes on Microsoft Update, can be downloaded from the Microsoft site. Users must be running a legitimate copy of Windows to grab the patch.