Microsoft sure is a different company than it was a few years ago. Well now it looks like they have sold 400 million Windows 7 copies and 100 million Office 2010 copies. And now the Windows 8 public beta is set to make an appearance at CES 2012.

Those numbers make it the fastest-selling OS in history. Many of us will go ahead and spend another $100 on the newest Windows version and complete the cycle all over again. Microsoft is pretty happy about that tonight.

At GDC this week Sony outed some impressive numbers: 41 million to be exact. That’s the number of PS3 consoles the company says it has sold worldwide. In 2010 the PlayStation store saw a 60 percent boost in traffic and a 70 percent boost in revenue from a total of 70 million PSN accounts.

That impressive stuff. And titles like Killzone and Call of Duty sure help. Playstation Plus doesn’t hurt either. To be clear, we are talking about 70 million PSN user accounts, 41 million PS3 consoles, and 80 percent of them are online. Sony has a lot to celebrate right now.

Rumors had been circulating that AOL, who owns Engadget and Webblogs Inc were about to purchase Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch, and it now looks like those rumors were true as AOL has just announced that they have purchased TechCrunch.

AOL has also purchased all other sites in the TechCrunch network, which includes MobileCrunch and Crunch Gear. No details on the purchase price have been announced yet, but Business Insider is reporting that it was sold for $25 Million.

Samsung claims that they’ve sold a million Galaxy S phones in the US over just a month and a half. We know those aren’t iPhone 4 worthy numbers, but that is pretty amazing.

The success isn’t limited to the US. It took Samsung just three weeks to sell a million Galaxy S smartphones globally and they did that before the device even arrived in the US. The company has sold 300,000 in S. Korea alone during that time and 900,000 for the quarter.

Between 2003 and 2005, Dell sold millions of OptiPlex computers. According to documents, Dell knew these systems were full of dangerously faulty motherboards that might catch fire, but sold them anyway.

The NYT paints Dell as a desperate company, so hell-bent on cutting costs that they knowingly sold computers with capacitors that were sure to eventually burst and ooze all over the motherboard and they refused to fix the 1000 affected computers of the firm representing them regarding the related lawsuit. Apparently Dell was fixing these systems with the same faulty motherboard here and there.

If you were around during the beginning of instant messaging, then you probably remember ICQ, which set the standard for instant messaging. AOL initially acquired Mirabilis, the Israeli-based company who came up with the program, back in 1996 for $407 million.

Now the company has decided to let it go for just $187.5 million to a Russian investment company, Digital Sky Technologies. I bet this brings back instant messaging memories for many of you.

Here are the numbers. 300,000 iPads were sold, leading to 1,000,000 app downloads, and 250,000 ebook downloads from the iBook Store.

The original iPhone sold 270,000 units in the first 30 hours. So 300,000 is pretty impressive. Remember, many are holding out for the 3G version next month and this was a US-only launch. Not bad at all. But then we knew they would have no trouble selling them.

Palm and Sprint haven’t confirmed the numbers officially, but according to JPMorgan in a Wall Street Journal article, “sales in the first two days probably exceeded 50,000.” The figure was “aligned with expectations, but probably fell short of the 146,000 reported first-gen iPhone sales” during its opening weekend. And that was due to “capacity constraints in manufacturing.”

So it looks like the Pre launch was a success. Next weekend’s sales may put it all in perspective. It’s great news for Palm, but it isn’t all roses. We’ll have to see if new Palm owners are still having problems or not.

LG is proudly announcing that they have successfully made a lot of money off 20 million QWERTY cell phones around the globe. We don’t have any other breakdown on the data, like how many candybar, clamshell or slider form factors sold the most.

The most successful QWERTY devices include the enV series that sold over 8 million units in North America alone along with the Rumor series that sold 6 million units in North America. It’s quite a milestone for LG. You might say that the QWERTY bird gets the worm.

Sony claims to have sold 50 million PSP handhelds worldwide as of January 2009. That number includes all PSP-1000, 2000, and 3000 devices sold since December 2004. That’s a pretty impressive number, for sure.

But not so much if you’re sitting in Nintendo’s corporate offices, looking at 96.22 million DS handhelds sold between December 2004 and December 2008. I guess since they can’t brag about how many PS3 units have been sold, they have to have something to give them hope.

Looks like one lucky user got their 120GB Zune a tad early, before it’s formal debut on the 9th. It was sold at a Fry’s in Atlanta for $250. Nice!