Caceres, 27, of White Plains, said his computer was stolen in early September when he left it on top of his car while carrying things into his home.

His first efforts to figure out who stole the laptop by logging on remotely were stymied, Caceres said. "It was kind of frustrating because he was mostly using it to watch porn," he said. "I couldn't get any information on him."

But then the suspect typed in a name and address to register on a Web site, and a few hours later, police caught the suspect.

The man was charged with grand larceny, said police Lt. Eric Fischer in Wednesday editions of the Journal News.

Think MacBook screen, possibly a bit smaller, in glass with iPhone-like, but fuller-featured Multi-Touch. Gesture library. Full Mac OS X. This is why they bought P.A. Semi. Possibly with Immersion's haptic tech. Slot-loading SuperDrive. Accelerometer. GPS. Pretty expensive to produce initially, but sold at "low" price that will reduce margins. Apple wants to move these babies. And move they will. This is some sick shit. App Store-compatible, able to run Mac apps, too. By October at the latest.

Viewers of the Charlie Rose show tonight were stunned to see the normally composed Rose looking like he'd just been in a bar fight. He has a very bad black eye and a bandage over part of his forehead. I contacted the show's producers to hear what happened. Earlier today, they said, Rose tripped in a pothole while walking on 59th Street in Manhattan. He was carrying a newly purchased MacBook Air and made a quick (but ultimately flawed) decision while falling: sacrifice the face, protect the computer. "In doing so, he pretty much hit the pavement face first, unfortunately," they said.

When we saw Ray's work, we recognized its immediate appeal to our clients who want to personalize their computers with a unique design," said Peder Blohm, president of Laptop Design USA, LLC. "With our production method, we are the first company in the U.S. to perfectly replicate custom air-brush artwork and apply it to a single unit, a limited edition and even thousands of computers."

Bishop's canvases also appear on motorcycles, cars, musical instruments and other surfaces that people want to showcase.

"My exclusive agreement with Laptop Design allows my work to be seen by a much wider audience," said Bishop. "Computers have a similar appeal to cars, motorcycles and other surfaces, because they aren't like traditional canvases which are only viewed on a limited basis."

It is anticipated that Bishop's air-brush designs will be purchased by a variety of Laptop Design's customers including individual laptop owners, sports teams that want to offer fans their own uniquely branded computer hardware, and by major retailers that want to sell limited editions or unique designs for mass appeal.

Laptop Design has developed a high quality process to apply virtually any design and a durable, automotive-quality finish to exterior computer surfaces. The company's paint specialists can match virtually any color to produce matte, high gloss and metallic finishes.

Savant Systems LLC, with a visionary approach to home automation that emphasizes reliability and a maintenance-friendly open platform, has announced the first Apple-based coffee table surface product. The ROSIE Coffee Table Touchpanel Controller supports all the capabilities of the Savant suite of ROSIE In-wall touch panels plus new and exciting interactive multimedia capabilities, such as integration and interaction with iTunes multimedia content, digital cameras, IP network cameras, business card readers, and many additional high-tech devices.

Victor Saverino, director of product management at Savant said, "The ROSIE Coffee Table brings the converged functionality of a touch panel to an interactive surface technology that is practical on the one hand, entertaining and exciting to use on the other. The ROSIE Coffee Table is truly the evolution of interactive technology-it can seamlessly download photos from digital cameras, play music, movies, and TV shows as well as accomplish complete home control all from within one elegant forty-inch interface."

A Surface computer is able to recognize physical objects from a paintbrush to a cell phone and allows hands-on, direct control of content such as photos, music and maps. Surface turns an ordinary tabletop into a dynamic surface that provides interaction with all forms of digital content through natural gestures, touch and physical objects.

The new product is aimed directly at hotels, retail establishments, restaurants and public entertainment venues and should be commercially available towards the end of the year.

It's an interesting product in that it's completely out of left field. Microsoft gives examples of ordering a beverage during a meal with just the tap of a finger and quickly browsing through music and dragging favorite songs onto a personal playlist by moving a finger across the screen. Build this into a bar and you'd get one-touch beer service although I'm not sure if they've found a way to work out when your beer glass is empty so replenishment becomes automatic, maybe in a later version.

MagicMouse, a three-dimensional ultrasonic computer mouse designed by a team of five WPI undergraduates, is one of 10 inventions honored with the inaugural PopSci Invention Awards, the cover story in the June 2007 issue of Popular Science.

Developed by seniors Christian Banker (Norwich, Conn.), Michael Cretella Jr. (Monroe, Conn.), Jeff DiMaria (Prospect, Conn.), Jamie Mitchell (Worcester, Mass.), and Jeffrey Tucker (Nottingham, N.H.), the mouse is designed to permit a computer user to control and manipulate items on a computer screen just by pointing at the monitor. The mouse uses an array of receivers to track the motion of a tiny ultrasonic transmitter worn on the index finger like a ring.

The MagicMouse is a true 3D mouse. Users can move the cursor about the screen simply by pointing and moving their index finger. Zooming is achieved by moving the hand nearer to or farther from the screen. Since both actions can be done simultaneously, the mouse makes it possible to work easily in three dimensions to pan and zoom through 3D maps, for example, or manipulate objects in computer-aided design (CAD) drawing packages. The mouse could also make game play more realistic and interactive, much as the novel 3D remote on the new Nintendo Wii game console has done. For more routine applications, like word processing and web surfing, the WPI students note that controlling a computer with hand gestures should make computer use more intuitive and less intimidating.

The device uses standard mouse protocol to communicate with the PC - so it doesn't need any additional software, and is plug-and-play through its USB interface.

Though consumers can download Vista over the Web for the first time, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told one audience that, as in the past, most consumers will switch to Vista only when they buy new computers. More than five years in the making, Vista was released for businesses Nov. 30, but the unveiling for consumers only came Tuesday. The software retails for $100 to $400, depending on the version and whether the user is upgrading from Windows XP.

Vista comes as changing dynamics of computing - notably the rise of open-source software and Web-based services that replicate what traditionally could be done only on a desktop computer - are threatening Microsoft's dominance in the industry.

But Gates contended that the operating system has a higher profile than ever before, as the PC has morphed from a souped-up typewriter to a networked entertainment center, personal media library and gateway to the Internet.

Sixty-five percent of Americans polled said they spend more time with their home computer than their spouse or significant other, according to research by Kelton Research Inc. released Monday.

Those who have chosen computer over companion don't seem to be getting much satisfaction from their inanimate partner. Of those answering, 84 percent said they were more dependent on their home computer now than three years ago, but that on average, they had experienced computer trouble eight times in those three years, and estimated they wasted 12 hours per month due to home computer problems, the report said.

Now, for the first time, a commercial or industrial firm can have - first thing any morning - complete facts and figures, analyzed and summarized, on its previous day’s performance ... in production, in sales, in procurement or any other major or minor activity.

The almost unbelievable feats of Remington Rand Univac in computing, sorting, classifying and reporting business data enable management executives to formulate "fact-powered" decisions in the merest fraction of the time previously required. Also, highly pertinent analyses and forecasts that were never even attempted before, are now easy and almost completely automatic. Univac has cleared the way for phenomenal improvements in the coordination of business facilities.

And the same versatile Univac equipment helps management multiply clerical productivity many times over in every phase of record keeping and accounting. Univac is just as effective in a job like payroll preparation or cost distribution as it is in complex statistical and mathematical projects.

One idea would be for customers to have to buy two laptops at once - with the second going to the developing world.

Five million of the laptops will be delivered to developing nations this summer, in one of the most ambitious educational exercises ever undertaken.

Michalis Bletsas, chief connectivity officer for the project, said eBay could be a partner to sell the laptop.

"If we started selling the laptop now, we would do very good business," Mr Bletsas, speaking at the Consumer Electronics Show, told BBC News.

The proposed $100 machine will be a Linux-based, with a dual-mode display—both a full-color, transmissive DVD mode, and a second display option that is black and white reflective and sunlight-readable at 3× the resolution. The laptop will have a 500MHz processor and 128MB of DRAM, with 500MB of Flash memory; it will not have a hard disk, but it will have four USB ports. The laptops will have wireless broadband that, among other things, allows them to work as a mesh network; each laptop will be able to talk to its nearest neighbors, creating an ad hoc, local area network. The laptops will use innovative power (including wind-up) and will be able to do most everything except store huge amounts of data.

The way technology moves forward, 300 TB on a 3.5-inch hard drive may not seem so big in 2010. But here in 2007, it’s a lot of data, especially when Seagate’s largest single hard drive capacity is a paltry 750 GB in comparison.

-Correction- The 300 TB is actually terabits, and not terabytes. Therefore, the new Seagate drive in 2010 will store approximately 37.5 terabytes, and while that's just over 10 times smaller than a real 300 terabyte drive, it's still massive compared to the drives we are using today. And who knows what we'll have by 2011, or 2012!

The technology used today to expand hard drive capacities is called perpendicular recording, where bits are recorded to a hard drive in a vertical fashion, instead of horizontal, allowing many more bits to be recorded into the same physical space.

To pull the 37.5 terabyte (or 300 terabit) rabbit out of the hat, technology comes to the rescue once again. This time, Seagate will use a technology called heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR). These isn't much detail on exactly how this works, but a single square inch of hard disk space will be able to store 50 terabits of data.

Nobody cranks out quirkier mouse designs on such a regular basis than Japan's Elecom. This 800dpi mouse packs the somewhat useful novelty of being suitable for either left or right-handed people -- flick the switch to reverse the left and right-click functions. Just remember to leave the mouse on the correct side of the keyboard to avoid any confrontation with your partner.

The elegant design of the Tulip Ego laptop with its round shapes and fashionable, interchangeable skins, marks the beginning of a new era in computer design. The ultimate in luxury laptops, the Tulip Ego is easily carried either on the shoulder or by hand with its rounded chrome handle. The Tulip Ego also features the world's first hi-fashion interchangeable skin system. Available in different designer fabrics, finishes and colors, the skins can be changed anytime, anywhere using a customized USB-stick cap that comes with the laptop.

Tulip Ego features the most sophisticated design and technology available. It’s sleek and fast -- with AMD Turion 64 Mobile Technology -- and, provides optimum connectivity, function and style. In addition, it has an integrated webcam which enables photography, video, and instant videoconferencing; a keyboard with 15 dedicated keys, providing direct access to e-mail, IM, web browser, media-center, speech recognition, web cam, virus scan, and data back-up; and a state-of-the-art audio system with two microphones, doubling the capacity to capture and control audio for internet calls (VoIP) and voice recognition software.

According to research from Nielsen/NetRatings, people are buying cutting-edge technology but often don't understand the terms that describe what their device actually does.

So while 40% of online Britons receive news feeds, 67% did not know that the official term for this service was Really Simple Syndication.

Terms such as podcasting and wikis are still meaningless to many.

"In the relentless quest for the next big thing when it comes to new forms of digital consumption, there is a significant tendency for the industry to over-estimate consumer's knowledge and understanding of the seemingly limitless new terms and products out there," said Alex Burmaster, internet analyst with Nielsen/NetRatings.

"The trend towards larger screen notebooks is emerging because more and more customers are looking to portable devices for gaming and for higher-end entertainment functions," Samir Bhavnani, director of research for Current Analysis told LAPTOP. The trend certainly makes sense-as more people look to their notebooks as potential entertainment centers, the demand for more powerful systems with larger screens grows, and so do the notebooks themselves. Thus 18-pound systems are born. At what point is the line between desktops and notebooks rendered pointless? It seems that we're getting pretty close.

Since we happened to have a Dell XPS M2010 lying around the office, we figured it an opportune time to take the 20.1-inch system for a spin in the crowded streets of midtown Manhattan. Despite its prominent handle, the 18.3-pound system isn't designed for carrying around crowded city streets. It's also not designed for tiny coffee shop tables, nor the human lap-even as a 5'11" male, I had a fair bit of trouble keeping the thing steady on mine, a situation not improved by the fact that the keyboard detaches automatically. Here's a recap of my big-screen-machine adventure.

CushTop (F8N044) -- $39.99

Made of high-quality, furniture-like upholstery, the CushTop provides increased padded comfort for laptop users. A convenient storage pocket keeps your power adapter and mouse tucked away. By flipping its platform over, the CushTop can accommodate small or large laptops. It is available in three contemporary colors: silver, orange and green.

PocketTop (F8N043) -- $49.99

The PocketTop is your laptop computer's new home base, doubling as a case and a workstation. Its simple form provides generous storage space for a mouse, power supply and other accessories, such as pens and notes. A convenient hatch gives you easy access to the storage area and doubles as a handle.

Ideal for use on your lap or desk, the PocketTop features a built-in cooling pad to keep the heat from penetrating through the bottom surface. With semi-rigid material, the PocketTop provides superior protection for your laptop, while leaving you with unrestricted access to your side ports. It is available in three stylish colors: silver, orange and green.

The 8-bit system came with 4KB of memory, expandable to 48KB. It used a cassette rather than a disk for storage. It cost $1200, about twice the base price of its two biggest competitors, the Tandy TRS-80 Model I and the Commodore PET 2001. It couldn't even display lowercase letters (in the first several years of its existence, anyway). Yet it packed more pure innovation than any other early computer, and was the first PC that deserved to be called a consumer electronics device.

Born out of the Home Brew Computer Club by Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs's tiny Apple Computer in 1977, the Apple II was the company's second PC, but it boasted more than its share of firsts: It was the first color PC (you could even use it with a television), the first to be easily expandable by users, and the first to run the VisiCalc spreadsheet--proving that these new boxes had a place in business.

Perhaps its greatest innovation was its design. Jobs wanted the machine to look at home on people's desktops, so he insisted that the Apple II have a sleek look, as opposed to the sheet-metal-and-exposed-wire appearance of most other early PCs. The machine's coolness factor--an Apple trademark to this day--was as important to its long-term success as Wozniak's inventive engineering was.

It is very small compared to the Ram and flash chips on the market, but it is a start.

In fact many companies, including IBM, have been working on the nanotechnology behind Mram for around a decade.

Put simply, Mram stores data magnetically, in the same way a hard drive does. This makes it non-volatile.

It is also very quick, and does not wear out over time. So it seems to have the advantages of both RAM and flash, with none of the disadvantages.

Only don't expect these new chips to hit your price sensitive consumer electonics just yet. The first markets for MRAM will most likely be automotive or industrial settings where durability is critical. So hold tight and let the invisible hand work some magic, mkay?

The design is the result of a personal annoyance for years and years. Almost everybody with a computer has the same problem. An ugly looking skincoloured box under the desk, all kind of ugly wires, all the peripherals like soundsystems, transmitters and so on are annoying too. No matter how nice the desk looks when you buy it, by the time you have everything installed there is not much left of it. A lot of people decide for that reason not to put the PC in the living room.

In the i-Con I everything is integrated. The PC is in the desk. The only thing you see yet is the front of the DVDburner, the adjustable screen and the powercable, coming out of one leg, that's it. All the other things, the motherboard, the harddisk, the wires to and from the screen, the bluetoothhub and other transmitters, all that is in the desk.

One year ago, Hank Gerbus had his hard drive replaced at a Best Buy store in Cincinnati. Six months ago, he received one of the most disturbing phone calls of his life.

"Mr. Gerbus," Gerbus recalls a stranger named Ed telling him. "I just bought your hard drive in Chicago."

Gerbus, a 77-year-old retiree, was alarmed. He knew the old hard drive was loaded with his personal information -- his Social Security number, account numbers and details of his retirement investments. But that's not all. The computer also included data on his wife, Roma, and their children and grandchildren, including some of their Social Security numbers.

In June 2005, when Gerbus took his computer to Best Buy for repairs after a hard drive crash, he knew the drive was a potential hot potato. So when a clerk there told him it had to be replaced, he asked for the damaged hardware back.

Picking our list wasn't exactly rocket science; it was more like group therapy. PC World staffers and contributors nominated their candidates and then gave each one the sniff test. We sought the worst of the worst--operating systems that operated badly, hardware that never should have left the factory, applications that spied on us and fed our data to shifty marketers, and products that left a legacy of poor performance and bad behavior.

Under the idea, which Microsoft is introducing this week, people would be able to get a PC for their home with a mechanism that charges them depending on how much computing they use. Consumers would pay for about half of the PC upfront and then, say, 50 cents or 75 cents per hour of use. After several hundred hours of paid use, they would then own the PC outright.

"The real goal of FlexGo is to make that dream of owning a full-featured PC a reality," said Mike Wickstrand, director of product management in the market expansion group at Microsoft.

The exact finances of the program would vary, depending on a number of factors. These include the cost of the software and hardware being used, as well as the country's prevailing lending interest rate. Microsoft has already tested the idea in Brazil, but plans to expand that program in coming weeks, alongside new trials in Russia, India, China and Mexico.

Microsoft has been grappling with the challenges of emerging markets for some time. The company has offered a lower-priced operating system option, its stripped-down Windows XP Starter Edition, as part of low-cost PC programs across the globe. But total shipments of Starter have been modest, with the company having sold 100,000 copies as of last July.

"Microsoft's track record is clear," the firm says. "It consistently misses target dates for major operating system releases. We don't expect broad availability of Windows Vista until at least 2Q07 (second quarter of 2007), which is nine to 12 months after Beta 2."

Microsoft, however, maintains that everything is on schedule, in line with its March announcement.

"We respectfully disagree with Gartner's views around timing of the final delivery of Windows Vista," a Microsoft spokesman told CNET News. "We remain on track to deliver Windows Vista Beta 2 in the second quarter and to deliver the final product to volume-license customers in November 2006 and to other businesses and consumers in January 2007."

I should not have been surprised. Survey after survey shows that whether you measure your productivity in facts researched, alien spaceships vaporized, or articles written, adding an extra monitor will give your output a considerable boost -- 20 percent to 30 percent, according to a survey by Jon Peddie Research.

So now, while I am editing this article on my main screen, the screen beside it shows the outline or earlier draft I am working from -- and, sometimes, Web sites or other documents I keep referring to.

When I edit photos, the second screen lets me compare the copy I am working on with the original, or shows tool palettes and thumbnails of other images, and I can blow up panoramic shots for closer viewing (though with a bar down the middle, like the central pillar of an old car's windshield). When I am shopping on the Web, my two screens let me compare products. When I work on tables or spreadsheets, I can see all the columns at once. When I expect important messages, I keep my e-mail program open on the side monitor while I work on something else.

With a single monitor, I could jump between applications with a mouse click or a keyboard command (Alt-Tab, in Windows), but not nearly as fast -- and small delays add up when you repeat them dozens or even hundreds of times a day. With my dual displays, I simply sweep my mouse from one screen to the other.

Regardless, the initial reaction to the UMPC, announced by Microsoft on March 9, will become clear in just a few months. The first UMPCs -- small computers with 7-inch screens that are designed to occupy a niche for consumers who want a device larger than a handheld yet smaller than a laptop -- are expected in the second quarter ending June 30 from electronics manufacturers such as Samsung, Founder and Asus. UMPCs, priced between $599 and $999, promise to run all the applications that a Microsoft Windows desktop computer does.

On the plus side, products like cell phones and the iPod didn't initially strike consumers as must haves, but became big hits. On the other side of the ledger, products like Apple Computer's Newton, a handheld computer that debuted in August 1993, was a commercial flop in large part because its handwriting recognition software didn't perform well. Microsoft, for its part, has attempted to create new categories of computers before, as with its Tablet PC, which analysts say has yet to be a big seller beyond select industries such as health care and financial services. However, even commercial flops can be deemed a success if they blaze a path to new categories of products. For instance, Apple's Newton was an early disappointment, but forged the way for handhelds like the Palm Pilot 1000, launched in March 1996.

So what will be the fate of Microsoft's UMPC, formerly codenamed "Origami"? According to Clemons, there is potential for the devices, but he won't know how much until he gets to play with one. Kendall Whitehouse, senior director of advanced technology development at Wharton, says the UMPC is a good way for Microsoft to spread its software into all forms of devices as they begin to converge. Wharton marketing professor Eric Bradlow suggests that Microsoft has a sales challenge convincing consumers they need another device that is a "tweener" between a laptop and a handheld. Jagmohan S. Raju, also a Wharton marketing professor, predicts that the UMPC will have a tough time competing due to its high price. And Robert Shelton, co-author of Making Innovation Work (Wharton School Publishing), describes the UMPC effort as another attempt by technology companies to use innovation to create new markets by finding just the right mix of size, functionality and price.

The layoffs represent about 5% of the company's 21,400 employees. Lenovo managers will identify the workers by the end of March, spreading the cuts throughout company offices in the Americas, Asia-Pacific and EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa) regions.

The changes make sense in terms of the competitive PC market, analysts said.

"Business desktops are a narrow, narrow margin business; they are almost a commodity. You have to be very efficient in order to make money selling desktops," said Gordon Haff, senior analyst at research company Illuminata Inc.

Lenovo faced a challenge achieving that efficiency because it was still struggling to integrate IBM's PC division into the rest of the company. Lenovo acquired that business in 2005.

A blade is a server that slides into a big, tall box called a chassis that is about the size of a refrigerator. Companies can replace all the hundreds of servers in their data centers with a blades that fit into these big boxes. They take a lot less room, and a lot less power. Blade servers count as one of the fastest growing product introductions in IBM's history—the business went from zero revenues three years ago to $800 million last year. And Zeitler expects blades to be a $10 billion business by the end of the decade.

The key to hitting that goal is IBM's committment to making those blade slots standard. So if you don't like IBM's blades you can theoretically swap in a blade from another supplier. (Although, in reality, HP's blades don't fit in those slots, and I'm not sure that Sun's do either).

But the rise of blade servers presents a few interesting business opportunies. (VC's, by the way, have poured an estimated $1 billon into blade startups since 2000, and will invest another $1 billion over the next four years, according to VC David Helfich).

Gartner estimated 218.5 million PCs were shipped in 2005 while IDC said it believes worldwide PC shipments totaled 208.6 million units. Both companies count desktops, mobile computers and x86-based servers in their figures and both said the data is provisional.

"The general good news is that it's another strong quarter," said Loren Loverde, director of IDC's PC Tracker research. Despite long-standing concerns about weakening consumer PC sales, shipments have grown more than 17 percent above 2004's totals for the past three quarters running, he said.

The Europe, Middle East, and Africa region (EMEA) came out on top of Gartner's regional ranking for the first time to become the largest PC market worldwide. Shipments in EMEA totaled 72.6 million in 2005, a 17.1 percent jump on 2004 and several million units ahead of the U.S. market, which was estimated to have seen 67.2 million shipments in the year. U.S. market growth was pegged at 7.5 percent, which was well below the worldwide average of 15.3 percent.

Seagate's new drive, the Momentus 5400.3, was being shipped as of Monday, the Scotts Valley, Calif.-based company said. The shift to perpendicular recording allows it to bump up the maximum capacity of its notebook drive to 160 gigabytes from 120 gigabytes.

The 2.5-inch drive costs $325, compared to about $240 for the 120 gig model. Seagate plans to extend the new recording technology to other notebook drives, as well its 1-inch drives used in handheld gadgets and 3.5-inch drives for desktop PCs.

"Our transition to perpendicular technology increases our ability to meet the needs of our growing customer base," said Karl Chicca, general manager of Seagate's Personal Storage unit.

Other drive makers also have either announced products or plans that include perpendicular recording. At the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this month, Toshiba unveiled its second 1.8-inch drive that relies on the new technology.

Everybody in the entire world has been looking disgustedly down at their current keyboards since seeing the Optimus, with its hundreds of keys that are also LED screens, each one of which can be customized to display different things and perform different functions, depending on the program or the operating system. Well, do we even have to tell you that today's top link refers to a rollout date for the Optimus? Can you even contain the unbridled, childlike excitement bubbling up inside you at the prospect of owning such a keyboard?

Google representatives in the U.K. denied the LA Times report as "wholly inaccurate", stressing the company's good relationships with existing PC makers.

Speaking to Macworld UK they said: "We have many PC partners who serve their markets exceedingly well and we see no need to enter that market."

The LA Times reported on Sunday that the purported Google PC could cost as little as a couple of hundred dollars because it would not use Windows.

Fewer replacements and slower economic growth will slow down computer sales in the coming months, but the lure of low-cost and portable machines will keep the growth rate at double digits in 2006, the market researcher said in its forecast on Tuesday.

The overall growth rate for 2006 might have been even lower but for a revised forecast of 15 percent growth in the fourth quarter of 2005, IDC said. The earlier projection for the quarter was 12.6 percent, and 9.1 percent for 2006. The strength of the overall market, particularly in portable PC adoption, has boosted prospects in all markets except Japan.

"Following the shocks of 2001 and 2002 many people were impressed with the strength of the market in 2004 but cautious about the foundation and longevity of this growth," Loren Loverde, director of PC research at IDC, said in a statement. "The fact that solid double-digit growth has continued through 2005 shows that the market recovery did not peak in 2004 as many expected but is still ongoing."

The new projections make 2006 the fourth consecutive year likely to have double-digit shipment growth, and raise the compound annual growth rate for 2005 through 2009 to 9.4 percent, IDC said. The number of shipments is projected to touch 300 million units in 2009, while the value of shipments will be $250 billion.

But in terms of groundbreaking new features, there wasn't much to cheer about this year, and next year probably won't be very different. Leaps in PC technology, seen in previous advances like wireless networking, truly portable notebooks, or optical storage technology, will be hard to find in moderately priced PCs in 2006. Dual-core processors will become the norm, but companies such as Microsoft are worried about the leisurely pace at which PC application developers are converting their products to take advantage of a new parallel world.

Perpendicular data storage technology for hard-disk drives, which allows for much more data to be stored than currently, has been talked about for years and now it's finally starting to appear in a handful of commercial drives. In 2007, it will become mainstream in PC drives. That will push storage space in desktop drives toward the terabyte level, according to most estimates.

In removable media, the big change will be the slow transition from DVD to Blu-ray Disc or HD-DVD. This is expected to start on a few high-end machines in 2006 but it won't be until 2007 that the technology starts to penetrate the upper-end of the mass market.

"Hundreds of thousands of tons of carbon dioxide are needlessly produced every year by computers, digital set top boxes, chargers and many other products left on standby mode," said Environment Minister Elliot Morley in June. "We know that products can be designed to be much more efficient and do less harm to the environment. Wasted energy is a hidden cost for consumers and in this day and age that is unacceptable."

There has been confusion in the past about whether it is better to turn PCs off when not in use, or to leave them switched on. Some people have claimed that regularly turning computers off can, over time, weaken links between components and damage hardware such as the hard drive.

According to some estimates, just turning off a monitor can save 75 percent of the overall energy consumption of a PC.

One of the easiest cures for sluggish PCs caused by an aging hard drive is included in the Windows operating system. Microsoft'sRelevant Products/Services from Microsoft own Disk Defragmenter and Disk Cleanup utilities are located in the Start menu under Accessories/System Tools.

Disk Cleanup checks the hard drive for unnecessary programs and other clutter, such as temporary Internet files. Running this clean-up program at least once a month will keep free space on the hard drive available to speed up file access.

Disk Defragmenter is a very reliable program. It analyzes the condition of the hard drive and optimizes folders and files. When the file shuffling is completed, the hard drive is reorganized so that files are stored in contiguous clusters, speeding up computer performance tremendously.

Monitor the hard drive fragmentation ratio weekly. When Disk Defragmenter shows the drive is fragmented more than 10 percent, click the Defrag button. Plan on doing this at the end of the work day. Given the size of today's hard drives, the fixing process can take several hours.

Is the mainstream market going to see that $100 PC that everyone has been talking about? Not quite yet, said Current Analysis senior analyst Toni Duboise. "All I can say is, watch the promotions... what you will see are extremely aggressive prices."

Potentially, the situation could lead to promotional prices of $199 for entry-level desktops with an Intel Celeron or AMD Sempron processor, 256MB of RAM, a hard drive with at least 40GB, and Windows Home Edition in the package. The PC would also be bundled with a 17-inch CRT display and, possibly, a printer, Duboise said. Approximately 18 percent of the desktops selling at retail at this moment are priced at less than $500 after rebate, she added.

Midrange and high-end desktops and notebook PCs would have even more wiggle room, according to Duboise, meaning that mainstream PCs with Intel's Pentium 4 or AMD's Athlon 64 chip, 512 RAM and 80GB or 100GB hard drive could see price drops of 10 percent to about $583. Entry-level Media Center PCs with integrated graphics cards from ATI Technologies could also see price reductions, from $599 to $539, the analyst said.

Shipments of personal computers grew by 17.1 percent during the third quarter of 2005, according to IDC, driven by the popularity of notebooks, low-cost systems and international sales. As a result, IDC also boosted its annual forecast for shipment growth to 17.1 percent, well over the 13.3 percent growth rate the research firm predicted in August.

First, by dramatically lowering the cost of the display. The first-generation machine may use a novel, dual-mode LCD display commonly found in inexpensive DVD players, but that can also be used in black and white, in bright sunlight, and at four times the normal resolution—all at a cost of approximately $35.

Second, we will get the fat out of the systems. Today's laptops have become obese. Two-thirds of their software is used to manage the other third, which mostly does the same functions nine different ways.

Third, we will market the laptops in very large numbers (millions), directly to ministries of education, which can distribute them like textbooks.

South Korean-based Samsung said its latest NAND memory device has 16-gigabit density. That's twice the density of the 8-gigabit NAND memory developed last year by Samsung, Toshiba, Hitachi and others.

NAND flash memory is widely used in consumer devices like digital cameras, cell phones, USB flash drives and portable music players such as Apple Computer's new iPod Nano.

But Samsung's top brass are touting the new small-size, large-capacity device as an alternative to mini hard drives and even the hard drives used in laptops.

"This year, it appears clear that NAND will surpass NOR as the most popular flash memory," a representative with Samsung said. (NOR flash is highly reliable and used to store software code, but it's less dense than NAND.)

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Prospective coders can view all the requests on the site, and bid for the ones that interest them. Once I'd accepted a bid - it was less than £200 for a fortnight's programming work - I paid the money to the site, which placed it in escrow. My coder, a young man in Belorussia, completed the work, and once I'd checked it was up to scratch (it was), I instructed the site to release the cash.

By using all of the media instead of just the surface, holographic storage promises breakthroughs in storage density and cost and data transfer rates. It differs from spinning disk technology in that the media and head are fixed and the disk rotates very slowly; the company doesn't even track RPMs. Those differences also make holographic storage more reliable.

The initial product, a 130mm disk, is expected to hold 300 gigabytes (GB) of data — the equivalent of 462 CDs — with a transfer rate of 20 megabytes (MB) per second. InPhase says capacities for its "Tapestry" family of drives will reach 1.6 terabytes (TB) on a single disk by 2010.