Wal-Mart Black Friday Update

In the beginning of the month we alerted you to Wal-Mart's super low-priced PCs and laptops to be flogged on Black Friday. Now we've been told that it gets even better. For $378 without any rebates, you can get your hands on an HP Pavilion ze2108wm laptop, installed with AMD Sempron processor with PowerNow! technology. The best part of this laptop looks like its battery life, which should last about 3 hours on the 6-cell battery. Not bad for under $500. Now the question is, does it matter enough to mingle with the freaks who will be in Wal-Mart the day after Thanksgiving? You'll have to use your better judgement on that one. More »

Macworld Coverage: Wednesday - Part III

The finale to Will Leitch's Macworld coverage in which Will discovers the magic of voice command the hard way. More »

MacWorld Coverage: Wednesday - Part II

A continuation of Episode I in which Will is lured into the back seat of a Lexus. More »

MacWorld Coverage: Wednesday

We got there late, but we got there. Will Leitch, a special friend of Gizmodo, sends us a twisted missive from the heart of Mac Country. Will is not a techie. He's a journalistic pit-bull, a sports fan, and is coming to MacWorld with fresh eyes. He sees what we won't see. He'll bring back the blood, the glory, and the heart of the Mac Community. Ladies and gentlemen, we present to you: More »

Panasonic Color eBook

Move over B&W Sony Librie eBook, there's a new eBook in town. A color eBook. That's still a prototype. And may be available next year. But not here. Tough break, fans of eBooks. You better get yourself a pBook, which is a paper book. More »

SKYN Tones Laptop Skins

I don't know what's up with all these laptop adhesive things, but it's kind of silly. I suppose it might be good if you want to keep your aluminum Powerbook nice and clean, but why would you need one for a generic plastic beast? More »

Infill T3: Big Time Car PC

It's big and it's brawny and it wants to live in your car. No, it's not your mother—it's the INFILLL T3, a double-tall car in-dash car PC with a 1.6GHz CPU, a 40GB hard drive, GPS, and a lot more (although maybe not Wi-Fi, which seems miraculously shortsighted). Price and availability is still up in the air, but it looks like a beast. Too bad it's retarded to watch movies while driving. More »

Schtickers LapSchticks

What makes the LapSchticks Schtickers more appropriate for laptop decoration than other stickers? Not much—except the $20 stickers can be easily applied and removed, allowing you to swap out and customize your laptop as the spirit moves you. The designs aren't amazing, but they aren't terribly gaudy, either. This 'DJ Turntable' Schticker, for instance, is actually pretty slick. More »

IBM Launches Dual-Core PowerPC 970 Chip

With all this Intel stuff, I'm surprised IBM is still even TALKING to Apple, but whatever. That boy is just asking to get his heart broke. Apple is like SO over IBM and he comes out with some crazy dual core G5 like nothing ever happened and we all know something happened namely Intel was totally almost doing Apple at Jamie's party last week. More »

Silly Customer! Verizon is Evil Part Deux

Reader Eric writes: More »

Antec Sonata II Reviewed (Verdict: Once You Go Black...)

We normally steer clear of commodity PC parts (except video cards, because, well, those make everyone happy), but I've had an Antec Sonata case for the better part of a year and am a big fan. It's quiet, it's nice looking without being fruity, and it wasn't expensive as these things go. Now Antec has the second generation 'Sonata II' out, with a even quieter design (they ditched those punched holes in the side) and a better power supply. If you're looking for a top-shelf case that might help your PC from sounding like a whirlwind, check it out (just don't plug in the eye-searing front LEDs). More »

Motion Computing LS800 Mini Tablet PC

Some of you are going to be very happy about Motion Computing's new LS800 Windows Tablet PC. It's small, for starters—just a 8.4-inch screen. And it's reasonably powerful, with a 1.2GHz Pentium M (certainly strong enough to get any business computing done). But by being so tiny, it might not serve as the laptop-replacement some people want, despite an optional plug-in keyboard and dock. Whatever—we prefer options in form factors over 'do everything' devices any day. More »

Friction Free Lube

Those dirty Japanese have discovered an almost friction-free lube. Before you get all worked up about the future possibilities in the realm of hentai tentacle porn, it's actually designed for fans and other machinery. The lubricant is made of an array of fullerene molecules between thin films of granitegraphite [Blame this on the Intern from Kansas (IfK)- Ed.]. The force of friction created is under .4 nanonewtons. That's like the light touch of a butterfly against your pasty skin. More »

iPod Mini Everywhere

This interesting piece of patent marginalia shows a potential iPod Mini stuck inside a potential PowerBook. This is actually probably just Apple's way of covering its arse when someone comes out with a similar notion of an MP3 player built into a laptop, something about prior art or whatever, but the premise is compelling. The iPod acts as the laptop's touch pad and, like some other laptops we've seen, the screen supplies handy info like battery life, grayscale pr0n, and track listings. Will it ever be made? Naw. But it's nice to know someone is thinking out in Cupertino. More »

SilverStone LC18

Case designs have been leaning towards the "pimp-my-mobo" side of things recently and this is no exception. THe SilverStone LC18 has an external LCD monitor on the case and looks like the bastard spawn of a MacMini and ThermalTake death-beast. Featured at this year's C3, the LC18 is an interesting mix of elegance and over-the-topness that I can't quite get my head around. I wonder about heating issues with a phat LCD inside a tight overclocker's case. More »

Adventures in the Sysadmin Trade

John here. Got back from the NOC last night—the NOC is in DC and I'm in New York, so it was kind of like visiting the reclusive Uncle rather than a fun road trip—and I rebuilt MOST of the system. Now I need to get my MySQL DBs back out of an image of the disk that failed. I ran mke2fs -S on it, ran fsck, but now I have five million files in the lost+found. Anyone know any way to dig them out without ending up with a mess? More »

Incredible New Ebay Phishing Mail

This is a bit off topic, but it's a fascinating study of what happens when Phishers get a book on Javascript. More »

Motion LE1600TC Tablet

Finally. Motion has rethought its previous trade dress—let's make it look as chintzy as possible and easily breakable—and gotten with the program. Although case color doesn't mean things are going to be better at old Motion, we do hope they've learned a bit over the umpteen years they've held onto the same gimpy chassis. More »

Nvidia Geforce 7800GTX Review Round-Up (Verdict: The Bestest Yet)

The NDA wraps come off Nvidia's super-hot new 7800-series graphics cards today. The short take is this: it's really, really fast—so fast, in fact, that most modern games aren't going to take advantage of the power a single card offers, let alone two cards in an SLI configuration. The first cards will show up on the market next week, so if you've got $600 or so sitting around, it'll certainly be the latest and greatest. But chances are you'll have to roll in our selected manner, and sate your desires with the massive load of previews showing up around the web today. More »

Toshiba Looks Back, Forward, Gets Dizzy, Sits Down

Toshiba held a bit of event in Australia and talked about their coming line-up including the Hershey's-Kiss-sized Libretto U10 and the Qosmio U20. They also talked about their sales numbers: 11K sold in 1985, 7 million in 2005. You've come a long way, baby! More »

Gigabyte GV-3D1 Reviewed (Verdict: Overpriced Dead End)

Gigabyte's GV-3D1 is a neat graphics card: it stuffs two Nvidia 6600GT cores onto one card and stitches them together in SLI, without any fussy wires or dual slots. That's the good part. More »

Zalman Reserator Plus 1 Passive Cooling Tower

Zalman has officially announced its Reserator 1 Plus passive water cooling system, a hulking black upgrade to the blue model first released over a year ago. The new model includes new CPU and GPU cooler designs as well as providing an anti-corrosive water additive in the box. I hope they changed the internal pump they used on the previous model, as I discovered the 1 Plus while searching for solutions to quiet the clattering propeller in the original Reserator sitting on my desk. More »

Carbon Fiber Asus V6V

There's a rule in the tech industry—making something out of carbon fiber makes it cooler. I don't care if it's a toilet plunger or a car hood, carbon fiber just sounds more interesting than "shiny plastic." Therefore, we aren't surprised to see that Asus is giving it a go in the carbon fiber notebook niche. More »

Mushkin Redline Performance Memory

The concept of overclocking has flown by me in the past and still does. [This was written by Intern Travis. Please yell at him. - Ed.] For those people who enjoy pushing their computers to the absolute limits, Mushkin has a new type of memory for you. They have released their appropriately named "Redline" performance series memory. One of the big kickers is that this RAM is rated to run around 3.4 volts, which could be considered "redlining" on many motherboards. To counter this, the memory also requires active cooling. This memory is available at $179 for 1GB. More »

Shuttle XPC SN25P

Shuttle is expanding its line of SFF PCs with the SN25P. The size of the case itself is bigger in size, allowing for better airflow and easier access inside. The motherboard uses the nForce4 Ultra chipset and has everything you would need already integrated, including 7.1 audio. One of the best new features is an external clear CMOS button. Maybe this will help the Shuttle line appeal to the more overclocking friendly techies. More »

Toshiba Tecra A5 sub-$1000 Notebook

Toshiba is introducing a nice 14-inch business laptop for the grey flannel suit set. It's a standard Centrino chipset with optional NVIDIA GeForce Go 6200 and a nice WXGA screen, and it weighs about five pounds. Nothing to get to excited about. Just a plain old workhorse. More »

Some Possible Office Pranks

As a public service, we're bringing you a list of interesting and topical office pranks from Pocket-Lint. I think my favorite, which appears above, involves clover seeds (?), a keyboard, board chow, and a bit of water. The resulting chia keyboard made me pee a little. More »

Security Watch

Buddy of mine posted a wee tidbit on his site in regard to security and damn foolishness. The exchange is immortalized here: More »

In-Depth Interview With UI Expert Larry Yaeger

This guy seems to have done it all—early computer graphics on the Cray, designing the handwriting recognition for the Newton, building software that simulates life, and generally doing more cool stuff than anyone has any right to do. Reader Jeff interviewed him for Ars Technica and the resulting three-part discussion kind of made me a little happier today. More »

MacInDell Part Quatre - The Ruby Goldmine

I've been lax this morning because the OS X Intel torrent finally downloaded. I approached my computer with apprehension and palpable turgidity—could this be the fabled x86 OS X ISO? Had I found the Grail of legend, the last disk from which Steve Jobs accessed data before he passed from this world into the darkling plain of the superego? More »

Evesham HTPC Review (Verdict: Nice)

Evesham has released a new innovative media center computer. Radeon X700, 200GB SATA hard drive, 1 GB of ram, TV tuner card, DVD burner and 5.1 audio are all nice features. Why, it even has s-video and composite outputs integrated into the motherboard. Appearance wise, this Evesham Axis is built into a smaller form factor case that can easily be placed on a desk or fit into an entertainment center. This machine would be ideal for the dorm rats and studio apartment livers. More »

MacinDell Part Trois

I know I'm harping on this, but I will soon be vindicated, fear not, you VNC-loving freaks. More »

HAL9000 Case Mod

I like everything about this funky case mod except for the little action figure floating around inside of it it. I suppose you can't have everything. Part of ExtremeTech's Sci Fi case mod contest, this mini-HAL has liquid-cooled innards and uses a cube server unit to recreate the murderous computer from such films as 2001: A Space Odyssey and 2005: OK, So Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke Got it Pretty Much Wrong But that Motorola Video Phone Ojo Thing is Kind of Futuristic. And We Eat Space Food Like Red Bull and Dippin' Dots.. More »

MacInDell Part Deux

Ok, you filthy petards, explain this with your Pear OS X/QuickTime full-screening hoax-busting. Look at the above image and then pop past the jump for what Pear looks like in the wild. More »

Flybook A33i

The link between the PDA and the notebook is getting even closer with the Flybook. Dialogue presented its fully-functional 9 x 6 laptop at Computex. The Flybook weighs in at 2.6 pounds, will have a 1.1-GHz Pentium M Dothan chipset and up to 512MB of RAM. Bluetooth, SM card slot, and built in WiFi capabilities are also included. More »

Sony VAIO VGN-T2XP (Verdict: A Midget Workhorse)

Weighing in at a lightweight three pounds, this Sony small laptop packs a lot of punch. Low voltage 1.2 Pentium mobile chip, DVD writer, 512MB memory, Bluetooth, Memorystick slot, 60GB hard drive, integrated wireless, 10.6 screen, PC card slot, USB 2.0, firewire. The benchmarks are coming back showing this little beast topping out in the next best in most categories. All this could be yours for a mere $2,700 dollars. More »

casefancasefancase...

Some people go to the extremes when dealing with their computer temperature. We've seen it all—water cooling, vapor cooling, 900mm fans, etc. But here's a new one: the casefancasefancase... More »

Hush M MCE PC

Hush Technologies unveils their latest in set-top box style PCs today with the "Hush M MCE PC." In the Hush tradition, the system is fanless and features a swell 3" profile. Specs include a 1.4 or 2GHz Pentium M Celeron, some memory, a hard drive with a couple gigabytes of space, and all the fun that is Windows XP Media Center Edition. It's also one of few PCs to be available in "Bronze" from the factory. More »

Sharp Mebius HTPC

Sharp also announced their new HTPC today, called the "AV Center PC Mebius." They announced it, but couldn't be bothered to actually tell us any of its specifications so we can decide whether or not it's crap. We do know it has a 32" LCD with the dual display feature we addressed earlier today, but I'll point out that the screen is not the 32X2. If you have WiFi and media playback capabilities in the computer itself, there's not much of a reason to throw them in the LCD as well. The press release say the machine doubles as a hybrid recorder and mentions a 250GB hard drive, so at least we know that much. More »

IE Gets Tabbed Browsing, Maintains Suckitude

Call me a big OS X/Linux hippie or whatever but come on—aren't they about ten years too late? Consider the fact that while Mozilla/ Firefox/ Monkeytooth and Opera and everyone else in the entire world has had tabbed windows since 1937, IE has been stuck in the Dark Ages. Overall, this doesn't help my opinion much. Listen: just use Firefox. Stop downloading browser bars and pop-up blockers and adware destroyers all that claptrap. We'll see what IE 7 has to offer, but I'm not holding my breath. More »