Desktops

Another week, another cool touch screen video that everyone's e-mailing around the office.

The latest most-forwarded is the CeBIT demo video below, which is a collaborative effort between TouchKo, White Electronics Designs, and Groupe 3D. A cross between a monitor and a Wii controller (without the actual controller), the "touchless touch screen" responds to hand movements directly in front of it; you don't even have to come into contact with the screen.

Looks pretty neat, but also kind of exhausting. Although we haven't seen one available in stores yet, the concept of a "touchless … Read more

Digitimes is reporting that the next release of Mac OS X, code-named Leopard, will not ship until October of this year as Apple works to ensure compatibility with Windows Vista.

Sounds a little hard to believe, but the report says that with the inclusion of Boot Camp inside Leopard, Apple wants to make sure that Mac owners will be able to run Vista and Leopard on the same machine. Boot Camp, currently in beta, allows Mac users with Intel's chips to run Windows XP on their systems. Apple plans to include a final version of Boot Camp with Leopard.… Read more

If Microsoft hadn't issued a press release on this new keyboard, we honestly would never have been able to pick it out of its growing crowd. Even then, the company's product nomenclature doesn't make it easy to distinguish one item from the next: The product in question is the "Wireless Laser Desktop 4000," for example, not to be confused with the "Wireless Optical Desktop 4000" or the "Wireless Laser Desktop 6000."

Whatever it's called, the new keyboard-mouse package is part of the wave of Vista hardware continuing to reach the … Read more

While so many other computer companies are trying to hide their CPUs, a handful of brave mavericks are actually trying to draw more attention to them. But that doesn't mean they're building the standard and deadly boring old gray boxes.

Directron, for example, is selling one that looks more like a rubber ball than a PC--hence its name, the "Ball PC System." Not much is offered in the way of specs, pricing or availability, but SCI FI Tech says the shiny sphere splits open, spaceship-style, to reveal a 40GB hard drive between its hemispheres.

That means … Read more

Forget about those silly bomb-defusing alarm clocks. This is one piece of hardware that would make Jack Bauer proud (real or fake versions alike).

This case mod was designed to "look like the sort of atomic bomb that one sees in spy movies or on TV shows like 24," as described on TechEBlog. The creator is quick to add that he "tried not to base the design on any real or fictional bomb, but simply out of my imagination." That's a relief--we think.

We weren't particularly fond of the keyboard computer, but we don't want to hold that against all combo devices. The "Meivo TV," for instance, is something we wouldn't kick out of the living room if someone gave it to us as a gift. The 22-inch LCD has 720p resolution, an Intel Core 2 Duo chip, wireless keyboard and mouse, and is ready for both HD and Vista, according to Tech Digest

Made by U.K. gaming notebook maker Rock, the Meivo is priced at 1,000 pounds (around $1,940)--which may be its biggest … Read more

Now this is interesting. From a CeBIT press conference comes word that AMD has cooked up some streamlined HD audio technology with its next-generation ATI graphics cards. Details are slim, but what the graphic over at Beyond3D.com suggests is that if you have a motherboard with an HD audio chip on it, AMD's forthcoming ATI RV6XX graphics cards will be able to grab that signal and spit it out through its own HDMI port, with no cable or other internal fiddling like you need to do with current HDMI-equipped cards, including Nvidia's 8800 series. That means fewer … Read more

As the convergence trend steams ahead, we've seen everything from air-purifying lamps to camera-speaker combos. (We didn't say it was a good trend.)

So logic would dictate that this would be inevitable: the keyboard PC. Cybernet's ZPC-945SL is an all-in-one QWERTY keyboard that includes an Intel Pentium 4 processor, up to 2GB of memory, a hard drive, built-in speakers, a mini-PCI slot and six USB ports, according to Tech Digest. But even though it sits only 1.5 inches high, we're not sure if it would be approved by the ergonomics police.

We don't normally delve into the seedy world of PC-cooling hardware, but when CoolIT's Geoff Lyon came in to talk with us last week about his company's new Eliminator CPU Cooler, we thought it was worth a mention. If you've ever tried to liquid-cool your PC, you'll know setup can be a hassle. We've tried it. Not fun.

Enter the Eliminator. A self-contained liquid-cooling system that fits entirely inside most large PC cases, the Eliminator and its bigger brother, the Freezone (for hotter running quad-core chips) let you get rid of that noisy CPU … Read more