"Yes, it's still possible the gizmo may have been stolen. Or it may be somewhere jammed into an obscure crevice in my apartment. For now, though, my review unit lays claim to being the first MacBook Air to be discarded by mistake. But, I will wager, not t

Man spends $1600 or so on a new Dell; is pleased when he can spend $800 to get it fixed.

"I decided to create a laptop that at any point, I could upgrade every component as they grew too old."

XAMPP is an integrated server package of Apache, mySQL, PHP and Perl (the AMPP in XAMPP) that all run from a portable drive.

"PDFrasterFarian renders (rasterizes) PDFs on the computer using a non-retarded program (ghostscript) so that fonts come out normal, plus runs the results through an image filter to further increase contrast and legibility."

A Ukrainian distributor of the Hanlin V8 by Jinke, this eBook is a lower price point than the Sony Reader, yet contains the features I need. Perhaps I should look into importing this one.

A few shots of the Hanlin V2 book reader; interestingly, it uses a standard Nokia cell phone battery to power it. Nice little device...

Instructions and add-ons for running Linux on a Toshiba laptop. But really now, who's getting a Toshiba laptop? I wonder.

The author's experiences are specifically with an Inspiron 9100. My tastes (as far as x86 laptops go) run more towards ThinkPads, but the advice is still good.

Describes a step-by-step building a laptop using one of MSI's whitebooks (whitebox notebooks). More expensive, yes. More interesting, yes.

With an Office Depot across the road from my office - not to mention a significantly lower-than-usual $699 price tag - this is bad juju for my wallet.

Not a Cingular customer? Don't want to pay $7.99 a month? Unlock your laptop!

ThinkPad X41 with EmperorLinux installed, allowing full use of everything - even the X41's biometric fingerprint scanner. Only downside is it's a couple hundred bucks higher than an X41.

One of these costs less than my share of my apartment's rent. I'll buy one if only because (a) it's a Linux laptop that (b) can be used effectively outside. Hope it has WiFi.

Hint: it's not really DRM. Think maybe Cory jumped the gun without getting any details on what GamePark's DRM really consisted of? What would the odds of that be?

Envy A228, AMD Turion featherweight laptop

Widescreen PC tablet