Inside Sling Box TV Streaming

And though Apple laptops slipped a little in our most recent reliability and service survey

The scope of these nimble systems is far reaching. Aside from being candidates for powering back-up memory, they have also been identified and investigated for use in biomedical applications. ORME, for example, is working with a vendor to supply small HP Pavilion ZE4100 that would support deep implantsdevices that would correspond to arteries or organsto gauge certain clinical information.

Other useful software touches: the HP Advisor unobtrusively keeps an eye out for trouble and breaks it down with an easy-to-digest interface. MS Works comes preinstalled, as does a wealth of bloatware. Wild Tangent games sit on your system as do Flash ads for Slingbox. (Really? We have to delete ads from our new notebook now? We know that sometimes trial software and shareware piggyback on new PCs, but straight-up video ads are a bit much.)

And though Apple laptops slipped a little in our most recent reliability and service survey, they still get high marks in those areas. Comparatively, Dell's reliability and service measures were mostly average, and HP and Compaq scores were primarily average-to-below average. (Compaq is owned by HP.) That said, the MacBook Pro is a ZE4200 Battery bit skimpy on some basics. Consider USB 2.0 ports: the MacBook Pro has just two, while the HP and Dell systems each have four. As for fingerprint sensors (which are usually more trouble to use than they're worth), the MacBook Pro doesn't offer that as an option, though it comes with the HP laptop and is optional for the Dell.

DSN-1100 is a five-bay iSCSI SAN array that can be configured with up to five 1.5-TB SATA disks for a total capacity of up to 7.5 TB. The DSN-1100 comes with IP-SAN Device Manager, an embedded suite of utilities for monitoring and control via the Storage Management Initiative-Specification (SMI-S) command set. It has four Gbit Ethernet ports that can be grouped for up to 425-MBps bandwidth. It also supports RAID levels 0, 1, 1+0 and 5. Price: Starts at $1,799.

With the dv3 (and with the Pavilion dv2, for that matter), HP embraces high-definition resolutions. Capable of 1280 by 800 pixels, the Pavilion dv3 has a glossy coating that helps images pop (and yes, there will be some sunlight-induced glare as a result). But as with the dv2, as you push the brightness up, you'll be Pavilion ZE4200 Battery surprised that it's still delivering an acceptable, viewable image. It just makes some colors on the brighter end of the spectrum seem a little more subdued.

I’ve dropped the poor thing several times, once badly enough for the screen cover to pop open and some panels in the back to pop off, and I have worn a spot on the space bar- other than that, it looks new with a little polishing. Remember- I carry it with me almost everywhere and it shows little sign of it.Back to the netbook at hand. When I first laid hands on the NC10, my gut reaction was that it seemed an awful lot like the original Lenovo IdeaPad S10. Measuring 10.3 by 7.3 by 1.5 inches and weighing 2.9 pounds, it has similar lines and a similar layout to that machine. And it has a similar price--it sells for about US$440. But after shaking off that creeping sense of déjà vu, I grew to love--and hate--the NC10 for a couple of reasons.