Dell teased us with a brief showing of their new Adamo laptop line at this year's CES, but after that first peek, we were all left hanging with only a mysterious website to satiate our curiosity. Today, Dell has finally officially announced the Adamo notebook line, which they call a "luxury brand notebook designed for the luxury conscious consumer." We got to play with the Adamo at a recent press preview meeting, and can confirm that this beauty is indeed luxurious -- easily worthy of envy. We have a ton of Adamo unboxing and close-up photos after the jump, but here are the technical details that you care about:

• Adamo's launch models are 13.4" inches (screen resolution is 1366x768) , priced at $1999 for a 1.2GHz Core 2 Duo U9300 with integrated Intel X4500 video, 2 GB of DDR3 RAM, and 128GB SSD running a custom skinned Vista 64-bit. Dell has also custom skinned the Bios to match the Adamo aesthetic.
• External hard drives (up to 500GB) and Blu-Ray drives are also available, both of which match Adamo's styling.
• Dell told us that Battery life rated at 4 hours, even though the press release states 5+.
• Physically, the Adamo measures only .65" thick (thinner than the Voodoo Envy), and weighs in at 4 pounds. Aside from the Dell and Adamo logos, the notebook's rigid surface --made from aircraft grade aluminum -- bears no other unsightly marks or stickers. Even the Windows authenticity sticker is hidden in a magnetic cover in the back.
• Built-in ports include 2 USB (with power share, so you can charge devices even when Adamo is off), one eSATA/USB combo port,  Display Port, RJ-45 (Wireless N is included), and a SIM card slot for mobile broadband. The Adamo has no Express Card slot nor microphone jack, though a tiny mic is embedded to the left of the keyboard.
• The Adamo is now available for preorder, shipping March 24th in Pearl and Onyx colors. A $2700 model is also available in foreign countries, and sports a 1.4GHz CPU, 4GB of RAM, and a built-in 3G wireless card.

Read on for our large gallery of unboxing and hands-on photos. 

Sometimes you just want to browse and listen to your album collection at the office without having to load it all into a portable music player. Pandora and Last.fm are great web services that can help you discover new music, but they won’t let you specify your own music playlist. Streaming music from within a home network is easy with iTunes and Windows Media Player; what’s trickier is getting access to your 100GB music library while away from home. We’ll teach you how to turn your library into an Internet radio station with Apache server software and a little-known program called netjukebox. You’ll be able to browse your collection via a gallery of album cover art, stream custom playlists, and even download entire albums as zip files.

The first thing you'll need to do is set your desktop up as an Apache server.

It's been far too long since we've run a Parts and Price Guide on the website, but we're now ready to get back into the groove of monthly component recommendations for your next PC build. This month, we're starting off with a $1000 PC. You'll be surprised at how much power and storage you can get for a grand -- even we're hesitant to call it a mere budget rig. In the following weeks, we'll also be running guides for $1500, $2000 systems, and will even try assembling and benchmarking a $500 configuration for the really budget-conscious (the troubled economy pretty much mandates it!). But for now, take a dive into our choices for a respectable system, and sound off on how you would build your PC differently! 

Read on for our parts and price list!

Comic-book conventions are wonderful spectacles of geekery, and major Cons are the only place to get exclusive access to behind-the-scenes previews and sneak peeks at your favorite comic book or upcoming film. But for us, the biggest attraction at these sweaty gatherings is the Cosplay: fearless nerds showing off their love for genre characters with marvelous homemade costumes. This past weekend, we roamed the halls of San Francisco's Wondercon to play Cosplay paparazzi. The cosplay harvest wasn't as bountiful as last year's San Diego Comic-Con (where we snapped up four hundred photos), but we still found some delightful gems (and familiar faces) at this local event. Keep an eye out for no fewer than four Rorschachs from the upcoming Watchmen movie,  sexy slave Leia, and the most amazing Transformers costume we've ever seen!

Click on for 150+ examples of cosplay greatness!

Look what the mail truck dragged in! After first announcing the X8 in early September (where we got our first look and photos of the mouse), Microsoft has finally shipped the latest addition to the Sidewinder gaming mouse family. The X8 adopts Microsoft’s proprietary Bluetrack technology, which empowers it with 4000 DPI tracking resolution (scalable from 500) and the ability to work on almost any surface. We tested this claim on five different surfaces, from a rough wood desk to Styrofoam board and even coarse carpet. The mouse worked fine (though understandable not perfectly smooth) on all of our test surfaces, and only failed when we tried moving it over glass.

The shipping version doesn’t differ much from the pre-production model we fondled back in September, and retained the nice grip and smart button placement that we liked from our first hands-on. The included rechargable battery was a cinch to install, and tethering the mouse to the thin magnetic cord didn’t hinder our sweeping mouse movements. The wireless receiver is built into a clunky puck-like disc that sits on your desk, which ensures that you get better reception than if the receiver was hidden on a USB key behind your PC. The X8 still feels big for some hands, but our initial impression is that this is a winner. We’ll post our full review soon, but for now, enjoy these sexy unboxing and handling photos.

Read on for many more photos!

Of the new internet startups that have emerged in the past few months, one of our favorites has to be Boxee, the streaming social media center from the team that created the acclaimed XBMC frontend. Boxee (currently still in Beta) combines popular video and podcast streams from CBS, ABC, and PBS into one slick and functional media center that turns any connected computer into an internet TV receiver. One of the best features was that it supported streaming from Hulu, which meant users could navigate through thousands of hours of content (e.g. all of Arrested Development) without opening a web browser.

Unfortunately, that is no longer the case.

Just today, Boxee announced that they would be discontinuing support for Hulu streaming after content providers complained and demanded that the Boxee service be shut off. In a sobering blog post, Boxee CEO Avner Ronen informed users that as of this Friday, Hulu streaming would be unavailable via their service. “We have many content partners who are generating revenue from boxee users and we will work with Hulu and their partners to resolve the situation as quickly as possible,” said Ronen. In the Boxee beta, content from Hulu retrained all of the advertising that users would see when watching a video on Hulu.com, so the issue doesn’t appear to be related to missed ad revenue opportunities. Ronen also stated that Boxee beta testers streamed 100,000 videos from Hulu just last week alone.

And what did Hulu have to say for itself? Read on. 

The odds have always been stacked against Call of Duty: World at War. This sequel revisits an undeniably exhausted FPS setting—World War II—and wasn’t designed by series creator Infinity Ward, but Treyarch has delivered a sufficiently compelling shooter. World at War doesn’t bring any lasting innovations to the FPS genre, but it has enough unrelenting shootouts and dramatically scripted events to keep us immersed in the action.

Read on for the rest of the review!

Easily the coolest part of today’s TED event was Dr. Pattie Maes’s “Reframe” presentation on new technology interfaces. Maes, a researcher at MIT’s Media Lab, energized the crowd with a demonstration of a $350 piece of technology that her team dubs “the sixth sense.” Maes’s Fluid Interfaces research group collaborates on projects and inventions that augment the interaction between human and machine, including both visual and haptic interfaces that are far more immersive than our traditional keyboard and monitor.

Maes started by discussing the five natural senses that humans have developed over the past million years of evolution. These senses help us make important decisions in everyday life, including how we interact with other individuals and our physical environment. But arguably, the most useful stimulus we come across is information that we don’t have easy access to via these senses, such as large amounts of aggregated data and factual knowledge. Increasingly, all of this knowledge is being stored and made available online.

The question, then is whether we could develop (either naturally or artificially) a sixth sense to detect this meta-information that may exist and is relevant to our decision-making.

Read on to see what Dr. Maes and her team developed!

Bill Gates (the philanthropist, not the technologist) capped off the “reboot” segment of today’s TED speeches with a presentation about two of the important global problems the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have been addressing since Gates retired from day-to-day operations at Microsoft: eradicating malaria and boosting education. 

With regard to the Malaria issue, Gates noted that though the disease claims the lives of one million victims each year, this is a greatly reduced number from when Malaria was a global epidemic a hundred years ago. Now, the epidemic is centralized in poorer countries, whereas first-world nations have largely dismissed the problem. In fact, Gates noted more money was spent on developing baldness medication than on curing malaria – Malaria simply isn’t the rich man’s problem.

Gates then proceeded to release a handful of mosquitoes into the air, joking that there was no reason that only poor people should get malaria. These mosquitoes obviously didn’t carry the disease, though the surprise move drew more than a few nervous laughs from the 1,300 in attendance.

How did TED curator Chris Anderson react?

In between Tim Berners-Lee and Nandan Nilekani’s featured presentations at this year's TED conference, past-TED speaker Cindy Gallop announced the launch of her new website: Make Love Not Porn (NSFW, so we won’t link it). The feisty New York advertising exec, who last year gave a speech called “The Toyboy Manifesto” (about relationships between older women and younger men) started the site to debunk the myths that hardcore pornography is teaching about sex. Using some saucy language, Gallop claimed that internet pornography has become a de-facto substitute for sex education for today’s youth, and wants the site to become a open dialogue on the cultural meaning of sex. So far, the new site has only one entry.

Never a dull moment at TED indeed.

If you check the list of hot topics on Twitter right now, you’ll fine #TED at the top of the list. That’s because today is the opening day of the annual TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference, a prestigious gathering of just over 1000 of the world’s most influential thinkers, entertainers, and futurists. This private event (registration costs $6,000, and that’s only after you’re invited) hosts a series a thought-provoking presentations aimed at stimulating the minds of attendees who are then encouraged to engage in an exchange of ideas throughout the week-long session.

Past speakers include Al Gore, JJ Abrams, and Jeff Bezos, who each gave provocative talks about their passions and innovations. This year’s lineup includes Green Auto Pioneer Shai Agassi, web pioneer Tim Berners-Lee, and one Bill Gates. The public typically has to wait several months before videos of these 18-minute long TED talks get uploaded, but we’ve received special access to the live stream of the main stage. Over the next three days, we’ll be posting recaps of tech-related talks to give you some insight into what goes on in this exclusive and enlightening forum. Keep tabs on our TED coverage by clicking this link!

It's been over a week since the Windows 7 Beta was released to the public. You've read our initial impressions and even followed our guide to installing the OS using a USB key. So what now? Microsoft's post-Vista Windows experience is more than the obvious Taskbar and user interface updates; there are plenty of hidden features and shortcuts that haven't been advertised. But fear not: we've compiled a list of every known Windows 7 tweak and secret. Follow these 20 tricks to make the most out of this beta and become a Windows 7 power user.

Read on for all the tips!

1. Palm Pre is All Win

Finally, someone has announced an iPhone killer that we can all get behind. The Palm Pre surprised everyone at CES with its best-of-all-worlds specs and features. We’re talking about a multi-touch phone with slide-out QWERTY keyboard and a truly innovative web-integrated user interface.

Early impressions indicate a really smooth and fast interface and web-browsing experience, with all the productivity and media features that we’ve come to expect from a modern smartphone. It’s as if Palm designers made a list of everything that was lacking from the iPhone and made a point to incorporate it here. Real GPS, MMS messaging, USB port, and removable battery lets Palm blow a raspberry at the competition. Copy and paste is just gravy. But too bad it won’t be converting iPhone users anytime in the near future – the Pre is a Sprint exclusive.

Click through for the rest of the list!

There's been a lot of buzz on the internet in the past few days about the speed of USB 3.0. Some sites are reporting that recent tests of the new standard are producing slower-than-expected results, and many readers are confused about how realistic the touted theoretical bandwidth of 5000 megabits/sec really is. We spoke with Jeff Ravencraft, President of the USB Implementer's Forum, (who also gave us our first look at USB 3.0 back at last year's IDF conference) to set the matter straight and get a demo of the latest SuperSpeed hardware in action.

Read on to find out what speeds you can really expect from USB 3.0!

  We've already spent some hands-on time with the G13 gamepad announced last month, but now Logitech has finally unveiled its full CES peripheral lineup with the rest of the new G-series family members. The popular G15 gaming keyboard has been completely revamped in a new G19 model, not only boasting more macro keys (the count is now up to 12 physical keys with 3 modes each) and customization options, but also a full color 320x240 GamePanel LCD display. Logitech also announced a brand new USB gaming headset, the G35. Dolby 7.1 surround-sound technology, noise-cancelling mic, convenient button locations, and voice-morphing software make this the first Logitech headset that we’re actually excited about. The $200 keyboard and $130 headset will be available in March, but we have some hands-on impressions and photos for you right now!

Youtube videos on your keyboard? It's possible! 

Read on for more of the review. 

It was a herculean task. Team Maximum PC at this year’s Comic-Con International consisted of only two people, and there was no way we could attend every packed panel at the event. So instead of bringing you movie and television panel reports you’ve probably already read on SlashFilm or AintitCoolNews, we wanted to be your eyes on the show floor. And that meant showing you what stood out most in the 500,000sq ft space of the main exhibit hall: the cosplayers. Our quest to document as many unabashed costumed geeks as we could find yielding 400 photographs of comic-book, anime, fantasy, science fiction, and film characters. We saw dozens of jokers and batmen, numerous video game-inspired outfits, and even steampunk-era Ghostbusters. The impressive level of creativity and enthusiasm that we saw in these cosplayers was an awesome reminder of why we love geek culture. We hope you can appreciate it as well. 

Click through for, yes, all four hundred photos -- each in thumbnail and full-rez formats. Can you name all of the characters?

We’ve heard the phrase “visual computing” being used a lot lately – it refers to the use of computers and graphical environments to interact with and manipulate heady data sets and other textbookish content. Well, we’ve encountered one of the most visually stunning and impressive examples of visual computing in San Francisco’s Morrison Planetarium, the new $20 million dollar facility that’s a part of the recently reopened California Academy of Sciences. This isn’t your daddy’s planetarium (nor is it Barack Obama’s famous $3 million dollar star charter, either).

The Morrison Planetarium is a technological marvel, enabling astronomers not only to show traditional star charts, but to guide visitors through an immersive fly-through of our universe – realistically rendered in real-time. We were fortunate enough to be invited for a private screening of the new exhibit, and went behind to scenes to check out exactly what PC hardware drives this modern stellar cartography lab. And before you ask – yes, the system can play Quake. 

We'll guide you through a tour of the planetarium, show you what visitors get to experience in the amazing digital presentation, and then walk you behind the scenes for an exclusive look at how the tech gods who built the whole system make it work.  Trust us, you'll be impressed.

 Hit the jump for the full story!

Forget the lessons of Tyler Durden. The things you own define who you are. And nothing makes a bigger statement than your cell phone ringtone. Your ringtone gives valuable insight for everyone within earshot about your preferences and personality -- information with which they'll use to judge you (and yes, you're always being judged). You don't want to be the guy sitting in a quiet lecture hall when your phone suddenly starts blasting the latest Fallout Boy single. That tells your neighbors that you have poor taste and probably cry yourself to sleep at night. No, you want to be the guy who has Europe's The Final Countdown chime in at opportune moments, letting that cute hipster girl nearby know that yes, you too are a fan of Arrested Development. 

For geeks and techies who want to attract like-minded compatriots, we've compiled a list of the top 10 must-have ringtones to own. Any respectable tech/gadget/sci-fi aficionado should have these tones stored on their phones at all times, alternating the chimes in a daily rotation to prevent them from getting stale. We've also included a definitive list of the 10 coolest text-message alert sounds, as well as the most clichéd and obnoxious ringtones and alerts that must be avoided at all cost.

Read on for the full lists!