To get onboard the Blu-ray train in a hurry, Plextor rebadged a Panasonic SW-5582 Blu-ray drive as its own. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Invaluable firmware updates will come from Plextor and not some Pac Rim outfit. And to be fair, the Panasonic’s far better than the first-gen Pioneer Blu-ray drive we reviewed in October, which couldn’t even read CDs.

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Garage developers have coded some of the most amazing software available today—including MemoriesOnTV Pro. Version 3.0 of Codejam’s powerful slide show maker packs in a ton of new features and improvements yet maintains the friendly design that we’ve long loved about the app.

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Remember when your high school counselor asked you about your life goals? Remember when you told her that you just wanted to finish high school? Remember when she sighed and told you to set your goals a little higher? The folks at Trevoli should do the same thing with Photo Finale.

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Today’s simple username/password system is a single-factor authentication mechanism—your credentials are the only information necessary. When an evildoer has that information, whether it was stolen with a keylogger or a “phishing” email, you’re screwed.

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We loved MSI’s last nForce4 board so much that we gave it a Kick Ass award and even bumped the Asus A8N32-SLI board from our Best Of The Best list. Unfortunately, MSI was so late to the nForce4 SLI x16 party that the board debuted right on the cusp of the AM2 launch; thus its lifespan was brief, and product was impossible to find.

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In a world of “me-too” motherboards, Gigabyte is known for its “not-me” risky moves. The company was the first to integrate two GeForce 6800 GPUs onto a single card, and it was the first to make dual BIOSes standard.

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You can look at every PC as having its own personality—an essence comprising its strengths, quirks, and flaws. Take iBuyPower’s Gamer’s Fire PC, for example: It’s a crossbreed of Rodney Dangerfield and Steven Seagal. You might not respect its pot belly and ugly golf clothes, but it can snap a suite of benchmarks like a twig.

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When we first received WinBook’s Viiv-ready Jiv (both words rhyme with five—go figure), we realized that we didn’t really know exactly what it meant to be a “Viiv” PC. And remember, we pride ourselves on knowing the difference between an AMB and AMT.

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When we looked at Digital Storm’s Twister Ultra 4, we thought of it as Every Dude’s Machine. You know, it’s just how the average person would build it. There’s no fancy-pants paint or custom wiring. But there is a gratuitous use of drive bay doodads like an LED screen, removable hard drive adapter, and Creative Labs Live drive. The upshot? The already-macho-looking Cooler Master CM Stacker case looks even more, well, macho. Yup, this rig will make you hitch up your pants, snort, and say, “Oh yeah, this is just how I’d build it—none of that sissy stuff!”

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Oh, how the world turns. Last month you marched past the Intel 975X chipset motherboards holding your nose, but with the release of the Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Extreme CPUs you’ve made a U-turn to give this chipset a second look.

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Wouldn’t it be great if you could get a DIY notebook and install your components without having to crack open the manual?

That’s what Asus expects people to do with its compact new Z62J notebook. This 5.5-pounder features a 14-inch glossy screen, a built-in camera, an nVidia GeForce Go 7300 videocard with a 128MB frame buffer, and support for Intel’s Core Duo/Centrino Duo CPUs.

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If you want to judge nVidia’s vision for the new AM2 nForce 590 SLI chipset, look no further than Foxconn’s C51XEM2AA. This motherboard is the closest you’ll get to nVidia’s concept design. In fact, nVidia even wrote the BIOS for this board.

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Asus’ modus operandi of late has been to rush out new board designs so far ahead of its competitors that the other guys just seem to give up. Witness the company’s A8N32-SLI Deluxe board. In the dual-x16 nForce category, it was the only game in town for months on end.

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We were so in love with the old Diamond Monster Sound that it wasn’t until our recent move that we finally sent the unsupported, driverless card to hardware Valhalla.

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We haven’t yet seen a Toshiba notebook that’s competitive in gaming performance, but the latest Qosmio (pronounced Cosmio) just might be the best Media Center notebook we’ve seen to date.

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EVDO, which stands for evolution data optimized, offers “broadband-like” speeds using the CDMA mobile phone network. Such technology has been available for some time but never at the affordable prices it is today.

Sprint’s Mobile Broadband package is available two ways: $40 for 40MB of usage and one-tenth of a cent per additional kilobyte, or all you can eat for $60 (provided you have a voice account with Sprint.)

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We’ve come to realize that there are two kinds of Maximum PC readers: The first is the standard Joe or Jane who has four desktop machines at home to do all the heavy lifting. For these users, a small, low-power notebook is more than sufficient.

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If you’re limited to a notebook PC, you’ve no doubt been wrought with envy as your desktop buddies brag about their dual-core processors. Well, suffer no more! You aren’t stuck with single-core anymore!

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The newest update to Photoshop Elements 4.0 is just a bunny hop forward from the previous iteration. Adobe really sweetens the deal, however, by bundling the home-user edition of Photoshop with the home-user version of Premiere—Premiere Elements 2.0.

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Much of that capability comes from the D50’s lineage. The body feels and functions like a detuned D70, which was itself a breakthrough product. The D50 sports the same imaging sensor as the more expensive D70, and delivers terrific bang for the buck.

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