Dell's Latitude 10 tablet starts at $499 and runs a full version of Windows 8.

For $499, Microsoft will sell you its Surface RT tablet, which delivers a gimped version of Windows 8 designed for ARM-based hardware. It's fine for running apps and surfing the web, but it doesn't support full fledged Windows applications, not unless you step up to a Surface Pro slate. The two problems there are availability and price; you can't yet buy a Surface Pro, and when it comes out, it will cost $899 or more. This is where Dell's new Latitude 10 tablet has a decided advantage.

The world's thinnest gaming desktop just received a few upgrades.

Digital Storm was as proud as a peacock when it unveiled its Bolt desktop back in October of this year, claiming it had designed the world's thinnest gaming PC. Now that it's been on the market for a couple of months, the boutique system builder has had a chance to evaluate customer feedback, and based on the responses it's received, the company decided to upgrade its Bolt line to run faster and quieter without jacking up the price.

It's good to know that while everyone's talking up tablets and the so-called post PC era, there are still companies dishing out high-end hardware. Boutique system builder Origin PC is one of those companies, and nobody's going to confuse its EON17-SLX gaming laptop with a slate. It is, however, a desktop replacement that you can deck out as far as your budget allows, and it now comes with a 3D display option.

Give Dell credit for wading into open source waters with "Project Sputnik," a pilot program to build a developer solution based on Ubuntu 12.04LTS. After six months of exploration and feedback from testers, Project Sputnik has now landed and is renamed Dell XPS 13 Laptop, Developer Edition. It's a thin and light 13.3-inch Ultrabook powered by Intel's Core i7 3517U processor and driven by Ubuntu, though you could potentially end up paying more versus a similarly spec'd Windows 7 model (with slower processor) or Windows 8 model (with half the storage space). Let's look at the hardware.