ASUS, the world's most prolific PC manufacturer has been in the spotlight recently over its branded PC's, in this case UMPC's, which have set in motion an entirely new genre of affordable, easy to use laptops.

"Eee" as it became known is now set to sell the next phase of production (5 million units), with two of every three units sold being loaded with a Microsoft Windows operating system. The other one third of those units will contain the Linux operating system that has been sold in earlier units of this small, highly useful mobile laptop.

As rumored recently, AMD has begun volume shipping of its triple-core Phenom processors, which is excellent news for the struggling chip firm who has not seen much success of late.

For us end-users though, don't get too excited. At this stage AMD is only shipping its Phenom 8400 (2.1GHz) and 8600 (2.3GHz) triple-core processors to OEM companies including Dell, HP and Mesh. At this it is a start for AMD who is in need of good things to happen rather soon.

The lads at PCOnline have chosen to jump the gun a little on NVIDIA's upcoming GeForce 9800 GX2 graphics card, set to be launched in less than a week from now. They've posted up a whole bunch of benchmark runs with the dual-G92 monster in conjunction with an Intel QX6850 CPU at 3.0 GHz on ASUS' Striker II Formula motherboard and an early supported (ForceWare 173.67) beta driver.

Putting the card up against a Radeon HD 3870 X2, NVIDIA's latest dual-GPU offering comes out supreme in almost all tests thrown at it including 3DMark06, Half-Life 2 Episode Two, Unreal Tournament 3, Call of Duty 4, Company of Heroes, Call of Juarez and World in Conflict at resolutions of 1920x1200 and 2560x1600.

SanDisk have launched a MP3 player called the Sansa Fuze.

At only 0.3" thick, the very small device is both funky and trendy. This portable iPod competitor will be shipped with 2GB, 4GB, or 8GB of storage for your ever growing library of MP3's. You can also include movie clips in your library as the Sansa Fuze can display them on the 1.9" color screen. The video will have to be stored in MPEG-4 format, and music formats that are supported include MP3, WMA, secure WMA, WAV, Audible, and Overdrive.

There is also the option to tune into FM radio stations, of which 40 can be preset. The other nifty feature includes a built-in voice recorder, and last but not least, for those of you who just have to show and tell, JPEG pictures can be stored and displayed at your leisure.

It's not April Fools today, is it? On first inspection, this is the type of product I thought we were dealing with here.

HIS has just released its newest product called the "iClear" which is said to aid in noise reduction from graphics cards and TV tuners.

It provides up to 10% increase performance on SNR (signal-to-noise ratio) which is said to offer a better gaming experience by reducing the distortion and noise generated.

OCZ has had its SATA I 64GB solid state drive on the market for some time now but just today they have introduced their High-Speed SATA II solid state drive.

It comes in 32GB and 64GB models and claims read speeds of 120MB/s and write speeds of 100MB/s, which is a huge improvement over the previous generation drive, which offered 58MB/s reads and 35MB/s writes.

MAINGEAR are makers of high-end computer systems in the US. Today they have unveiled something quite astonishing - say hello to the Ephex Skulltrail.

With a base price of $8995 USD, you would expect to get something quite good. Stuffed inside the system is an Intel Skulltrail motherboard with two Intel QX9775 Core 2 Extreme quad-core processors. They overclock them to 4GHz using their so-called Redline technology for folks who don't know how to overclock or cannot be bothered doing it.

It definitely looks as if phase change cooling is starting to become more mainstream or at least more than it has been in the past.

Normally reserved for elite enthusiasts with big bank accounts, companies are noticing the popularity in the cooling technology and are making it more readily available to users with less experience.

OCZ first introduced its Cryo-Z a couple years ago and recently began selling it. Now our friends over at Thermaltake want a piece of the phase change pie and good on them - it only means more user-friendly options for end-users.

WIth all intent to focus on bringing hardware closer to Vista with its Aero interface, Microsoft has just announced their Wireless Laser Desktop 7000 series keyboard and mouse set. The physical layout and aesthetics strongly follow Aero and its characteristics with a smoked translucent border that mimics the same look and feel.

Apart from the matched Aero theme used for the design of this new set, the keyboard itself also allows for instant one-touch access to the Aero exclusive Windows Flip 3D feature and a bunch of floating hot keys ready to be configured to the user's liking.

OCZ Technology has just released its newest CPU cooler, the Vendetta 2.

The Vendetta 2 is designed for all current Intel and AMD processors and uses heat pipe direct touch (HDT) design technology, which is said to dissipate heat more efficiently. It includes three pure copper heat pipes and includes two year warranty.