Acer barges in at the bottom end of Tablet PCs

Forget ultra-lightweight, long battery life, mobile processor, premium-priced Tablet PCs. Acer's new TravelMate will do little travelling if you have to carry it by hand, but at ?999 ex VAT and packed with power, it has its sights firmly set on the classroom. In particular, the Acer TravelMate 250PXCi introduces a new range of desktop replacement Tablet PCs with an eye on getting in the catalogue of the Government's Laptops For Teachers campaign, (and their students). ...more

The pointy clicky things get optical

There are two new Microsoft mice: the Trackball Optical and the Wheel Mouse Optical. The Wheel Mouse Optical combines IntelliEye technology with the popular Wheel Mouse. The absence of moving parts, to wear out or stick, should add to the shelf life of this particular rodent. ...more

Dell pushes the Dimension for Budget PCs

Dell is attacking the value the end of the PC market with its latest Dimension, the 2400. Pricing for the Dimension 2400 starts from ?429 (inc. VAT and delivery), the chip for which would be a 2. ...more

IT Forum 2005: Microsoft scales its Desktop Search for the enterprise

Microsoft has extended its Desktop Search product for enterprise deployment. The program provides a means for users to find documents and files across their hard disk, network file shares or the Internet in a relatively seamless fashion, and can now be more easily rolled out across large scale organisations. Windows Desktop Search, along with the associated MSN Search Toolbar, can now be deployed across organisations via Microsoft's Systems management Server 2003, or specialised third party tools, and can be extended to search additional document formats using IFilters and protocol handlers. ...more

Vista tweak enables iTunes downloads authorisation

Early adopters of Microsoft's Windows Vista have discovered that they are unable to play songs purchased from Apple's iTunes Music Store without tweaking Vista's settings. While iTunes will happily play DRM-free songs that have been ripped from CD, when it tries to play a purchased track it prompts the user to authorise it by entering their Apple ID and password. And although iTunes then says that authorisation has been successful it continues to refuse to play the relevant songs. ...more