Weighing in at exactly 1.4 pounds, there's no doubt that the Sony VAIO P is currently the lightest 8-inch notebook computer on the planet. However, its Windows Vista operating system can be anything but light. Thankfully, the Sony VAIO P also comes with a super-fast Linux-based environment called Xross.

I e-mailed Sony to ask about their Blu-ray burner... their response was (to read) the official system requirements for the drive. The official system requirement is Windows XP. Sony does not support the drive on Windows Vista... MORE->

Psi is a free, open source instant messaging application designed for the Jabber IM network (including Google Talk) compatible with Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.

If you're tired with the Jabber functionality of Empathy or Pidgin, both lacking lots of important features for this protocol, you should give Psi a try.

There was a time when geeks were the only ones who used instant messengers. Not so now. Almost everyone, from high school students to Congressmen, have instant messaging accounts. Businesses use instant messengers like Lotus Sametime or Novell GroupWise within their companies. How did instant messengers get this far?

After learning that Dell quietly added a better screen to their Inspiron Mini 10 netbook, I was considering praising its feature here, since it is seeming more and more like the netbook that has everything. Unfortunately, I was annoyed to discover that the 10" version is only available with Windows

Bright and early this morning some guys came into our shop with a newish notebook with a major problem: they'd killed Vista and their rescue partition. They came armed with a legitimate Windows XP Home CD and key but said they weren't able to get XP on the notebook. It may sound odd, but Linux was the solution to getting XP working on the machine.

So, here I am now, having lived with - and used when I can - an Ubuntu Linux laptop for the last couple of months. I've been trying it out alongside my usual laptop (Sony Vaio running Windows XP), my new MacBook Pro, and a Vista notebook that we also have in the house.

I've been running Ubuntu Linux on my notebook, a Sony VAIO TX model, for some time now. I'm impressed with how stable it's been and how a whole raft of features like action-key support (for things like dimming the display) are available directly out of the box, without having to install additional stuff that I needed to download from Sony's site. But because getting used to Linux itself can be jarring for Windows folks, I decided not to just dive in and hope I'm able to swim. Instead, I'm using a gradual approach: I take it to bed with me.

2009 may be the year of the Netbook. But there's a big if. Here's the choice: Will consumers buy a thin, light, relatively fast $1,800 MacBook Air or a thin, light, ultrasmall, not-as-fast $450 Hewlett-Packard Mini 1000 Netbook? (Correction: the HP Mini 1000 configuration cited here was originally stated incorrectly as $700.)