Vista fans, don’t get too hooked on DirectX 10 just yet. Although you may have Vista on your desktop, it may not be as worthwhile for your notebook. In fact, Vista will likely decrease your notebook’s gaming performance. We installed Windows XP on the notebook we built for a few reasons. First, Vista doesn’t support all of our older, but still beloved hardware, such as joysticks, gaming mice, and gaming keypads. Gear makes a difference, and we’re not willing to give it up. Secondly, although we configured our barebook with a top of the line mobile GPU, an Nvidia GeForce Go 7950 GTX, it won’t support DX10. (No mobile GPU supports DX10 at the time of this writing.) Third, although Halo 2, which will require Vista, is around the corner, there aren’t any DirectX 10 games available right now. Finally, without DX10, Microsoft has said that you will take a 10 to 15% performance hit while gaming with Vista. Plus, our older DX9 games will perform better in WinXP running DX9. Because we wanted a gaming machine, our best bet was WinXP, at least for the time being.

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In another sign that you can get about anything you want in an airport, Kingston and N.J.-based MyMemory are offering USB flash drives and CompactFlash and SD cards via what’s believed to be the world’s first flash memory vending machine. The first MyMemory Digital Memory vending machine set up shop in London’s Gatwick Airport’s North Terminal, and additional machines are already planned for Heathrow Airport and London train stations. MyMemory is reportedly also developing relationships with SanDisk and Olympus, as well as
Sennheiser and Uniross, to join the vending
machine movement. According to Anne Keefe
Kingston’s sales director, buyers “want instant
access to SD cards and USB drives as they need
them 24/7, so vending machines in public
spaces was the most obvious solution.”

Starting in mid-March, Dell and its Alienware subsidiary began giving buyers theoption to configure select XPS, Aurora, and Area 51 desktops with a 1TB Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 drive. In case you’re curious, Dell says that’s enough storage to keep a million photos, 16 daysof DVD-quality video, or 1 million minutes of music. Yikes. As Neil Hand, Dell’s VP of worldwide consumer marketing product group, aptly put it, “This type of capability used to be available only to the largest corporations.” The 7,200rpm 7K1000 includes 32MB of cache; uses a 3Gbps SATA interface; and offers 8.5ms/9.2ms (read/write) and 4.17ms average seek and latency times, respectively. At press time, customizing a Dell or Alienware rig with the 1TB drive added $400 to the original price.