Hi fellow dc-ers,

I'm looking to build a pc for my kids (email, web surfing and some gaming). I'm looking for some ideas in terms of cpu, motherboard, case, disk, memory... possibly tested configurations. The excellent guys at ArsTechnica used to have hardware guides with several configurations (budget box, hotrod and god box) but they've not been updated for quite some time (Oct 2009), any other good trusted source?
Thanks in advance.

Cheers  /jerome

Hi there,

You might want to have a look at this list by Scott Hanselman:
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/LightItUpListOfApplicationsThatUseNewWindows7Features.aspx

Some tools have already been mentioned here (Gmail notifier) but there are some good finds as well.

Cheers  /jerome

I also tried Chrome when it was announced, as suggested by a friend of mine I read the end user license agreement... scary to say the least.
My view on this is that google has forgotten its original motto "don't be evil", they just launch a browser to get more data about what people are doing on the web and use that to improve their engines and above all to improve the monetization of their work through ads.
If you have the smallest concern about your privacy, don't use Chrome... Use firefox or even IE (given the scrutiny MS gets, you're probably safe)
By the way, you should also try alternative search engine, I must admit I don't use google a lot these days (try ask.com, exalead.com or even bing.com, their results are as good as, if not better than google). I hate monopolies and to me, google is probably one of the most perverse of all monopolies.

Jerome