Aluminum is expensive and light. If you want cheap and heavy, either demand thick steel cases or tape some weights to your computer.

It's funny how "clever" that acronym is worded. Whose rights are being managed is never made explicit, but you can be sure it's "their" rights and not "your" rights.

I skipped nVidia's cards recently because of questionable power consumption

Yeah, having the pictures in the correct orientation really can help. I really can't understand traditional maps, either. It's amazing that people can navigate with those things. And as for the graphics, they aren't much fancier than a "3D" version of a paper map (with a refresh time of about 5-10 seconds.)

I would rather see the prices on the nicer non-TN panels drop sometime

I would assume that a company would switch to a team in India for cost reasons. I have no first hand experience with the quality of work that comes out of the various organizations there, but it's pretty clear what happens when aggressively pursuing the cheapest solution. There's a definite trade off. The contents of your local Wal-Mart is a good example of the result of one type of cost cutting.

Yay! It's the "limp blanket on a staircase" graph!

I got a set of full carts with a recent Canon printer. It's a remanufactured device, so I don't know if there's a difference with the new retail units.

Not very good. It drains really fast even when casually browsing the web (aggressive power profiles enabled.) Nowhere near the 3 hours claimed by Windows when the battery is fully charged..

What's the point of that? The rating on a power supply is only the maximum overall power that it's supposed to be capable of delivering. My computer uses a power supply rated at 450W but only sometimes draws a maximum of 168W because of my choice of components.

Didn't AMD at one point have a similar feature in their hardware? I recall them having to release microcode so that all cores would be throttled simultaneously. It seems Windows (pre-7 probably) sometimes had a habit of leaving threads on the "sleeping" cores.

I was really hoping this would have been fixed eventually, but in addition to enabling support for automatic processor/fan throttling in your BIOS, you must also configure Windows to use these features. In the "Power Options" (not sure what it's called in Windows 7) in the control panel, you need to set the power scheme to "Minimal Power Management." Different power management profiles enable different strategies for throttling hardware into lower power states in about the most non-obvious way possible. Anyway, I hope that works for you. (This also applies to Windows XP. Not sure about Windows 2000, though.)

double double (or double long. Not like those names aren't already overloaded.)

That would be the idea, but it only goes up to 64 at the moment. (And having the 64-bit types is optional.)