MORE NEW PRODUCTS from the elves in PR departments across the globe, in no particular order, with no particular rhyme and with no particular reason. Let's start out with the free stuff.

Gigabyte is offering you a free, yes I said FREE upgrade to the BIOS of your existing Gigabyte board. This FREE update, at no charge, supports the new AMD Sempr0n processors. At this price, download 2 and give one copy to a friend. Also, all new boards should support the CPUs as well. Could you ask for more? [Yes, Ed.]

Also FREE is the upgrade to CloneCD 5.0.0.0 beta, as long as you own an older one. It ads a lot of DVD support, and a bunch of options dealing with cloned DVDs. The page, with download link is here.

In the not quite free category, we get to Lieberman. Yes, the company that provokes more letters to my inbox than any other with a mere mention of the name. It would be hard to get more hate mail if I were to crack a joke insulting all of the world's major religious figures at once. [Go on Charlie. Ed.]

It announced an Athlon64 based Hollywood Gold64. It is a new version of the beloved Mongo I lug everywhere, but this one has an A64 3700+ in it and a 17-inch screen. Thin and light it is not, but it does get the job done. Instead of the Gold64, you can opt for the Gold Xpress, the first PCI-E based laptop. It has a 1680x1050 screen, upgradable to a 17ns 1920x1200 panel. I want one, Oh Dalek Lamai.

It also has its new line, the Cosmopolitan, a-coming. I don't really get the joke in the name, but it sounds cool. It has a 15.4-inch widescreen screen, and this one comes with a range of CPUs. You can get just about everything from a P4EE to an A64 to a Prescott. Fast, yes, battery life... Ummm, did I mention they are widescreen? Seriously though, I have a Pentium 4 2.8 in mine, and it can get about an hour and a half if you are careful.

Next up is Synaptics again. Not announcing 101 million touchpads sold, but a new type of touchpad. This one is for handhelds, and the debut device is the HP iPAQ hx4700 Pocket PC. You can read all about it in HP's so-called press office. Type this. http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press_kits/2004/ipaq/products.html), it sure sounds like an interesting idea.

Then comes the kicker, Gateway. It announced that it is selling its laptops through Best Buy! Who would have thought it? Oh wait, we did. When it send sout the next round of releases, we promise to feign surprise then as well.

Now, there is another release that is worth mentioning. Gateway announced a tonne of new notebooks, and almost the entire line is refreshed. Both eMachines and Gateway have several new ones, and the low end Gateway starts at $699 after rebate, not bad for a laptop. Now, if you think about it, eMachines is positioned under Gateway in the market, so there should be a ton avoirdupois of very affordable laptops out there this back to school season.

Not free, or even

FREE

, but not bad either, we come to Oki. Oki just cut the price of its colour laser printers, the C5150n, C5200n and all of the C5400 line. The low end one starts out at $599, and the highest end C5400dtn tops out at $1699. Not all that bad for a colour laser printer. I got a chance to play with the ancestor of this line, the C5100, and it was a decent printer, and certainly better than any inkjet. One of these days, I am going to have to figure out how many pages it takes for a laser to have a lower cost per page than a laser .µ