Stories by: Yardena Arar

The Acer Aspire One 522 (model BZ897) delivers a good, classic netbook for a very reasonable price ($330 as of March 18, 2011). Petite and slim with a handsome 10.1-inch widescreen LED-backlit display, a 250GB hard drive, an integrated 1.3-megapixel webcam, and a multitouch touchpad, this portable does a solid job with multimedia and boasts pretty good battery life: nearly 7 hours in our tests using the provided 6-cell battery.

TaxActDeluxe has been the budget tax-software option for some time now, but can it handle business taxes? The answer is yes -- but only if you don't need a heap of guidance and you can make do with limited data-import features.

Home is where the network is: That's the mantra of networking vendors at the Consumer Electronics Show 2011 in Las Vegas this week.

From Jules Verne to Stanley Kubrick and beyond, writers and artists have imagined what the future would be like. Their visions range from the comically bizarre to the uncannily accurate to the wildly optimistic (where are those jet packs they promised us?!). Here's a quick collection of our favorite examples.

Even if your work is humdrum, your documents shouldn't be. The latest version of Microsoft Office makes it easier than ever to create handsome documents, thanks to some cool new tools for dressing up text, displaying images, and embedding video.

Nero, makers of optical media-burning software, has announced a new version of its SecurDisc data- protection technology, which should increase your chances of recovering content from damaged CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray Discs.

Home networking giant Netgear plans to introduce a 500 megabit-per-second line of HomePlug AV powerline products this fall. Netgear announced a slew of products, including next-generation powerline and advanced multimedia-optimized Wi-Fi products this week at CeBIT, the giant tech trade show in Hannover, Germany.

A slew of network-connected gadgets now let you watch Netflix and Amazon on-demand videos to your TV, and a growing number of sets, set-top boxes, and Blu-ray disc players come with built-in software for accessing content on these and other Web sites such as YouTube and Pandora. What's been missing, however, is an easy and convenient way to enjoy any content you can view with your PC on your big digital TV screen. That may soon change. Intel's next-generation notebook CPUs, announced at the consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, are so powerful they can compress the contents of a PC display on the fly and stream it wirelessly to a soon-to-be-introduced Netgear set-top box, the Push2TV (PVT 1000), that you'll connect to your set via HDMI or component cables.

As expected, Panasonic's CES press conference dwelt heavily on the company's plans to bring 3D HDTVs mainstream, including model info on five plasma sets slated to ship by midyear, and a Blu-Ray Disc player. Panasonic also became the second CE vendor of the day to announce the addition of the popular Internet phone call service, Skype, to its VieraCast connected TV service lineup (LG beat them to it by several hours).

LG Electronics' connected TVs are getting more connections - including support (with the addition of a Webcam accessory) for Skype video calls on many of its new sets. This expands on LG's introduction, last year, of sets with built-in support for video-on-demand services such as Netflix and Vudu. Other new Internet services include Picasa and AccuWeather.