Have you heard about virus protection for PDAs? Symantec Corporation is producing virus protection software for handhelds and McAfee Security is not far behind.

It’s all going to be a hard sell though, because there are few viruses that target handhelds. Symantec’s product “Anti-Virus for Handhelds – Corporate” is out there now and a consumer version is priced at $39.95. I told you about this type of software some time ago, and what I said then is still appropriate now. If your notebook or desktop is well protected, you have little to fear. Should your PDA get infected, you just reset it and synchronize with your notebook or desktop to get your data back on the PDA. Just be sure that you synchronize frequently so that little data is lost. Symantec can be contacted at www.symantec.com and McAfee can be reached at www.mcafee.com.
Pelham Sloane makes the PS 1500. The PS 1500 is a desktop that has all of the PC components in the back of the monitor and weighs in at less than 20 pounds. I would say that they’re mistaken calling this machine a desktop. They need to call it a mobile computer. While I wouldn’t backpack it very far, I certainly would move it from room to room (even location to location). The PS1500 has a 15 inch screen that houses a 2.4 Gigahertz Intel Pentium 4 or a 1.8 Gigahertz Intel Celeron or a Via Technologies C3 933 Megahertz processor. The five models that are available start at $1,369 and have up to 1 Gigabyte of RAM, a 120 Gigabyte hard drive and options for a touch screen and wall mount. At less than 3 inches thick, it definitely is mobile. Seventeen and twenty inch screens are due out this year.

Hitachi Maxwell is hard at work on a writable optical disk that will hold a terabyte of storage. This disk will be of the write-once type and it will be backward compatible with DVDs and CDs. Don’t look for this technology any time soon though. It’s not expected to be available until about 2008. With a name like “multi-information layer electrically selectable optical disk” I can’t wait.
Here’s info on some notebooks that you don’t hear about every day. Systemax has the Pursuit SC-B13, with a 1.3 Gigahertz Intel Pentium M, 1 Gigabyte of DDR SDRAM, a 60 Gigabyte hard drive, a DVD/CD-RW drive, a 15-inch TFT screen, an ATI Radeon Mobility 9000 graphics card with 64MB of memory and a touch pad. The Pursuit is priced at $1,999. Systemax can be contacted at 888-845-6225 or www.systemexpc.com.
Averatec makes the 3150P, with AMD’s mobile Athlon XP-M 1600+ processor (1.4 Gigahertz), 256MB of DDR RAM, a 30 Gigabyte hard drive, an S3 ProSavage 8 graphics chip, a 12-inch SVGA screen, a DVD/CD-RW and a 802.11b wireless connection. The 3150P is priced at $1,025. Averatec can be reached at 877-462-3462 or www.avertec.com.
Now eMachine is producing the M5305. This notebook has a 1.8 Gigahertz AMD Athlon XP 2200+ processor, 512MB of slow SDRAM, a 40 Gigabyte hard drive, a 15.4-inch LCD screen, an ATI Radeon IGP graphics card, a DVD/CD-RW drive and a touch pad. The M5305 is priced at $1,249. eMachines can be contacted at 800-362-2446 or www.emachines.com.
Have you seen the Toshiba notebooks with the 17-inch screen? I’m not crazy about the prices but I really like the screens. They’re a sight for my tired, old eyes. Now if they could only lower the prices a bit (as a matter of fact, quite a bit). The one I like has a fast processor, lots of RAM, a huge hard drive and all the other goodies. The only problem I have is the price and space for another computer. Maybe by the time I make the space, the price will come down to something I can afford. After all, my list of must-have gadgets is quite long.