In a radical shift in how personal computers are conceived and positioned, Hewlett Packard has given its latest PC the sense of touch and reduced important operations to fingering the screen or clicking a remote.

At a stroke, the TouchSmart PC, unveiled in Seoul last week, has transformed a boring - for many families, challenging - technology to something as easy as operating a TV set or jotting notes on a pad.

The new PC is built around a BrightView 19" LCD flat screen and doubles as a TV monitor, thanks to a built-in tuner. The system runs on Windows Vista and the TouchSmart lets the users touch various options displayed on the screen.

This machine is powered by an AMD Turion 64 X2 dual-core TL-52 processor and has 2GB of DDR2 SDRAM memory, a 320GB hard drive, and 256MB Nvidia GeForce Go 7600 graphics card. Not really powerful but it does its job.

The IQ770’s touchscreen monitor includes HP’s SmartCalendar application that serves as a bulletin board for family members: Users can write on virtual Post-its and paste them into a calendar
along with pictures. Users also can update the calendar with voice, scribbled, or typed messages.
HP’s TouchSmart IQ770 has a DVD drive/burner, decent speakers, a 1.3MP Web cam, Bluetooth, and 802.11 a/b/g Wi-Fi connectivity.

Overall, the HP TouchSmart IQ770 is simple, convenient, and flexible enough to broaden PC usage and move it into a central spot in mainstream family life. The TouchSmart PC will be available globally in the second quarter of 2007 at a suggested price of US$1799.

Sony unveiled their latest Desktop PC build around the Core 2 Quad processor from Intel. The Vaio R Master split-tower desktop PC features the Core 2 Quad 6600 processor. Other specs include 3GB DDRII-667 MHz RAM, 3TB of storage (SATA).

Graphics on this beast are powered by the nVidia Quadro FX 1500. The Vaio R Master includes a BluRay disc drive and a 24" Monitor at a resolution of 1900x1200. This killer machine is set to hit stores in Japan on 10 February and will cost around $8,300! Any takers for this one?!!

Now that Dell has Alienware under its belt, its XPS line of gaming PCs will probably be taken more seriously.  At the CES, Dell introduced a new H2C version of its XPS 710 gaming computer, with a couple of added features and an increased price (but that's pretty much what you have to expect these days).

The H2C model has a new two-stage cooling system.  First, a liquid-to-air heat exchanger moves heat away from the processor, and then a fluid chiller uses ceramic modules like those on a space shuttle to move heat to the cooler areas of the case.  This extreme cooling system allows Dell to include a Core 2 Extreme QX6700 processor overclocked to 3.2GHz.  In addition to that, the base system includes 4GB of memory, two 160GB (10,000 RPM) hard drives, two GeForce 8800GTX cards, and a 20" widescreen monitor.

We may have forgotten as a result of AMD's 4x4 platform marketing, but Intel is reminding us that a two-processor system is not something brand new.  At CES in Las Vegas, Intel demonstrated an 8-core desktop PC with two quad-core Xeon processors.  While Xeon processors are typically reserved for workstations rather than mainstream use, there's nothing wrong with putting a Xeon processor in your desktop PC, and there are plenty of current solutions allowing two workstation processors in the same computer.

Intel also pointed out that, while AMD's 4x4 is built from the ground up to be an enthusiast platform, such an Intel alternative could cost you a lot less than purchasing an extremely expensive motherboard and two FX processors.  It's also more power-efficient: all of the FX processors compatible with 4x4 fit the most power-hungry envelope AMD has, while Xeon processors can take as low as around 50% of the power of their FX equivalents.  Nevertheless, Intel is not going to market this as a 4x4 competitor; they merely want to point out that 4x4 isn't anything special.

With their new budget AMD laptop just out of the oven, Dell's turned to quad-core processors and new PCs that will incorporate them.  They have announced that they will soon offer workstations and desktop PCs with quad-core CPUs.

Supposedly, the new PCs will give you up to a 63% performance boost.  Granted, these numbers are usually way higher than what you'll actually see yourself, but that's still pretty impressive.  They also claim a 40% increase in performance-per-watt, which makes sense, given that quad-core CPUs don't take twice the power of their dual-core equivalents.