Media of all sorts, its duplication, manipulation, distribution and even distortion has been the real focus of PC marketing for the past year or more. Ever since Intel and AMD started marketing multi-gigahertz capable chips and Microsoft unveiled XP everyone kept asking, "What am I going to do with all that power?" Let's face it, you can only word process just so fast, after that it's wasted CPU cycles.

As we've mentioned in the past, one of the areas we have been following is something we like to call the "Home Enterprise", and a particular aspect of it, the 'media center'. The concept of media centers covers a lot of territory. Like any 'buzz word' a lot of companies apply it to anything they feel even vaguely fits the definition. And, since there is no formal definition, that leaves a lot of room for interpretation.

last installment, we discussed the facts of life about desktop data storage, backup and recovery. There's no question that periodic backup of desktop data files is a critical part of computer procedure. There are lots of choices as to the way you can protect your desktop data. These can range from tape drives to removable storage media to external drives to software that allows you to replicate the image of your drive on another hard disk drive. Let's look at these alternatives briefly and some of the products available.

Leonardo DaVinci was supposed to have said, "Genius is in the conception, not the execution". In all deference to Mr. DaVinci, I beg to differ. Recently I was sitting with some notable colleagues at a press event at CES