Dreamworks is not doing a 3D version of the full film but it did some scenes in 3D to show off a techology that it plans to use in future. We had to don Polaroid specs to get the effect and it was quite startling to find oneself flinching a virtual missiles that seemed to be coming straight at you. Incidentally the 2D version looked good too, but off course that requires only half the computing resources needed for 3D.

One result of the colloboration between HP and Dreamworks has been the HP Dream Colour display that can render a billion colours. It seems that the old CRT monitors reproduced colour a lot better than LCDs and the two companies got together to do somthing about it. The colour fidelity is obtained partly by modulating the LCD backlighting as well as the liquid-crystal plane. The machines will cost about $5000, around a quarter the price of equivalent models today.

One interesting factoid from the event came from Phil McKinney, chief technology officer of the personal systems group. He reckoned that if all the data held by every home PC were transmitted across the internet the task would take 11 months to complete. And ghe amount of data stored is rising exponentially. McKinney's conclusion is that we can't leave everything to the Internet. "We are always going to need some local storage," he said.

The six drive bays are aligned at right angles to their normal positions, accessible through neat little panels at the side. They can take standard or solid=state drives. On the front is a secondary monitor with no specific use, though it can be used to display system papareters.

The one on display was running a pair of next-generation SLI-ed Nvidia graphics cards, details of which were under embargo. The machine can take up to 8GBytes of overclockable 1600 MHz CORSAIR PC-14400 DDR3 SDRAM.

There's a choice of 3.20GHz or 3GHz Intel QX9770 quad-core processors, overclocked to the maximum judging from the impressive array of liquid-cooling pipes and a base that looks like a radiator. Voodoo would not say how fast it clocked.

HP describes it as a luxury PC. So luxurious, in fact, that you won't be able to buy one for a while because they will be offered initially only to people who already own a Voodoo.

Voodoo also showed a notebook called the Envy, presumably because that is the emotion it is designed to inpire in your friends. It is actually a rather plain-looking black box, made of carbon fibre, with a 13.3in WXGA screen but it has impressive specs - see here, where you will also find more details about the Omen.

Having forked out £19 for a USB-ethernet converter for my ludicrously under-ported MacBook Air, I was particularly interested to hear Rahul Sood, chief technology officer, described how Voodoo got round the fact that the Envy was not thick enough at 0.7in to take a standard Ethernet jack. Instead he stuck one in the power adapter to avoid people having to buy special leads.

The iRex iLiad, which I am in the process of reviewing and is if anything is thinner than the Air, uses the same idea.

Typical was the way he launched Apple wireless networking in 1999 as if the company had invented it, although it had been in widespread use on PCs for two years.

Still, you have to hand it to the man: his hype works. Analysts ARCchart report that Apple's Airport Extreme has become the top-selling wireless router in the US, outselling brands like Linksys, Dlink and Netgear.

The Extreme sells at the Apple site for $179; a Linksys router with similar specs can be bought for $40 less and should work as well with a Mac as with a PC.

Looking at the entire base-station market, including models not packing a router, Apple comes fourth with an 11 percent share. That is still higher than its 6 percent share of the US computer market (globally it has only about 3 percent).

ARCchart concludes that PC owners must have been buying the Apple model, indicating the power of a brand. Of course it could also mean that Mac users have taken this long to save pennies enough to meet Apple's inflated prices, and are only now in a position to catch up with the rest of us.

Eight per cent of office workers now struggle with the painful digits and sharp pains shooting through their bodies associated with RSI (repetitive strain injury), while 68 per cent of office workers suffer from some sort of pain (like back ache and sore eyes)

John Allen, managing consultant at the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA), said "there have been some high profile court cases that have attracted very large damages awards recently and as such more people are becoming more aware of it and reporting RSI." He also expects RSI injuries to increase in the future as technology use increases.

Bronwyn Clifford, a chartered physiotherapist, advises that "keystrokes, rather than using the mouse, help against RSI". Voice activated commands, taking breaks (like a proper lunch break) and, in some cases, using a more sensitive and even a bigger mouse can also help, she said.

At PCW, we use vertical mice and tablet pens to easy the pains of using a computer. Little, however, can help our eyes from the strain of staring at a screen for 10+ hours a day.

He claims the sensitivity of the eGPS system is particularly impressive because of the limited scope for aerials in mobile devices. It has also boosted what he calls the "across body" performance to providing good communication even when link back-pocket device to headphones. Apparently in some earlier models, body attenuation has caused some problems.

BlueCore 7 also uses CSR's proprietary Auristream voice codec but reverts to Bluetooth's CVSD if talking to a non-CSR device.

Arm sells designs and does not make chips to actual implementations, and thus performance and power drain, are down the manufacturer. Chris Porthouse, senior product manager, said some Arm customers would implement it at 45nm scale and some were looking at 32nm.

There is much interest in how Arm is going to play against Intel's new Atom processors on price and performance. Apple's iPhone and iThouch have shown what can be done with Arm technology, but Mali-400 designs won't hit the market until 2010. Products using its single-core Mali-200 are expected to appear this year.

So it surprised us to here that UK buyers of the Eee PC 900 received a 4,400mAh battery while American's got a 5,800mAh battery pack.

Now, however, Asus has now decided it will swap out your 4,400mAh battery and send you the larger 5,800mAh battery for £10 (P&P included).

Asus has also released a new Bios (version 0601) that, it says, will add around 30 minutes extra battery life on the Eee PC 900. UK Eee PC 900 owners should go to Asus' support site to grab the bigger battery and download the new Bios.

It has an exceptional feature list, starting with a 10in screen, 1.6GHz Intel processor (that's all we're allowed to say... for now), 1GB Ram, an 80GB 5,400rpm hard drive, a 1.3megapixel webcam, and a much bigger keyboard than the Eee PC.

The processor is overclockable to 1.9GHz, which MSI's UK marketing manager, Richard Stewart, says is a unique feature for such a small-form factor notebook.

It weighs 1kg with a 3cell battery, packs all the usual goodies like Wifi, Blutooth, XP Home, a card reader and three USB ports and its price is something special: £329 inc. Vat.

The screen is LED backlit and has a 1,024x600 resolution. That's a small step behind the HP Mininote 2133, which has a superior 1,280x768 resolution, but it's still an impressive display for the £329 price point.

Richard Stewart's comment: "demand will undoubtedly outstrip supply", is a bit of an understatement in my opinion.

Asus has already had problems building enough Eee PC 900s (my uncle ordered two a few weeks ago and they still haven't arrived) and rumours suggest that Intel is struggling to keep up with demand for its current and upcoming ultra-mobile CPUs.

But while supply will be a problem, demand is equally a factor, since the Wind breezes past the competition in terms of feature list, value for money and possibly even performance too.

Stewart also confirmed an 8.9in version of the Wind, due for launch at a later date with Linux instead of Windows, and a desktop version of the MSI Wind is also in the works. The desktop version will have a similar price and similar components (the same processor), but lose the battery and display in place of an optical drive.

Dell's mini laptop, Acer's Aspire One MiniNote, Medion's 10in wonder which PCW saw at Cebit08, HP's Mininote 2133, Via's Openbook (possibly to be sold through Belinea and Packard Bell), Acer's new Eee PC 901 (based on the Atom rather than the 900 based on the Celeron 353), Acer's 10in Eee PC and even Elonex's £99 notebook make this a crowded and, happily, a competitive market.

It's a reference design that will be re-badged and tweaked by manufacturers just like the Nanobook was (Belinea's S.book 1 and Packard Bell's Easynote XS used Via's older design).

It is perhaps named Openbook because, Via says in its launch video, that it will put the CAD design files for the notebook freely on its website so manufacturers can easily modify the original design to suit their brands.

The Openbook design has been modernised to include a bigger and higher resolution 8.9in display with two webcams (one pointing out, one pointing in) and a sleeker chassis compared with the Nanobook.

One of the more disappointing features is the claimed three hour battery life. When you consider Via said the original Nanobook was capable of four hours, yet in our labs it could barely last two hours, then by the same measure the Openbook could end up achieving just an hour and a half in real-usage situations.

I think it's a better idea now, more than ever, to read reviews of the new cheap and portable laptops, because they are often being advertised with ridiculous battery life claims and performance varies drastically between models. For example, we've seen many Via C7-M based laptops that can't even play back standard definition video smoothly; although that may not be the case with the Openbook since it should have hardware decoding of Mpeg2 and Mpeg4.