Twenty years ago giving someone a notebook as a gift would have been considered ultra-lame. If you give one today, you have a friend for life. The difference between the two is the difference between microchips and paper - silicon and ink. There's a lot there. Today's notebooks allow us to watch movies, play intense and real time games, balance checkbooks, write printable term papers and surf the World Wide Web. Big difference indeed.

If you like multiplayer war games for the PC, Battlefield 2 (BF2) is probably going to be a member of your collection soon. It is a sequal to Battlefield 1942, which was an on-line multiplayer World War 2 game (still one of my favorite games).

Electronic Arts (EA) has taken multiplay to a whole new level in this game. For example, you can have squads so you can kill people with your freinds.