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Last month I explained why Android smartbooks would end up being free. It seems that my predictions were not optimistic enough: free netbooks are already starting to appear! Techradar reported yesterday that Virgin will be offering free netbooks with some of their contracts in the near future. Let's look at the offer in more detail. Complete Story

I have published a review of the free Smplayer media player on Tech-no-media For me the the best free media player for Windows and Linux is mplayer. It is not only a very fast player, but it also offers a ton of advanced options. The one thing that it lacks is a good graphical user interface to access all the power it has under the hood. Several GUI front ends have been written for mplayer, but in my opinion there is one that stands head and shoulder above the others: Smplayer. Read the full review of Smplayer

A review of the excellent Ubuntu alternative Linux Mint. Taking Gloria out for a spin: A review of Linux Mint 7.0 There is a soft spot in my heart for Linux Mint: Mint 3.0 was the first Linux distribution that I really used rather than experimented with. Since then I have moved on to Ubuntu (on which Mint is based), but the release of the new Linux Mint 7.0 codenamed Gloria made me want to install and review Linux Mint again. I brought my old Dell latitude D400, a 5 year old subnotebook, out of storage and started the Mint live CD. The Live CD experience Running from the CD is never a really pleasant experience, but Linux Mint seems to have made the process as painless as possible: at start up I am greeted by the Mint logo, soon replaced by the usual boot "text mode". after about a minute I am in front of a very nicely designed login prompt with a 10 second countdown to login. Maybe they should have made the CD autologin faster, as the wait could worry newbies. Once logged in I am presented with a very polished desktop complete with some Compiz eye candy. No network connection however. I have a look in the start menu for help: the menu is very Windows like and the control center easily accessible. The hardware driver applet tells me that I will need to download a legacy driver for my Broadcom wireless adapter.I am not too surprised as I know from my old Mint 3.0 installation that this adapter is badly supported on Linux. Beside this everything seems to work perfectly, so I'll continue the review with the installation