You’ve probably heard about this snow kitty operating system for Macintosh computers. What you might not’ve heard is exactly how it’s supposed to be unleashing the power of all those processor cores crammed inside your computer.

The heart of the matter is that the trick to actually utilizing the full power of multiple processors—or multiple cores within a processor, like the Core 2 Duo you’ve probably got in your computer if you bought in the last two years—is processing things in parallel. That is, doing lots of stuff side by side. After all, you’ve got 2, maybe 4 or even 8 processors at your disposal, so to use them as efficiently as possible, you want to pull a problem apart and throw a piece of it at each core, or at least send different problems to different cores. Sounds logical, right? Easy, even.

The rub is that writing software that can actually take advantage of all of that parallel processing at an application level isn’t easy, and without software built for it, all that power is wasted. In fact, cracking the nut of parallel processing is one the major movements in tech right now, since parallelism, while it’s been around forever, has been the domain of solving really big problems, not running Excel sheets on your laptop. It’s why, for instance, former Intel chair Craig Barrett told me at CES that Intel hires more software engineers than hardware engineers—to push the software paradigm shift that’s gotta happen.

A big part of the reason parallel programming is hard for programmers to wrestle with is simply most of them have never spent any time thinking about parallelism, says James Reinders, Intel’s Chief Software Evangelist, who’s spent decades working with parallel processing. In the single core world, more speed primarily came from a faster clock speed—all muscle. Multi-core is a different approach. Typically, the way a developer takes advantage of parallelism is by breaking their application down into threads, sub-tasks within a process that run simultaneously or in parallel. And processes are just instances of an application—the things you can see running on your machine by firing up the Task Manager in Windows, or Activity Monitor in OS X. On a multi-core system, different threads can be handled by different processors so multiple threads can be run at once. An app can a lot run faster if it was written to be multi-threaded.

One of the reasons parallel programming is tricky is that some kinds of processes are really hard to do in parallel—they have to be done sequentially. That is, one step in the program is dependent on the result from a previous step, so you can’t really run those steps in parallel. And developers tend to run into problems, like a race condition, where two processes try to do something with the same piece of data and the order of events gets screwed up, resulting in a crash.

Snow Leopard‘s Grand Central Dispatch promises to take a lot of the headache out of parallel programming by managing everything at the OS level, using a system of blocks and queues, so developers don’t even have to thread their apps in the traditional way. In the GCD system, a developer tags self-contained units of work as blocks, which are scheduled for execution and placed in a GCD queue. Queues are how GCD manages tasks running parallel and what order they run in, scheduling blocks to run when threads are free to run something.

Reinders says he’s “not convinced that parallel programming is harder, it’s just different.” Still, he’s a “big fan of what Apple’s doing with Grand Central Dispatch” because “they’ve made a very approachable, simple interface for developers to take advantage of the fact that Snow Leopard can run things in parallel and they’re encouraging apps to take advantage of that.”

How Snow Leopard handles parallelism with GCD is a little different than what Intel’s doing however—you might recall Intel just picked up RapidMind, a company that specializes in optimizing applications for parallelism. The difference between these two, at a broad level, represent two of the major approaches to parallelism—task parallelism, like GCD, or data parallelism, like RapidMind. Reinders explained it like this: If you had a million newspapers you want to cut clips out of, GCD would look at cutting from each newspaper as a task, whereas RapidMind’s approach would look at it as one cutting to be executed in a repetitive manner. For some applications, RapidMind’s approach will work better, and for some, GCD’s task-based approach will work better. In particular, Reinders says something like GCD works best when a developer can “figure out what the fairly separate things to do are and you don’t care where they run or in what order they run” within their app.

It’s also a bit different from Windows’ approach to parallelism, which is app oriented, rather than managing things at the OS level, so it essentially leaves everything up to the apps—apps have got to manage their own threads, make sure they’re not eating all of your resources. Which for now, isn’t much of a headache, but Reinders says that there is a “valid concern on Windows that a mixture of parallel apps won’t cooperate with each other as much,” so you could wind up with a situation where say, four apps try to use all 16 cores in your machine, when you’d rather they split up, with say one app using eight cores, another using four, and so on. GCD addresses that problem at the system level, so there’s more coordination between apps, which may make it slightly more responsive to the user, if it manages tasks correctly.

You might think that the whole parallelism thing is a bit overblown—I mean, who needs a multicore computer to run Microsoft Word, right? Well, even Word benefits from parallelism Reinders told me. For instance, when you spool off something to the printer and it doesn’t freeze, like it used to back in the day. Or spelling and grammar running as you type—it’s a separate thread that’s run in parallel. If it wasn’t, it’d make for a miserable-ass typing experience, or you’d just have to wait until you were totally finished with a document. There’s also the general march of software, since we love to have more features all the time: Reinders says his computer might be 100X faster than it was 15 years ago, but applications don’t run 100x faster—they’ve got new features that are constantly added on to make them more powerful or nicer to use. Stuff like pretty graphics, animation and font scaling. In the future, exploiting multiple cores through parallelism that might be stuff like eyeball tracking, or actually good speech recognition.

Reinders actually thinks that the opportunities for parallelism are limitless. “Not having an idea to use parallelism in some cases I sometimes refer to as a ‘lack of imagination,'” because someone simply hasn’t thought of it, the same way people back in the day thought computers for home use would be glorified electronic cookbooks—they lacked the imagination to predict things like the web. But as programmers move into parallelism, Reinders has “great expectations they’re going to imagine things the rest of us,” so we could see some amazing things come out of parallelism. But whether that’s next week or five years now, well, we’ll see.

[Back to our Complete Guide to Snow Leopard]

Still something you wanna know? Send questions about parallel processing, parallel lines or parallel universes to tips@gizmodo.com, with “Giz Explains” in the subject line.

Grand Central Terminal main concourse image from Wikimedia Commons

There’s nothing like the smell of race gas and burnt rubber on a fine summer’s morning, unique charms of the motorsports world that many long to be a part of. Sadly, few have the skills, funds, and luck to make the cut, so thank goodness for racing games. Motorsports-themed games continue to get more realistic and immersive every year, good enough even to entice even those with the requisite professional attachments to hone their skills in a safe (and cheap) environment before hitting the track. As the games get better the hardware that supports them must as well, with steering wheels being the most tangible addition. Logitech’s latest is the $299 G27, a 900-degree, force-feedback wheel that is, at first pass, barely distinguishable from the G25 that precedes it. There are differences, but sadly few are entirely for the better.

Continue reading Logitech G27 racing wheel impressions

Filed under: Gaming

Logitech G27 racing wheel impressions originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 26 Aug 2009 11:58:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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I’m happy to report that the leading car navigation apps for the iPhone work surprisingly well. Not only that, but for the next week, there’s a clear choice for best app.

Until August 31st, Navigon MobileNavigator will cost $70. In my testing, it competed neck and neck with the $100 TomTom, so for the next eight days, it’s the best value among the top contenders. But when they’re both selling for $100, that TomTom is going to look a lot more tempting. The third app I tested is TeleNav’s AT&T Navigator. It’s certainly worthy, and has some connected capability that the other two apps here don’t, but in the end, the economics are wrong: At $10 per month, it could become frightfully expensive, with no significant added value.

These three navigators are the most reputable in the app store (hence their heightened cost). They’re all based on software I’ve used in the past too, either in other phones or in portable navigators. Because of the familiarity, I knew I could spot anything amiss in the iPhone edition, but I was surprised to discover that, if anything, these iPhone apps are better designed than anything their companies made before—and run great on my iPhone 3GS. It’s a relief to know that GPS navigation with an iPhone is, finally, a really real reality.

Navigon and TomTom are completely contained apps that hog upwards of 1.2 GB a piece; TeleNav is a small app that relies on the phone’s net connection. Nevertheless, they all work more or less the same. They give turn-by-turn directions on an animated map, just like portable navigators. While they’re doing it, you can play music from the iPhone’s iPod, and if a call comes in, you see it pop up on the screen. GPS performance on the 3GS was better than I had hoped for—hiccupy at times but never completely gone, even when messing around indoors.

Every app also has direct access to Contacts—this isn’t just good for people for whom you’ve added addresses, it’s brilliant for quickly navigating to stuff you’ve found in Google Maps—you just whatever it is to Contacts with a single tap, open your navi app and it’s there.

No matter which app you’re using, the GPS runs constantly and the screen generally stays on, which means utter battery drainage: You will need to keep your iPhone plugged into the car’s lighter jack. You will also need a dashboard mount, which range from $10 to $30.

Here’s how the apps did against each other, followed by some deeper impressions:

AT&T Navigator by TeleNav
Product page; iTunes link

Unlike the other two, TeleNav is very much a connected app. It downloads a fresh map of your surroundings wherever you are, and it checks for traffic and POIs in much the same way. TeleNav’s servers are always being updated, so you’re never out of date. The trouble is that a) this costs $10 per month forever and ever, b) with the exception of searching for gas by price and the occasional useful traffic alert, the connectedness is hard to appreciate, and c) downloading maps and routes means that if you have poor phone reception, you might not have navigation.

TeleNav distributes its app “free” in the app store, but to get turn-by-turn navigation (the only reason you’d want the app), you have to sign up and commit to paying $10 a month on your AT&T bill. It’s a deal for the first 10 months or so, especially since you can cancel it at any time, so maybe you’ll only need it on trips. But if you intend to keep it and use it for more than that, you’ll kick yourself for not having paid up front for Navigon or TomTom—when you add up all those Hamiltons, the $100 apps are ultimately cheaper.

I had some trouble with the software, too. Version 1.1 of the “free” client app crashed a lot, and it didn’t automatically update to the more stable version 1.2i. I had to remove the app from my iPhone, and then add it again. The good news is, it worked and I haven’t experienced a crash since.

Though I was pretty pleased with TeleNav’s overall usability, but the connectedness did get annoying sometimes. The best example is the map section: TeleNav has very pretty maps, but they take a 21st century eternity to download (we’re talking 5-10 seconds here), and the whole screen has to reload when you pan or zoom. Also, when you’re in the map, you can’t tap on a destination and route there, a fact that seemed to render the maps useless.

The B- I give the program is a combination of the shortcomings, albeit minor, and the problematic economics for anyone intending to use this regularly for a year or more.

Navigon MobileNavigator
Product page; iTunes link

Navigon portable navigators had just started to get good when the company closed shop in the US. I can’t say I miss them, really, but what’s nice is that most or all of the great features of the portable product have arrived intact in the iPhone app. It really is startling to see how well both TomTom and Navigon have overlaid their core features to the iPhone.

Navigon comes with 1.29 GB of maps and POI data, good because, like TomTom, it’s not “connected.” There’s no live traffic, no online search, nothing like that. I can’t say I miss it. The app runs almost exactly like the last Navigon portables, with such nice touches as lane guidance (those screens that pop up saying which lanes you should—and definitely should not—be in). It lays out well in both landscape and portrait modes, and the driving interface, with its customization options, looks the best.

Navigon has always had some trouble with its POI interface—in this case, you can can easily search for something in the wrong place. If you don’t know the specific city a POI is in, just putting in the nearest big city is not enough. I recommend sitting down with it and familiarizing yourself with the POI search flow, because once you get the hang of it, you will be better at knowing where to look for stuff.

The biggest glaring omission of this app was the route view, what I used to call MapQuest view back when people remembered what MapQuest was: You get a full rundown of your turns, so you can see where the hell this thing is trying to take you. For the price, it’s still reasonable, and Navigon has already updated its software—for free—a few times since launch, so who’s to say that a good route summary isn’t up next?

I gave it an A- until August 31, when the price goes from $70 to $100. After that, it’s probably a B+ or B. On the level it can’t really beat the TomTom, but when it’s $30 cheaper, it most certainly does.

TomTom US & Canada for iPhone
Product page; iTunes link

I know some of you probably recall my negative sentiments about a recent TomTom portable navigator, and indeed, the whole family of TomTom navigators. I am happy to report that, by leaving hardware design in the hands of Apple, and by making at least a bit of effort to streamline the TomTom interface when bringing it to the iPhone, most of my complaints are rendered moot. There’s still the matter of taking four taps to cancel a route (it takes just two on the other two apps). There’s also the matter of POIs lacking coherent capitalization and punctuation, rendering them barely recognizable in English, and other hints of one-platform-for-all international scaling. But in general, it’s a damn worthwhile, even powerful app.

The next step is to see TomTom’s dock is any good. TomTom says it improves GPS performance, gives some voice command control and raises the volume on turn-by-turn instructions. I am currently using a generic iPhone dock, the one that sells for $30 on Amazon, and I plugged the iPhone into the car stereo for both music and instructions. Also, I didn’t really have any trouble with GPS performance (surprisingly), so whatever this thing costs, its value is as yet undetermined.

In the portable navigator world, Garmin is still king, but in this world, there is no Garmin, so TomTom will probably ascend to the throne. In the current lineup, TomTom’s offering is a B+, but that grade could go down as well as up. I just hope they take their roles as developers seriously and work on what still needs improvement, or else so help me I will nail another series of complaints to their door.

Tips for Using All GPS Apps
• Get a dash mount. Like I said, you can pay roughly $10 to $30 on Amazon, but the $30 version (middle in the pic above) has the nicer joint design. If you don’t mount it, you’re going to kill yourself. Note: The Amazon links are examples, not recommended products. Stay tuned for our review of TomTom’s mount, shown in the photo above at right.

• Never drive without a car charger. These things suck juice like nobody’s business. Operate without a charger, and your phone will become a brick within the hour.

• All these apps let you access iPhone Contacts. This means you should paste in addresses for your most visited friends and colleagues. It also means that if the app’s POI search sucks, you can go to Google Maps, do a search there (or with an app like Where To?) and then add that Google Map entry to Contacts. Instantly it appears in your navigation app too.

• You can listen to music while you’re navigating, if you can handle the navi voice coming on to tell you when to turn. Double-tap the home button to get a floating box of rudimentary iPod functions: track ID, volume, play/pause, forward and back. If you pause your music though, you can’t double-tap the home button to start it again. You’ll have to exit your navigation app, go into the iPod interface, and start it up.

Update: More Notes
Since I’ve probably driven with more various GPS devices in my car than almost anyone, and have been doing it since these silly things were a lot harder to use and cost $1500 a piece, I wanted to address some general questions from comments:

• There are two major map-makers in the world, Navteq (now owned by Nokia) and Tele Atlas (now owned by TomTom). Though traditionally Navteq’s US mapset was superior, they are both now almost imperceptibly identical, thanks to Tele Atlas’ acquisition of a US company called GDT a few years back. They are both very reputable sources of road data now, and it would take you a long time to identify any differences, let alone one’s clear superiority over the other. In other words, at this point, since it’s one or the other, source of road data doesn’t really matter.

• Map updates, however, do matter—but they matter at intervals of at least two years. The map makers named above are constantly updating, but they don’t publish updates (even to monthly subscription services) instantly. It takes months—sometimes weeks if you’re lucky—for map data to go live, and most tweaks are new housing developments and other things you might not notice. Also, map makers may spend a lot of time and effort on an area where you don’t live, and never get around to fixing your particular neighborhood problem. (There’s an intersection in Poughkeepsie, NY that has been wrong in Navteq’s database for five years, because hey, it’s Poughkeepsie!) So it doesn’t make sense to argue that you should spend over 2X the money for a subscription app that isn’t as good as the fixed ones—even if you have to buy expensive map modules or new versions of them in a couple of years. On the flipside, many people driving with three- or four-year-old Garmins are pretty happy.

• Someone mentioned that certain devices make a “ding” sound at the turn. That was always a signature of Magellan (who like Garmin doesn’t make an iPhone app at the moment). Every app tells you when you are approaching a turn. They do so at different intervals. While it seems from a comparative standpoint that the intervals themselves matter, they do not after the initial breaking-in period. You just acclimate to the instructions you’re getting from your own device, and make safe driving maneuvers based on those instructions.

• The state of California does mysteriously ban suction-cup windshield mounts. I have still driven in California with such a device, and would encourage people visiting California to not worry about it. Those of you who live in California should probably check out those sandbag mounts, but please, if anyone knows anyone who’s gotten a ticket for this “offense,” email me about it. I really want to hear this story.

• ALK, makers of the CoPilot software, have been around for many years and have not ever been among the strongest contenders. However, due to their price and the fact that they’re still around, I have agreed to check out CoPilot, and will be posting on that app when I’m ready. But don’t let that stop you from buying Navigon while it’s still on sale.

Usenet: Everyone’s heard of it, nobody uses it. This is ridiculous. Not only is it a fantastic way to download—it’s not that hard to use. Here’s how to drop your torrent habit once and for all, with Usenet.

This point of this guide is to get people acquainted with the basics of Usenet, but if any of you beardy old-timers have any tips, tricks, advice or tearful memories to share about your decades on the ‘Net, that party’s in the comments. Anyway!

What is Usenet?

I’ll spare you a deep historical and technical explanation, because it’d bore you to death, and I’m not the guy to give it: Usenet has been around since the late 70s as one of the bulletin board systems that the first generation of true nerds cut their teeth on. It was designed for discussion, and lived across tons of decentralized servers. For most purposes it’s been replaced by the internet as we know it today, but it’s still very much alive, albeit with a different face.

You see, somewhere back in the 80s, someone started uploading binary content—files, not words—to Usenet. This was, and in some ways still is, an awkward fit, but it quickly became one of the main uses for the service. Why? Because nobody seemed to care much about regulating it—they still don’t, for whatever reason—and because, man, it was fast. These factors made it a perfect refuge for for files of all types, and now the pure amount of stuff available on Usenet rivals—and in a lot of categories, exceeds—the best torrent trackers, which are getting picked off anyway.

Why Do You Want It?
This one’s easy: Aside from serving a huge amount of content, Usenet is usually the first place popular downloads show up, and unlike torrents, once they’re up, the downloads immediately run at full speed. Speaking of which, it bears repeating: Usenet is extremely fast. Unless your service is absolute crap, you’re probably going to max out your broadband connection. Once you’ve tasted this kind of speed, torrents almost seem silly. And lastly, you don’t have to seed, or upload, anything.

For download junkies, Usenet is a wonderland. But it’s got a longstanding reputation for being a little tough to get into, so most people don’t even give it a shot. This isn’t really fair, since Usenet isn’t at all hard to use. Here’s how to get started:

Choosing a Usenet Service

There was a time when ISPs weren’t just cool with Usenet binaries—they actually hosted them. Some still do, but in those rare cases there are usually crippling bandwidth restrictions, throttling measures and all kind of missing content. To mine the Usenet gold you really care about—the alt.binaries content—you’re going to need to buy access. Sorry! Usenet isn’t a peer-to-peer service, so you’ve got to pay someone, somewhere for all that bandwidth and storage. The good news is, you can get away with spending about $15 a month for unlimited, unthrottled access. If you’re not comfortable with this, get your feet wet with a free trial, like GigaNews‘, or just buy a one-off download pass, good for a few gigabytes.

There are a couple things to look for in a Usenet provider, but most major, reputable services are roughly comparable. Retention is a word you’ll see a lot: Usenet servers, given the pure volume of content they get loaded with, have to clear themselves out every once in a while, meaning that files have a limited lifespan. Retention is just a term to describe how long a provider can afford to keep uploads, and the longer they can hold onto uploads, the more files they have. You shouldn’t settle for much less that 300-day retention nowadays.

Providers also advertise how many parallel connections to their servers they permit at one time. More=faster, but past about ten concurrent downloads, the numbers really stop meaning anything, unless you’re on some kind of insanely fast commercial connection, in which case WHAT ARE YOU DOING DOWNLOADING FILEZ, HMM?

Lastly, there are download limits. This should be more obvious, but just just in case: This represents how much you can download from your provider in a given month. This one’s all you, so if you really don’t think you’ll break 10GB a month, only buy 10GB a month. Once you really start to kick your torrent habit, though, you might be surprised at what you’re capable of.

I’ve been using Astraweb for years—they’re cheap, and fast enough to saturate my connection—so the rest of the tutorial will assume you’ve chosen them. If you’ve gone with another provider, the only difference will be your server settings, which they’ll give you after you sign up. Remember: Usenet servers are all meshed together, so no matter who your provider is, the available downloads should be about the same, at least for as long as your provider keeps them around.

Choosing a Client

As with torrents, there’s some pretty weird stuff going on behind the scenes with Usenet. As I mentioned earlier, adding binary files to Usenet was kind of an afterthought, which means the procedure for downloading them kind of complicated, at least on the back end. For example: Usenet binaries have relatively low size limits, so any larger content—movies, software, etc—needs to be split up into lots of small pieces. You know how sometimes a torrent comes in about about 40 .RAR files that have to be rejoined once they’re downloaded? That’s because it came from Usenet, where files can’t be much more than 20MB. So, your client’s got to be able to handle all these group downloads, and preferably join them together for you automatically.

There a plenty of Usenet clients out there, but most of them are either don’t support the kind of file downloading we want—your email app probably falls into this category—are command-line-based, or cost money. I’m done spending your dollars for today, so I’ll point everyone toward the only free, cross-platform Usenet binary client I know of, and one I’ve been using for quite a long time: It’s called SABnzbd. The rest of the guide will be based around this app, though you can try to follow along with some other free alternatives if you like. Mac OSers may want to try Hellanzb (GUI version linked) and Windows folks could go with Alt.binz. But SABnzbd is, to put it bluntly, pretty great.

SABnzbd runs a local web interface, so it’ll look the same no matter what OS you’re on. Here’s how to get started.

1.) Download and install the client (For Windows, it’s an installer like any other app; for Mac OS, it’s a .DMG)
2.) Start it up. It should open a browser window to a control panel-esque page, clearly label as SABnzbd.
3.) Navigate to the “Config” Page and click “Servers”
4.) Enter the server settings your Usenet provider gave you after signup (Astraweb’s at left)


5.) Staying in the “Config” page, click “Folders”
6.) Choose where you want downloaded files to go, and where you want the temporary files to live before they’re finished downloading.
7.) Choose a “Watched” folder. This how SABnzbd will know what you want it to download. Make it a place that’s easy for you to save to, from a browser.

That’s it! Now just leave SABnzbd running, and we’ll start to explore Usenet. Feel free to play around with more of SABnzbd’s options, like the themes, one of which is featured on this article’s top image, but follow this general rule: if it’s not totally obvious to you what an option changes, you should probably ignore it. The only thing you might have to worry about outwith this setup procedure is enabling an SSL connection, if your ISP is throttling your download speeds. More on that here.

Finding Those Files

Now that you’ve got access to Usenet, and the right tools to draw those sweet, sweet files from it, it’s time to dive in. Since Usenet in the raw is an incomprehensible mess, something has emerged called the Newzbin, or NZB standard. NZBs are a lot like torrent files: They’re little pointers that contain information about all the little scattered pieces of a given download, and which give clients like SABnzbd everything they need to make downloading look seamless to users. To “explore Usenet” is really to explore indexes of NZBs, and to do that, you need a good search engine. The best is at Newzbin, from the people who invented the NZB format. Unfortunately, it too is paid, and currently invite-only. Instead, you should use one of the decent free alternatives, like NZBs.org, Binsearch or Newszleech. Searching takes some practice, but once you get a sense of how people name stuff ’round these parts, it’s a breeze.

Once you find your NZB, download it to the directory you marked “Watch” in SABnzbd. Alternately, you can just download it to wherever you want, and add it to SABnzbd at the program’s homepage, under “Add File”. Now check on your SABnzbd queue, where you should see something like this:

It’s working! And yes, it’s really going that fast. If it’s not downloading, you may need to check your server settings: Sometimes ISPs block the default port, 119, meaning you’ll have to use another one that your provider supports. 8080 is a common one, as is 1818. Refer back to step four for this; changing it should only take a second.

SABnzbd takes care of all that nasty .RAR rejoining and extracting for you, so once the download is done, your designated download folder should have a fully-cooked, ready-to-watch/listen/run file waiting for you. Bask in it.

So, that’s Usenet!

Odd and Ends

As you’ve probably guessed by now, there are a lot of ways to make SABnzbd more powerful. For that, have a look at this fantastic thread on SomethingAwful by one of the app’s developers, and the SABnzbd wiki, which answers just about any support question you might have.

Also, there’s a big subject we didn’t even address here today, which is how you actually add stuff to Usenet. The process can be a little involved, and hey, you’re brand new to the world of Usenet—let the rest of us worry about uploading for now. That said, when you’re finally ready, here’s a primer.

So that’s about it! Please add in your experiences in the comments—your feedback is a huge benefit to our Saturday guides. Happy torrenting Usenetting, and have a great weekend!

Life isn’t a Supermarket Sweep: You can’t just grab every back-to-school gadget in the weekly circular. College-bound kids have to conserve cash for important things like pizza and beer, err textbooks. Cut through the marketing crap and snatch the essentials.

WHAT YOU NEED

Value-Priced Laptop
If you were thinking about getting a desktop, STOP. Laptops are the perfect library or couch companion and even the best laptops on the market have come down in price. Apple’s MacBook is one of the best laptops for students, and if you want the nice unibody aluminum one, you can pick it up refurbished for $900. If you opt for Windows instead, this Dell Inspiron 15 is solid for as low as $500. Take it from Prof. Dealzmodo, you don’t have to be scared of buying refurbs, as long as it’s through the manufacturers themselves.

WHAT YOU NEED

All-in-One Printer
You’d think in this day and age you’d be able to email your papers, but lots of college professors still require you hand in your masterpieces on dead trees. An all-in-one printer gives you the vital copy and scan functions, too, so there’s no point in buying a single-function printer. The Canon MX860 (on sale for $160 on Amazon) packs wireless printing and prints on both sides of the page. The $100 HP PhotoSmart C4680 focuses on your photos, with its LCD screen and fast color-printing times.

WHAT YOU NEED

iPod Dock/Alarm Clock
Waking up for class to your music rather than a crappy local radio station is going to be way easier on you (and your hangover). Winner of the eight way iPod Dock Battlemodo, the $200 JBL OnStage 400p is one of the best-sounding choices, though it doesn’t have its own clock-radio built in, so you’ll have to set your iPod or iPhone. Looking for something a tad cheaper? Try the $130 Logitech Pure-Fi Anywhere 2. If you are really worried that an iPod alarm won’t wake you, try the iLuv iMM153. Its sound quality might not be on par with the above docks, but its vibrating ring will actually shake the bed.

WHAT YOU NEED

Point-and-Shoot Camera
Believe me, one day you’ll want to remember the “best years of your life” in something better than the grainy blurry shots you get from your cellphone. Today’s cheapest point-and-shoots let you capture stunning still pictures and quality video, too, in case your bud does something College Humor worthy. The 12-megapixel Sony Cyber-shot DSC-W290 will cost you about $200 and shoots 720p video with a 4x zoom. Canon’s $180 PowerShot SD1200IS will give you great still shooting performance for the money, and its 640×480 video is good enough for YouTube videos. Don’t forget a big SD card—8GB or so.

WHAT YOU NEED

Gaming Console
Making friends in college is way easier when you can lure them into your room for a RB jam session. A game console can also serve as DVD player, music jukebox and streaming media receiver, so there’s a lot of value in one box. Understanding that dorm rooms are cramped, Sony’s new PS3 Slim is smaller than the original and cheaper with its $299 price tag. And with 120GB of space you’ll have more than enough room for storing movies and music. And if you want something even more affordable and can hold out for a few more weeks, the Xbox 360’s price is rumored to drop. No matter what system you choose, make sure to grab extra controllers.

WHAT YOU NEED

Headphones
Whether you are trying to block out the sounds of your roommate’s squeaking bed or the non-whispering library voices, a good pair of headphones is a must. While a pair of noise canceling headphones will run up the bill, Shure’s $99 SE115s isolate background noise really well with rubber or foam, not expensive circuitry. If you’re trying to keep it on the cheap but can’t stand free-with-purchase earbuds, Altec Lansing’s Backbeat Plus for $50 aren’t too shabby.

WHAT YOU NEED

HD Monitor or Cheap HDTV
If you have that all-powerful game console, you’ll need something to hook it up to. Many kids split up the responsibility with a roommate, a good friend—or a spendy parent. One buys the console, the other buys a display. We recommend either a larger monitor, like Dell’s 24″ S2409W with HDMI input. Or you could go with a budget 32″ HDTV. It may not have the best picture, but this 32-inch 720p Insignia is a great deal at $380. (Don’t waste money on 1080p TVs if the screen isn’t at least 40″.)

WHAT YOU NEED

Mini Fridge
Here is a gadget you don’t see on Gizmodo every day (except maybe ones powered by USB), but a mini-fridge is a must-have for a dorm room. The Emerson 2-Door Compact Refrigerator has enough space in the fridge for leftover Easy Mac, and a separate freezer for keeping that non-freezing liquid and some hotpockets. The Haier fridge microwave combo also is a good bet for those that can’t live without popcorn or instant soup.

WHAT YOU NEED

Notebook Bag
Picking a notebook bag can be more personal than picking what goes inside it. Not only do you want something protective but something that also sticks with your own style. Timbuk2 makes some of the best on the market, and though they will cost you north of $60, they are known for having a decent warranty policy—send in pics to see if your damage is covered—and random acts of consumer kindness. The Laptop Messenger is now $65.

WHAT YOU NEED

Reliable Cellphone The dorm room has a landline jack but you will never use it. Make sure you have a good cell on a carrier that gets service at your school. Though we’d love to say, “Buy an iPhone 3GS or Palm Pre,” the fact is, they come with costly monthly plans. Depending on your budget, you may just want to go with one of the newest messaging phones from Samsung or LG—with an unlimited messaging bundle. (You may also want an iPod Touch running on Wi-Fi, so you don’t miss out on the 99-cent apps.)

WHAT YOU DON’T NEED

Laptop Lock Every retailer recommends you buy a laptop lock for your dorm room, but the reality is you will never use it. Now, we care about your laptop’s safety, but the answer is being smart about where you leave it: Lock the door when you go out, have a friend watch it at the library or meal hall, etc. And for the insanely paranoid there is always this.

WHAT YOU DON’T NEED

Camcorder
Forget the Flip Mino, the Creative Vado or even the Kodak Zi8, since the functionality is essentially what you already have on a point-and-shoot. Unless you are a film student, you aren’t going to be making documentaries. Just keep that still camera handy to catch drunken clips of girls crying or your friend puking.

WHAT YOU DON’T NEED

Bluetooth Headset
Unless you are majoring in douchebaggery, a Bluetooth headset should not be on your shopping list. It is nice that Motorola is lowering prices on some headsets for back-to-school, and those should be snapped up by drivers who need them in the car. But if you are walking and talking, you can hold the phone up to your ear. If you are in your room, crank up the speakerphone. Seriously, having a headset in your ear all the time is no way to make friends.

WHAT YOU DON’T NEED

Ebook Reader
Devices like the Kindle DX are fun, and Sony’s new affordable readers are looking nice too, but for a student heading off to college, ebook readers are still an unneeded expense. Digital textbooks just aren’t widely available yet, so you’ll still have to buy a backbreaking amount of old-world books. Plus, what are you going to do when you accidentally drop it in class and it shatters? So try and ignore the hype this year, and maybe next year, McGraw-Hill, Prentice Hall and the like will come through for you.

WHAT YOU DON’T NEED

Anything Too Expensive, or Not Rugged Enough Mark my words, what doesn’t get stolen will surely be barfed on.