I am an avid PC gamer and when I play, I always use headphones. I use headphones because they don’t disturb the people in my home and it helps block out the noise in the environment that disturbs my play. Typically, when I play I use a set of Razer Barracuda headphones that provide very good surround sound audio quality.

Razer has introduced what may be my next set of headphones called the Megalodon 7.1 surround sound gaming headset. The headset uses Razer’s new Maelstrom Audio Engine to process positional audio cues 800% faster than comparable virtual surround sound systems according to Razer.

It’s back-to-school time across much of the country, and many people are out buying the notebooks for the coming school year. I’m sure there are many students headed off to college for the first time, who would like to take a nice gaming notebook with them. The reality is that most decent gaming notebooks cost around $5000, more than most college students can afford.

Gateway announced that it has added a new, affordable gaming notebook to its FX series called the P-7811FX. The cost of a notebook is only $1399.99 at Best Buy, making it very price competitive with basic notebooks on the market. Despite the low price, Gateway packs it full of higher-end features that you wouldn’t expect to see at this price.

Every time I travel with my notebook computer, I always take a notebook mouse with me so I don’t have to rely on the track pad built-in. For the most part my mouse of choice typically comes from Logitech when it comes to notebooks. I have reviewed several great notebook mice from Logitech over the years. Today Logitech announced its latest notebook mouse called the V550 Nano cordless laser mouse.

The mouse has familiar Logitech features, like the tiny nano receiver that protrudes just 8 mm from the side of your notebook allowing you leave it installed at all times. The new mouse also features Logitech’s freewheeling scroll wheel that makes navigating long webpages or documents a breeze.

I commonly use both a Nikon D80 DSLR camera and a Sanyo Xacti HD camcorder that both record to SDHC media. If I wish to shoot images in RAW format on my Nikon camera, I have to have a big memory card. A smaller 2 or 4 GB storage card fills up very quickly. Thankfully, the storage capacity of SDHC cards is increasing all the time and Kingston’s latest has 32 GB of storage.

The Kingston 32 GB Elite Pro SDHC card can be used with digital cameras and HD camcorders that record to SDHC format. Kingston says that the card will hold more than 6000 10 megapixel still images and over eight hours of HD video, even when the video is recorded at high-quality 6 Mbps settings.

Lenovo has always been a brand most associated with business notebook and desktop computers. Lenovo did recently start selling notebook and desktop computers aimed at the consumer market in the US. Despite that, Lenovo is still mostly associated with business users and that market is what it is known for.

Lenovo is looking to capitalize on its business market with the new ThinkPad notebook called the W700. The W700 is a 17-inch widescreen mobile workstation aimed squarely at the business user needing lots of power in a somewhat portable form factor. Lenovo says that its W700 is the first notebook in the industry to deliver a built-in digitizer and color calibrator.

Any Windows user has had their system crash at one point or another. Far more often that Microsoft would like to admit, a crash leads to the inability to start the computer back up. Short of reformatting your PC, a recovery disk could be the only chance of saving the data on the computer and getting back to work.

The catch is that the majority of users never make rescue discs and can’t access the commands needed to try and repair a faulty system. Kingston and Symantec have announced a new flash drive that puts software needed to try and repair a Windows PC on the flash drive.

Say RAID to some people and they think you are trying to kill ants or other bugs in your home. To the geek, RAID a way to make data access faster or more secure. When it comes to backing up important data, RAID mirroring is one of the best ways to do it.

Addonics announced a new enclosure called the Portable Dual Drive Enclosure that gives RAID capability to the portable user. Addonics says the enclosure can be powered by the USB port alone or can be powered with an AC adapter. The enclosure can hold a pair of 2.5-inch SATA drives up to 9.5mm in height.

If you use one of the small notebooks that fall into the ultraportable category, you may not have an optical drive onboard. Some cheap computers could lack a DVD burner as well. When it comes time for a new DVD drive or an upgrade, an external USB DVD burner is the way to go for many users.

Buffalo has a new external USB Super-Multi drive called the DSM-SL20U2. The drive does what you expect a DVD burner to do — like burn DVDs and read them. It also adds a feature that you don’t expect from a PC DVD drive — upscaling for DVD movies.

When the diNovo Edge first launched for Windows PCs, I grabbed one up and really liked using it for my day-to-day computer needs. It wasn’t quite up to gaming so I ended up changing between the Edge and my gaming keyboard frequently. After several months that got old and I ended up just leaving my gaming keyboard connected all the time. You gotta have priorities, right?

With all the time I used the Edge, I can say that it was the best general use keyboard that I have owned. Mac users can now enjoy the diNovo Edge as well with Logitech’s new diNovo Edge Mac Edition. The Mac version of the Edge shares the same looks and design of the original Edge. You get the thin 0.5-inch profile, black semi-translucent Plexiglas frame, and orange backlighting.

Convergence has never been more apparent in the computer world than it gets for USB devices. I have seen some odd things that are designed for a multitude of strange uses over the years. Boynq has a new device called the Iris that rolls three items into one package that looks a lot like the lamp that crushes the “I” in the Pixar logo.

The Iris has a one-piece speaker, LED light, and webcam rolled into one device. The webcam has a mic as well and uses a VGA CMOS lens. Around the webcam are a 5W RMS speaker and eight LED lights for lighting up your desk or the face of the person doing the web chatting.