HWRoundup Earthweb's agglomeration of tech sites is soon to be sucked into the maw of Internet.com. What will its new parent do with the hardware properties, the venerable Sysopt.com, and the really rather good Hardware Central (besides sack all the staff)? Internet.com already owns SharkyExtreme, and that has never sat too comfortably with Internet.com's collection of Internet, software and enterprise sites.

While pondering this imponderable, we gave Earthweb the onceover, and came across this neat article by Vince Freeman. Entitled: Weekly Platform Trends: Pentium III - Present and Future, the piece notes that the PIII is the mainstream processor for the business market, and will continue to be so for some time yet.

Freeman runs through the various flavours of PIII chipsets, and explains the implication of the upcoming Pentium III Tualatin, which will use the new 0.13micron core (smaller die size = cheaper to produce chips). Pointing to the 'conspicuous absence' of Celeron from Intel roadmaps, Freeman speculates that the PIII will become the value and midrange processor with the Pentium 4 occupying the high-end. His article is a model of clarity. We recommend it.

AMD showed off a dual Palomino system at CeBIT, but declined to share with us any performance data. Now

has got some Sandra scores from a Tyan mobo. Yes, it is impressive. And no, nothing's launched yet.

Overclockers, read

(Dry ICE, a little over the top.)

Thinking of upgrading the laptop to play some computer games? Stomped is here to help, with an

on which Geforce 2 Go Laptop you should invest in.

With the recent drops in DDR memory prices. some of you may be thinking to upgrade Digi-Web has a

at the Asus solution based on the ALi MAGiK chipset.

And for people seeking an Intel-based CPU solution, FullOn 3D has a look at the SMP IWill DDR Motherboard. It's a

.