Last.fm is a music networking site that not only records what songs you’ve been playing and shares them with your friends, but also recommends you artists based on what you listen to, shows how compatible you are with your friends music tastes and has a radio station that you can listen to over the web (free only in some countries). It’s a great way to find new music for your collection and connect with friends and their music too.

To get started, all you have to do is make a Last.fm account, follow the instructions to get started and then download the music scrobbler for your media player. It works with most music players on the computer, as well as your iPod/iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile, Symbian OS and even your Xbox 360 (and many more). And if you’re looking for me, I’m scorpus57.

The current 9.5mm-tall 2.5-inch drives are too tall for some laptop designers, and they want to go slimmer without turning to more expensive measures such as 1.8-inch drives and solid state drives. The perfect solution? Seagate’s Momentus Thin hard drives that are set to launch sometime this week for developers to get their hands on to.

The “world’s thinnest 2.5-inch hard drive” is 7mm high and is set to be a low cost solution for netbooks and ultraportables that want thinness, cheapness and capacity. The drives will come in 160GB and 250GB configurations, both with 8MB of cache and spinning at 5,400RPM on the SATA 3Gb/s interface. OEMs should start seeing these drives early next year, with laptops to follow.

The new Pine Trail Atom chips from Intel haven’t hit the markets yet, but a German site CarTFT have got their hands on the latest D510 and D410 Pine Trail chips (designed for nettops) and put them through some performance benchmarks comparing them to current-gen Atoms. The results aren’t that surprising; we always expected the Ion platform to do better.

The new Pine Trail Atoms are slightly faster in CPU performance than current generation Atoms, with the performance difference showing in Super PI 8M; less when it comes to the real world. However, both Windows 7 and 3DMark06 favour the 330/Ion combo over the D510 and D410 when it comes to graphics-based applications, which isn’t that surprising considering Intel graphics have never been great. Luckily the chips won’t be expensive and won’t consume much power compared to current Atoms – maybe a bonus for nettops at the sacrifice of power.

If you like odd looking cases with ugly wood panels then these Foxconn bamboo cases are probably right for you. On the right is the older Foxconn Bamboo Forest 1 case which can fit an ATX motherboard and claims to be “environmentally friendly.” One the left you can see the newer Bamboo Forest 2 microATX case (aka the TMX-355) which is a good candidate for a HTPC if you have wooden-style TV setup. Foxconn is selling both cases now for around US$55

The Windows 7 installation isn’t suited to netbooks really: their lack of DVD drives makes it difficult to install and you had to go through a complicated process of making a bootable flash drive through partitioning and other software, copying the contents of your Windows 7 DVD onto it and booting into it to install. Quite a pain in the ass if you just want the latest Microsoft operating system on your netbook.

Lucky for you though, Microsoft has decided to officially release a simple tool that makes the process quite simple. The open-source Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool will do all the work converting your Windows 7 ISO into a bootable USB flash drive ready to install Windows 7. Grab the easy to use tool now from Microsoft’s CodePlex.

This laptop is basically the same as the Kohjinsha DZ-series dual-screen laptop we saw a few weeks ago, except that it has a few key changes that make it a better buy that the DZ-series. The Onkyo DX dual-screen laptop features the same two 10.2″ panels, except with increased resolution (1,366×768 up from 1024×600) so the laptop can now play two HD videos side by side (not that it will be able to decode them well).

The Onkyo DX keeps the AMD Athlon Neo processor with ATI Radeon HD 3200 graphics and all the connectivity features, but ups the stock RAM (2GB up from 1GB), increases the hard drive space (320GB up from 160GB) and adds Gigabit LAN with x86 Windows 7 Home Premium. All of these features comes out cheaper too, with the overall price coming to ¥84,800 (~US$960) – a saving of around US$150.

It appears as though HP has leaked a huge heap of info about some upcoming products they are releasing, including info about new Intel processors and ATI graphics cards, along with the new HP software suite. All of the leaked info looks current and details the new North American Spring 2010 line-up from HP, which by the looks of it is going to be a good line-up.

In the new HP Pavillion desktop computers it appears as though we will be seeing the latest from Intel’s Clarkdale range. The new Core i5-6xx processors will be included, featuring Intel’s Turbo Boost technology that can speed up certain cores depending on the workload at hand. Core i3-5xx processors are also going to be used, however these will feature a lowered L3 cache and no Turbo Boost technology. It is also speculated that the HP TouchSmart will be getting an upgrade to the Arrandale Core i5 and i7s.

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One of the coolest cases I’ve ever seen, the BMW-designed Thermaltake Level 10, is getting a nice fit out from iBUYPOWER. The OEM will chuck into the case an Asus P6T motherboard loaded with a Core i7-920 and 6GB of DDR3-1333 RAM along with a 2GB Nvidia GTX 285. You also get a 128GB Kingston SSD for boot and 1TB HDD for storage and a DVD drive which is upgradeable to a Blu-ray drive. All of that, plus the awesome Level 10 case, starts at US$2,499 from iBUYPOWER right now.

Haven’t managed to get in on the Google Wave action? Well this might be your chance to get a Google Wave invite for yourself so you can explore the new features of Google’s latest social tool. We have 25 invites to share, and here’s how you can get your hands on one:

Simply leave a comment on this post asking for a Google Wave invite, with a legit email in the email field when you post a comment, or in the comment itself. Or you can contact us asking for a Google Wave invite and specifying your email address. We’ll then use the Wave invite station to hand out the invites to you. Get in quickly or the invites might start disappearing.

It’s been a while since Thunderbird 2 was released; two years to be exact, and now it looks like Mozilla has finally got around to giving the mail client a much need update – Thunderbird 3.0. Thunderbird 3 has gone the way of tabs, similar to Firefox and other web browsers, and includes a much more powerful search feature that will also identify related people to your searched messages and does a fantastic job of narrowing down searches to the most relevant messages. Mozilla have also streamlined the email account setup process to make it much easier to get started.

Thunderbird 3 is also a lot faster than previous versions thanks to optimisations, and with the new search feature and filtering options it should be much easier to use as well. If you feel like switching from another mail client such as Outlook or webmail, Thunderbird is completely free, small to download and is available for Windows, Mac and Linux. Download it now or check out the release notes.