Gift ideas: USB drive, 'The Sims 2' or iPod

Deseret News (Salt Lake City), Nov 30, 2004 by James Derk Scripps Howard News Service

As the holidays approach, I get lots of questions about gifts for computer users. Here are a few bits of advice.

-- There are lots of USB hard drives on the market now. These tiny marvels are simply incredible. Considering that one can now store a gigabyte of information on a chip that will fit easily on a key ring is amazing. (I once paid $499 for 20K of memory.) If anything these things are getting too small.

The Crucial Gizmo! is a good example of the state-of-the-art. It offers no moving parts, USB 2.0 compatibility, a blistering transfer speed of 480 megs a second and low price ($39 for 256 megs, $64 for 512.) This is the perfect thing to bring home files from the office or transfer files from a desktop to a laptop or vice versa.

Details at www.crucial.com.

-- "The Sims 2" is not your ordinary computer game. Consider these excerpts from an upcoming patch: "A Sim whose fiance dies can now become engaged again" and "Maids can now clean up pizza boxes and baby bottles." The original is arguably the best-selling computer game of all time, and this one has the tall order to improve upon a classic.

All you do in this game (and it's a lot) is manage the lives of autonomous little computer people. You decide how the "family" you create lives, how they interact and how they manage their lives.

There is no good way to review a game as large and involved as this one. Suffice to say if someone on your list is the Type A personality we all know and love, "The Sims 2" is the right choice. (For Windows PCs) About $45 from www.ea.com

-- For music lovers out there, the Apple iPod (and its Mini cousin) remain the gold standard in terms of design and "coolness" to me. This is a company and a product that seems to be firing on all cylinders. As more competitors are released, expect this field to become crowded, but the iPod and the related iTunes download service are the gold standard.

WEEKLY WEB WONDER: Check out the Web site for the singer Kasey Chambers at www.kaseychambers.com.

James Derk is co-owner of CyberDads, a computer repair company, and a computer columnist for Scripps Howard News Service. His e-mail address is jim@cyberdads.com.