1. All Hail Grads! Go Dads! The Tom’s 2008 Gift Guide is Here!

If you’ve been waiting for gifting inspiration to strike for your 2008 graduates, or wondering what to get the old man for his big day on June 15, wait no longer. The Tom’s Guide Dads and Grads Buyer’s Guide for 2008 is here to help you put a check beside every person on your gift list. Stay with us as we guide you through a plethora of techno gadgets and goodies carefully selected to fit most budgets and potential recipients.

This year, our roving eyes caught a svelte smart phone, a genuine multi-module, do-it-yourself gadget array, plus a nice high-def camcorder and an equally spiffy compact video projector with an integrated DVD player. Next, we picked out a super-duper DVD burner to which you can connect a VCR or camcorder and burn DVDs directly, without requiring a PC to get involved, along with some efficient video transcoding software that lets you pick one or more video clips that you can reformat for download to your favorite media player or gaming system. Our next foray is into the area of media peripherals, with a house-rocking digital media networking manager and receiver as well as a keyboard with its own iPod dock and media card reader.

Our gift ideas for graduates and dads continue with PC pieces and parts and a slammin’ little notebook. We recommend a "best-buy" motherboard whose bang beats the bucks it will cost. Then, we suggest a super-cool hard disk enclosure eminently suited for big SATA drives, and finger a fabulous and relatively fast and affordable solid state disk drive for PC builders and upgraders.

Just for the big grins that it’s sure to elicit from its recipients, we also suggest a bright and sizable 22" LCD display. This portion of our list concludes with a nod for the newly released Lenovo Y510 notebook PC, which combines an Intel Core Duo processor with a solid case and sweet keyboard to offer great value to those ready for their next (or first) notebook PC.

We hope you’ll find this year’s Buyer’s Guide for Dads and grads as much fun to read as we found it to write. With a little something for every price range, and just about every set of technical interests or needs, you should be able use it to at least check off some entries on your gift list!