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When the Asus Eee PC 900 landed in the TechRadar office a month ago, there was an air of excitement.

The buzz was apparent even amongst those behind the scenes-types who wouldn’t normally get excited about what is essentially just a new PC.

And yet when we actually saw the Eee PC 900, the atmosphere fell flat. It looked exactly the same as the original apart form a bigger screen. And a bit of extra storage and memory wasn’t really enough to get anyone excited.

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A U.S. judge has ruled on a nearly US$111 million copyright-infringement decision against TorrentSpy.com, the BitTorrent peer-to-peer search site.

Judge Florence-Marie Cooper, of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California in Los Angeles awarded the judgment to the Motion Picture Association of America, the MPAA announced late Wednesday. Cooper entered a default judgment against the operators of TorrentSpy in December, saying they had destroyed evidence related to an MPAA lawsuit against them.

After months of resistance, retailer Circuit City opened up its books for Blockbuster to complete the process of due diligence to acquire the consumer electronics retailer.

Blockbuster made a public offer in April of up to US$1.33 billion to buy Circuit City, in a deal that would allow the movie rental company to put media content on electronic devices. Blockbuster offered $6 to $8 per share in cash for Circuit City, depending on the results of a check of Circuit City’s books.

While the fabled ‘digital home’ is still yet to materialise in any meaningful way, it’s certainly a lot closer now than it was five years ago.

Media streamers that wirelessly stream music and movies from your PC onto your living room television, are now widely available.

And some people think that the next step is for people to embrace the standalone media PC. It sits under your TV like a games console or a DVD player – except it’s a fully fledged computer running Windows Vista.

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Japan’s Cultural Affairs Agency has proposed adding a fee to the price of Apple iPods and other digital music and video devices to partially compensate rights holders for revenues lost to piracy.

The proposal represents an extension of an existing program that adds the fee to the price of blank recordable media and products such as MiniDisc recorders. Consumers end up paying an additional few tens of yens (tens of U.S. cents) for media under the scheme that started in 1992.

Microsoft has told TechRadar that the COFEE tool it has built to help the Police look into PCs believed to have been used for criminal activity is still in Beta and has not yet been made available to forces in the UK.

Microsoft had announced that its suite of programs – named the Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor or COFEE or short – was already being circulated, but there remains widespread confusion as to whether this is the case.

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