Chris Mellor, Techworld, com

This week on the PCWorld Podcast, editors Robert Strohmeyer, Elsa Wenzel, and Nate Ralph are joined by PCWorld Sales Director and veteran road warrior Gabe Rogol for an in-depth discussion of high-tech productivity tools and the best techniques for using technology to stay on top of a heavy workload.

At the heart of any good productivity system, we identify three pillars: capturing everything, outcome-oriented thinking, and a focus on next actions. Our podcasters explain how they put desktop and mobile software and Web-based tools to work to keep their action lists rolling along.

It's January again, and that means the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is about to begin. This year, we'll see some huge strides in laptop and desktop PC performance, a massive wave of new smartphones running Google's Android OS, and more tablets than you can shake a fist at.

Join PCWorld editors Robert Strohmeyer, Jason Cross, Ginny Mies, and Nate Ralph as they look forward to the week's hottest tech trends, and be sure to check back often at PCWorld.com for the latest news from the show floor in Las Vegas.

Curious about the options out there for protecting your new iPad? Here's a look at some of the bags and cases on the way.

The Bloomberg Terminal is the de facto standard machine for any professional working in finance. And it doesn't come cheap, costing about $1,600 per month.

But what about the rest of us? How can we possibly stand up to traders with near-unlimited resources and lightning fast data?

You can, of course, save the contents of a Mail mailbox as an archive. But the messages in those archives can only be read if you import the archive back into Mail. What if you want to archive those messages as an easy-to-read-and-search text file? Reader royhinckley has a solution that seems obvious, but has never been published on MacOSXHints.com before:

When I wanted to archive e-mail messages as text, I spent nearly an hour looking through Apple.com for an export menu, script, or third-party software that would do it for me. Then I found the too-obvious solution: select the group of messages you want to archive (no need to expand threads) and choose Save As. At the bottom of the Save As window, make sure the Format pop-up is set to Rich Text. Mail will then save the selected messages (expanding threads as necessary) to a single RTF file, complete with images and other attachments.

Given the amount of hype that preceded the iPad's release, it's hard to believe that it would bear any great surprises not touted by Apple or that it could possibly live up to expectations. Still, when we unpacked our iPads on April 3 and used them over the next three weeks, we found unexpected delights as well as features that made us go "Hmm…."

With the Wi-Fi iPad approaching its first month on the market-and the 3G-enabled models set to arrive at the end of this week-here's a rundown of what surprised and disappointed us with Apple's latest mobile device.

Sometimes it'd be nice to be able to put just your Mac's display to sleep, without knocking out the entire machine. For example, say you've scheduled a backup utility to run in the middle of the night. You want your Mac to wake up (and then, when it's done, put itself back to sleep). But you don't want its screen to be blazing away the whole time.

If you were sitting at the keyboard, you could press Shift-Control-Eject to sleep the screen. But what if (as in the scenario above) you're not at your keyboard when you want the screen alone to sleep? MacOSXHints.com reader Lutzifer has an AppleScript that could help.

Ever need to optimize the reception at a specific point on a wireless network? If so, the following tip from MacOSXHints.com reader ALT147 could help.

I recently had to connect to a wireless network operating from a point more than 100 meters away from the base station and in a metal shed--not the best environment for wireless communication!

Whenever we write about applications such as HandBrake or RipIt, we get comments asking about whether ripping your DVDs to enjoy in a different format is OK to do. Here are answers to some of the questions people have regarding the subject.

Is DVD ripping illegal?

Dell's 3330dn monochrome laser printer may not look exceptional, with its compact footprint, low price, and rather basic feature set. But it offers impressive speed and print quality, plus plenty of connectivity and other ways to grow. It would be a good choice for a busy small or medium-size workgroup.

The 3330dn blew through our formal lab tests. On a PC, the 3330dn printed plain-text pages at a swift 23.8 pages per minute, and it handled a variety of color graphics at a good average speed of 7.5 ppm. As often happens with printers, the 3330dn ran slower when connected to a Mac, turning in page rates of 18 ppm for plain text, and 4.3 ppm for a document with mixed text and color graphics (printed as grayscale). Text quality was perfect, but graphics quality was marred by noticeable banding and a limited midrange of grays that made round objects and shadowy areas look too dark or too flat.

Apple has released Mac OS X 10.6.3 v1.1, what is essentially an update to its recent update for Snow Leopard. It contains a typical round of stability, compatibility, and security fixes for Mac OS X, though apparently not enough to warrant a bump to 10.6.4.

Included in v1.1 of 10.6.3 are improvements to QuickTime X, OpenGL-based apps, coloring messages in Mail, and printing reliability. This update also resolves issues with opening files with some special characters in Rosetta apps, color problems with HD content in iMovie, recurring events in iCal when connected to an Exchange server, and it improves performance of Logic Pro 9 and Main Stage 2 under 64-bit mode. Apple digs into greater detail in its release notes.

It really is the year when everything is happening in desktop virtualization. Citrix, which has been particularly active in this field, has made a push in another direction by making what it calls a "strategic investment" into Kaviza, a company that looks to bring desktop virtualization to small businesses.

The unspecified Citrix investment has been made to develop Kaviza's VDI-in-a-Box service, the company's desktop virtualization offering for SMEs, an appliance that automates the provisioning, load-balancing and management of virtual desktops. The company claims that the rollout can be carried out considerably more cheaply than the cost of providing an desktop PC.