Aug. 12--THE GIZMO: Gearing up for school.

In my day, back-to-school prep focused on buying spiral notebooks and maybe a bookbag. Today, the options are a lot more high-tech and interesting.

DESIGN YOUR DORM: The new Web site Design Your Dorm (www.designyourdorm.com) invites freshmen to view their dorm room in a 3-D format. Try shifting items around. Then drag in, install (and maybe buy from Amazon.com) virtual items.

Design Your Dorm's first official partner school, the University of Pennsylvania, also hooks up roommates to share decorating notions online.

Site developers Bryce Widelitz and Taylor Robinson have also floor-planned freshman dorms at Penn State, Rutgers New Brunswick, Purdue, the University of Toledo, the University of Arizona , Arizona State, Northern Arizona University and a mess of California schools.

LAPTOP VS. NETBOOK: There are some pretty fantastic deals for back-to-school computer shoppers. One hypermarket recently blew out a well-featured Compaq Presario laptop for a mere $298. But PCs priced around that figure are mostly those cute new "netbooks" running Windows XP on a 10-inch (or smaller) screen with a fairly tight keyboard/touch pad.

Great for classroom note-taking, these petite three-pounders often have a decent (160 GB) hard drive but require an external CD/DVD drive to download software, watch movies, burn music and the like.

One standout is the new Toshiba mini NB205 (about $350), which has a nine-hour-capacity (six-cell) battery, a shock-resistant hard drive and a USB port with "sleep and charge" functionality for connected devices.

Moving up to the $500-plus range, a shopper finds lots of name-brand laptops with full-size keyboards and 15.6-inch screens like the Acer AS5810-4657, a $547 Wal-Mart/Sam's Club special.

These workhorses have a faster processor, more memory, 320GB hard drive and CD/DVD reader/burner. Windows Vista is preinstalled (ugh!), but the latest models promise a free and easy upgrade to the much-improved Windows 7 come fall. (XP computers don't come with a free upgrade, and a Windows 7 install will entail moving files to an external hard drive.)

BITING THE APPLE: While MacBooks still start at a grand, back-to-school deals throw in an iPod, either a high-capacity traditional unit or a low-GB iPod touch that opens up the wonderful world of downloadable apps, free e-mailing and more in a Wi-Fi zone.