An average week of products at PC Authority's labs contains a laptop or two, a printer, a camera, perhaps a motherboard, case or hard drive. And then, there's the odd, quirky little products that beg to be reviewed slightly differently.

d_skin

Remember at primary school, covering all your books in Contact -- that sticky-backed plastic waterproof covering that always seemed to leave airbubbles covering the face of your favourite sports star or celebrity?

d_skin: like contact for your CDs and DVDs, only without the airbubbles or sticky-backing

d_skin attached to a disc: fiddly to attach, but it seems to work

You can relive the nostalgia with d-skin. It's like contact for your CDs and DVDs, only without the airbubbles or sticky-backing. But it will protect your CDs and DVDs from marks and scratches. The idea is to take a thin laser-readable plastic and, using snap-attach edges, affixing them to your discs. You can then pop the disc in a drive and read it, or leave it lying around without running the risk of dust, dirt and scratches.

At first, we were a little sceptical, but a test run with 10 DVDs and CDs ranging from home-burned discs to commercial games and software proved that the skins work, although they're a bit fiddly to get onto the disc. A couple of skinned-DVDs wouldn't read in one of the drives we tried them on (an LG GSA-4167B), but all drives could read CDs covered with a d-skin.

It may be a case of suck-it-and-see to see whether your drive may be one of those that can't read the d-skinned discs.

We also attempted to try it in a slot-load drive, but the skin appears to make the disc too big to fit into slot-load drives effectively.

You can watch a demo at www.dskin.com, and d_skin is available in Australia from the distributor, Newee Computers

Verdict: fiddly but useful.

Stick'nGo

Here at PC Authority, we all have desks festooned with phone chargers, USB cables, power cords, connectors, adaptors and wires. That also means that they tend to go walkabout when someone needs a spare Nokia cable, or Blackberry power adapter, or whatever.

Fortunately, Stick'nGo has an answer for that, in the form of sticky labels designed for different cable types, each emblazoned with your contact details. The labels are water-resistant, can't be easily pulled off, and can even be bent and folded -- they'll bounce back to their original shape.

Stick'n'Go: 48 labels per packet

Stick'n'Go labels attached: for the very, very organised

Stick'nGo also managed to send the most appealing PR package we've seen in a while. Apart from a pack of Stick'nGo, they also included a hand-written endorsement and complete set of labels showing off the usefulness.

There's 48 labels in a pack, in four different colours, for $22.50 from Stick'nGo

Verdict: good for busy offices and family cables