No more shoving around furniture and sweating over a steaming ear-splitting vacuum cleaner. This latest high-tech robo-vac, The Roomba, does it all.

It vacuums any room (actually multiple rooms) on its own -- no need to even be in the house. It's got its own programmable scheduler; it alerts you when its dust bin is full; it shuts down automatically; it can even recharge itself when its battery gets low.

Will Roomba do the laundry or clean the dishes? No. It's also probably not a satisfactory substitute for a good full-service housekeeper or (in most cases) an average (far less than full-service) spouse-partner.

But this robot does know floors. It doesn't make a huge amount of noise. And, while it's working, it allows you to be playing...about as much as you can reasonably ask from a vacuum (or a spouse-partner for that matter).