gistek

Check the focus length on your camera. There may be portrait and landscape settings. Use the portrait setting for pics of the computer and anything within arm's reach of the camera. Use the landscape setting for anything further than your arm. If there's a group setting, use that for things in the same "bedroom-size" room.

Also, keep the camera very still when you press the button until you hear the "click". Sometimes, especially when the light is low, this can take a moment.

Unless you need to show the monitor, use <alt-prt scrn> to capture images from your computer. Some monitors have a flicker effect that our eyes can't see, but is hard to focus on if the camera and monitor are not synchronized. This is the same thing that makes videotaping from a TV screen so difficult. (The videotaping is easy, but eliminating the strobe effect is very difficult.)

Finally, for great action shots, consider getting a camcorder and extracting stills from the video. You don't have to worry about as much when you are shooting and have thousands of frames to choose from to get just the right one.