Monthly Archives: March 1999
Sony – Vaio PCG-F190
A relative newcomer to the notebook PC market, Sony made a real splash last year with its sexy little Vaio portable. Aiming to build on the success of that product, the company has launched a couple of additions to the line-up. This one, the PCG-F190, is the most powerful of the Vaio models, based on…
Gremlin – PoolShark
Pool is the perennial social pub game and a source of pride, frustration and occasionally violence. What better subject for a computer game? This way you can practise your trick shots without worrying about blurring your skill with alcohol and coming home with your clothes smelling of smoke. There have been a few pool games…
Hewlett Packard – Jornada 420
Clap eyes on the new HP Jornada 420 and your first reaction is likely to be “Cute, I want one of those”. Hardly surprising, as it’s the first palm sized computer to offer a colour screen, which does look pretty damned groovy. The 320 by 340 back-lit screen can display up to 256 colours, which…
NewSoft – Presto! Mr Photo Gold Edition
There isn’t exactly a shortage of photo-editing and image-manipulation packages on the market, driven even more in recent years by the Internet and the increasing popularity of digital cameras. NewSoft’s latest suite of photo tools is aimed squarely at the consumer. The core program is an explorer-like interface with files and directories, the right-hand pane…
ZyXEL – Omni.net LCD+M
As most users have probably discovered by now, thanks to the ‘impurities’ of the telephone network, 56Kbps modems rarely attain their full rated speeds. Somewhere in the low 40s is more likely and, although this is an improvement on the previous maximum of 33.6Kbps, increasing numbers of people are turning to ISDN for higher speeds….
Panasonic – RR-DR60 IC Memory Recorder
This is not exactly PC hardware, but it’s a small, cute, electronic gadget, so it merits a review. The IC Memory Recorder is basically a small audio recorder for note-taking, but instead of using micro-cassette tapes it is entirely solid state with no moving parts. Speech and any other audio is encoded digitally and then…
Enfish – Tracker Pro
Information is great. It gives you knowledge, power and confidence. As long as it’s organised. If not, searching for an important fact can be like the proverbial haystack and needle situation. That’s bad enough with a pile of paper in an office, but with electronic information bombarding us from e-mails and the Web, the problem…
Lexmark – Photo Jetprinter 5770
Digital imaging is, apparently, taking the world by storm. Despite the fact that digital cameras are still very expensive and offer picture quality that is marginally worse than a disposable 35mm film camera, the versatility of digital imaging, coupled with the lack of film and processing costs, is appealing. Or maybe it’s all down to…
PowerQuest – Lost and Found
It’s easy to lose files, either through ‘user error’ or because of a hardware or software problem. In most cases, once a file has been deleted or corrupted, the data it contains is still present on the hard drive, but actually tracking it down is a near-impossible task without (a) a hex editor and extreme…
Codemasters – Brian Lara Cricket
Cricket? The thwack of leather on willow, Matron? That most noble of English games that wanders on for days on end? The one at which we’re not really very good? Seems like an odd sport to make into a computer game – after all nothing really happens. Except that’s not really the case. Cricket has…