Monthly Archives: May 1999
ViewSonic – VG150 ViewPanel
LCD monitors are becoming increasingly popular, but are still nowhere near dominating the desktop. There are various reasons for that, not least of which is price, and that’s set to rise due to increased manufacturing costs. ViewSonic is a company that’s had a good grip on the conventional CRT (cathode ray tube) monitor market for…
Gremlin – Wild Metal Country
One of the first types of game to appear on the PC, and indeed other computer platforms, was a cute little tank game. It appeared under many different names, but simply involved two (or sometimes more) tanks on a 2D landscape. You chose the elevation of your gun barrel and the power of the shot,…
Fujitsu – Desktop Picobird13
This is one of Fujitsu’s recently-introduced EIDE/UltraDMA hard drives. The Desktop Picobird13, also known as the MPD3173AT, may have a strange name, but it has a lot to offer system builders or end-user upgrade demons looking for a high capacity desktop hard drive. In this instance, high capacity means 17.3GB for the biggest model in…
IDT – WinChip 2A-300
Although you wouldn’t necessarily believe it judging by the company’s marketing campaigns, Intel does not have a total monopoly in the PC processor market (and nor would it want one – that could draw unwelcome attention from government departments). Cyrix and particularly AMD continue to harry the chip giant, with considerable success. But there are…
Terra – V.90 USB modem
More than five years after the USB standard was first proposed, and several years since virtually all new PCs have shipped with USB ports at the rear, manufacturers are really starting to work on flooding the market with USB peripherals. The latest area to come under the USB influence is analogue comms, with this V.90…
Sienna – Starry Night Deluxe
This astronomy package has been out for a few months now, but it’s worth a look because it’s one of the most comprehensive and interesting products of its kind. Astronomy software can veer from the simplistic to the hardcore, but Starry Night Deluxe gets it right, balancing attractive images of the skies with hard data…
Evergreen/AMD – Spectra 333
One of the promises that the PC has often failed to deliver is upgradeability. The concept of the ‘future-proof’ computer has now rightly been laughed into oblivion, but even when Pentium systems were being sold, one of the selling points was Intel’s perceived commitment to a nice long upgrade path. That happened for a while,…
Infogrames – Silver
3D action games too intense for you? Traditional role-playing games too dull? Then have a look at Silver. A role-playing game at heart, there’s plenty here to delight the more shallow player (myself included) who just wants to pick up a sword and get hacking without having to go through the tedious process of learning…
Soyo – SY-6VZA
As Intel’s Celeron processor chips change shape, so must the motherboards that house them. This is Soyo’s board for the new 370-pin chip range; it’s an ATX board with a PGA 370 processor socket. That’s not remarkable in itself, of course, but the SY-6VZA does have one particularly unusual feature. It is based on the…