Monthly Archives: September 1999
Elsa – MicroLink 56K USB
The Universal Serial Bus (USB) came of age last year when Apple and Microsoft finally provided proper support for the standard on their respective iMac and Windows 98 platforms. Connecting a modem to your PC is an obvious use for USB and Elsa’s MicroLink 56K USB modem is a good example to review. One of…
TMC – TI5VGF
While AMD’s Athlon and Intel’s Pentium III processors, in their slot-based motherboards, are garnering much of the attention of press and public at the moment, there’s still a good trade going on in the Socket 7 market. Chips from AMD, IDT and Cyrix are available for the older style Socket architecture; the only difficulty is…
Ezenet – Instabase 4.0e
A company Web site is now technologically and financially within reach of all but the smallest organisation. Unfortunately, while it is quite easy to set up a simple HTML page listing information about your company, some photographs and a few contact phone numbers, that doesn’t really cut the mustard in the more competitive environment of…
Aztech – Riva TNT2
If you take your PC gaming a little more seriously than most, inevitably nVidia’s TNT2 3D graphics chipset will be on your short-list. Since the late spring it’s been the chipset which has taken over from the 3Dfx Voodoo as the 3D gameplay benchmark for PCs and it’s also the chipset that Aztech has chosen…
Rock – Sigma
Sony proved last year with its Vaio range of laptops that notebook PCs don’t have to look like dark grey paving slabs, and many other vendors have since followed suit with sexy laptops of their own. Rock has recently entered the fray with this new Sigma, which combines a good selection of features with a…
Hasbro Interactive – MechWarrior 3
For the purists, it’s been four years since the last true MechWarrior title, MechWarrior II, was released, although there have been some spin-off games in the intervening years that also featured large metal battle bipeds. After the initial flurry of bundling the last game with various 3D graphics cards, things went a little quiet. Now…
Intelliquis – IntelliFix 2000
It’s getting nearer. That big day that IT departments are dreading and lawyers are gleefully anticipating. Y2K, the day of reckoning. The day when we discover whether all the worry was just hype, or whether something as simple as a two-digit date code can really bring the computing world to its knees. Enough of the…
Adaptec – SlimSCSI 1460
Adaptec is the king of SCSI connectivity devices and currently offers two PC Card (PCMCIA) SCSI cards. The 1460 is the jack-of-all-trades model, working with virtually every operating system (including OS/2 and even DR-DOS) along with most SCSI devices. However, if you want to take advantage of UltraSCSI transfer rates you’ll have to splash out…
Panasonic – DVD 632 Kit
Not all DVD-ROM drives are alike. A silly remark, maybe? Not if you might need read compatibility with the recordable DVD standard, DVD-RAM. To date, we know of very few manufacturers who are shipping DVD-ROM drives which can read DVD-RAM discs. Panasonic’s is the SR-8584 unit, which is packaged for retail outlets as part of…
Lernout and Hauspie – Power Translator Pro 6.43
This latest version of Power Translator Pro represents a significant leap forward in language translation software. This advance has been made possible by using new techniques which improve greatly upon the old method of performing a literal word-by-word translation. This software looks at the source text sentence-by-sentence in order to better determine the context of…