Monthly Archives: May 2000
Umax – Actionbook 345T
Notebooks costing less than a grand including VAT have a regrettable tendency to be complete crap, so we approached the Umax Actionbook 345T with some circumspection, eyes open for the killer defect that would consign it to the skip. The big question of course is ‘How did they do it?’, to which the first part…
S3/Diamond – Viper II Z200
At the moment, the higher end of the graphics card market is pretty much under the stranglehold of Nvidia’s GeForce technology. And with good reason; they’re very nice cards, aside from the odd stability issue. There’s one drawback though – you pay the price for this speed, with even the cheapest GeForce cards sitting just…
Sage – Instant 2000 V6
From the number of folk out there using one Sage product or another, you’d think that Sage was the only player in the budget accounting field. It isn’t, but at the last count the company had over 2 million users world-wide and more than 3,200 employees, which gives it a big influence. At the bottom…
TerraTec – M3PO
MP3′s great. You can listen to music on the move with a pocket-sized player (see here for details), store ten times as many tracks on a CD as is possible with conventional recordings, and download new tunes quickly and easily from the Web. What more could you want? Well, two things. First, an in-car MP3…
Activision – Star Trek Armada
Aliens. They’re everywhere. Whether they’re humanoids with Cornish pasties Sellotaped to their foreheads, pointy ears or ridiculously bulging Mekon-style heads. Or your more difficult to read gelatinous blob multi-pod type of creature. Whom or whatever, as a representative of the Federation standing for peace, it seems they are out to make your life miserable. The…
HP – LaserJet 3150
Hewlett Packard has two ranges of multi-function device, one based around inkjet technology and the other around laser engines. The LaserJet 3150 is a member of the second group and is a fairly substantial machine using a mono laser engine and a separate scanning head. There are two, near-vertical paper bins set in the top…
Toshiba – Tecra 8100
The latest Tecra is a typically businesslike offering aimed at the corporate bulk purchaser equipping its workforce. The core spec is middle of the road, even slightly conservative, with a Pentium III/500 in the driving seat, flanked by the slightly underweight 64MB of SDRAM usually fitted to corporate machines, along with one of Tosh’s own…
Agfa – SnapScan Touch
Agfa’s SnapScan Touch scanner combines some trendy design with high scan quality for a budget device. Although it has a cream body, it has a translucent white lid with a coloured insert, which can be changed to any of the six colours supplied. This should keep the iMac fraternity happy, as should the scanner’s USB…
Microsoft – Asheron’s Call
Some games are not so much games as a way of life. To certain people, that is… sad lonely individuals, who spend long hours hunched over their PCs in their dimly lit bedrooms, naught but decaying pizza boxes and half-empty coke cans for company. Certainly no-one who writes for IT Reviews could fit this description….