Monthly Archives: October 2000
Dell – Inspiron 5000e G750VT
Dell must know that it’s on to a good thing with its Inspiron 5000 series notebook, since it improves the specification in various ways but doesn’t change the design. This is what’s happened with the latest version, which now features a punchy Pentium III/750MHz SpeedStep processor and a vast IBM Travelstar hard disk capable of…
Amacom – Flipdisk USB
Amacom’s unique and strange-looking Flipdisk, which has been around for a couple of years, is a blue (and now translucent) gadget, about the size of a large palmtop computer. It has a built-in PCMCIA (PC Card) connector at one end and a compact parallel port connector at the other. Inside this uniquely-styled packaging is a…
Hard Drive Software – RedHand Pro 6
What’s the most destructive, hostile environment for any computer? Is the laptop-using sales bod’s car boot? Or a publishing house where the keyboards are used as ashtrays? Not even close. Obviously it’s a school. Nothing comes close to the devious, cunning malice with which school kids will hack away at the PC, changing Windows settings,…
ATI – Radeon 32MB DDR 3D
We’ve said it before, but we may not say it again; ATI display cards have tended to lag behind some rivals in terms of ultimate 3D game performance. Now we can report that ATI has stormed the 3D gaming world with its new-generation Radeon 3D graphics family. Radeon technology is a real challenger to nVidia’s…
Iiyama – TXA3813MT LCD monitor
Despite the fact that a great many people would welcome much wider use of TFT-based monitors for desktop PCs, the price of even the more basic models hasn’t fallen much recently and this is keeping the lid on volume sales. This is hardly surprising when you consider the cost of a typical 15-inch flat screen…
Microsoft – AutoRoute 2001
AutoRoute 2001, the latest (and just a shade early) upgrade to this well-established route planning tool, now covers roads and cities in continental Europe as well as Great Britain and includes GPS support. However, in most other respects, little has changed since the product’s previous release last year. As far as basic journey planning tasks…
Ricoh – MP9060A DVD/CD-RW Combo drive
Ricoh’s MP9060A is one of the first drives available to read DVD and CD discs, as well as being able to write CD-Rs and CD-RWs. To do this it uses two different lasers, with different wavelengths and powers, for the different types of media. The drive is easy to fit, sliding into any available 5.35-inch…
Ontrack – ZipMagic 4.0
We’ve reviewed a previous version of ZipMagic here (a year ago to the day, bizarrely). But now that all the millennium product-naming nonsense has disappeared, we can go back to the old-fashioned version numbers. This is version 4.0 of an application that takes a simple idea and executes it elegantly. As you’ll know if you’ve…
Havas Interactive – Diablo II
After what seems like an ice age of waiting, developer Blizzard has finally managed to get the sequel to its hit RPG Diablo out of the door and onto the shelves. As ever when a game has a lengthy development time, the question is was it worth the wait? Another question you could quite feasibly…
IBM – ThinkPad A20m
IBM has recently rebranded its ThinkPad range of notebooks into two broad categories, with an A or a T prefix distinguishing between them. A-series machines are considered desktop alternatives, while the T-series is aimed at users wanting more portable, lightweight computing on the move. The A20m isn’t at the top of the new range, but…