Monthly Archives: June 2001
Sony – CDX200E Double-Density CD-RW drive
CD-RW drives are getting more common as their prices drop and more people realise how useful they are. With a single drive you can produce permanent and rewritable back-ups and copies of work. Although the capacity of 650MB on a single CD-RW or CD-R might seem generous, technology moves on and Sony is the first…
Electronic Arts – Clive Barker’s Undying
“Barker?”“Here Sir”“Herbert?”“Here…”“King?… King?”“Uhh, here Sir” Just imagine it… a class full of kiddie horror authors. Naught could be heard but the soft and slightly irksome scratching of the chalk upon the blackboard, as the raven settled on the sill of the open window, its cold, beady yellow eyes traversing the room, flicking its head gradually…
Digital Workshop – Illuminatus Opus
Illuminatus Opus is the successor to Digital Workshop’s very popular multimedia authoring tool, Illuminatus 4.5. It’s ideal for creating anything from a simple slideshow of your holiday pictures to a full-blown corporate presentation or even an educational quiz game. Opus takes what was already a wonderfully powerful and versatile package and adds support for more…
Hercules – Prophet 4500
We reviewed an earlier Prophet card here, but this one’s based on a faster chip; the Kyro II graphics processor from ST Microelectronics. This chip is set into a blue board with a single heat sink and cooling fan. There are no bells and whistles – no TV tuners, S-video output ports or the like…
Intelliquis – Web Site Traffic Builder
One of the problems of running a Web site – arguably the biggest problem, in fact – is letting people know that it’s there. You can spend loads on marketing, but ultimately it’s the search engines that really generate the traffic. Trouble is, search engines are notoriously hard to manipulate, so getting your site into…
Dan Technology – Olympian 1.5 P4
Dan’s Olympian 1.5 P4 is a powerful, if very expensive, well-built system that’s aimed at the grey area between high-level business use and entry-level workstation territory. Most of the high price comes from the P4′s reliance on Rambus memory, and the particular Olympian P4 we looked at came with a whopping 512MB of PC800 memory….
Tiny – Personal Firewall
One doesn’t need an ‘always on’ connection, such as ADSL, to be wary of connecting to the Internet. The threat from hackers and other malicious entities is real enough and a state of paranoia is healthy in this case. Tiny Personal Firewall (TPF) is a ‘free for personal use’ package which acts as a firewall,…
Epson – Stylus Color 980
Epson’s Stylus Color 980 is a big, no-nonsense inkjet printer, capable of printing pages up to oversize A4 in a conventional way, from a paper tray angled at the back of the machine to a telescopic receive tray, which folds down and pulls out from the front. Controls on the printer include buttons for power,…
LG Electronics – Flatron LCD FL885LE
It’s still commonplace for larger flat panel displays to cost the best part of £2,000, so LG’s 18.1-inch Flatron LCD FL885LE has an attention-grabbingly low price. Inevitably, the first reaction something like this provokes is curiosity as to what was missed out to get the cost down, but from the outset, no corner-cutting is evident….
DTP software group test
Legacy is a powerful concept in the world of computing. It explains why your PC boots through DOS, for example – Microsoft had to retain compatibility with the old operating system in case any users out there still ran programs on it. And legacy also explains why PageMaker still exists, now on version 6.5 and…