Monthly Archives: July 2001
Abit – Siluro T400 TV Out
At a time when the GeForce 3 graphics chip is dominating the gamers’ news pages, here’s a cheaper, less ostentatious rival – albeit from the same stable. At the core of this card is Nvidia’s GeForce 2 MX400 chip, the ‘boosted’ version of the standard GeForce 2. This chip runs at a core speed of…
NEC – Versa UltraLite
The sub-notebook category of PCs represents something of a contradiction. When faced with the latest slimline, ultraportable notebook, the gasps of admiration and desire from onlookers are audible. When it comes to actually buying a new notebook, however, most people opt for more sensible machines, with larger screens, more features and better keyboards. Partly this…
ScanSoft – OmniPage Pro 11
Back when OmniPage was developed and sold by Caere, there was an ongoing battle with Xerox’s OCR software. It seemed that a new version of each product was released on a monthly basis, which helps explain why OmniPage Pro is now on version 11. This optical character recognition software is pretty much best of breed….
Belkin – Regulator Pro Gold Series 525VA UPS
Is your PC at risk from mains power failure? With solar flares (yes, really) and extreme weather-related threats to electricity supplies in the news a lot these days, mains power reliability is not 100 percent guaranteed. If you have to share your electricity supply with heavy duty electrical machinery, power protection could also prevent unforeseen…
Atlas – Meridian
If you’re looking for stunning performance from your desktop PC, but at a sensible price, then you have to be considering Athlon systems with DDR (Double Data Rate) memory. Most of these systems are faster than Pentium 4-based PCs, as well as being considerably cheaper. One such example is this Atlas Meridian 1.33, which in…
Teco – Relisys TF785
Teco is considerably better known in the Far and Middle East than in the UK. The company makes various PC components, including monitors such as this one. The TF785 is part of the ‘Superior’ line, which is quite an achievement given the price. Other products, in the ‘Intro’ line, for example, are available for a…
Eidos – Gangsters 2
There’s only one thing stopping you from playing Gangsters 2 and that’s your middle name. If it’s Mark, John or – heaven forbid – Brian, you can forget it. It needs to be something like “the shark”, “lightning”, “hands” or “derringer”. Y’know, like Marty “the blade” Cappuci, or Luigi “the cornetto” Higgs (feared and known…
Hewlett Packard – Vectra VL800
The latest addition to Hewlett Packard’s Vectra range is also the fastest. Powered by a 1.7GHz Pentium 4, backed up by 256MB of PC800 Rambus memory, the VL800 is powerful enough to cope with all of today’s business applications. It is a mostly tool-free system with the added advantage of having a decent case lock…
McAfee – PGP Personal Security 7
We’re big fans of encryption here at IT Reviews, thanks mainly to the UK government’s increasingly misguided attempts at privacy invasion (see here for example). So convenient data encryption software such as this is right up our street. We reviewed an earlier version of this PGP software here, but this new package has some useful…
Sony – Vaio PCG-FX101
The Sony Vaio PCG-FX101 is strange. This is because it looks very ordinary. It looks suspiciously like any other OEM notebook, knocked-up from cases bought in bulk from some Taiwanese factory and full of bog standard components. This is odd because, upon entering the notebook market just a few years ago, Sony built up a…