Monthly Archives: September 2001
Microsoft – MechCommander 2
Like the first MechCommander game, this new title from Microsoft plays heavily on the MechWarrior franchise. If you don’t know about MechWarrior (and we’d be very surprised if not, since it’s been around for donkeys’ years in at least four incarnations), the idea is based on what could loosely be called a strategy board game,…
Olympus – Camedia C-4040Z
The Olympus Camedia C-4040Z is the latest in a series of compact digital cameras to share the same basic chassis, starting with the 2-megapixel C-2000 launched back in 1999. The C-4040Z is a 4-megapixel update of the successful 3-megpixel C-3040. It’s not the first 4-megapixel camera from Olympus. That honour goes to the Camedia E-10,…
MGI – SoftDVD Max 6.0
The prospect of playing DVD movies on a PC or notebook is quite an appealing one. True, you won’t usually have the luxury of a wide-screen monitor (unless you can plug your PC into your TV) and the computer’s cooling fans can be a bit of a distraction, but playback quality is usually good and…
Best Price – Poweroid 7004
Most PCs come with one processor, one hard drive and one CD or DVD drive, but Best Price has decided to double up in all three places in this admittedly pricey PC. As a result, the machine could be used as a top-end graphics server, perhaps for video-editing work, or as a small network server….
Kingston Technology – DataPak 2GB
Portable storage solutions are becoming increasingly popular, as more users realise the benefits of being able to carry important documents and even e-mails around with them. The problem, though, is capacity. Zip disks are limited to 250MB, which sounds a lot but can quickly be filled, while few USB ‘memory drives’ have capacities over 128MB….
Fujitsu – MPG3409AH-E
We don’t review hard drives very often on IT Reviews, mainly because the days when end-users regularly upgraded their drives are fading into distant memory. Most new PCs come with hard drives so large that the rest of the machine is likely to be obsolete long before the hard drive fills up. This is because…
TerraTec – M3PO Go
We reviewed one of the first home MP3 players from Terratec, the M3PO, more than a year ago. This portable version is based on the same principle, incorporating audio CD and MP3 playback into a single unit. But instead of using a hard drive like the home stereo version, the M3PO Go reads CD-R and…
Matrox – Millennium G550
It seems like Matrox has been in the graphics cards business forever, but in recent times the company has been overshadowed by the likes of ATI and Nvidia and has been left behind in the race for the most powerful 3D graphics cards. On performance alone, this latest card isn’t going to get Matrox back…
CD-ROM Productions – CD-R Suite
It’s surprisingly simple to lose the data on a CD-R. Even with the widespread use of BURN-proof drives, huge data buffers, increasingly clever software and ever-cheaper discs, errors can be made quite easily. The big problem is that often you don’t notice the error until it’s too late. For example, on a couple of occasions…
IBM – Thinkpad X21
The thin, lightweight Thinkpad X21 notebook from IBM has been designed for users who want a fully functional laptop that is easy to carry. While the X21 on its own doesn’t fulfil that need, by adding the optional lightweight media slice it becomes a very useful ultra-portable. Despite being thin, and only weighing 1kg, this…