Monthly Archives: November 2001
Vivendi – Throne of Darkness
If you’ve ever played Diablo – and let’s face it, most of us have – then you’ll get to grips with Throne of Darkness (ToD) pretty swiftly. It’s built upon the same RPG principles, in fact many facets of the engine, such as the experience allocation, inventory, skill system and so forth are pretty much…
Network Associates – McAfee VirusScan 6.0
Anti-virus software such as this has two key components. There’s the scanner itself, which is used for thorough file checking and virus removal, and a memory-resident program that watches for virus-like activity all the time your PC is switched on. Inevitably with the latter there’s a trade off between scanning efficiency and overall PC performance,…
Mesh – Matrix XP 1900 R-85
These new processor speed-grades just keep on coming. The 1900+ Athlon XP from AMD was announced just a few weeks ago and already Mesh has a PC wrapped around one, to give pretty amazing performance. When you look at what’s fitted to the system, this isn’t altogether surprising. As well as the 1.6GHz Athlon XP…
Maxtor – Personal Storage 3000LE
External hard drives offer a convenient way of storing your data, but they typically transfer data a lot slower than internal IDE or SCSI drives. By using the latest USB 2.0 protocol, Maxtor has attempted to address this performance failing with the Personal Storage 3000LE. USB has come a long way since its inception. Although…
IBM – Netvista X41
When IBM first launched the Netvista series of compact, all-in-one PCs they were legacy-free and used a combination of PC and notebook technologies. While they certainly saved space, their performance was nothing to write home about. The latest in this line, the Netvista X41, completely turns this concept on its head and is a powerful…
Symantec – Norton Personal Firewall 2002
With an always-on connection such as DSL or cable, your computers are open to the world on a permanent basis, giving any malicious person the opportunity to attack them. Firewalls, which are also useful for dial-up users, are designed to act as defences against Internet-borne attacks. They keep a watch on all incoming and outgoing…
Epson – Perfection 1650 Photo
There are two versions of the Epson Perfection 1650 flat bed A4 scanner; a standard version and a ‘Photo’ version. Both are equipped with a USB 1.1 interface, but the latter version we tested incorporates a transparency illuminator in the scanner lid. This is neat as no bulky additional light box is required. Despite housing…
Elsa – Gladiac 721 TV-Out
It’s that time of year again: time for Nvidia to announce a new range of graphics chips. The latest release is the Titanium series, consisting of three products. Two of these are based around the GeForce3 core – the Ti 500 and Ti 200 – while the third, the Geforce2 Ti, heralds the return of…
01 Communique – Communicate v.10
Communicate (there’s supposed to be an exclamation mark at the end of the name, but…) is an all-in-one fax, voice and data messaging system. It is aimed at the home office user who wants the features of a fax/voice server without having to pay for expensive hardware or software. Designed to work over a dial-up…
Hewlett Packard – PSC 950
Hewlett Packard played a big part in inventing the All-in-One device category (combined printer, scanner and copier) and the latest model to join the range, the PSC 950, moves the genre on to new levels. The new machine is smaller than previous models, such as the OfficeJet G85, but then it contains no document feeder…