Monthly Archives: April 2005
PowerColor – X850XT Platinum Edition
Retail graphic cards based around the fastest available GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) are notoriously difficult to find, so any addition to the channel is always good news. PowerColor’s latest card, the X850XT Platinum Edition, is, as you might guess from the name, built around ATI’s current flagship processor; the Radeon X850XT Platinum Edition. The Radeon…
SpeedTouch – 716g
Retailing at just under £100 (plus VAT), the SpeedTouch 716g offers the home and small business user a great deal of broadband and networking functionality for not very much money. To start with you get a broadband router ready to plug straight into a BT line and connect to the Internet using both current ADSL…
Acer – TravelMate 8104WLMi
Not so long ago the trend from notebook manufacturers was to make them as small and light as possible, as the only people who seemingly used laptops were travelling corporate warriors. Times have changed and now notebooks are seen by many home and business users as a sleek and compact alternative to the once mighty…
LaCie – d2 External SATA Hard Drive
Serial ATA, or SATA, is fast becoming the standard for high-speed hard drive interfaces in PCs. It’s faster and uses simpler cabling than its older, parallel ATA counterpart. However, until now, virtually all SATA drives have had to be internal ones, running from a SATA controller on the system board. What LaCie has done with…
ScanSoft – Dragon NaturallySpeaking 8 Mobile
I well remember my first experiences of speech-to-text software. The long training periods with new applications teaching them to recognise my voice, which because it was so different from an American voice seemed to present an almost insurmountable problem. Speaking slowly, trying to sound as BBC as possible, endless editing to correct errors, waiting for…
Adobe – Creative Suite 2
Adobe announced the upgrade to its best-selling collection of design software in April, with a view to begin shipping throughout the US in May and to UK customers by the end of June. This review is based on the final beta release. The original Creative Suite appeared at the end of 2003, bringing together several…
ECS – 915-A
A dream motherboard for system builders and home enthusiasts alike would be a motherboard that supported a variety of different sub-system architectures. Ideal for system builders because they could use a single design of board throughout a large range of PCs, and ideal for the home user as it would be an easier route to…
Firebox – VoIP Cyberphone with Skype
Voice over IP is increasingly popular and it’s not difficult to see why. Get yourself some free software and a headset of some kind, and you can make free calls to anyone, anywhere, over the Internet. For some people, though, setting up software and hardware can be daunting. If you are looking for a low…
Palit – GeForce 6200 TurboCache
The seemingly unlimited rise in the power and performance of high-end graphics cards has enabled new technologies and features to filter down to entry-level graphics chips, allowing for more capable cards in the lower market segments. In the case of the GeForce 6200 TurboCache, nVidia has combined a new technology, PCI Express, with one that…
Intuit – QuickBooks Regular 2005
We’ll make no secret of the fact that we like Intuit’s QuickBooks software. We’ve used it for running our own accounts in the past and we were impressed by the enhancements implemented in recent incarnations of the product. But can QuickBooks 2005 keep this gold standard up? It certainly continues the tradition with crisp, clean…