Monthly Archives: March 2006
Acer – TravelMate 3010
On the surface the Acer TravelMate 3010 looks like a good buy. It’s very neat, it weighs just 1.5kg with the standard battery pack (or 1.65kg with the extended life battery) and it has every connection device you could ask for built into the small chassis (297 x 210 x 24/32mm in size). It’s also…
Sega – Full Auto
Full Auto on the Xbox 360 should, in principal, work. At its core, it aims to take the wild arcade racing of Burnout and add guns to the mix. It then throws in wanton destruction on an at-times staggering scale, drops in a smidgen of nitro boost and then leaves to simmer. Plus there’s a…
Plextor – PX-EH40L
Not many companies tick the right boxes in quite the same manner as Plextor. That’s no surreptitious piece of advertising on our part, but it is appreciation for a company that truly understands the importance of everything working straight out of the box. Bluntly, we can’t remember one of its products that didn’t work first…
Rock Direct – Pegasus 650
Rock Direct’s Pegasus 650 has an interesting solution to the mobile user’s dilemma of graphics performance versus battery life. You know the problem: should you go along the integrated graphics route and get longer battery life at the expense of decent gameplay, or should you go for the dedicated graphics option and sacrifice battery life…
Atari – Tycoon City: New York
New York, New York, it’s a wonderful town… providing you aren’t being mugged, of course. Or shot. That can really take the zing out of an otherwise top night out. Still, we’d rather be both mugged and shot, then set on fire for good measure, than have to sit through Tycoon City’s cut-scenes again. From…
Compaq – Presario SR1639UK
Compaq’s latest addition to the Presario range is pitched at a market segment that is already heaving with products, supplied by companies ranging from the big corporates like Dell down to the smallest OEM in a garage. So the Presario SR1639UK needs to be pretty special to make a difference, yet sad to say it…
ThinkFree – Office
ThinkFree Office is a suite of tools that creates a niche that, at this stage, even OpenOffice 2 can’t equal. Put simply, it’s a trio of applications that you can access and load through a Web browser (it’s a Java-based suite that we tested through FireFox). Naturally that brings with it a selection of interesting…
Various – Google Pack
Viewed in a couple of years’ time, this review could either look like a startling piece of foresight or something that offers predictions even Mystic Meg would struggle to put her name to. Yet is there any company in the world better based to take on Microsoft than Google? Even if they don’t say it,…
Electronic Arts – Rugby 06
The computer is a cheating git. Actually, that’s not quite what we were calling the AI opposition in EA’s latest rugby sim: it was a veritable rainbow of unprintable language, punctuated by the occasional protesting thud of a joypad on our knee. Let’s see… One of our backs gets tackled, the computer turns the ball…
Intuit – QuickBooks 2006 Regular
Forget woodchucks. Here’s a better tongue-teasing conundrum: if a quick look at a book was a flick through, how quick would a thick hick flick through a quick book? The answer? Quick sticks, of course, which is exactly the sort of speed that QuickBooks 2006 aims to help you get your book-keeping done at. After…