Monthly Archives: July 2008
Pentax – K20D
When you first take Pentax’s K20D DSLR out of the box you’d be forgiven for believing the retailer had sent you the wrong camera, as its bodywork is virtually identical to that of its predecessor, the K10D. It has exactly the same dimensions – 101 (H) x 141.5 (W) x 70 (D) mm – but…
Eidos – Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures
The Massively Multiplayer Online market has never appeared as crowded as the present, with a seemingly unending flood of new titles arriving on the shelves (or more likely, waiting to be downloaded) every month. Yet for every successful World of Warcraft and Lord of the Rings there are many that fail to take off (recent…
AMD – Phenom X4 9850 Black Edition
AMD’s first stab at a quad-core processor was a bit of a turkey, as Phenom was plagued by a TLB (Translation Lookaside Buffer) error that required a temporary fix before the processor could be launched. Although none of us were clear about the function of the TLB, we rapidly learnt that the hot fix for…
Penny Arcade Adventures – On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness
It isn’t just the precipice that’s slick in this combat oriented point-and-click adventure; it’s the production values too. The game’s comic book art style is beautifully realised, with smartly rendered 3D graphics blending seamlessly with 2D comic strip cut-scenes. Precipice, as we’ll call it for short, is an adventure that doesn’t just have graphical style….
Elonex – ONEt
Elonex’s project to produce a £100 laptop has spawned a secondary Ultra Mobile Computer (UMC), rather confusingly called the ONEt. The name may only be slightly different from the company’s ultra-budget handheld, but the design and specification is quite a bit better; not surprising, since the price is £80 higher, unless you’re in education. If…
Actinic – Business v9
Actinic has been around for a long time now and we’ve been impressed by every new release of this popular e-commerce application. However, as the years roll by, new features and enhancements have become a lot less obvious, with nothing hugely significant in the long list of tweaks to be found in the latest Actinic…
2K Sports – Top Spin 3
A 47MB update greeted us as we loaded up Top Spin 3 for the first time. Add on the installation time and it was a fair while from inserting the disc before we were able to go near a virtual tennis court. Still, when we did get there, we found the Top Spin franchise in…
Acronis – Snap Deploy 3.0 for Workstation
As well as disaster recovery, disk imaging can be used to deploy new PCs without having to install an operating system and then configure application software and custom settings every time. Snap Deploy from Acronis takes this one step further, adding tools to enable images to be pushed out to bare PCs and configure them…
Xerox – DocuMate 262i
There are scanners designed to transfer your photo prints to JPEGs, scanners designed to convert your transparencies to TIFFs and scanners whose sole purpose in life is to help create electronic records of paper documents. Xerox’s DocuMate 262i falls firmly into the last of these categories. It can scan up to 38 pages per minute…
Nintendo – Cooking Guide: Can’t Decide What To Eat?
Nintendo continues its crusade into the casual gaming arena, and having told us we’re overweight (Wii Fit), dim (Brain Training), half blind (Sight Training) and terrible at maths (Maths Training), the firm is now focusing on teaching us to cook. But this is no Cooking Mama. Instead this is, almost literally, a cookbook on cartridge….