Monthly Archives: April 2010
Uniblue – Driver Scanner 2010
Keeping your PC’s scores of drivers up to date is a thankless task, but it’s an essential one if you want to keep your system running smoothly. Uniblue’s Driver Scanner 2010 tries to make this chore as effortless as possible and, despite a couple of annoyances, it succeeds. Windows Update in Vista and 7 does…
TomTom – Start 2
TomTom’s entry-level Start sat-nav first appeared during the second half of 2009, and the new Start 2 keeps the same physical design but brings some welcome additions to the still rather basic feature set. While expensive sat-navs are increasingly stuffed with gizmos and gadgets of varying degrees of usefulness, at the bottom end of the…
Sony Ericsson – Vivaz
Sony Ericsson’s Vivaz is aimed at those who want high megapixel stills and HD ready video shooting alongside a whole host of other top-notch features. So, the list of what is built in includes an 8.1-megapixel stills camera, video shooting to 720p, Wi-Fi, HSDPA, GPS and some support for social networking apps too. The physical…
Olympus – PEN E-PL1
Olympus hit on a winning formula when it decided to revive the retro styling of its original PEN series while throwing in many of the benefits of the digital tech revolution. Following on the popularity of the PEN E-P1 and E-P2, the company has now brought out its third Micro Four Thirds camera, the PEN…
NVIDIA – GeForce GTX 480
The GTX 480 is the new jewel in NVIDIA’s crown, representing the fastest single GPU card ever released by the Santa Clara-based company. As the long-awaited response to ATi’s mighty 5800 series, we can’t remember a more eagerly-awaited video card launch. So after a delay of close to six months, we finally have in our…
Zotac – H55-ITX WiFi
The Mini-ITX Zotac H55-ITX WiFi is built around an Intel H55 chipset and supports the full range of LGA1156 Core i3, i5 and i7 processors. On the I/O panel there are HDMI and DVI-I graphics outputs (Zotac also includes a DVI-to-VGA adapter in the package) and while it is tempting to say that the H55…
Carolina Road Software – Jarte 4.1
Depending on your beliefs, in the beginning the word was God. But since the initial creation of the universe, things have expanded considerably beyond those three letters. We now need keyboards with more than four giant keys (G, O, D and Return), and we require things like word processors in order to be able to…
Xara – Web Designer 6
The idea behind WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) web editing is a good one: you get all the flexibility of DTP-style layout without having to learn a line of code. Although this is an idea most of us can get behind, such products usually have some associated problems. First, the graphic design…
Uniblue – SpeedUpMyPC 2010
Although the lure of inexpensive PCs – and the constant coaxing of Intel – encourages everyone to upgrade their entire system every five minutes, it’s not always necessary. We have a perfectly serviceable Dell Dimension here that’s over five years old and still runs pretty much everything (except proper video editing and lots of multi-track…
Gigabyte – GA-790XTA-UD4 Motherboard
Gigabyte has been on something of a roll in recent months, with its P55A series boards for Core i5 processors making significant inroads into Asus’ market leading position. With the GA-790XTA-UD4 the manufacturer has turned its attention to socket AM3, with the headline-grabbing features being USB 3.0 and 6Gbps SATA support. Current solid state drives…