Hareware Reviews

It seems it’s now the law. Once, a keyboard was a simple tool acting as the interface between you and your computer. That was deemed simply not enough.

Now, from the humble computer keyboard, you need one-touch buttons to control much of your computer’s talents. Music? Check. Web access? Yup. There’s even a thing called F-Lock these days too.

The same goes for the mouse. Two buttons? Pah! Now it’s scroll wheels, optical, lasers, added buttons and not a wire in sight.

But is this all superfluous decoration, or is there value in forking out decent amounts of cash for desksets? That’s what we’ve all gathered here to find out. So settle back as we put three of the latest cordless desksets head to head.

In the home it’s common to install separate printer and scanner units, but that can be a real pain in the office. For one thing there’s usually not much space and for another you want to keep IT equipment out of the way.

If you add a fax and a photocopier to the equation then the situation can rapidly get out of control as that could mean a total of four boxes all vying for desk space and a plug point. Heavy users of print services will have little choice except to buy or lease a suitable laser printer, but many small offices will find that an inkjet Multi Function Device or MFD, sometimes called an all-in-one, will fulfil their needs.

There are many types of MFD, and while they will all include a printer and scanner, which in turn gives a copy function, a fax and network connection are optional extras. To add to the confusion, many MFDs include a Direct Printing facility to make life easier when you want to print photos from a digital camera, which may be of use for some people, while being of little value to others.

There can be significant variance in print quality and print speed between one MFD and another, and of course there’s the thorny issue of the cost of consumables which can come as a nasty shock. You can be quite sure that there is an MFD out there which is perfect for your needs, but finding it may take some detective work, which is where we come in.

Although AGP isn’t yet a dead technology for graphics cards, it’s rapidly moving on to the endangered list as PCI Express grows in popularity. Motherboards that support PCI Express have a large chunk of data bandwidth assigned to this new bus which is usually divided up into 20 lanes.

Of these 20 lanes, 16 are dedicated to a slot for a PCI Express 16x graphics card, or PCI-E 16x for short, and there will also be one or two short PCI-E 1x slots. Although we have yet to see expansion cards that use PCI-E, other than graphics cards, you can be sure that they will start to make an appearance during this year.

Athlon 64 and Pentium 4 motherboards that support PCI Express also have conventional PCI slots but you will usually have to choose between AGP or PCI Express graphics as very few motherboards support both types of graphics.

The real strength of PCI Express is that it has a huge capacity for future expansion in data bandwidth whereas AGP has almost reached the limits of the technology. PCI Express has two particularly neat tricks, one for the high end of the market and the other for the low end.

Budget PCI Express graphics cards can be supplied with very little onboard memory, say 32MB, to save on the cost of components and the graphics card can then use system memory for 3D work. Although this is slower than using onboard memory it is perfectly satisfactory for slower graphics chips such as the GeForce 6200.

At the high end we have dual graphics card technologies such as Nvidia’s SLI (Scalable Link Interface) where the motherboard has two PCI Express graphics card slots. The graphics cards work in tandem to either power up to four monitors on the desktop, or they can work in a piggy-backed fashion to double the power of the graphics chip, which will be of interest to gamers.

So let’s have a look at six PCI Express graphics cards to see what’s on offer.

Want to join the Voice over IP (VoIP) revolution and make free phone calls via the Internet? Then you’ve a number of choices, including software to run on your PC and custom IP phones to plug into your network. Alternatively you can opt for an ADSL router with a VoIP adapter built in, which is what we’re looking at in this group test.

As well as the adapter to convert phone calls into IP packets and back again, the routers featured here all use a protocol called SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) to register with an online VoIP service provider. Once registered you can then make and receive calls both to other SIP users and, via the service provider’s gateway, to subscribers on the ordinary public switched telephone network (PSTN). The SIP calls are free, with low rates for calls made to the PSTN, even those abroad.

SIP can also be used with softphones and IP phones but by building the technology into a router you end up with a much neater solution, better able to avoid problems caused by network address translation (NAT) and firewall settings. Plus you can use an ordinary analogue phone with one or more connectors on the router into which existing handsets can be attached. Added to which you can use the handset as an ordinary dial-up phone in the event of a power or hardware failure.

Of course you also get a range of standard router features such as firewall protection and, in some cases VPN support. Some even come with a bundled subscription to an online SIP service making them relatively easy to configure, with full details of just how easy they are in the reviews that follow.

Hardened gamers who want to use a gamepad with their PC will happily tell you that the best route is to get an adapter that allows a PlayStation 2 pad to be used in a USB port. Still, that would perhaps be unfair on the nicely evolving range of Logitech pads, which do offer a worthy alternative.

Here we take a quick look at three of Logitech’s latest gamepads, to give you an idea of which one is the best for you.