Hareware Reviews

Wireless mouse and keyboard desksets (Logitech, Microsoft, Trust)

admin — Sat, 10 May 2008 13:52:19 +0000

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.

Inkjet Multi-Function Devices (Brother, Canon, Epson, HP, Lexmark)

admin — Sat, 10 May 2008 13:50:51 +0000

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.

PCI Express graphics cards (AOpen, Asus, Leadtek, Sapphire, Sapphire, XFX)

admin — Sat, 10 May 2008 13:49:32 +0000

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.

VoIP enabled ADSL routers (Billion, Draytek, Intertex, Zoom, Zyxel)

admin — Sat, 10 May 2008 13:48:01 +0000

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.

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Logitech gamepads

admin — Sat, 10 May 2008 13:46:37 +0000

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.

Mid-range digital cameras (Canon, Casio, HP, Kyocera, Olympus, Panasonic)

admin — Sat, 10 May 2008 13:45:40 +0000

A digital camera is one of those rare products that successfully bridges the two worlds of IT (Information Technology) and AV (Audio Visual). That’s a bold claim to make, but we can justify it fully.

Moving from film to digital means that you never have to pay for a roll of film again, and neither do you have to pay to have your film developed. In addition to the obvious cost savings, the process of transferring photos from your digital camera to your PC, Mac or notebook is very quick, so you can see the results almost instantly.

Then, once you have the photos on your computer, you can edit them with photo editing software, print them out or e-mail them to friends and relatives in foreign parts. Best of all, you can store thousands of photos on your hard drive with no degradation in quality as the years roll by, although we’d recommend that you archive them to CD or DVD on occasion, just in case your hard drive fails.

So the obvious question is which digital camera you should buy, and that’s the question we’re addressing in this group test, with a selection of cameras ranging in price from £280 to £350, and in resolution from 3-megapixel to 5-megapixel. Remember that the prices we’ve quoted are manufacturers’ recommended prices, so you should be able to buy your chosen camera for less.

£499 PCs (Carrera, CCL, JAL, Microland, NetHighStreet, Watford)

admin — Sat, 10 May 2008 13:44:21 +0000

Buying a new PC isn’t the traumatic business it once was, if only because the typical price of a decent new desktop has dropped considerably in the last year. Where you used to have to look at around £1,000 for a well-specified computer, you can now look at around half that price, though you’ll usually have to add the dreaded VAT on top of that.

What you can now get for £499 + VAT is pretty impressive. A system with a fast processor, plenty of memory, capacious hard drive and possibly even a DVD rewriter is quite in order, and you can add to that a 17-inch monitor, reasonable speakers and maybe a wireless keyboard and mouse.

So, what jobs can you do with a PC with this kind of specification? Pretty much anything, from traditional business applications such as word processing or building a spreadsheet, through leisure or semi-professional interests like photo manipulation and digital video editing, to games playing. At this price point, the kind of PC you can buy puts very few limitations on your work.

There must be some shortcomings to the budget PC, though, or everyone would be buying them and sales of anything more expensive would plummet. There are bound to be compromises and you’re most likely to see them in the quality of the sound system, the lack of a second CD or DVD drive and most especially in the type of monitor.

At this price point, you’d be lucky to see an LCD screen. There’s still a price premium on the devices and although you can get systems at £499 + VAT which include them, you’d expect to find corners cut elsewhere. Look instead for a good quality, near-flat CRT monitor and try to get the best set of speakers you can, particularly if you’re interested in playing games.

We’ve tested six of the latest PCs at this price point.

MP3 players (Archos, BenQ, Creative, Panasonic, Philips)

admin — Sat, 10 May 2008 13:42:37 +0000

MP3 players are absolutely everywhere, and that’s despite the fact that it is illegal to rip a CD to MP3 in this country, even if you paid full retail price for the thing. Naturally, people tend to ignore that quirk of the law and many have got huge music libraries stashed away on 100GB+ hard drives.

It may help to bring MP3 out of the shadows if the iTunes and MusicMatch music stores were available in the UK, but as yet only Napster has arrived, and that only recently. In the meantime, MP3s are a bit dodgy, whether they come from CD, your mates or that there Internet.

Apple has just announced its latest quarterly sales figures and it turns out that it has sold more iPods than computers. Mind you, practically everyone has an iPod while iMacs and iBooks are relatively rare, but even so it’s a surprise. We reviewed the new iPod ages ago (in June 2003) and we’re still waiting to see the mini iPod here in the UK. Unfortunately shipments have been delayed until the summer as the US market is buying all the mini iPods that Apple can produce, so you won’t find any Apple products in this group.

What you will find is a mix of players that use different ways to store your music files, ranging in price from £59 to over £200 and from 128MB to 4GB. We could have included players up to 60GB in size and £349, but we reviewed the 30GB version of the Creative Zen Jukebox Xtra in March, and the gorgeous 20GB Philips HDD120 is damned expensive at £299, so instead let’s have a look at the coolest kit to make your journey to work that bit more pleasurable.

Prices quoted here are the manufacturers’ suggested retail prices - if you shop around or use our price comparison links you should find the players available at considerably cheaper prices.

DirectX 9 graphics cards under £150 (Asus, Connect3D, Hercules, Leadtek, PNY, Sapphire)

admin — Sat, 10 May 2008 13:41:15 +0000

If one thing pushes you to upgrade your current PC, it is likely to be a new game. Absolutely nothing else stresses a PC quite as much as a modern game running with all the high quality settings turned on. You need a decent processor, plenty of memory and a fair amount of hard drive space, but the really important thing is your graphics card.

At the end of 2002 Microsoft introduced its DirectX 9 technology for 3D graphics, with the emphasis on cinematic realism. The key here is two graphics technologies called vertex shaders and pixel shaders. Previous versions of DirectX would offload graphics work to the processor if your graphics card couldn’t cope, but if you don’t have a DirectX 9 graphics card you simply won’t see the new effects that the games designers have created.

In fairness a DirectX 8.1 card will make an attempt at running a DirectX 9 game, but if you have a GeForce MX or Radeon 128 and you want to play Half Life 2 (when it arrives) then it’s time to get a new graphics card.

The most important part of a graphics card is the chip or GPU (Graphics Processing Unit), but the amount of memory is also significant, as are the output ports. If you want to do video capture you’ll also need a video-in feature, and let’s not forget that most manufacturers will include some software too.

Although you can spend up to £400 on a graphics card, we reckon that most sane people think that £150 is a far more reasonable figure, so we’ve rounded up seven DirectX 9 graphics cards that sell for less than that sum - and most are closer to £100.

Sub-£100 inkjet printers (Canon, Epson, Lexmark)

admin — Sat, 10 May 2008 13:39:39 +0000

Unfortunately, the myth of the paperless office is just that - a myth. We all seem to print more pages now than we ever did. Make a purchase over the Internet and you’ll want to print off your order acknowledgement. See an interesting Web site and you might print off a couple of pages for a friend or relation who has never heard of HTML.

If you have a digital camera, no doubt you are in love with its ability to take endless high-quality pictures, but sooner rather than later you’ll want to print out a lovely glossy A4 print, and a stack of 6″ x 4″ too.

Then there are text documents. Of course you can read through on screen, but it’s a fact that you’ll spot more mistakes when you see it all laid out in black and white, and of course you can make notes on a printout using your trusty Biro.

You’ll be printing black text, text combined with pictures and high quality colour pictures, and the easiest and cheapest way to achieve all those tasks is with an inkjet printer.

Of course there are different kinds of inkjet printers, with a huge variety of prices. Most of us need a relatively basic printer, although we may have a preference for one type of printing over another. So in this group test we’ve gathered together six inkjet printers that cost less than £100 including VAT, to see just which budget printer is the best for your home or small office.

Hareware Reviews

Wireless mouse and keyboard desksets (Logitech, Microsoft, Trust)

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Inkjet Multi-Function Devices (Brother, Canon, Epson, HP, Lexmark)

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PCI Express graphics cards (AOpen, Asus, Leadtek, Sapphire, Sapphire, XFX)

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VoIP enabled ADSL routers (Billion, Draytek, Intertex, Zoom, Zyxel)

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Logitech gamepads

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Mid-range digital cameras (Canon, Casio, HP, Kyocera, Olympus, Panasonic)

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£499 PCs (Carrera, CCL, JAL, Microland, NetHighStreet, Watford)

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MP3 players (Archos, BenQ, Creative, Panasonic, Philips)

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DirectX 9 graphics cards under £150 (Asus, Connect3D, Hercules, Leadtek, PNY, Sapphire)

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Sub-£100 inkjet printers (Canon, Epson, Lexmark)

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