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Jessops Eight Inch Digital Photo FrameWe all know the problem; the family emails you their latest holiday pics but you never get around to printing them, at which your spouse complains, so you think, I know, I’ll load them onto a digital photo frame; that ought to satisfy everyone. Well in our experience it does, or it can when you’ve got your preferences set up right, but such a unit can offer more than simply displaying photos.
Logitech Speaker Lapdesk N700Logitech's Speaker Lapdesk N700 could indeed be considered a laptop comfort zone, and in more way than one. It's basically a shaped and padded base on which you sit your notebook/netbook while the entire assembly sits on your knees, bed, or other surface. Some examples of this genre build in a cooling fan, but the N700 also gives you a half-decent pair of neodymium stereo speakers.
Although Photoshop Elements is a trimmed-down version of Photoshop, it's still a feature-packed program, easily powerful enough for all your digital photography needs. In fact, many professionals use it and you need to be very pro or very specialised to want the full program. But even Elements is not the easiest program to understand or, indeed, to get the most out of.
Logitech QuickCam Pro 9000 There are many webcams out there to choose from, and many laptops come with one pre-installed, usually embedded in the top strip of the screen. While these can work adequately, features such as auto-focus, zooming, video and audio tuning, mirroring the image etc may not be supported.
Canon Pixma iP100 These days, many PC users spend much of their time on the road and could do with a means of getting high quality printouts while away from mains power.
The handsome, silver-bodied Canon Pixma iP100 covers this need nicely. Its rear mounting battery - once you've sussed out how to attach it to it's carrier box - gives that remote option that will be valued by all travelers as well as those who like a no-wires home setup, but of course most users will use the mains adapter for assured power supply when they can, plus a USB cable. A wireless connection is made possible via infrared or optional Bluetooth adapter, though there's no WiFi facility as such. There's also PictBridge for digicam connection but, as is usual with printers, no USB cable is provided.
DFX Audio Now don't get me wrong, I love the flexibility and ease of use of MP3s and CDs but to an old school HiFi fan, they do all sound a little too clinical, lacking in personality. It's a constant disappointment every time I buy a new CD or collection of MP3s only to find the mastering has left the thing sounding totally uninvolving. To be honest, I'd pretty much given up on ever really enjoying music again.
Then one day, I was browsing the HiFi forum on CIX and someone mentioned some high end piece of wunder kit they'd been playing with and somewhere along the line, DFX Audio got mentioned as the savior of good music.
Trust Mouse Pad with 4 Port USB HubTrust produce a broad range of budget priced products. This time round we're looking at their new mouse pad which unusually sports a 4 port USB hub and sells for a mere £12 or so.
The mouse pad area measures 215 x 200mm and is covered in a durable but slightly textured microfibre material that should prove to be a good surface for most mouse types. We tried it with ball as well as optical types and it worked very well with both.
Roboform Pro Here at Practical PC we are always harping on about the need to use secure passwords. If you use easily guessed passwords then you have only yourself to blame if someone hacks into your account. Best practice is to have different passwords for different accounts, but it's easy to see how the number of passwords will build up beyond what you can remember.
Wacom Bamboo FunMost people will be familiar with Wacom, a company that seems to monopolise the graphics tablet market. Its latest models combine pen and multi-touch input, much like the overpriced iPhone, and they're called Bamboo Fun.
The name might suggest a, well, 'fun' device rather than a serious piece of equipment but that would be misleading. You can use the tablets for controlling your computer instead of or as well as the mouse, and they are seriously useful - yes, and fun! - when used with drawing and photo editing software.
Over the past year or so, an increasing number of computer tutorial books have been published, supposedly aimed at the 'older generation', in recognition of the fact that not everyone was born with a laptop in their cot. We've reviewed several here and, in truth, most would be suitable for anyone wanting to learn about computing, not just Silver Surfers.
MailWasher Pro 6.5MailWasher is a spam filter. It works, quite simply, by reading your emails from the server and displaying their content and information. It identifies ones it thinks are spam and ones it thinks are from friends. You can check the list and delete the spammy one from the server so when you fire up your email program you only get the good emails. It's simple, it's easy and it works.
Over the years I've used a great many languages on a great many platforms but one which I've managed to avoid until now has been Java. Whilst it's not quite as hot as it once was, it's still used a lot in a large number of organisations so I figured it was time to give it a go.
Antec Notebook Cooler 200Antec are best known for their fine range of enclosures and power supplies. They do also produce a number of specialised cooling solutions such as the hard driver cooler we reviewed a while back. This time however, we are looking at the Notebook Cooler 200 designed to help with laptops with a tendency to overheat.
The Antec Notebook Cooler 200 is so named because of the huge 200mm Antec Big Boy cooling fan that dominates the middle of it. Whilst we're on the subject, someone, please tell Antec that 'Big Boy' sounds, well, just a bit suspect!
Belkin Netbook Power Adapter Kit for TravelThe chances of your laptop or netbook’s battery charger cum power supply unit lasting as long as the computer it serves are pretty good – it’s generally the mobile PC itself that fails, most often at the fragile power input point. However, there are other reasons you might want a separate unit, and these multi-purpose kits from Belkin can do the job, provided they are aimed at your particular brand of computer.
We looked at the netbook kit, F5L065uk, and this catered for netbooks from Toshiba, ACER, Samsung, HP Mini, and ASUS. It did this by supplying changeable tips to suit the power input design of your computer, but it could do other things besides this.
iStorage diskGeniePortable disk drives abound these days, and their cost has tumbled to suit their popularity, but one problem has always been that of data security. The loss of huge amounts of data, much of it related to personal databases obtained by various government departments, has lead to much unrest among the populace.
What was needed was an encrypted drive so that the thief could not read the contents. That copy of the data would be lost, it's true, but at least it was 'safely' lost, and a new copy could normally be extracted from the original. Add password access as a second layer of security and the job would be complete.
PHP is a server-side scripting language which means it works on the server holding a web site, for example, before passing the results to a browser. A client-side language such as CSS or JavaScript is executed by your browser to format web pages or create animations.
The benefit of server-side scripting is that it's harder to interfere with making it more suitable for handling sensitive information, making changes to database information and so on.
Laptops That Defied the Norms…When someone says “laptop”, the picture that comes to mind is a clamshell device with a screen panel fixed to a keyboard panel. But there are a few laptops that have put their toe out of the line. Yes. Innovation has driven the makers to create laptops that look different. They serve different purposes too. While some of them have actually come into being, some others are still in their conceptual stage. Have a look…
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