Just in: Buffalo LinkStation mini

Thursday, June 26th, 2008

This is by far the smallest NAS drive that I, or any of the handful of PC Pro staffers I’ve shoved it in front of have ever seen. Inside lives two 500GB 2.5in laptop hard disks, giving a massive total of 1TB storage.

The case is just 135 x 40 x 81mm – that’s just 437 cubic centimetres – that’s over 2GB per cubic centimetre – that’s amazing. If data was a liquid, you could pour 600GB into the mug sitting on my desk. In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m impressed.

A full review will be on the way just as soon as I stop wasting my time on these sums.

The true cost of a lifetime of gaming

Thursday, June 26th, 2008

How much do you reckon you’ve spent on games in your life? A few quid? A few hundred? Absolutely no idea?

That final option was my immediate answer, and probably yours too, so the results of a recent survey by online gaming community GameStrata may shock you. Brace yourselves.

The average gamer will spend more than US$30,500 between the ages of 18 and 48. Yes, thirty thousand dollars. That’s more than £15,000. On video games.

Now that figure covers both games and gaming hardware, and the survey does only encompass a community of dedicated online gamers, but it’s still astonishing when lumped together like that. I could have bought a new car, put a deposit down on a house, or enoyed the holiday of a lifetime. Instead I took Bromley to League One mid-table mediocrity and shot a few pigeons in Liberty City. Depressing, isn’t it.

(more…)

Before the AMD Phenom there was… the LG Phenom.

Thursday, June 26th, 2008

I’ve just come across this little LG PDA which, amazingly, has been knocking around the office for a decade – it was reviewed in the December 1998 issue of PC Pro. Even stranger is the name: the Phenom, a title now belonging to AMD’s consumer CPUs.

Plugging in the power supply and switching on to see its black-and-white passive-matrix screen, I was whisked back to a peculiar moment in computing history. (more…)

I am scared of Google

Wednesday, June 25th, 2008

First off, I’m not paranoid. I don’t have a tin-foil hat, subscription to conspiracy weekly, or a pressing need to take a different route to work every day to stop people following me. I genuinely believe Diana died in a car crash, Elvis died on the toilet, and the lone gunman actually did it. I understand that Governments cover things up, and I’m happy with that because I suspect their secrets are either a) boring or b) terrifying – both of which are covered in my life by a) tax returns and b) overdrafts. There’s no such thing as aliens, and even if there were, I certainly wouldn’t believe they travelled all this way to stick something unpleasant up my bottom. And if they did, why is everybody in such a hurry to meet them?

But I am scared of Google. Not because of the conspiracy theories, or because it’s fashionable, but in the same way I’m scared of the sea. It’s huge, mostly benevolent, and unpredicatable – and the vast majority of us depend on it far too much.

(more…)

The globe-trotting life of a PC Pro staff writer

Wednesday, June 25th, 2008

People keep reacting in disbelief when I tell them that I’ve never been on a plane before. Or been abroad, for that matter. I suppose it’s unusual in this day and age but, sadly, it’s true.

Thankfully, PC Pro came to my aid: a trip to the HP Labs Masterclass 2008, which took place in Dublin on Monday and Tuesday and promisd a full schedule of seminars and workshops about plenty of new and existing print technologies. I know, it’s only Dublin – but when you’ve never left this island and you’ve never flown, it’s a (baby) step in the right direction.

So, with backpack and boarding pass, I turned up at Heathrow two hours early. After all, the email I’d got confirming my visit had said that was the ideal time to arrive for check-in and all of that malarkey. Except that, after I’d checked in online, I didn’t really have to do anything except get through security.

(more…)

The wrath of Gates

Wednesday, June 25th, 2008

There are doubtless a number of things Microsoft employees will miss about Bill Gates when he toddles off to airdrop billions on charities, but his email rants won’t be one of them.

To mark his passing, the Seattle Post Intelligencer has dug out what it bills as an “epic rant” to poor Jim Allchin, describing the world of pain the Microsoft boss sufferred when he tried to download and install Windows Moviemaker in 2003.

(more…)

Just in: HTC Touch Diamond

Tuesday, June 24th, 2008

I’ve been using the HTC Touch as my regular phone for over a year, so I won’t deny it. I jumped up and down a bit, such was my excitement to hear about the new “improved” version – the HTC Touch Diamond. And I was almost buzzing with anticipation when it arrived in the office yesterday.

But I’ll be honest. My first few experiences with the phone have dampened my ardour. It looks quite nice, with its diamondesque back and glass-dominated front, but it’s so slow it makes a British tennis player look nippy around the court.

For example, the 3D animated menus don’t keep up with your commands – there’s a full half-second lag on occasion. When you try and use Windows Mobile rather than HTC’s TouchFLO interface it’s also slow. In fact, everything’s slow.

There are lots of nice touches that may yet win me round. The built-in gyroscopic accelerometer, which detects whether the screen should be in portrait or landscape mode (and the clever marbles-down-the-hole game that HTC has bundled to show it off).

The web browser, based on Opera Mobile, which makes viewing websites a pleasure. The already-mentioned TouchFLO interface, which means you hardly need to use Windows Mobile at all anymore (an improvement we desperately called for when originally reviewing the Touch). The rather nice on-screen keyboard.

Look out for the in-depth review later this week.

Does anybody remember that Facebook thing?

Monday, June 23rd, 2008

Ironically on the day it’s announced that Facebook has never been more popular, I appeared to have stopped using it. I say “appeared” because it took me a long time to realise I’d given up on it, which is my friends fault, because they didn’t realise they’d abandoned it either.

I expected more. Not the sounding of trumpets and a rain of angel feathers necessarily, but very definitely a last straw. I really wanted a last straw. I wanted Facebook to introduce a Beacon mk.2 system that rummaged through my personal details, worked out my bank details and advertised them on an RSS feed, allowing some unwashed malcontent to nick the last and only tenner from my account. Or, a virus wave to sweep over the entire thing so that every game of Scrabulous became akin to dancing barefoot with Typhoid Mary in a gutter filled with used syringes. I wanted to storm away from its charms in a huff.

I wanted it to do… something. But it hasn’t, it’s just continued. And gradually myself and my friends have simply drifted away from it. A peaceable parting of the ways. It’s not that I don’t particularly like it, for a while there it was pretty much our entire social calendar. Every party was arranged, discussed and dissected on the walls. If somebody was telling me a story, it was common for them to give up halfway through with the line: “just go and look on Facebook, I’ve stuck all the pictures on there.”

(more…)

How to drown in “crapware”: buy a printer

Monday, June 23rd, 2008

A few months back Sony was forced to scrap its outrageous plans to charge punters extra to get their brand new laptop clean of “crapware” – the useless bundles of trial software that seem to clog up more and more systems that enter the Labs thse days.

Many of you left comments agreeing that enough is enough, and reader rjp2000 made the point that the printer and camera markets are just as bad as laptop manufacturers. From experience I knew that (s)he was spot on, but this month that point has been rammed home far more irritatingly than I ever imagined.

(more…)

Standing up to UK rip-off prices

Monday, June 23rd, 2008

Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro Extended is one of the best pieces of software to be released in the past five years. It’s breathed new life into what we thought was a tired product, with excellent features such as embedded video and hassle-free collaboration.

But we’ve decided that it can’t get a PC Pro Recommended award for one simple reason: in the US, it costs $699. In the UK, it costs £619. With VAT, it actually costs £727 – more than the dollar price.

We’re well aware of the arguments given for prices being higher in the UK (and indeed the rest of Europe and Australia) than the US, and these might justify a 20% even 30% price hike. But almost 100%? (more…)