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If you enjoy music on a PC/Notebook then the speakers and sound card/chip are important. To put a better sound card in a notebook is very difficult and even in some PCs not that easy, here is an alternative.
Having recently tested an entry level labelling machine (P-touch 55 22/8/04) aimed at the younger market here I get involved with a larger machine that has even more functionality.
The earlier machine was meant for kids
both in the colour choice and key size as well as having mobile phone
type input. Here in this machine that would look at home in any office
- it's grey - with QWERTY keys and a total of 58 keys almost all can
produce symbols or accents with the press of a second key. It
is 14x12x5cm and it is close to 600grams.
I do not normally play a lot of games, perhaps the occasional Freecell or two and the odd very odd game of Bridge, however I have to confess that the Bank Holiday saw me spending far to much time on Trainz.
Free means different things to different people. Take Freeview and free-to-air as an example. There is no subscription charge but you do need to purchase an appropriate receiver.
The Government's perceived wisdom (surely an oxymoron) is that analogue TV has had its day and will be replaced by digital broadcasts. This digital switchover is due to begin in 2007. A taster of what is to come can be experienced with the Freeview service which rose, Phoenix-like, from the debacle known as On-Digital and its monkey figurehead.
Free means different things to different people. Take Freeview and free-to-air as an example. There is no subscription charge but you do need to purchase an appropriate receiver.
Designed by Porsche is not something you immediately think of when talking about speakers, cars are far more likely. However these speakers are not anything like bulk standard boxes.
Music on the move, first there was the cassette player, next the CD player, nowadays the MP3/WMA player seems to rule the roost. Here an ultra small CD player that can also play MP3/WMA etc, its called the NAPA Ultra Slim DAV-397.
A multifunction inkjet unit from Epson that is not a great deal larger than an inkjet printer. So Scan, Copy and Print from a single unit all at a not outrageous price. It can also read almost all types of memory card, meaning that printing is possible direct from cards when the PC is not on.
It is 45x43x22cm and weights a little less than nine kilos. Paper is stored face forward vertically at the rear of the unit. It is delivered face up from the base of the front of the unit. Items to scan or copy are placed face down on the flat scanning surface under the cover, items up to A4 can be scanned/copied. This is a four ink model placing it in the 'mid' range.
If like me you remember the old Dymo labelling machines with the circular dial where you punched in each letter only to sneeze or stutter at a vital moment then this offering from Brother could be for you.
They say size is not everything, except sometimes it is, and in the case I am thinking of the smaller the better. For those who are unsure I am talking of USB stick drives.
3megapixel, 3x optical zoom, 32MB SD card, if that does not get you interested then perhaps the sub £100 price point may, if not then you are probably not looking for a digital camera.
A graphics tablet used to be expensive and really only the domain of a graphics professional. Wacom have released some smaller and lower specified units, this is the smallest and cheapest yet.
What is bright red and bears the logo of a kicking horse? Sorry but anybody whose thoughts turned to the personal chariot of a speeding German and Formula One are wide of the mark. Instead it is the latest status symbol from Acer in the form of its Ferrari notebook.
As DVD players become almost as cheap as the discs themselves, introducing the very first LCD projector under three hundred pounds.
Small and neat, stylish chrome facia, powerful 5megapixel camera, all of these and more are true of the HP R707 could this be the digital camera we are all looking for?
With the right tools your computer can take over many tasks that can be considered tiresome. Just image your system could be reading this document for you. Read on to find out how.
Video players in their current form will be redundant when we all have to go digital, lots of people -me included- have stuff we will still want to play so this Bush Video/ DVD recorder could be the answer.
There are a lot of cheaper phone services available and anyone who makes a reasonable number of calls surely uses one. TeleVoice offers a couple of things that most others do not.
This is a mono printer, it is also a sheet fed scanner, it can send and receive faxes and just for good measure it is also a copier even when the PC is not connected or turned on.
3 or 4 megapixel not enough? Then this offering from Goodmans may well be what you are looking for, a compact 5 megapixel digital camera with a basic 32MB of storage.
Its small it will easily fit in a pocket or purse. Its stylish, at least as far as Im concerned. Its easy to use and its still a powerful digital camera that takes great images.
Computer manufacturers are no longer restricting themselves to internal improvements with fast CPUs and motherboard features but are also opting for a most aesthetic approach to the design of the chassis. Take the Aver Veriton series for example.
A colour PDA with excellent screen resolution, lots of inbuilt RAM, additional storage by SD card and just for good measure a 1.2megapixel camera built in, surely now this will satisfy this old git who owns an antiquated Palm 5x?
All optical zoom lenses I know of protrude from the front of the unit, not so with the Sony Cybershot DSC-T1, the zoom takes place within the unit actioning vertically.
Something very different in price and concept from the normal items mentioned here, however as I know a good number of members are managers or system administrators this is something that is of interest.
The title only covers part of what this unit can do, it can also record and play .wav files as well as having an FM radio, so far it has stubbornly refused to make the tea.
A four megapixel digital camera for a little over £100, complete with a 32MB Compact Flash card, even with todays fast moving price reduction hysteria this is something well worth investigating.
How can one speaker enclosure + sub woofer give surround sound, sorry you are not going to get a technical answer from me, I will just say the sound it gives is excellent.
A new digital accessory from Fujifilm could be said to have a split personality. Although entitled xD-MP3, this device combines the features of a memory card reader and pen drive with its main function of being an MP3 player.
With a CD writer at say 24X or 48X the time difference for burning a 700MB disc is only a few minutes, however the time difference between 4X and 8X for a 4.7GB is substantial because of the volume of data.
It should be possible to burn up 4.7GB of data in a little over ten
minutes, given that only a few years ago it took much longer than that
to burn a CD-ROM then you can see the advances. Of course why should we
need to burn up this amount of data, this is entirely due to bloatware
- badly written packages - that we are all lumbered with using. The
data is there and data in the most important community we have.
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