The popularity of customised PCs continues to grow and is showing signs of moving out of the enthusiast/gamer market. Adding bells and whistles, or more appropriately flashing lights and windows to your PC won't improve its ...

Manufacturers of high-end tape drives aim to double capacity and performance every couple of years. Which is exactly what HP has managed with its Storage Works Ultrium 460, the first of the new generation LTO Ultrium ...

Every so often you come across new technology which appears magic. The InkLink, from Seiko Instruments, is just such a piece of kit, enabling an ordinary pen and paper to become a computer input device for ...

Bluetooth has been a long time coming. The wireless connection protocol has been mooted for five years or more, but only now are we seeing viable Bluetooth-equipped peripherals, such as HP's DeskJet 995c. To make use ...

AIT is increasingly taking over from DDS as the tape technology with the more promising (i.e. higher capacity) future, so it's not surprising that LaCie has taken an AIT1 drive and squeezed it into one of ...

With all the talk in the media about broadband Internet connections, it's easy to forget that the vast majority of UK home and small business users still have dial-up access to the Internet. The reasons for ...

There are two fast connections you can make from your PC to the outside world; FireWire, standardised as IEEE1394, and USB 2. Both are fast enough to connect mass storage devices like DVD and hard drives ...

Multi-purpose memory card readers such as this one are becoming increasingly popular, due in part to the IT industry's complete inability to settle for one particular type of flash memory storage. There's a limit to how ...

We reviewed an earlier version of the SwitchView MP, under a different brand name, here. Like that model, this one allows you to connect up to four computers to a single keyboard, mouse and monitor, and ...

It's one of computer life's little truisms that there's never one accepted standard for anything when there could be five competing ones. This is particularly true of memory cards, with five current standards: PCMCIA - also ...

Losing power while you're on the move can be a real pain. Batteries in mobile phones and notebook computers still don't last particularly long and have a habit of dying at just the wrong moment. But ...

With the (probably temporary) setback in the widespread sharing of music files over the Web, it can be hard to find digital versions of your old vinyl records. True, many will be available on CD, but ...

Is your PC at risk from mains power failure? With solar flares (yes, really) and extreme weather-related threats to electricity supplies in the news a lot these days, mains power reliability is not 100 percent guaranteed. ...

Despite the lure of high-speed, always-on, cable modems and ADSL, a lot of people continue to use ISDN, or its BT Highway variant. Part of this reason is because you get a guaranteed data speed per ...

Regularly backing up your hard disk is vital if you want to avoid spending hours re-installing your operating system, applications and drivers, not to mention recreating your data. Although you can make do with a stack ...

Think of SCSI and the name 'Adaptec' springs immediately to mind. The company has been involved with SCSI controllers from day one, and produces one of the largest range of adapters and associated equipment. With many ...

To set a potential scene... perhaps you might have a digital camera which takes Compact Flash (CF) memory cards and an MP3 player which takes SmartMedia cards, and perhaps neither device has a fast USB connection. ...

If you're wondering about the 'Fun' in the name of this modem, in this case it seems to mean 'Transparent Green'. Or it might refer to the picture on the box, of a young woman roller-blading ...

There has never been a better time to buy a personal global positioning satellite (GPS) receiver for finding out where you are and where you are going. Yesteryear's slow, inaccurate, expensive, PC-hostile and cumbersome GPS units ...

Many things designed for the office end up at home. Goodness knows how many Microsoft Office 2000 CDs and even sticks of PC memory have been 'liberated' from the office environment. And that's not to mention ...