I've read reviews, looked at pictures and generally fancied the idea of a box in the corner with all my MP3s on, which is also a hard disk recorder and digital TV plus being able to do the odd bit of browsing etc. let alone play games and check my emails.

But.... let's be honest it isn't going to happen until we can see these things in shops. If the likes of Comet, John Lewis etc feel it's important to have their entire range of TVs and Hifis playing away so the punters can be impressed with the sound and picture quality before making a choice, then surely these same punters want to see and hear equipment that is going to set them back twice the price of a normal TV, especially as most of the boxes are so ugly that there unlikely to get the thumbs up from one member of the family at least (normally female with an eye for matching accessories and colour schemes).

All this is before the problem of who will be actually able to work it in the family cuts in. The old joke about who can program the video recorder gets magnified when half the family won't be able to switch the thing on just watch TV.

At a time where I've experienced that even the most simple MP3 player may need a firmware update in order to fix a problem it makes me wonder whether the technical types have finally taken over the asylum.

R. Houghton

Posted by on July 28, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0)

I have followed with interest the progress of the Time and Tiny group of companies over the past few years. As an unfortunate customer of the original Tiny outfit (usual story... seemed like a good deal, but when components started failing the after-sales support was appalling), I was most interested to read of their reincarnation under the Time banner. Would things be different this time around ?

For the past few months, I have read with a fair degree of scepticism the Tiny.com adverts in PCW that claim cheapest prices and best components, by supplying direct from the UK and cutting out the middleman. Surely this was too good to be true ?

The news today indicates that this was indeed too good to be true, as Time/Tiny has gone into administration and closed all its shops. To help me better understand how this could happen I took a quick trip to www.grumbletext.co.uk and a search on 'Time Computers' gave a huge list of
varied complaints, covering everything from Sales to Manufacturing to Assembly to Support. It appears that the problems with Time/Tiny machines are common knowledge to those prepared to carry out a modicum of background research.

Posted by on July 28, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (3)

I've always wondered just how important it is to get the latest all-singing processor rather than one a rung or two down.

It's interesting to look at advice on how to upgrade an old computer. The prevailing wisdom is to boost RAM first, then hard disk size. As to swapping the processor - apparently it's not worth the hassle and cost for the small performance increase.

If that's true of a system that's now second-hand, wasn't it true when that same machine was new? Yet people would have paid far more for the fastest machines of the time.

And isn't the logic just as true for today's new machines? Lots more money for the very top flight, but not a huge speed benefit. In fact, isn't the stress on processor speed just a con?

Kevin Overbury

Posted by on July 22, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0)

With reference to your high-speed wireless routers article in the September 2005 magazine.  I’m just finishing a Masters degree and have been investigating the use of a MIMO WLAN inside a ship.  Your article highlights the extra bandwidth offered by these MIMO systems and I’m glad to see you had similar data throughput figures and didn’t get anywhere near the advertised 108Mbits/sec advertised rate either – I was using the Belkin Pre-N system. 

To compare data rates, I connected the 2 laptops I was using for my WLAN trial directly with a cross-over Ethernet cable and only got 74Mbits/sec bandwidth.  Streaming a DVD used only 3.82Mbits/sec, so still plenty of bandwidth.

Posted by on July 22, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (1)

Why do web pages print with the right-hand edge missing?  Over the years I've used many printers on many web pages and, recently, unless the page is laid out with all the text centred, the last word or fraction of a word (who knows?) is omitted down the right margin. 

Can it be that all webpages are designed around American Letter page size, which is slightly wider than A4? I've just tried a new HP laser printer using 'ZoomSmart' (scaled to fit A4) which perfectly reduces an A3 Excel spreadsheet to A4 portrait size but which cannot tame a web page.

I, and several thousand others, would be very greatful for for your insight into this phenomenum.

Colin Benson

Posted by on July 22, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (11)

Hi from New Zealand on a cool Winter's  day.

I have an elderly relative in the UK who is virtually house-bound and who, in an effort to keep up with her family over here via email, has been persuaded to purchase a computer. Unfortunately  the level of assistance for her appears to be minimal and she has struggled to manage with only very occasional help from a well-meaning but not very technical friend.

Posted by on July 15, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (7)

We now all live in a world where almost everything we do is controlled by PIN numbers. I have today taken stock of exactly how dependent we are on these combination of numbers and how without them we have major problems

I woke this morning and after entering the hallway was prompted to enter my alarm PIN number. After breakfast I turned on my laptop and desktop PCs which both requested PIN numbers. Using my mobile reminded me I needed a top-up via my credit card and, lo and behold, my pin was required to turn the phone pad on and again to allow use of my credit card.

To open my briefcase another 4 digit number was required and 30 mins later upon leaving the house my alarm had to be reset using a 6 figure pin.

Luckily my car CD/radio has a PIN preset that's only needed if power is lost. A call to the cashpoint needed yet another PIN.

Entering the company car park is controlled by PIN number - so is the main office door and several others in the building but these are not set by me and are harder to remember which leaves me stuck outside more times than I gain entry

Posted by on July 15, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0)

The results of your tests show that the AMD Athlon64 was faster in all but one video encoding test
compared to the Intel CPU where it was 20% slower.

During some tests this year, a commerical Windows 32bit application was built using Intel compilers with optimisation enabled. The same application was then built using a Sun compiler and run on the same dual CPU AMD hardware but with no optimisation flags enabled.

In each case the PC had a clean install of 64bit Windows or Solaris installed, and the same test data
was used.

The Sun 32bit compiled code was between 140% - 180% quicker. Thus, in any test comparing AMD and Intel a vendor-neutral compiler is essential. Given that Intel produces faster compilers than Microsoft it is fair to assume that the Sysmark tests are built with the Intel compiler.

Paul Smith

Posted by Rob Jones on July 8, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (1)

With regards to the article in your July 2005 issue on PC performance (p44), Gordon Laing is quite right that acceptable performance may be had for much lower supply power and that top end processor chips give a poor speed/power quotient.

Of course chips that get very hot and live fast also die young, and this has advantaged the industry in the past.  However, at the root of actual PC performance is the operating system and software  - and huge, unweildy and innefficient software has long been masked by increase in hardware power.

It is possible to get the processor to power down when nothing is happening. The advent of fast, cheap flash memory means that accessing the hard disc all the time and taking ages to boot up and idle is quite unnecessary.

So pressure must be put on the software writers to clean up their act - the power wasted on Internet servers for example must be quite enormous and PCW has reported on cost savings that can be obtained to justify efficiency gains (July issue, p23 news).

Leon Di Marco

Posted by Rob Jones on July 8, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0)

I recently built a quiet yet powerful PC using the reviews and information
gleaned from both your excellent magazine and the Internet.

There has been one major disappointment – the monitor.

I chose a Viewsonic VP171B-2 for the combination of response time, viewing angles and height adjustment that I wanted. The screen is absolutely superb except for one faulty pixel. It’s not dead, which would not be too bad, but stuck on bright red! It is about a third of the way down the screen and slightly off centre so in a very noticeable place. Because it is red it is very obvious whether watching movies, playing games or in general windows use. I have tried to ignore it but I cannot. I am so disappointed as it means my new PC is not the pleasure it could have been.

I emailed MicroDirect who sent back an email explaining how it is a Class 2
product and so it was not returnable under warranty.

So, it appears I am stuck with it (pun intended!). I cannot sell it with out
mentioning the known fault and so I am faced with potentially buying a brand new monitor to replace my brand new one monitor!

Please print all or part of this letter to let your readers know the risks in
buying a Class 2 monitor.

Jonathan Beard

Posted by on July 1, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (4)