One gigabyte of RAM is enough to get most applications running smoothly, but should you buy the cheapest or the fastest?

MACROMEDIA E-LEARNING STUDIO

TrueSpace has always led the pack in terms of features as far as Windows 3D animation packages under $2,000 are concerned. Recently, however, the market has become rather crowded, with a powerful upgrade to Ray Dream (reviewed issue 9, p100) and the cut-down version of LightWave 3D (Inspire 3D) both challenging it on features and price.

Welcome to the first zombie movie we’ve seen that’s actually any good. Left 4 Dead finally gets gaming away from the trigger-point mechanic: you have no idea if a dozen zombies are around the corner, or one, or none.

Almost five years have past now since the first release of 3ds max, then called the full 3D Studio MAX. One of the first packages of its kind to introduce affordability and performance to an industry dominated by huge price tags. And even after its competitors have been forced to compromise their price to compete, max has kept up its innovative features and held its ground.

In its day, it held the speed crown, but today’s dual-core CPUs leave it trailing for power, efficiency and value.

Chance or coincidence? AMD releases the Athlon 64, specifically targeted at the consumer performance market, and only days later Intel announces a secret processor aimed squarely at the same MHz-hungry community: the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition (P4EE).

The latest iteration of the Pentium 4, code named Prescott, is an interesting development for a few reasons. First off, it represents Intel's entry to the world of 90nm (90 nanometre, or 0.09 micron) fabrication for processors. For the uninitiated, all this means is the size of individual components on the processor core have been shrunk to even smaller levels. It's a natural part of processor evolution to shrink the size of components, as it allows more transistors to be packed into a smaller space, reduces heat and resistance, and this all leads to faster CPUs.

Is the mighty Quake franchise becoming tired and repetitive? Or is this the best one yet?

The emphasis is placed on careful investigation of each environment and the wise selection of appropriate weapons and tools.

You’ll see a lot of hype surrounding the 3.06GHz Pentium 4, and doubtless you’ll see benchmark scores for the new processor. If you do, regard them with a heavy degree of skepticism because all is not rosy with this chip.

The Kodak EasyShare LS743 is one of the new generation of mid-range digital cameras hitting the market. At its core is a 4 megapixel CCD, capable of 2,304 x 1,728 resolution, which sits behind a Schneider-Kreuznach C-Variogon lens with 2.8x optical zoom.

Digital photography has made enormous strides in recent years, and as a result, the technology is being incorporated into affordable consumer products.

If laptops were cars, then the Pioneer Power 470 would be a caravan - a quick scan of the specs reveals that it has almost everything. The 470 model we tested was a 3.06GHz Pentium 4 unit with a large 60GB of drive space and 256MB of DDR.

The Athlon XP 2700+ represents a significant leap forward for the Athlon line – it solves a long-term problem by stepping up the default frontside bus (FSB) speed from 266MHz to 333MHz. This means that the Athlon XP can finally run in sync with 333MHz DDR RAM. While most currently available Athlon motherboards support 333MHz DDR, there is virtually no performance boost between this and 266MHz DDR when running an Athlon XP with a 266MHz FSB. The extra speed offered by the RAM quite simply goes to waste, because the CPU can't keep up with it.

Visually mindblowing, COD4 provides you with an enormous arsenal of real-world weapons to hack and chop at the seams of international terrorism.

With a complete overhaul of the plug-ins this is the biggest update in years, but it’s too expensive.

Eighteen months after the release of Panther, Apple's Mac OS X 10.4, codenamed Tiger, is finally here, and it has been well worth the wait.

With the release of version 4.1, Windows users finally get a look at Apple's iTunes software on home ground. From the brushed aluminium and ice blue of the Mac OS branding, to the organisation of the interface, it feels almost alien in a Windows environment.

As you're probably aware, LindowsOS is an attempt at a consumer-friendly Linux that looks and works like Windows. It was even originally intended to run Windows applications, using the Wine emulator, although this only works well with certain high-profile programs such as Microsoft Office.