David Moss tackles misbehaving com ports and resolves a windows share issue.

Adobe significantly strengthens its print, web and production workflows – and the integration between them

The Quark-killer has finally landed. For the last year, the hype about Adobe's replacement for the worthy but old-fashioned PageMaker (reviewed issue 22, p108) has been building to fever pitch.

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With the increasing size of operating systems, games and the broadband smorgasbord of music and movies, it's just a matter of time before that dreaded message box pops up to tell you just how little space you have left.

Just over four months on from our massive hard drive roundup (October 2002, page 74), and Serial ATA (SATA) hard disks have finally arrived. Phew.

One of our favourite power supplies, with loads of headroom for everyday use.

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PC Authority playtests the Halo 3 campaign in four-player co-op mode, and tries out a newly unveiled multiplayer map, called “Narrows”.

A reliable means of backing up virtual machines to prevent disasters.

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Quick-release hard disks can’t make up for design flaws.

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It has been a long time coming, but finally there is some serious competition to the mantle assumed by the behemoth that is NVIDIA. The Radeon 8500 is the latest graphics chipset from ATI, which itself is a graphics giant, though does not possess nearly the same public profile in the consumer 3D market. Unlike previous ATI cards that featured exclusively on ATIs own branding and PCB, the Radeon 8500 and 7500 are open to other board manufacturers, presumably to take a bigger bite out of NVIDIAs lucrative market share.

The Radeon 7500 is the little brother to the Radeon 8500 and is essentially an enhanced version of the original Radeon card, an example of which was tested in this round-up as a yardstick and included in the performance graphs (pages 50-51). It features the Charisma Engine; ATIs equivalent of the T&L engine found in GeForce-based cards.

What makes Publisher different is its automated approach to design through its colour and font schemes and huge range of publication templates. These are handled via the redesigned Task Pane, which now has a simplified Start panel offering drill-down access to project types split into print, Web and themed sets. Another ten attractive master sets increase the total to 45.