Microsoft prepares to march into Adobe territory with its forthcoming suite of graphics and web development software.

Useful new features and a total interface overhaul make this the best Office ever.

Over the last few years there is no doubt mainstream PCs have leant increasingly towards visual applications. The power of visually communicating has grown in acceptance as more and more products and applications reach fruition.

Built-in tracing and improved drawing, formatting and colour correction make X3 the best CorelDRAW upgrade in years.

Accurate speech recognition, a flexible control system and a good price – for those in need, Dragon delivers.

A worthy update to the most underrated of the Office applications — OneNote is now a must-have.

Sydney Trains is a great little program. As the name implies, this is a time-tabling application for the Sydney metropolitan train network. Written for PDAs, Sydney Trains works on both Palm OS and Pocket PC.

The arrival of Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 (ES2K3) is a significant event in the history of this product. First, it brings to a close the second era of the codebase. Released back in 1996 on the NT 4 wave, ES4 (there was no 1, 2 or 3) brought enterprise-level email, contact management, diary management and so forth to the Windows Server platform in a new and comprehensive BackOffice application.

Impressive technology, but increasing cores doesn’t necessarily increase performance.

The Quadro FX3000 is based on the same NV35 core that powers the latest GeForce FX 5900 cards, but with a few new additions to cater to the professional market. Compared to the older Quadro FX2000, which was based on the NV30, or GeForce FX5800, the FX3000 has double the memory, at 256MB, as well as a 256-bit memory interface, giving double the theoretical graphics bandwidth, hitting just over 27GB/s. It also supports other features from the NV35, including a 128-bit floating-point precision graphics pipeline, 128-bit colour, 12-bit sub-pixel accuracy, 16x full-scene anti-aliasing, 3D volumetric textures, and of course support for all the latest OpenGL, DirectX and NVIDIA’s own Cg graphics language versions.

Enact comes with the complete box and dice including application software, database, web-server and application server and the server can be run on a basic Windows XP Professional desktop. While the Java-based interface can be a bit buggy and slow at times, it is generally clearly set out and easy enough to use.

Kaspersky's first integrated security suite relies too much on the anti-virus component.

PowerDirector 3 is the latest version of CyberLink’s DV editing application aimed at home video enthusiasts. It has been radically overhauled since the previous version 2.5, and includes many new features as well as a revamped interface. On the capture front, a new quick-scan option enables fast pre-capture preview of an entire 60-minute DV tape in just six minutes. There’s also a new title editor, Picture-in-Picture (PiP) motion effects can be easily added, a three-track audio mixer provides real-time mixing during playback, and you can now record voiceover narration during timeline playback of a project.

In conjunction with several of their other top-of-the-line software application upgrades, discreet have released the long-awaited combustion 3. Unique in some of its features and price point, combustion seems to have been searching for its market-place slot. Sharing the code, tools and quality of its bigger siblings, flame, inferno and smoke, combustion has, in the last two years, pulled its price down from 10 thousand dollars to around two thousand.

101 Killer Apps for your Pocket PC is a handy reference freeware and shareware book for users of Pocket PC PDAs. It's quite comprehensive, but very application biased.

What makes PDF (Portable Document Format) unique is that it can provide an exact electronic replica of any document from any application on all major platforms, including all text, graphics and fonts. It’s an amazingly flexible format with a myriad of uses ranging from electronic manuals and e-books, through secure document exchange and archiving, to multimedia presentation and high-end commercial print.

OneNote is one of those rare apps you'll wonder how you ever managed without it. It's basically a note-taking application where you work on sheets of electronic paper, putting down your ideas and rearranging them.

Advanced long document functionality and screen-based publishing via Flash contribute to another Quark-bashing.

Fantastic looks and comprehensive features Lightroom is a winner for improving workflow efficiency.

Excellent support, but a confusing user interface and disappointing firewall let AVG down