When Macromedia released the first Dreamweaver almost three years ago it was welcomed with open arms by professional Web developers.

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

FrontPage used to pride itself on its almost code-free approach to Web design, but not any more. Top of the new coding features is the Split View, which combines layout and HTML views. There are also improved code formatting and Auto-complete features, providing a drop-down list of context-sensitive options as you type. Auto-complete also handles regularly reused code snippets and works with HTML, CSS, XSL, JavaScript, JScript, VBScript and ASP .NET, which are all directly editable.

In order to control distribution of movies and prevent piracy, many most DVDs are region protected to ensure that they cannot be played outside of their region of issue. In short, this means you can't play American DVDs on an Australian player and vice versa. To further complicate the matter, PC and notebook DVD drives are locked to the least region set with DVD drives correspondingly locked after five changes of region code by the user.

Web Easy promises that anyone can use it to create Web sites and even a complete novice can create and publish a page in less than an hour. With only a few qualifiers this is absolutely true.

If all you want is a simple Web page generator, then a template-based, wizard-driven Web designer such as Web Easy Millennium is all you need.

The book is entertaining. The game is not.

MACROMEDIA E-LEARNING STUDIO

A useful code editor that offers a small, but powerful set of features.

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.

QuarkXPress defines and dominates high-end publishing in much the same way as Adobe Photoshop does photo editing.

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.

One of the best lightweight document editors available

nVidia GeForce 256

While many ultraportable laptops, like the Toshiba R200 go all out to get size and weight to an absolute minimum, a great deal of usability is often sacrificed – the X505 is impractically small for constant daily usage while the R200 has limited battery sizes.

Much improved, but IE still lags behind Firefox 2 in terms of innovation, features and security.

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

Crystal Reports creates structured reports from databases by selecting fields from source data and grouping them appropriately.

The first problem you face when reviewing a Linux reference title is that you know youre on to a loser.

A new interface delivers significant improvements, but the bundling of separate apps for related tasks raises concerns.