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.

Improved handling of templates, tracing, text and layers along with new table support, but ultimately X4 disappoints

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

The future of storage is expensive, for now. That aside, how do Blu Ray drives compare to DVD drives?

Red Hat's latest offering is a finely tuned offensive into the lucrative corporate desktop market. With the Linux steamroller on a collision course for Redmond the last year has seen a number of major wins for the open source upstart with corporations such as IBM and governments that include Germany, France, China, Japan, Russia and Britain either already making the switch or considering it. And not just for servers, but on workstations too.

Support for new file types and platforms plus improved 3D rendering, but director is yesterday’s tool – and it shows

We've put both mini-notebooks through their paces, and while Linux fans may disagree, the winner is clear.

Microsoft has four key 'visions' for Pocket PC 2003 (PPC 2003): make it easier for manufacturers to innovate, improve the 'wireless experience', bring easy instant messaging to the PDA, and expand the 'media experience'.

Flexible, beautifully designed and reasonably priced. An excellent attempt to attract the masses.

MACROMEDIA E-LEARNING STUDIO

It might seem unfair comparing MYOB’s best selling single user product with Quicken’s multi-user small business accounting package, but the key difference between the two is number of licences and not the functionality.

The Ultimate Reference Suite is the latest digital edition of the Britannica. Consisting of three encyclopaedias, numerous dictionaries, thesauri, timelines and even an atlas, it's just as exhaustive as its predecessors, covering mountains of topics in impressive detail.

A genuine step forward for the laptop, with unbelievable capabilities for the price, plus an ultra-low weight.

With advanced packages such as the latest Photoshop (to be reviewed next month) Adobe is the leading software developer when it comes to traditional graphic design...

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

Enjoy your music on the move: we try out five of the best flash-based MP3 players on the market.

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

Microsoft prepares to take on the portable music player industry's heavyweight: Apple. Would you believe it?

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

A welcome update to the Sound Blaster that can deliver perceptibly better audio than onboard chips, but it goes beyond most people’s needs for PC audio.