Hmm. Actually, I don’t think I’ve seen a virus in my email for well over two years, let alone had an infection, but viruses are being discovered at exponential rates. So, many viruses, but none
on my computer?
‘What gives?’ I wondered. I bet you’ve wondered, too.
To answer the question, we trawled the internet, looking for the online equivalents of slums, red-light districts and the very worst parts of town. We’ve condensed our findings into a handy guide to the risks you really face, and you can only read it in this issue.
A wireless router is the first step towards a solution for many home networking problems, and we’ve rounded up every draft-N (version 2.0) router we could to find the fastest and most flexible around. In October PC Authority, you can find our networking weapons of choice.
Something a bit less practical (but considerably more brag-worthy) is our round-up of camcorders. Solid-state HD is where it’s at, and you may be surprised to find that it doesn’t break the budget.
Also one for the show-off stakes is our head-to-head comparison of Acer’s stylish and portable Aspire One against the current king of the netbooks, Asus’ Eee PC. See who gets our vote for best of the microportables?
And don’t forget to vote in our annual reliability and service awards – your chance to serve brickbats and bouquets to the manufacturers who make the products you use. You’ve got the chance to win one of 40 fabulous prizes, as well as knowing that your feedback will find its way to the people that make the big decisions about customer service in major companies.
• Space Siege demo
• BB FlashBack Express 2
• iolo System Mechanic 8
• Ashampoo UnInstaller Platinum 2
• Iolo Search and Recover 5
With Flash media handling and integration with Acrobat.com the Acrobat platform embraces the Internet – at last
New image editing tools and a more powerful library mode makes Lightroom 2 compelling. It's also compatible with Vista 64-bit.
An improvement over the Eee PC 900, with longer battery life and sleeker looks – but its rivals are catching up
A great way to extend your desktop once you’re out of DVI ports
Innovation and solid performance in an attractive package make the N1 Vision stand out, but it’s expensive
You've been raising some big questions in the forums about 64-bit. Here's our FAQ to 64-bit Vista vs XP, and whether it's worth the hassle if you're not a workstation user, but a gamer or power user.
Meet a new player in the local motherboard market, with great features and solid performance
It’s not quite an office grade product, but the MFC-7840W is a great choice for a busy home office.
Wondering if your neighbour can tell if you're leeching their bandwidth and see what you're doing online?
It's like the Tardis: small on the outside, but extremely capacious on the inside, with 4GB storage and some classy touches that make the Corsair Mini Voyager a cut above regular USB flash drives.
Another big improvement, but this time it’s enough to make PowerDirector a worthy alternative to its mainstream rivals
Good value, but without the decent performance or the feature set of our current award winners this time
Good value, but without the decent performance or the feature set of our award winners this month
Lacks in power, but terrific hardware design makes this an intriguing take on the Eee brand.
A tiny, fast personal laser printer with a temping price and great quality.
Excellent touches promise so much, including a great screen and browser, but in use it’s unbearably slow
We’ve reviewed projectors with built-in wireless features before, but this is the first standalone box we’ve come across.
The LaCie Little Big Disk Quadra is less than the size of a Harry Potter book, yet crams in two 500GB 2.5in hard disks.
Fast performance, slick design and excellent software, all at the right price
A decent board, but the Hybrid SLI feature doesn’t justify the high asking price
Striking looks but limited features, average performance and a high price put paid to the Netgear’s chances
Pocket-sized digital camcorders are becoming more capable all the time. We round up ten of the best
There are more iPod nano challengers on the market than we’d care to mention, but not many put up too much of a fight, except this one.
We rank the top 7 old school video game theme songs of all time, with a little help from Youtube.
Stewart Mitchell delivers his verdict on the features rumoured to be ready for Windows 7, including the new kernel, multi-touch, and virtual drives.
Faster wireless networking is finally within reach. We test and rate every draft-n 2.0 ADSL modem router on the market.
We explain port forwarding and triggering, firewalls and traffic filtering, the DMZ and other broadband bits you should know.
