February 1998 / What's New

Little Problems Trip Up a Little Notebook Not All is Well in Munchkin Land	Since last year's announcement of the Toshiba Libretto sub-notebook, vendors including Hitachi, Nimantics, and Mitsubishi have raced to provide higher-powered micro-laptops. - by Michelle Campanale
The Joy of Portable Computing	Compaq's Presario 1680 has all the features of a high-end laptop with new enhancements to make portable computing more pleasant.
Movin' on Up to Windows CE 2.0 More VELOcity from Philips	The Velo 500, Philips' latest Windows CE machine, is unchanged in form factor, keyboard, and all outward physical characteristics from the Velo 1.
Bringing Yet More to the Table Check Out the Banquet Offerings	The latest Lexmark Optra monochrome laser printers, the Optra S 1620, a 16-ppm printer, and the 24-ppm Optra S 2420, bring new networking, paper-handling, and print capabilities to the printer family's table.
Brainy and Brawny Very Smart Despite Its Size	Heavy-duty industrial printers do not need to be big, dumb brutes that only a mechanic can diagnose and repair.
Hardware Solution for Software Problems	The Micro 2000 Centurion ($60) is a half-height, 8-bit ISA- or EISA-slot add-in c ard that you install in your 286, 386, 486, or Pentium system to repair year 2000 incompatibilities.
Eight-Way NT Server	Axil's rack-mountable eight-processor WindowsNT system, the NX803 ($18,000), supports up to eight 200-MHz Pentium Pro CPUs, up to 8 GB of SDRAM, and 16 PCI slots.
Rough-and-Tough Servers	The Ruffian/HA ($28,995) is not only among the fastest Windows NT servers on the market but, the manufacturer claims, has no single point of failure.
Speed Limit: 32x	Pioneer New Media Technologies clocks its Pure CAV 32x CD-ROM drive at 7300 rpm, with speeds of up to 4800 KBps.
Project Yourself Out of the Office No More Excuses for Missing Meetings	Polycom's new ShowStation IP ($12,999) projector extends the capabilities of an overhead projector to include remote p articipants with remote collaboration faculties.
A Workhorse of a Workstation	The Medallion 300X-D workstation targets high-end graphics and data-intensive applications with support for the newest system technologies, which should stave off the early onset of obsolescence.
Scanning Without Interference Go Inside for Great Scanning	MicroTek's ScanMaker 5 ($3000) is a 36-bit 1000 by 1200 optical dpi (8000-dpi interpolated) color flatbed scanner with a built-in medium tray that eliminates distortion when scanning slides, film, or transparencies.
Get More from Your Hard Drive Get Your Video On Your Desktop	IBM harnessed the capacity of its denser Giant Magnetoresistive head technology to build the Deskstar 16GP, a 16.8-GB drive that's built for the desktop.
Build a Smarter Network Build a Smart Network and They Will Come	Gadzoox's Denali Fibre Channel Loop (FCL) area switch, which is priced at $12,250, works with FCL hubs to build enterprise Storage Area Networks (SAN s).
Back Up Your Backup System	The Ark System ($8995) provides speedy disaster recovery and high availability of data on distributed, multivendor systems.
Real-Time Translation, Word by Word Translate As You Read	If you work for a global company or browse many Web sites with an international focus, Accent Software's WordPoint can help you understand words written in another language. - by Elena Arroyo
Integrated Web-Site Management	WindDance Networks' HTML- and Java-ba sed WebChallenger delivers Web-site exploration, server-failure or slow-performance alarms, content verification, server load balancing, performance measurements, real-time server-failure detection, and real-time client-usage reports.
Help for HTML Blue Skies, Sunshine, and HTML Assistance	Blue Sky Software's RoboHTML 1.0 ($499) is an HTML help authoring tool that complements Blue Sky's RoboHelp 5.0 and Microsoft's HTML help format.
Web and Database Integration Somewhere Between Software and Database	Kiva's Enterprise Server 2.0 ($35,000 on Unix, $25,000 for Windows NT) middleware resides between Web-server software and an enterprise database, helping developers create applications that work with existing enterprise systems.
Your Own Private Firewall	PC Secure is a personal firewall that protects individual PC users, workgroups, or small business networks from on-line attacks.
An Insider's Outsourcing Tool	As companies increasingly depend on outsourcing to get work done, a product such as Glovia 4.0 can help you keep track of outsourced labor and integrate it into existing financial, manufacturing, and customer-service operations.
Making Sense of Your Data Won't Leave You Up a Tree	AnswerTree ($495) is an ODBC-compliant data-mining tool that builds profiles, predicts outcomes and trends, and uncovers patterns in data.
Linux for the People Roll out the Red Hat of Accessibility	Linux is considered by some to be Unix-for-geeks-with-PCs, but Red Hat Linux 5.0 ($49.95) aims to make the popular OS accessible to the mass market.
A Universal Inbox	Communicate Pro ($179) has a single graphical interface for collecting and coordinating all your messaging services, including voice mail, pager, fax, e-mail, contact management, and Internet phone capabilities.
Speak Naturally to Microsoft Word They're Speaking My Letter	Dragon has expanded its family of continuous speech programs for Windows.
Remote Access for Administrators More Than Remotely Possible	NetOp for Windows ($149), from CrossTec, is remote-access software that can reach multiple PCs on multiple platforms simultaneously.
More Scalable Videoconferencing	While videoconferencing breaks barriers between people, BoxTop Interactive's iVisit aims to break barriers in videoconferencing technology.
Standards-Based Interoperability	NFS is a Unix file system that, among other things, allows NT applications to run on Unix platforms.
Eudora Pro 4.0	Eudora Pro 4.0 ($39) keeps abreast of the latest e-mail, Internet, and directory protocols, and provides an updated interface and an enhanced client called Eudora Pro CommCenter ($59).
CorelDraw 8	CorelDraw 8 graphics and image-editing software for Windows has been upgraded to support more file formats while offering a customizable interface.
CoSession Remote 32	CoSession Remote 32 version 8 is a 32-bit implementation of Artisoft's remote-access software for remotely running applications and document sharing.

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