• Decent battery life

• No expandability through docks, odd for a business product
• Not a great screen

HP's ProBooks are non-extravagant business-orientated machines with additional diagnostic tools built in for the benefit of system administrators. This 4310s model is a perfectly serviceable machine for almost all everyday tasks; however, it will struggle to run 3D games or do any heavy-duty media creation work.

The machine runs a Core 2 Duo T6570, which contains two CPU cores running at 2.1GHz each. Complementing this is 2GB of RAM, a 250GB hard drive, wireless N networking, gigabit Ethernet, Bluetooth, VGA and HDMI outputs, ExpressCard 34 and audio ports, SD card reader and a modem of questionable utility.

This laptop is not hugely expandable. There is no FireWire connector, no port replicator or docking port and no PCMCIA slot. All this is fine, provided you're the kind of user who won't miss the extra external connectivity.

The upshot of its modest configuration is good battery life. Even with the screen brightness at maximum, it took over three and a half hours to drain the battery from full while decoding MPEG-2 video. We repeated the test in HD using the vastly more computationally intensive VC-1 codec, and saw the battery life drop to a very respectable hour and 50 minutes.

The 1366x768 display has reasonable horizontal visibility, but the image washed out faster than you'd expect when you tilt the monitor off-axis. This isn't so much a problem with text, but images and video will appear washed out and inverted when you look at the screen from steep angles. Despite the LCD having quite a bit of flex, the notebook's construction is solid.

At the top right of the keyboard are a series of touch-sensitive hotkeys for volume controls, wireless and a HP launcher. We found the volume up and down buttons unresponsive, and occasionally the wireless would turn itself off without us touching it.

On the software side, a subtly HP branded copy of the 32-bit version of Windows XP Professional comes preloaded. Many of the recent patches to keep it stable, however, do not. XP Service Pack 3 had not been installed. IT managers will like the diagnostic tools built into the hardware that are accessible by interrupting the boot sequence.

A 60-day trial of Microsoft Office is included, as is a 60-day trial of Mcafee Total Protection Service. It's an antivirus suite with extra programs that notify you of phishing attacks in Internet Explorer. This continued to function when we upgraded Internet Explorer from version 6 to 8; however, the software added itself as a space hogging toolbar. It functions with minimal extra effort under Firefox, but does not work at all under Google's Chrome browser.

There are HP branded software helpers scattered throughout the operating system, many of which are unnecessary. After installing our benchmarking applications and several Adobe products to test real-world usage, we found the machine could not finish its restart cycle, although this problem disappeared after several Windows updates. During our battery life tests, we hit a blue screen.

If you find that the price is right and you are only planning on doing menial tasks, you could do a lot worse than the HP ProBook.

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• Very nice touchscreen
• Good plain text quality

• Ink tanks very difficult to insert and remove
• No fax
• Frustrating Smart Solution set-up

Design and features

The Lexmark Prestige Pro805 is a behemoth of a multifunction printer when you first take it out of the box: measuring 25x46.5x39.2cm and weighing 9.27kg it's certainly a large addition to any workspace. Along with the rest of the oddly-titled range (including such gems as the Impact, Prevail and Intuition — find us a printer that's intuitive and we'll eat our hat), the Pro805 is a wireless-enabled device that prints, scans and can even check the weather forecast for you. At AU$499, this printer does cost a pretty penny, so you'll want to make sure it's fully tailored to your needs before you fork out a wad of cash.

It's therefore evident that the Pro805 has a myriad of calling cards, but the most intriguing ace up its sleeve is the 4.3-inch web-enabled touchscreen that takes the place of the traditional colour TFT panel at the front of the device. With a sleek piano black finish, it certainly adds a touch of refinement to an otherwise conventional Lexmark printer design. With the Smart Solutions interface, you can download applications to install on the printer (such as RSS feeds, and one-touch printing for commonly used documents providing a computer is connected to the printer at the time). There's also an application that lets you view the closest retail location from which to purchase ink.

Connectivity is taken care of thanks to 802.11b/g/n or the standard Ethernet port at the back of the device. At the front alongside the touchscreen are standard PictBridge connections (though only for SD, Memory Stick, xD and MMC cards). At the back is the Ethernet port and USB cable connector if you don't feel like freeing yourself from cords. A novel addition for business people is the scanner's ability to read business cards and import contact details into a communications program of choice (such as Microsoft Outlook). There's automatic duplexing as well. The included cartridges are XL (high yield) consisting of three colours — magenta, cyan and yellow — and black. Paper consumables are loaded from the front of the device.

Performance

Taking the Pro805 out of the box is no easy task, as the printer is hidden beneath a layer of styrofoam, cords and instruction booklets (thank goodness that Lexmark chose to include physical copies of the documentation this time around, unlike some of its earlier printers). Included in the box is the printer itself, four cartridges, instruction manuals and networking guides, an installation CD and service guideline CD, USB cable and a protective/polishing cloth (presumably to wipe away those smudgy fingerprints from the touchscreen's surface). Installing the software and printer drivers took at least half an hour, with the printer needing to update its firmware not once, but twice during the set-up process.

The set-up process is the first time that you will encounter the touchscreen interface, and it certainly makes a good first impression. It's nice and responsive, and intuitive to use. It even gives a nice visual indication (complete with little animated bubbles!) to tell you the current ink tank levels.

This is where our admiration for the printer begins to wane. In our experience, there's always an aspect of a printer that proves frustrating, and for the Pro805 it wins the tearing hair award for having the most fiddly ink tanks. The tanks wouldn't snap into position on the printhead without a lot of jostling, abrasions and the odd expletive or two. An honorary mention has to go to paper jams as well — the Pro805 fed several sheets at once through the printer, making the paper get stuck as it passed through the device. There's no easy way to remove the paper either, so you'd better hope for some small hands to jam underneath the print tray to retrieve your treasured, crumpled sheet.

As for the Ethernet and wireless set-up, well, the less said the better. The printer intermittently connected to our network of choice, and then dropped out (regardless of the connection method) which was incredibly frustrating. Linking the device to the Smart Solutions website was also difficult with the printer constantly timing out when connecting to the site — and this wasn't an internet issue either as the printer kept verifying that it was connected to the internet. After the Smart Solution website required a printer firmware update (again) to allow the site to communicate with the printer, we thought at least this time it would be straightforward. Not so.

One of the elements that we tested was syncing the printer with the Smart Solutions website in order to download applications for the touchscreen. A week of struggling with the syncing process was met with many errors until finally after resetting the printer to its factory defaults, the printer finally synced and installed the applications we chose from the Smart Solutions website. Cue more hair loss here.

This printer isn't particularly fast — with our standard test document sent via the USB connection it took one minute, 13 seconds for the first page to emerge from the printer, with lengthy delays of 10 seconds or more between pages thereafter.

Fortunately, text quality with standard 12-point font was fairly good, though at larger sizes there was a small amount of smudging and banding across the text. Lexmark claims that the Pro805 can spit out a 10x15cm print in 24 seconds — we measured exactly double that time for a photo quality print on Lexmark's photo paper. The quality of the print was reasonable, but nowhere near lab quality with visible droplets and over-saturated colours.

Cost and consumables

One of Lexmark's perennial claims is how cheap it is to run one of their printers — 1¢ per page (black). You can find the nearest place to buy cartridges using one of the apps on the Smart Solutions interface. The Pro805 uses individual colour cartridges and one black cartridge, a shift away from the combined colour cartridges of old.

Service and support

Lexmark provides a three-year on-site exchange warranty. The Lexmark website also includes a number of downloads including driver updates for new operating systems. Support is via email or via a 1300 number which we had to call during the Smart Solutions debacle — fortunately, we can verify that the staff on hand are very nice to deal with and very patient. Pity there isn't an app for "Find the nearest wig shop".

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• XFS and Ext3 supported
• Supports ZFS for easy snapshots
• Dual DOM should keep hours of operation high
• Updated interface
• Expandability

• Loud
• Not configured to DHCP out of the box

Design and features

Thecus has carved quite the name for itself amongst network storage enthusiasts; however, of late it's faced stiff competition from the likes of QNAP and Synology, which offered similar performance and features, but with a much nicer looking chassis and interface. To this end, Thecus has released a new look firmware for its NAS, which is now rather AJAX heavy just like its competitors. The result is the inevitable increase in lagginess of the interface, but as a trade off the ease of use is significantly higher.

A five-bay NAS, the N5500 straddles the prosumer to SMB category. This in particular is highlighted by the presence of two Disk On Module (DOM) units, one containing the operating system, the second a mirror of the first, adding some redundancy for more demanding environments. There's still the power supply as a single point of failure, or potentially even the motherboard, but doing anything about that would likely drive costs up substantially.

Of course the usual iSCSI support is there too, and through USB it can act as a DAS too, offering a fairly large degree of flexibility. You can even choose the file system, a welcome addition, either going with EXT3, XFS or ZFS, although the latter would have to be run in user space to avoid licence issues, meaning performance wouldn't be too great. Not to mention it's there as a file system only — RAID-Z is not offered on the N5500, leaving the user with the choice of RAID 0, 1, 5, 6 or JBOD (and whether or not to encrypt those volumes). If you run out of space, you can stack multiple N5500s together using iSCSI to make it appear as a single storage unit to the outside world.

The dual-gigabit Ethernet ports support 802.3ad link aggregation, although as usual with Thecus we had fun navigating through it's not-so-intuitive LCD screen to manually set an IP to begin with — for some reason Thecus chooses to ship with DHCP disabled, a practice we wish it'd reverse. In setting the IP, we also noticed that the access door to the drive bays was a little flimsy and difficult to open via its magnetic-push latch.

Inside is an Intel Celeron 440, clocked at 1.86GHz and a 1GB DDR2-667 SODIMM, although there's a place for a second should you wish to upgrade. Expandability is decent too, with five USB ports and an eSATA port, should you need to attach additional storage to the unit temporarily. An RS232 port is supplied for UPS management, and if you're so inclined you can share a printer off one of the USB ports. All this seems to come at the cost of noise though, with the N5500 packing some relatively noisy fans to push the heat out.

Typically with NAS devices it seems those with the most features wins, and so the N5500 is stacked to the gills. On the server front, it can be an NTP server and a DHCP server, and also packs FTP, iTunes and UPnP media servers. For networking protocols it covers CIFS/SMB, NFS, AFP and Bonjour, and you can mount ISOs if you so desire. The usual email notification and wake on LAN is present, as is scheduled power on/off and disk spin downs for power management.

Active directory is supported, as is local user and group control. Thecus offers its unfortunately named Nsync for backups, although you're free to use whatever backup solution you like, so long as the NAS understands the protocol you're using.

Finally, the Thecus supports modules to expand capability — Thecus by default offers download manager, IPcam, web server and mySQL modules, although the community has long been developing its own modules for Thecus' range. While there doesn't seem to be any dedicated N5500 modules yet, no doubt some of the pre-existing ones will simply work off the bat.

Bugs and performance

Thecus' beta firmware (3.00.07) clearly isn't fully baked yet — which, given its beta status, is to be fully expected. In our testing, logging in as users other than anonymous caused the FTP server to hang when receiving passwords, and eventually claim the password was incorrect. We also found that you could not change the machine's workgroup without turning on ADS.

Thankfully, performance was fine. Copying across a 2GB file saw a maximum of 85MB/s read speeds from the NAS, while write speeds peaked out at 63MB/s. We would have preferred that the unit wasn't so noisy though — trapped in a server room it's fine, but given the Thecus effectively straddles from home user to small business, a quieter operation would have been a plus.

Thecus' N5500 is, like all of Thecus' lines, best suited to the professional user who doesn't mind tweaking the unit to get the most out of it. We believe QNAP and Synology currently have the edge in terms of ease of use, design and quietness, but the N5500 is not too far behind for those who know what they're doing.

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• Cheap

• Wireless receiver isn't built-in for keyboard/mouse
• Can't be used as an extra monitor
• iMac offers better value proposition

Design and features

While we're not sure whether we like the idea of all-in-ones as business machines yet, the Vostro 320 certainly gives its best stab at it. Black is the order of the day, although the monitor stand is curiously red. Curious, because mostly this will be hidden from sight — it's like a designer somewhere decided to subtly get their revenge over all the black business machines.

The front panel is devoid of anything functional, save the screen and embedded webcam — everything else has been moved to the side. Unfortunately, this means you can't see the status lights at all without moving your head to the side. It's certainly not a deal breaker, but if the point of status lights is to have a quick glance to make sure everything's behaving as it should, putting them out of view isn't necessarily the smartest thing to do.

The screen itself is a basic 19-inch, TN-based, 1440x900 model, and unlike the recent spate of Windows 7 machines it doesn't even mention the word touch. While the aforementioned stand only offers limited tilt adjustability, the Vostro can easily be mounted to an adjustment arm for further manoeuvrability.

Being a business machine, the Vostro is subject to the usual anachronistic mess of ports, from the six USB ports, one FireWire and SD/MMC/MS card reader, to the ancient parallel port, serial port and PS/2 ports on the rear. A headphone and microphone jack is also included on the right-hand side of the unit, and while there are speakers included, they're bad enough to only be satisfactory for system sounds.

Dell has included a wireless keyboard (which has a jog dial for volume control, and multimedia/web/mail/computer/calculator dedicated buttons); however, it requires a wireless dongle — the receiver isn't built into the unit. While our review unit included a corded mouse, retail samples should include a wireless mouse hooked into the same receiver as a keyboard — but an internal receiver would have been a better option so we could reclaim the extra USB port.

Internally our review sample sported an Intel Core 2 Duo E7400, 2GB RAM and a 160GB hard drive, all tied up by the X4500MHD chipset for graphics. This is a bit different from what's available at retail — with either the option of a Core 2 Duo E5300 or E7500 for AU$799 or AU$999 respectively. It currently sells with Vista with no XP downgrade rights (although Windows 7 should be available as an option soon with downgrade rights to XP), and unlike the rest of Dell's lines, there's no configurability at all as far as specs are concerned, although you can of course increase your warranty.

Performance

As a business machine, the Vostro isn't required to be too grunty, but the 1047 score in 3DMark06 isn't too bad (at least it'll run Aero just fine), and the 5892 in PCMark05 makes it fine for production work — and the viewing angles are acceptable too.

The Vostro 320 does have its shortcomings, yet for a sub AU$1000 machine we find we can't complain too much. Still, Apple is the king in this arena and we'd be sorely be tempted to spend the extra AU$600 on the iMac 21.5-inch. For your cash you get a significant upgrade, with a 3.06GHz Core 2 Duo processor, 4GB RAM, 500GB hard drive and GeForce 9400M graphics — although non-Mac friendly businesses may not have that option.

While a few tweaks such as an in-built wireless receiver for keyboard/mouse and a video input so it could double as a monitor for your laptop would be nice, if you're looking for a cheap all-in-one PC, it's hard to ignore the Vostro 320 as an option.

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• Apple iMac 24-inch (2009)

• Looks and feels upmarket for the price
• Multi-touch touchpad in entry-level machine

• Low battery life
• No Bluetooth

Design and features

For an affordable laptop at AU$1199, the K50AB looks quite good. The silken coating on the exterior contains a faint half-tone pattern, making what seems at first an ordinary black more of a deep champagne colour, depending on which way the light shines on it.

The 15.6-inch, 1366x768 glossy screen has the requisite 1.3-megapixel webcam up the top. Moving further down, the speakers are provided by Altec Lansing — this in itself doesn't mean much, but the bundled SRS Premium sound app included does do a good job at making the sound better. The multi-touch Elantech pad has lightly concave dimples, which doesn't interfere with use unlike the UX30's. The keyboard features a slightly squished numpad, and the optical drive has been moved to the left instead of being on the usual right. The usual complement of ports is present — four USB, gigabit Ethernet, microphone and headphone jacks, SD/MMC/MS card reader and VGA out. The nearly ubiquitous wireless N is here too; however, Bluetooth has been cut from this budget model.

Internally it plays host to AMD's hardware — an Athlon X2 QL-65 2.1GHz CPU drives the laptop, while a Radeon 3200 and Radeon HD 4570 pull graphics duties. The user is able to switch between the integrated 3200 to save battery, and the discrete 4570 for extra graphics power by right-clicking on the desktop and running ATI's PowerXpress application — although we wouldn't mind a hardware switch for this too. A 320GB hard drive and 4GB RAM round out the specs for the K50AB, while Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit is the OS of choice.

Performance

Two graphics cards means testing twice — and with the Radeon HD 4570 enabled, the K50AB scored 2929 in 3DMark06 and 3820 in PCMark. Battery lasted a concerning one hour, 36 minutes and 19 seconds in our test, where we turn off all power-saving features, set screen brightness and volume to maximum and play back an XviD file.

Switching to the Radeon 3200 should have presented less performance, but greater battery life — however, only one of these was true. 3DMark06 and PCMark05 pulled in 1485 and 3678 respectively, though the battery test only went for one hour, 37 minutes and 34 seconds — indicating something is wrong either at the hardware or driver level when switching GPUs. Regardless, this is the second K50AB we've had from Asus that exhibited the same issue, so we can only assume the problem is endemic to the series at this point in time.

The K50AB is a typical mid-range laptop that looks good, but the in-built GPU-switching feature doesn't save on battery at all. We'd suggest looking elsewhere for your mid-range needs.

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• Sharp design
• Great battery life
• MS Exchange email support
• Good camera

• Gesture games are rubbish
• No 3.5mm headphone socket
• Keypad design makes texting difficult

Design

Subtlety isn't something we encounter too often when reviewing mobile phones, but if anyone is to deliver a subtle elegance in its design aesthetic, it's Sony Ericsson. The Yari isn't a high-end phone, its RRP of AU$549 places it somewhere in the middle of the road, and from a distance it looks like another boring handset. Up close though, you discover something quite beautiful in its black and white composition, its asymmetrical curving white trim and oddly shaped camera key — the gentle ridges that define the keys on the T9 keypad.

While we find this handset beautiful to behold, we don't find it fantastic to use. The aforementioned keypad design is cool to look at, but it's essentially a flat plastic surface with raised peaks, and while this is nice to slide your fingers across, it makes it difficult to type on quickly and accurately. The same can be said for the navigation panel under the phone's screen. Again it looks great, with careful, subtle design, but the buttons aren't easy to use without care.

Good game?

If you've heard anything about the Yari it's no doubt about the phone's gaming prowess, Sony Ericsson's first gesture-controlled gaming phone. For most gamers the following statements are probably completely redundant, but we'll say them anyway: these games suck like a Dyson cyclonic vacuum cleaner. Of the 10 games pre-installed, five of them are controlled by a player's gestures recorded by a front-facing camera, similar to the EyeToy on the Playstation. There's Baseball, Boxing, Bowling, Tennis and Fitness, with only Bowling responding well to gestures and none of them coming even close to being fun.

On the flipside, the games controlled by either the number pad or an in-built accelerometer are mostly fine for killing time. There's LocoRoco, a motion puzzler controlled by tilting the phone, Bubble Town, which is like Bubble Bobble with a story tacked on, and the self-explanatory FIFA 10 and Guitar Rock Tour.

Media and the web

The Yari comes with all the hardware you'll need to connect to the web, including HSDPA data transfers, but no Wi-Fi. The web browser is OK for short sessions of Google searches, but the combination of the browser and smallish screen make reading your favourite desktop websites a feat of patience and sharp eyesight. Yari also has GPS on-board and a range of location-based services installed, including Google Maps and a navigation app called WisePilot.

Sony Ericsson's excellent media browser is present here too, giving the same excellent user experience we've seen recently in the W995 amongst others, with album art display and access to a range of good equaliser presets. On the back of the phone, alongside the 5-megapixel camera and flash, are external speakers which are surprisingly loud and clear. Less impressive is Sony Ericsson's lack of a 3.5mm headphone socket or adapter to plug in standard headphones.

One area of the phone that definitely meets our expectations is the camera. We're not often fans of Sony Ericsson cameras, especially in this price range, but the Yari is one of the exceptions. The photos we've taken so far have been colourful and with decent focus, perfect for capturing those impromptu moments with family, friends or clowns, etc.

Performance

We have no complaints about the way Yari processes common tasks. Throughout our tests the Yari remained stable and lag-free, executing applications quickly even when others remain open in the background. Data transfers were slower than you'll get with a high-powered smartphone, but as we said earlier, this isn't a great phone for web browsing on the whole. Call quality is alright, but not spectacular. The earpiece speaker on our review unit tended to be a little muffled, making it hard to hear when outside near traffic.

Sony Ericsson gets two big thumbs up for battery life, though. While using the Yari we charged the phone on either the third or fourth day, making it twice as battery efficient as the large display touchscreens available.

Overall

The Yari looks great but doesn't have stellar features or applications. The phone is fine and the battery is good, but this can be said for most phones we review. The web browser, games and navigation are mediocre features with limited purpose, and the music player would have been great if Sony Ericsson got past its insistence on using a proprietary port for connecting headphones.

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• Individual ink tanks
• Smart Solutions give flexibility
• Touch panel works intuitively

• Expensive
• Doesn't live up to speed claims
• Ink tanks tricky to fit

Design

There's not been a whole lot of innovation in the multifunction printer (MFP) space in recent years, and that's for one very simple reason. By the time you combine a scanner tray, printhead mechanism and paper mechanism together, you're limited to only a few basic shapes on offer. The S605 looks, for the most part, like any other black multifunction printer, until you look down at the control panel and realise that most of the buttons are missing. There's an indent for the power button next to a glossy black resistive touchscreen panel. Power up the S605 and it springs to life with large and simple buttons for common scanning and copying tasks, as well as a button labelled "Smart Solutions". More on that shortly.

Features

Looking at print speeds, the S605 isn't that much to get excited about. Lexmark rates it with a black print speed of up to 33 pages per minute (ppm) in draft black and 30ppm in colour. The scanner has 48-bit depth, but do note that it's a fax-free model, if faxing is important to you. Media card support extends to SD, MMC, xD and Memory Stick, with a PictBridge slot just below that. The S605 is 802.11n compatible.

One interesting new feature — at least for a Lexmark printer — is the inclusion of discrete ink tanks. There's an argument for cost savings here with three colour tanks and one larger black tank.

The hero feature of this product is the LCD touchscreen, which adapts its on-screen display to be relevant to the task at hand. This makes it a genuinely intuitive printer to use in pretty much any case or scenario, as it'll guide you through each process in turn.

The LCD also enables what Lexmark calls "Smart Solutions". These are web delivered miniature apps with a general printing bent to them, downloaded from Lexmark's dedicated web portal. Lexmark's hype for the S605 mentions "creating" your own Smart Solutions, but that's arguably a little deceptive. At least when we checked, all you could do was register your S605 and download Lexmark's existing Smart Solutions.

Performance

Installation of the S605 was surprisingly easy for a couple of key reasons. Firstly, Lexmark has finally cleaned up its installation procedures. Whereas in the past you'd have enough time in-between starting the installation and actually printing to start a small land war in Asia, the S605's software installation was speedy. Physical installation was mostly problem free, especially as the LCD panel in the S605 doubles up as a display monitor showing you what the next series of actions should be. Our only problem here was fitting the ink tanks, as it took us a little while to work out the correct way to get them to properly click into place.

Getting Smart Solutions onto the S605 does involve registering it with Lexmark, and the cynical part of our brains wonders if having a printer that talks back to its vendor won't result in it chucking a hissy fit if non-Lexmark cartridges are used within it. That having been said, there's a wide variety of Smart Solutions on offer. These range from the rather obvious — advanced copying presets, file printing and so on — to rather more obscure, like getting RSS feeds of MSNBC or Apple Hot News headlines to pop up on the printer. It's also worth noting that some Smart Solutions are Windows only, which is odd when you consider that it's software that's delivered to the printer, not to an operating system per se.

Print speeds on the S605 didn't entirely live up to expectations, with a draft page taking 15 seconds to emerge from the printer, and an average print speed in draft of 13ppm, well under the claimed 33. Photo printing a 10x15cm borderless print took 55 seconds. The S605's photo output was largely unremarkable, with most photos coming out a little drab and flat.

Conclusion

At AU$399, the S605 isn't an entry-level MFP, and it doesn't carry the kind of print or photo speeds we'd expect from a premium unit. On the other hand, the LCD panel works beautifully, and the flexibility of Smart Solutions do give it an edge over a more locked down multifunction device.

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• 16:9, full HD resolution

• HDMI overscans
• Glossy screen
• Overpriced

LCD monitors are slowly being released in the same widescreen ratios as widescreen TVs, which is great for the most part. This 21.5-inch HP 2159m monitor is an example of this trend, and even has a native resolution of 1920x1080; the same used by full HD televisions.

In practice, the wider aspect ratio means certain kinds of work become a little easier (for instance, working on two side-by-side documents) and the high resolution means that you can get more things on your screen at any given time if you don't mind squeezing a lot onto what isn't an overly huge monitor.

During our testing, we found that the panel could reproduce all the colours and shades of our DisplayMate tests. Out of the box the monitor pulls to the red quite a bit by default, and a little under its other presets. This wasn't as noticeable when the custom preset was set to its maximums, but by this point the display had become overly bright.

The panel is highly glossy, and you will be able to see your reflection (and the reflection of everything else around you) in dark areas of the image when in a lit room. This screen won't be at your eye line without the aid of phone books or encyclopedia volumes, as the stand does not extend vertically. On the flip side the stand does tilt quite far, the viewing angle is very good and the screen doesn't distort fine details such as text.

The only real technical frills are the ability to turn off the power LED, which you may not realise was distracting until you disable it.

While most of these limitations come down to taste and budget, there is a major technical flaw that should concern users who intend to connect their computer to this monitor through an HDMI cable. The HDMI input overscans by default, and cannot be overridden.

This would mean that the image from any computer plugged in via HDMI will be zoomed in and slightly cropped. You won't see the title bar of your program or the leftmost file menu, and you'll certainly lose the program bar at the bottom of the screen.

Overscan is a relic from the era of CRT monitors. Since not all CRTs could be relied upon to display a correctly aligned image, the film and TV industries kept the important parts of their images within safety margins so that no important information would be cut off by CRTs in various states of misalignment. This is why subtitles have never been placed at the far bottom of an image.

None of this is a concern in the world of digital pixel mapping, where pixels can be reliably mapped to precise, repeatable coordinates. When overscan is mimicked in digital hardware, the crispness of the image is entirely lost and fine details such as text are mangled horribly. This wouldn't be as big a problem if this were an LCD TV, but for a monitor it would be crippling if there weren't VGA and DVI inputs available that didn't overscan.

We do know of a workaround for this: you can use an HDMI to DVI adapter or cable to connect HDMI equipment through the DVI input of the monitor (which will leave you with one less usable input); however, none are included in the box.

If you were willing to work around this issue, we'd almost recommend this monitor, if it wasn't for one other major problem. The sticker price is simply too expensive. At AU$500, it's AU$200 more than comparable monitors, and AU$100 less than 3D capable monitors.

If you can find it for AU$300, it's worth a look. But until then, we can't recommend it.

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BlackBerry manufacturer RIM has finally announced a successor to its wildly popular BlackBerry Bold 9000, increasing the product number to 9700, but trimming the fat across all of the handset's physical dimensions. The 9700 is like the old Bold after a week at a Boot Camp for fat kids, now 5mm shorter across its width and length and 19 grams lighter.

But these are the only areas where the numbers have gone down, across all other specifications we see the numbers travelling in the opposite direction. The old Bold shipped with a 480x320-pixel display, 1GB of storage and a 2-megapixel camera, the 9700 ships with a 480x360-pixel display, a 2GB microSD card and a 3.15-megapixel camera.

The other big change is the shift from a jogball for navigation to an optical touchpad, like the one we saw on the 8520, which should, if nothing else, assist with web browsing, though we're keen to see if it also improves our high score on Brick Breaker.

For all these enhancements RIM still thinks it can squeeze better battery life out of the new model too, with six hours talk time (up an hour on the iPhone 3GS) and about 17 days standby time. It's certainly not in the same league as the four or five days we used to get on old BlackBerrys, but its not too shabby all the same.

The Bold 9700 should hit stores in the UK in November, though there's no word yet about when we might see the 9700 down under.

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• 50Mbps UTM throughput
• Gigabit ports for main WAN/LAN connections
• 3G wireless connectivity
• Load balancing and failover
• Comprehensive gateway security services

• Additional Ethernet ports are 10/100Mbps only

King of the small business security market, SonicWall recently added six new models to its popular TZ range of UTM (Unified Threat Management) appliances, delivering a mix of enhanced functionality and improved performance. Designed to serve the one-man-band upwards, the new range is topped out by the TZ 210 which, as we discovered, neatly bridges the gap between SME and enterprise products — and at a price that the competition will find hard to match.

The USB ports at the front of the TZ 210 can be used to add a 3G wireless dongle or an analog modem. At the back, the TZ 210 has two gigabit Ethernet and five Fast Ethernet interfaces. (Credit: CBS Interactive)

Available with or without an integrated Wireless-N (802.11n) access point, the TZ 210 has two gigabit Ethernet interfaces at the back, labelled WAN and LAN, for internet and local network attachment, respectively. Alongside are five other network ports which can be used for a variety of purposes including additional LAN/WAN connectivity with built-in load balancing and failover support, although these are all 10/100Mbps only, rather than gigabit enabled. At the front, you also get two USB ports for a 3G wireless dongle and/or to connect to an analog modem to further boost WAN bandwidth and protect against service failures.

In terms of performance, the firewall in the TZ 210 can inspect traffic at up to 100Mbps. With the UTM services applied this halves to 50Mbps, but that's still an impressive figure for a device in this price bracket. Indeed it's good enough to protect the WAN links of even quite large organisations and more than adequate where the appliance is used to secure connections to distributed branch offices.

Wizards help with initial deployment of the TZ 210. (Credit: CBS Interactive)

Installation on our (more modest) test network took just a few minutes, following the instructions in the comprehensive getting-started guide, which includes lots of useful examples showing how to cope with different network deployments. Most of the initial work is done by set-up wizards, which certainly helped us — especially with the VPN configuration. However, these can't do everything so, once the basic set-up is complete, it's down to the usual web-based interface for more detailed configuration or, on large networks, SonicWall's GMS (Global Management System) software.

Website browsing can be managed via a categorised list. (Credit: CBS Interactive)

We used a browser for our tests and found the interface very easy to navigate. On the downside, a degree of technical knowledge is assumed and some of the options took a while to work out. However, that's par for the course on this type of appliance, and it took us just under an hour to get the key firewall and antivirus services up and running and to use the content filtering service to stop users browsing sites we wanted to block. We also found it easy to zone our network and apply different policies to each — and even scan and filter traffic passing between zones.

Different services and policies can be applied to each network zone. (Credit: CBS Interactive)

There was no option to inspect SSL-encrypted traffic for threats, but you can scan compressed files and enforce local antivirus protection on network PCs. Plus there's a useful guest services option for wireless users, to allow visitors, for example, to connect to the internet but not snoop around the corporate LAN. You can even use the TZ 210 to manage security on other wireless access points, although only where SonicWall hardware is employed.

Comprehensive gateway antivirus protection is a key feature of the TZ 210. (Credit: CBS Interactive)

One other point to note is that most of the services have to be licensed before they can be used. Go for the bare appliance and you get the usual free trials. However, we'd recommend the Total Secure package, which includes licences for the gateway antivirus, spyware, content filtering and intrusion prevention services. This adds to the price of the TZ 210, but is cheaper than buying the licences separately. Plus you're immediately good to go with a full year of updates and support, after which there are several ways of extending your protection — one of the cheapest being a three-year Comprehensive Gateway Security Suite licence.

The ability to enforce and update McAfee-based client antivirus protection is an optional feature. (Credit: CBS Interactive)

Depending on your network, other costs may also be incurred. Spam filtering, for example, isn't included in the Total Secure package. Likewise, if you want the TZ 210 to enforce and update McAfee antivirus protection on local PCs you'll need yet another licence. Additional VPN licences may also be required, as just two IPSec and two SSL VPN licences are included as standard.

Conclusion

The TZ 210 is an impressive UTM appliance, delivering enterprise-class security and throughput to match similar products from competitors like Cisco and Juniper. Moreover, we found it relatively easy to manage and much more affordable.

Via ZDNet UK

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• Lightweight
• Internal DVD burner

• Build quality
• 802.11n is optional
• Poor quality WLED screen

Design

Metallic red isn't a colour you'd normally associate with a business notebook, but Dell has decided that a little splash of colour is needed in a business notebook market full of grey and black notebooks.

The 12.1-inch glossy WLED screen runs at a maximum resolution of 1280x800. Even more annoying than the fingerprint-attracting glossy screen was the screen bleeding that made itself known along the bottom of the screen. This becomes even more evident when viewing anything with a dark background.

The keyboard is light and tactile when typing, while the touch pad is responsive to touch. The touch pad settings can also be easily customised to suit your taste. A row of media shortcut keys (all with blue backlights), along with the power button and status indicators, are located above the keyboard.

Another disappointment is with the screen's hinge, which refuses to stay up once it's past the 130-degree angle. This mainly poses a problem for those that like working during their commute to work on public transport.

Features

Internally, our review unit had an Intel Core 2 Duo T6570 running at 2.1GHz with an 800MHz FSB with 2GB of RAM, which manages to run the pre-installed Windows Vista Business without many issues. However, anything more strenuous than the word processing or PowerPoint may be asking too much for this notebook.

It must also be noted that the retail versions of the Vostro 1220 will have a slightly faster processor, available as either a Core 2 Duo T6670 at 2.2GHz with an 800MHz FSB or a P8600 at 2.4GHz with 1066MHz FSB.

Although the internal 8x DVD burner is a welcome addition in a notebook this size, it comes at a cost. The shell casing above the DVD burner isn't particularly strong and could easily break if you're not careful while lugging the Vostro around with you.

In an odd move, despite the widespread availability of wireless LANs, the Vostro does not feature 802.11n wireless LAN connectivity as standard and is instead an optional extra, falling back on a b/g adapter as the default. Other connectivity options include three USB ports, a gigabit Ethernet port, VGA connector, Bluetooth 2.1 support (although this is optional on the base models), 34mm ExpressCard slot and three-in-one card reader.

In what should be a more widespread practice, Dell has decided against the usual trialware on the notebook, giving you free reign to decide the kind of software you'd like to install on the 250GB hard drive. Sure, you could just uninstall the software yourself, but it's nice to know that Dell has saved you precious minutes.

Performance

As to be expected from the on-board Intel X4500MHD graphics the Vostro managed a lowly score of 825 in 3DMark, but managed to protect its portable business notebook image better in PCMark05 by snagging a score of 3847.

The four-cell battery of the Vostro lasted for a respectable three hours, 25 minutes and 33 seconds on high performance settings with brightness and volume at maximum. While this puts it a few hours behind the best netbook offerings, it does have the advantage of a larger screen and significantly more processor power.

Vostro 1220 had a lot of potential, but has been letdown by its below average build quality — something that should be a high priority, especially for an ultraportable notebook.

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• Comfortable keyboard
• ExpressCard slot
• Optional HSDPA connectivity
• Good battery life
• Draft-N Wi-Fi radio
• Bundled docking station converts netbook into a nettop.

• Included docking station increases price but does not add new ports like HDMI

On the surface, the Booktop seems to be just another Atom-based 10-inch mini-laptop from a minor player. But while Gigabyte is better known for manufacturing mainboards than laptops, we were impressed that the M1022M managed to stand out from the crowd during our testing. In fact, it could be the first mini-laptop that can be configured as a nettop as well. The bundled docking station and excellent battery life make the AU$699 price tag expensive but not unreasonable. However, we feel the docking station should have been an optional accessory so that the M1022M can be offered at a lower price, since not everyone wants to use a netbook to replace a desktop.

Design

It may not be as hardy as a ThinkPad, but the Booktop is not some cheap OEM rip-off, either. The tapered chassis has an attractive hinge design and although colour options are not available, the simple black-and-white theme is understated yet attractive. It has a solid build quality and tight hinges so we expect this machine to be durable enough for the road.

But what really impressed us was how Gigabyte managed to fit in a six-cell battery without having it protrude from the back or bottom. This helps the M1022M maintain a slim profile and reasonable heft. We like the 92 per cent keyboard which is comfortable to use, though touch typing may not be feasible for those with fat digits. Our only complaint is that the trackpad buttons are located at the sides, which may take some getting used to.

The Booktop maintains a sleek profile despite a generous six-cell battery. (Credit: Gigabyte)

The fact that all three USB ports are positioned on the right may look unusual at first, but it makes sense when the unit is docked as it allows these slots to remain available. The docking station puts the netbook in an upright position to minimise its footprint and makes the unit resemble a nettop. Despite the accessory not having a heavy base, we never felt that the netbook was in a precarious position when in use. The dock includes VGA and Ethernet passthrough ports as well as three USB slots so you can keep the Booktop connected to an external display and peripherals.

Features

The Gigabyte M1022M is one of the few low-cost mini-laptops to sport an ExpressCard/34 slot. Surprisingly, it does this without compromising on the number of USB ports or reducing the size of the battery. The company did not skimp on hardware components, either, and the Booktop is decked out with Draft-N Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and Ethernet connectivity. The netbook can also be wired for HSDPA connectivity as an optional extra.

Though the 10.1-inch glossy display is not HD-ready, its 1024x600-pixel resolution is decent enough for internet surfing and emails. Which is all a netbook is really good for as its Atom processor and integrated GMA 950 graphics engine are not powerful enough for HD videos or most current gaming titles. The audio output through the stereo speakers is, like most netbooks, adequate at best, so plug in a pair of earphones if you are picky about sound quality.

As a nettop, the Gigabyte M1022M is comparable to first-generation low-cost PCs since current models sport dual-core Atom chipsets. Though the docking has a VGA output, Ethernet port and three USB slots, it does not expand the feature set by offering connectors such as HDMI or eSATA (which are becoming common among nettops). The docking station has a power button that turns on the netbook, as well as a battery key that shows the remaining power by lighting up the six LED lights at the front of the M1022M. This feature also works by clicking on the right trackpad button on the machine.

The bundled docking station puts the netbook in a space-saving upright position. (Credit: Gigabyte)

Gigabyte's proprietary Smart Manager software provides a user-friendly interface to change power profiles. In addition, it can control screen brightness and audio volume, enable the webcam and wireless radios. The latter is especially useful since the Gigabyte M1022M does not have a dedicated switch to turn off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

Performance and battery life

The Booktop runs off a 1.66GHz Atom processor, 1GB RAM and 160GB HDD. The single-core chip, along with its integrated Intel GMA graphics card, is best confined to internet duties and simple productivity tools such as word processing. Standard-definition videos are still playable, though HD videos (even those streamed from the net) do not perform well on this mini-laptop.

Battery life is where the Gigabyte netbook differentiates itself. Granted the Asus Eee PC series still takes the crown for exceptional uptime, but the six-cell 7800mAh battery in the M1022M holds its own. We looped a video clip at half-screen brightness on this netbook with the wireless radios turned off and it shut down only after an impressive five hours and two minutes. There is no extended battery option, though this netbook's uptime should be adequate for all but the most demanding traveller.

Via CNET Asia.

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• Record-breaking battery life
• Strong performance for an ultraportable
• Comfortable full-size keyboard
• Widescreen display with a sharp resolution
• WWAN and GPS options

• Nine-cell battery adds significant weight
• Lacks an optical drive
• Includes pointing stick but no touch pad

We were a little surprised when Lenovo announced an X series laptop with a 12.1-inch wide-aspect display; after all, the similarly sized ThinkPad X300 had won over many hearts and minds when it was introduced earlier this year. But the new ThinkPad X200 does nicely round out Lenovo's ThinkPad family. It's slightly smaller and — with a starting price of AU$2999 — significantly less expensive than the 13.3-inch ThinkPad X300. More importantly, with the nine-cell battery it features the longest battery life we've seen to date.

What the ThinkPad X200 doesn't offer — a built-in optical drive, a touch pad — will surely be a clear deal-breaker for some users. And you'll have to carry some extra weight to get a full day's worth of battery life. However, the Lenovo ThinkPad X200 makes sense for frequent travellers who want an ultraportable laptop that's both long-lived and powerful enough for a full day's work in a variety of applications.

Even from across the room, there's no mistaking the X200's heritage: its rectangular black case (wrapped around a magnesium chassis) is all ThinkPad. By virtue of its wide-aspect display, it features a slightly larger footprint than its predecessor, the ThinkPad X61s. In fact, the X200 now looks like a miniature version of the 13.3-inch X300. Though the X200's weight starts at 1.39kg, our ThinkPad X200 review unit tipped the scales at 1.68kg with its nine-cell battery. We think the extra weight is worth it (read on for the results of our battery benchmarks) but acknowledge that some road warriors might prefer the sub-kilogram weight of the Toshiba Portege R500.

The 12.1-inch widescreen display features a sharp 1280x800 native resolution that's more common on 14.1-inch or even 15.4-inch displays. The resulting text and icons are probably about as small as you can go for comfortable everyday use. Given the ThinkPad's business focus, we appreciate the matte screen finish, which avoids reflections in brightly lit office environments.

Another advantage to going wide with the ThinkPad X200: plenty of room for the keyboard. Whereas Lenovo's previous ultraportable, the standard-aspect ThinkPad X61s, had (of necessity) a slightly compact keyboard, the ThinkPad X200's wider case can accommodate the same keyboard used on Lenovo's 14- and 15-inch ThinkPads. (You can see close-up photos of both keyboards in this blog post.) The difference in size is noticeable; on the X200 we never felt like we were typing on an ultraportable machine.

Navigation, however, is still a bit limited. With its last few ThinkPad models, Lenovo has tried to accommodate both fans of the red TrackPoint pointing stick and those who prefer a touch pad by including both options. The ThinkPad X200, however, features only the TrackPoint and three mouse buttons (the centre acts as a scroll button); touch-pad fans, of which there are many, will feel left out.

Above the keyboard are basic volume controls as well as the very helpful blue ThinkVantage button, which launches a suite of system maintenance, power management, connectivity, and other utilities. All the other classic ThinkPad touches are here, including the nifty keyboard light tucked beneath the lip of the lid and a fingerprint reader below the keyboard for quickly logging in to Windows and a company network.

As with the ThinkPad X61s, the ThinkPad X200's slender case does not have room for a built-in optical drive. This may be a deal-breaker for some, but we like having the option of paring down our system to the bare essentials for travel; users who rely on optical media would be better off purchasing Lenovo's UltraBase dock, which includes a DVD burner, or opting for the ThinkPad X300, which incorporates both an optical drive and a larger screen.

Otherwise, the ThinkPad X200 offers the basic ports and connections a business traveller will need, plus one more USB port than average and the option for built-in WWAN and GPS. There's also a 1.3-megapixel webcam above the display.

Our ThinkPad X200 review unit contained a 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo P8600 processor and integrated Intel GMA X4500 HD graphics. The CPU gives the ThinkPad X200 an advantage over the low-voltage, lower-speed processors that power other ultraportables. On CNET Labs' benchmarks, the ThinkPad X200 outperformed the Toshiba Portege R500 and the Apple MacBook Air, and it showed notable gains over the ThinkPad X300. The ThinkPad X200 also easily outpaced a number of netbooks, including the admittedly less expensive MSI Wind U100, making it a far better choice for travellers whose work extends beyond web surfing and keeping up with email.

The ThinkPad's nine-cell battery lasted an astonishing six hours, 23 minutes on our video playback drain test. It even bested smaller systems, such as the Asus Eee PC 901 and the Samsung Q1 Ultra Premium. Anecdotally, we got about six hours of battery life from the ThinkPad X200 while simultaneously working on documents, surfing the web, and wirelessly streaming music.

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• Constructed from recycled materials
• Good call quality
• Can sync with Microsoft Exchange server

• Expensive
• Average camera
• No 3.5mm headphone socket
• Basic web browsing

The crazy Sony Ericsson phone names keep on coming, with the Satio, Aino and Yari to be joined by the Naite (pronounced Nate-ey). But Naite has another noteworthy trait separating it from its funky named brethren in that it is the first Sony Ericsson phone to carry the Greenheart badge — a reminder of Sony Ericsson's commitment to environmentally-friendly phone production and distribution.

How green is your mobile?

One of the major areas of environmental consideration is in the materials used to produce the pint-sized Naite. The company promises to use at least 50 per cent recycled materials in the casings, though you'll struggle to prove this to hippy friends as the casing of the Naite looks identical in build and quality to previous low-end Sony Ericsson handsets. Perhaps if it was made from hemp and had the look and feel of a Hessian bag this message would be clearer, but then who wants a crumby looking mobile?

Naite also comes bundled with a new mobile phone charger that is designed consumes less power and is designed to suck less juice when left plugged into a power source without the phone connected. The box you receive your new phone in is also dramatically smaller than most phone boxes we encounter, which not only saves on the packaging materials used, but also means more handsets per transport pallet which then leads to less emissions from the various forms of transport used to ship the phones around the world.

Lastly, Sony Ericsson has installed a couple of green-focused apps that help you measure your daily carbon emissions, but these are merely pandering to our guilty consciences and are not particularly well thought out tools. By adding in your guesstimate of how far you travel in cars and planes and your household energy usage, the Naite then tells you how bad you are, really nothing mind-blowing here.

Simple Simon

Once you get passed your own smug sense of world-saving self satisfaction, the Naite is a very simple mobile phone. Its standout feature is HSDPA web browsing, though this is hampered by a simple, sluggish pre-installed web browser. This speed is better used with the excellent on-board Facebook and Twitter clients. Facebook, in particular, is fantastic; the client is clean and easy to navigate and you can do most of your daily cyber-stalking while on the bus or train without too much trouble. You can even keep your recent friends status updates on your home screen as an animating ticker of the latest gossip and lunchtime desires.

The hardware of the Naite is very run-of-the-mill Sony Ericsson. The combination of a 2.2-inch QVGA display with the all-too familiar nav-pad and keyboard layout is common to just about every line of Sony Ericsson products over the past few years. This is a tried and tested design formula, and while it's not an exciting new phone, it is a solid one with easy-to-use buttons and controls.

Alongside its simple design, the Naite sports a basic raft of media capture and playback capabilities. On the back of the phone you find a flash-less 2-megapixel camera drilled into the textured chocolate-brown battery cover. The camera is featureless on the software side too, with no autofocus and only limited settings to play with, but is redeemed ever-so slightly by a fast 0.5 second shutter speed. For the media you already own, the Naite supports MP3, AAC and WMA audio files and MP4 and WMV video files.

Performance

It's hard to fault the performance of this little trooper, but equally hard to identify points of the phone to praise. Menu navigation is swift and the opening of common apps, like the camera and the browser, is suitably fast. Web browsing, as mentioned above, takes an eternity before the 3G connection starts to download any data when pulling up a web page.

Battery life is decent, at 4.5 hours talk-time as estimated by Sony Ericsson. During our tests we saw about three days between charges, which is good, but not outstanding. Call quality is up to Sony Ericsson's excellent standard, with all the calls we've made sounding clear and loud.

Overall

There has been a rise in new technologies due to big companies shifting focus to environmentally-friendly alternatives and with it, higher price tags, like Toyota with the Prius for example. Sony Ericsson follows suit in the price department — its AU$399 RRP is twice as much as we'd expect to pay — but doesn't really offer new technology. Sure you get the new low-power wall charger, but the phone itself is a bare-bones 3G handset, and though it performs well, it doesn't come close to justifying this ludicrous ticket price.

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• Luxurious design
• Decent power
• Leather wrist rest makes typing more comfortable
• Ceramic touchpad
• Overclockable "TwinTurbo" mode

• Weedy speakers
• Huge power brick may limit portability
• Left facing hot air vent

Asus' Lamborghini VX5, as all car-branded laptops are, is one for the enthusiast — the sound of a Lamborghini revving when the laptop boots is testament to this. Regardless, Asus' VX5 is a luxury that more than just car enthusiasts will appreciate, and although not as fast as its Italian namesake (or perhaps, German considering the current owners), it does manage a decent amount of performance.

It's not, say, Alienware-ridiculous-fast, but it does have a moderately grunty GeForce GT 130M, 4GB RAM and a Core 2 Quad Q9000 @ 2GHz. Dual 500GB hard drives and a Blu-ray drive also make this one of the more endowed laptops out there, but what really tips the scales is the leather wrist rest, which makes typing on the VX5's backlit chiclet-style keyboard an enjoyable experience (as well as minimising sweat).

The ceramic touchpad is a nice touch as well — although the non-uniform shape means there are dead zones around the demarcated touch area — something you soon adapt to. We do find ourselves missing the multi-touch touchpad Asus has been using lately though — the VX5 features Synaptic's single touch pad instead. Nestled between the far-too-difficult-to-press mouse buttons is a fingerprint reader.

The 16-inch, 1366x768 screen is nice, and at the top is a 2.0-megapixel sapphire crystal webcam — in theory a notch above the usual PC fare. Sadly, it was quite slow above the 0.3 megapixel resolution of 640x480, and we didn't notice any solid image quality improvements.

The rest of the laptop is all silver accents, champagne and piano black (there's also a ceramic white version, should the fancy take you), as many car-inspired grilles as possible and a Lamborghini logo on the rear, lit up by the monitor's backlight. Even the power button is designed in a way to make you feel like you're looking at car decor, with a speed button underneath that enables "TwinTurbo Mode", illuminating the touchpad and insignia on the monitor blue, and overclocking the FSB by 100MHz and the GPU by 25MHz when the laptop is plugged into the wall.

For a reasonably hefty laptop with a subwoofer, the VX5's sound is disappointingly weedy and lacking punch, with Karnivool's Themata and Muse's Hysteria sounding like pale imitations of their former selves.

Under the monitor is a button for controlling the ambient sensor (which allows the monitor and keyboard backlight to adjust depending on the ambient light in the room), two buttons for turning on or off the touchpad or keyboard illumination, and finally a battery profile button, which cycles between Entertainment, Quiet Office, Battery Saving and High Performance settings, each adjusting power settings and screen brightness to suit particular situations. All these are overridden if you enter TwinTurbo mode.

The VX5 plays host to four USB ports, one eSATA, HDMI and VGA out, headphone, speaker and microphone jacks, MMC/SD/MS card reader, ExpressCard54 slot and gigabit Ethernet. Bluetooth and 802.11n radios are also included. Vexingly, a hot air vent has been placed on the left-hand side. Given the VX5's spec, this will likely result in left-handed external mouse users potentially getting an uncomfortably warm hand when the machine is working at its hardest.

The VX5 runs off Vista Home Premium 64-bit, and includes a Norton Internet Security 2009 trial, Cyberlink's Power2Go and Microsoft's Office 2007 trial. Accessories include a microfibre sleeve, a cleaning cloth, a story book covering the history of Lamborghini, a quality Logitech NX80 external mouse with pouch (re-branded with Lamborghini and Asus logos) and a Targus mouse pad. It also comes with one of the bigger power supplies we've seen, which reduces the portability.

Performance

With a fair bit of grunt behind it, the VX5 performed well in the 3DMark06 and PCMark05 tests, scoring 6512 and 5012 respectively. Engaging TwinTurbo mode, this took performance up a notch to 6719 and 5364, respectively. Whether in TwinTurbo mode or not, the VX5 has a decent amount of guts behind it and should be capable of both gaming on fairly recent titles and office work.

Setting all power-saving features off, screen brightness and volume to maximum and playing back an XviD file, the battery lasted one hour, 24 minutes and 38 seconds, decent considering the hardware involved. Take in mind this is a highly stressing test — casual use would see significantly longer battery life.

Asus' Lamborghini VX5 is a luxury laptop, with a luxury price to match — thankfully justified by the quality of the laptop and package. If you've got a wad of cash burning in your pocket, don't mind a little luxury or want to make a statement, the VX5 might be for you.

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• Lenovo ThinkPad T400
• Toshiba Portege A600
• HP Mini 2140
• MSI GT725

• CD and DVD printing
• Nice quality photo prints
• Compact design

• Plain text quality not great
• Cost of consumables is pretty steep
• No Windows 7/Snow Leopard support

Imagine this. You're pulling an all-nighter for your last university assignment. The clock hits an ungodly hour of the morning as you desperately try to put the finishing touches on your essay. Finally, you let out a sigh of relief as you type your final sentence and then hit print, but lo and behold, your printer doesn't respond. Nothing at all.

In a mad panic before the clock hits the deadline for submission, you're racing around trying to find a printer — nothing fancy — just something cheap with a few extra bells and whistles. Enter the Epson Stylus Photo T50, undoubtedly a printer that many people will buy on a whim because of its price (AU$179) and because of the recognised brand name.

Design and features

This little black box is an inkjet printer — no fancy multifunction device here — that can print on CDs, DVDs and produce standard photo prints. It's a relatively lightweight unit at just 5.5kg, a feather-like relief after an array of cumbersome multifunctions that have passed through the CNET offices of late. It's coated in piano black plastic with a silver trim and is quite spartan in terms of extras — there's no LCD screen here. Connectivity is taken care of by a single USB cable, and that's all.

Consumables are either loaded from the back (paper) or the top panel (ink) that lifts up from the printer body. The paper catching tray at the front extends down but doesn't quite sit flush with the surface it rests on, thanks to the oddly positioned front decal. There's hardly any exterior fanfare, with no PictBridge connections for memory cards, and just three solitary function buttons at the front.

With six individual ink tanks the T50 definitely sees itself as a photo printer, using either standard or high yield cartridges. In the box you're provided with the printer itself, a USB cable, six ink cartridges to get you started, a CD/DVD printing tray, plus a software CD and installation guide. The rest of the documentation is provided on the CD.

Software provided includes Epson's Print CD (no prizes for guessing what this one does), Web-To-Page, Easy Photo Print, and Print Image Framer that lets you decorate your photos with all manner of objects. At the time of writing, there were no drivers available form Epson's website for Windows 7 or Snow Leopard.

Performance and running costs

We performed a number of tests with the T50. First, a 12-page PDF document with two colours and black text. From sending the document to the printer, to the first page emerging, took 43 seconds. After that the T50 averaged 13.6 seconds per page — not a quick result by any margin, but good enough for home use.

Text quality was average, letters were not as crisp as a number of other inkjets we've seen and had slight bleeding around the edges of letters on plain paper. The printer also struggled with smaller font sizes, causing them to become skewed. Images on documents (as opposed to photos) suffered from visible print droplets and there was a small amount of banding across these images.

For photo performance, we printed on three types of Epson branded photo paper (Premium Glossy, Ultra Glossy and Matte) and the results were fairly similar. Blacks were nice and deep but the T50 did like to saturate the reds and magenta hues a little more than average — which may be a result of having two magenta ink tanks. The T50 printed a border-less 10x15cm photo print on high quality settings in two minutes 20 seconds which is a far cry from the 12-second claim stated on the box. On matte paper, there was an area of discolouration down a line through the middle of our picture on A4-sized paper which was fairly noticeable even from a distance — this didn't seem to be an issue on the 10x15cm sized photo paper. Overall, the photo quality from the printer was very nice, with sharp and crisp images, and mostly accurate colours.

Each high yield cartridge retails for around AU$27 (at the time of writing) and will print approximately 860 pages (colour) or 540 (black). Considering you'll need to purchase six of them, the cost of ownership of this printer does begin to escalate fairly quickly — you'll almost be buying another T50 if you purchase it all in one go (AU$162).

Service and support

Epson offers a standard one-year warranty (return to base) on the T50, with the option of purchasing an additional extra two-year warranty.

Conclusion

The T50 is not a bad impulse buy if you want a capable photo printer that can also dabble in CD printing and the occasional document, but for presentation purposes, the text quality is not great. For a little more you can get a multifunction printer that's just as good with photos, can scan, copy and fax, plus does a better job on plain text documents.

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• Decent performance
• Solid build

• Poor graphics performance
• Obscured cursor keys

Design

The Extensa 5635Z is a business-centric notebook, and like most business models the core visuals take a back seat to functionality. This inevitably leads to a rather plain looking notebook, and there's really nothing in the Extensa's design that truly stands out. The keyboard uses just about every last millimetre of space open to it, which enables Acer to include a number pad on a model with a 15.6-inch display screen. The flip side of that is that some of the keys are very close together, and the cursor keys suffer from being quite small and being stuck under dedicated Euro and Dollar keys.

The one design feature in the Extensa that we did like — and that should appeal to the business crowd — is that it's a solidly build laptop, which should bode well for its ruggedness over time. "Solid" usually equates to "heavy", and with a weight of 2.5kg with the battery installed, you'll quickly feel the Extensa on your shoulder.

Features

Acer sells the Extensa in a variety of configurations, and predictably the "from $1099" price represents the lowest specification machine that Acer sells. Our review sample sported a Pentium Dual-Core T4200 CPU, 2GB of RAM and an internal Intel GMA4500M 64MB graphics chip. Storage is provided via a 250GB SATA drive, and optical duties are handled by an 8x DVD-Super Multi double-layer drive. The Extensa ships with a multi-format card reader, three USB ports, D-Sub VGA output and a multi-touch capable touchpad. On the networking side it's got standard Ethernet, 802.11n and Bluetooth.

On the software side, the review model Acer supplied to us came with Windows Vista Business 32-bit, but you can expect that to flip over to Windows 7 pretty shortly. You also get a 60-day trial version of McAfee Internet Security and Microsoft Office, and NTI's Media Maker and Shadow software packages.

Performance

Basic business machines are all about productivity and not necessarily pizzazz, and that's exactly what we got out of the Extensa. For writing or spreadsheet work it functioned well, as you'd expect a system with its core specifications to do. The cursor keys are a bit of a curse, especially if you don't need the extra dollar and euro keys, but they're not an insurmountable problem.

On the pure performance front the Extensa provided few surprises. Intel's in-built graphics solutions are always notably weak, so its 3DMark06 score of 779 was no surprise to us. If your boss buys you an Extensa, don't expect too many sneaky hours playing games with it, unless Solitaire really gets you excited. On the productivity front the Extensa performed well, with a PCMark05 score of 4017.

Acer supplies the Extensa with a six-cell battery life and is astonishingly modest about its battery capabilities. We're very used to the types of spin that vendors put on battery life, rich with qualifiers and often highly suspect battery life testing regimes. Acer's claim for the Extensa is that you'll get up to a two-hour battery life, which isn't much at all in comparison with just about any other modern battery claim. In our DVD playback test with all battery-saving features disabled and screen brightness pumped up to full the Extensa sailed past the two-hour figure, conking out at two hours and 55 minutes. For a system with a screen that large, it's a decent figure. Not the greatest battery life capable for a business machine to be sure, but we've got to applaud Acer's upfront honesty.

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Closer inspection reveals them to be almost identical, the crucial difference being that the X500 is aimed squarely at what HP calls "small and emerging businesses".

HP's StorageWorks X500 Data Vault supports up to 13.5TB of Windows Home Server-powered storage (including internal and external drives). (Credit: HP)

The X500 is housed in a pint-sized mini-tower chassis and, according to the specifications on HP's US website, is powered by a 2.5GHz Pentium E5200 CPU and up to 2GB of unbuffered ECC DDR2 RAM. There are four internal SATA drive bays, two or three of which are free depending on the model, each of which can be fitted with a 1.5TB drive. Four USB 2.0 ports and an eSATA port allow external drives to expand this up to a quoted maximum of 13.5TB.

HP is pushing the X500 range as a combined storage, sharing and backup solution for smaller businesses with limited IT support. Starting from AU$699 for 1TB, it's intended as a lower-cost alternative to NAS devices such as Buffalo Technology's Terastation III.

The X500 Data Vault is aimed at businesses with up to 10 PC (or Mac) clients and should offer the full range of WHS features, including remote file access, remote desktop, fully-automated client backup and UPnP media streaming. WHS is based on Windows Server 2003 R2, with proprietary Microsoft modifications to the data storage subsystem to enable hot-plug expansion and robust drive failure protection. It's designed to run headless, with all management carried out via a remote web console applet.

HP provides custom add-ins to the WHS console in its consumer products, and this video on HP's US site seems to indicate that most of those features are also present in the X500 series.

(Credit: HP)

This is a fascinating development in the rather ragged history of Windows Home Server — a technically interesting product that has failed to gain traction with consumers since its launch in 2007 (largely the result of a string of software hiccups and the reluctance of hardware manufacturers to buy into the concept). But WHS is a product with some powerful underlying technology that could well be more attractive to small businesses than consumers. However, it remains to be seen whether Windows Home Server is ready to undergo a business makeover.

Via ZDNet UK

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• Thecus N5200 Pro
• QNAP TS-509 Pro
• QNAP TS-409 Pro NAS

AVG is making some bold claims for these updates. The company is touting scan times that are "up to 50 per cent" faster, based on marking files safe until their file structure changes, and boot times that are "10 to 15 per cent" faster. Memory usage is also expected to be "10 to 15 per cent" better, as well. The built-in firewall, available only in the Internet Security version, uses a new database for automatically determining if certain programs are safe to access the internet without user input. This trusted database, called TrustedDB by AVG, should be less intrusive by querying for user input 50 per cent less often than in the previous version, says AVG. Also, the installation process has been shortened from 22 screens to 11.

There are few wholly new features available in version 9, but an interesting one is the Identity Theft Recovery Unit. Included in AVG Anti-Virus and AVG Free, but only for users in the United States, ITRU is a business partnership with Identity Guard which provides "consumer identity theft solutions". Accessible only from the browser toolbar, which only works in Firefox or Internet Explorer, the service provides "a dedicated identity theft recovery unit with fraud experts", to assist handling, getting and analysing a credit report, enrolling in credit file monitoring and offering report-filing support.

AVG 9 looks very similar to AVG 8. Most of the changes are under the hood. (Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

In hands-on testing last week, we found AVG to be relatively easy to navigate around, although the interface could be simpler. When you click on one of the items in the main window, you must double-click on one of the features to access more information on it. A single click, or even a mouse-over pop-up, would make the experience faster. Before we even ran our first scan, AVG detected icons associated with Pidgin as threats.

Double-checking them against Avira and McAfee revealed those detections as false positives, and when we finally ran the Fast Scan it took longer than 20 minutes. That doesn't compare favourably to competitors, some of which can complete a first Fast Scan in around 60 seconds. We were also surprised to find that Mozilla Thunderbird was not automatically approved to go through the firewall, despite the new firewall trusted database. While the installation process offers to install the browser toolbar for you, it doesn't seem possible to opt out during the installation and then install it later from the AVG interface, a strange oversight.

AVG Internet Security 9.0 is available for AU$99.99, and AVG Anti-Virus costs AU$46.99. Both come with a one-year licence and a 30-day trial, although AVG Anti-Virus lacks the firewall, identity protection, anti-spam and system tools that come in AVG Internet Security. Fans of the free version of AVG 9 will have to wait a bit longer, as AVG always delays the release of Free until after the full suites have been made public.

Via Download.com

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• Low price

• Limited adjustment
• Poor viewing angles
• Poor text quality

Design and features

HP's w185 is an 18.5-inch, 1366x768 monitor, with menu and power buttons under the bezel on the right-hand side. The aim is clearly for a clean design, but the end result is annoyance for the user as the buttons are harder to use than face-mounted ones.

Adjustments are limited to simply tilt, so in the very likely event you'll need extra height, you'll be stacking this on the last remaining phone books or encyclopedias you have. There's no cable management to speak of, so your power, DVI, VGA and 3.5mm audio cables will hang loose if you use the full complement of available ports.

The menu system is basic and easy enough to use once you find your way around the buttons, and offers simple adjustments like brightness, contrast, 6500K/9300K/custom and sRGB colour modes as well as in-built profiles that set all of these for you, including "Movie", "Photo", "Gaming" and "Text".

Performance

The w185 is based off twisted nematic technology and as such, the viewing angles aren't great. When combined with HP's lack of height, the poor vertical viewing angles really start to show.

Testing the monitor over DVI, it was immediately apparent that there was a lack of sharpness and considerable pixel bleed in the text. This was strangely enough fixed by switching to "Gaming" mode; however, this also had the unexpected side effect of shifting all the blacks to grey.

Loading up DisplayMate, while the w185 could display all 255 greyscale tones, the greyscale gradients showed significant banding at the darker end of the scale, with a high tendency to display greens and purples instead of greys. Colour gradients also exhibited the same banding problems at the dark end of the scale. Movie watching and gaming was passable, but not amazing. The speakers were also not so bad considering the size of the monitor, but realistically if you're listening to anything other than basic system sounds, you'll want a real speaker set instead.

Its limitations mean that the only scenario we can recommend the w185 in is where you need a dirt cheap monitor for extremely basic use, like to throw in a server room. Otherwise if you're looking for quality, we'd look elsewhere.

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• HP Compaq t5730w Thin Client
• Toshiba NB200
• Dell OptiPlex 960
• HP w2228h