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April 28, 2004 |
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Among this week's hot topics: desktop PCs get smaller (without getting weaker), the fastest 802.11g routers on the planet (for now), and printers that cost less than a good lunch. |
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Shuttle XPC G2 7500M
Among the most popular products in our search logs this week: the Shuttle XPC G2 7500M, a small-form-factor (SFF) desktop specifically targeted at gamers who want a powerful PC they can carry to LAN parties. (That's right, it's a portable desktop; even the most advanced notebooks can't push the same frame rate as one of these pups.) The XPC G2 can also serve as a living-room PC running Windows Media Center. It's small enough to hide somewhere out of the way, and it's just the latest in a series of these SFF systems, for home as well as for work. We expect to see many more that can do it all and do it small.
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D-Link DI-624 AirPlus Xtreme G router
The DI-624 was released back in October, but it's still one of the most inquired-about products on the site. The reason? It's one of a handful of routers out there that, thanks to some proprietary technologies, doubles 802.11g's 54Mbps top speed. (The Netgear WGT624 is another.) No, you won't get 108Mbps in actual usage; in our tests, 44Mbps was more like it. But that's still way faster than the actual speeds of any plain-old 802.11g products we've tested. So why the sudden interest in the D-Link specifically? Could be the fact that a bunch of different online stores are offering $20 rebates on an already cheap product, bringing the price down to the $60 neighborhood--good speed, good deal.
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Lexmark P707
It doesn't sound like a printer price: $49 sounds more like what you'd pay for a couple of pads of good paper and a box or two of really nice markers. But that's how much you can pay for the P707 photo printer from Lexmark--not some off-brand, but the folks who used to make printers for IBM. The P707 popped up in our search and traffic logs this week, probably because customers saw the price at some online stores and said, "No way." Well, way: The P707 gets a 6.6 (fair) from our reviewers, who say it "lets...amateurs print excellent photos," though optimal results require "patience and an optional ink cartridge." And it's not even the cheapest decent printer out there: the Epson Stylus C84 earns an 8.4 (very good) from our reviewers and can be had for a mere $29 after rebate. That's just nutty.
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MSN Messenger 6.2
Everyone's been looking for news about MSN Messenger. Reason: A new version (number 6.2) was due to launch last week, but then it got delayed. The new client will include, among other features, support for a new subscription gaming service. That answers a challenge from the latest version of AOL's ICQ client, which also supports gaming. Not to be outdone, Yahoo announced a new version of its client, which will get a more graphical interface and some new features, including photo sharing, an address book, video games, Internet radio, and search.
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Pioneer DVR-A07U
The DVR-A07U is only the latest in a series of DVD burners that write at 8X speeds. For those of you who've lost track of your storage stats, that's twice as fast as most DVD burners. Or, to be more exact and to quote our review, "the DVR-A07U...is one of the first drives on the market that boasts true 8X DVD+R and DVD-R reading and writing, as well as 4X DVD+R and DVD-R rewriting and 24X CD write speeds." Translation? It can write to and read the two most common DVD formats and do it fast.
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