Eric Grevstad

We won’t go so far as to compare NEC-Mitsubishi’s engineers to Piet Mondrian or Maya Lin, but the NEC MultiSync LCD1960NX sort of reminds us of the kind of art that makes some people say, “Is that it? It’s so simple, there’s nothing to it.” The newest MultiSync model is a rather plain-looking, 19-inch LCD […]

Your small business may not need a scanner as often as it did in the days before digital cameras, but it still needs a fax machine. So while low-priced multifunction peripherals are popping up everywhere, those that stop at printing, scanning, and copying — without the fourth function of fax — remain better suited for […]

You’ve heard of traveling light? Sharp Systems of America’s Actius MM10 is traveling anorexic: It’s a Windows XP notebook that weighs just 2.1 pounds and is wafer-thin at 8.2 by 9.9 by 0.8 inches. At the risk of sounding like a commercial, you can forget you’re carrying it (though you’ll notice by the time you […]

With the worms of August — Blaster and SoBig.F — having brought millions of Windows PCs, or at least thousands of IT managers and e-mail administrators, to their knees, the need for antivirus software has never been more obvious. Coincidentally, the two best-known retail antivirus vendors have released new updated versions of their popular packages, […]

We’ve finished running FutureMark‘s 3DMark03 test — including all four game simulations, including the DirectX 9 features — and now we’re watching the Codecreatures DirectX 8.1 benchmark running at a spectacular 1,920 by 1,200 resolution with 4X antialiasing enabled. It’s not the fastest gaming-PC performance we’ve ever seen, but we’re looking at a 7.3-pound notebook. […]

It’s rarely a good idea for a software company to wait two and a half years between upgrades. It’s a downright bad idea to do so during an explosion of popularity for image editing, with consumers snapping up digital cameras and competitors shipping stellar products like Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0. That was becoming clear in […]

“An IBM ThinkPad Under $1,000? Who Could Resist?” asked a Big Blue press release last week. Well, we could: The new ThinkPad R40 is indeed $999 with a 15.0-inch or $949 with a 14.1-inch display and 1.8GHz mobile Celeron central processing unit (CPU), but its 128MB of memory, 20GB hard disk, and compact disc-read-only memory […]

Japanese schoolgirls (and not a few Japanese adults of both sexes) croon, “Kawaii!” — “How cute!” — and whip out their wallets for the newest Hello Kitty backpack or Thunder Bunny lunchbox. Hardened business professionals say much the same thing when they first see the Vaio PCG-TR1A. The newest notebook from Sanrio — sorry, from […]

It’s hard not to feel a little smug. We’re looking at a crisp, colorful Adobe Acrobat PDF document, created from one of the PowerPoint templates on the Microsoft Office Template Gallery site. But we didn’t use the $399 Office to open and edit the template, nor did we use Microsoft software to create the PDF […]

South Dakotans are fashion-conscious, too, you know. In May, we reviewed Gateway’s first Intel Centrino notebook, the 450XL, and said it was a solid citizen of the wireless-networking nation — a good performer in a sort of generic-looking, 6.2-pound laptop slab, but not a conversation-starter like Sony’s Centrino offering, the skinny and silvery Vaio Z1A. […]

Color is overrated. Practically all the information a business generates is plain text, and the occasional pie chart or picture looks fine in black and white anyway. Okay, we don’t entirely mean that, we know you want colorful digital-camera images and it’s no fun to walk into a sales pitch when your competitor’s presentation handouts […]

If it were named the Dimension 4600S, it’d be easier to guess what the initial stood for: slimline, small, or space-saving. But the two-fifths-scale sibling of Dell’s mainstream Dimension 4600 minitower is called the 4600C, so we’re not sure: compact, or maybe cute, or a bit more costlythan the standard model. The Dimension 4600 is […]