Whitebox: Reviews

The speed with which an unprotected PC picks up malware from the Internet can be truly scary, hence the rise in popularity of security bundles that combine antivirus, firewall and spam protection.

The Toshiba Tecra M4-S515 is a nicely designed convertible notebook that's easy to use as a tablet PC. It has plenty of ports accessible in both tablet and laptop modes, but our test unit's touchpad didn't always work. To convert the M4-S515 into a tablet, you have to swivel the 14.1-inch screen clockwise and lay it flat against the keyboard. Along with the touch screen, the M4-S515 offers two keyboard pointing devices: an eraserhead and a touchpad. The eraserhead worked fine, but the touchpad did not. No matter how I tweaked the settings, the touchpad wouldn't reliably select text when I dragged my finger across it. Selection usually required several swipes, and sometimes it didn't work at all.

Pigs must be flying, because Apple has finally released a mouse with more than one button. Called the Mighty Mouse, the USB device includes four buttons and a multidirectional Scroll Ball.

The NEC MultiSync LCD1770GX achieved good scores on our text and graphics tests - in fact, it reached the highest graphics scores a 17-incher has attained recently. It also bettered all other monitors on our three real-life graphics test screens: a Web page with a mix of text and images, a photo of a vividly colored fruit tart, and a group photo of several subjects with different skin tones. Our jurors praised the detail and the rich, saturated colours that the monitor displayed.

A swiveling Webcam and an all-white carbon fibre case highlight the Asus W5A, an ultraportable laptop weighing just 1.86kg (not including its power adapter).

Within the confines of this machine's mini-tower case, Acer has packed components that could put many larger units to shame.

Styled with acrylic and best orientated vertically, the pre-production Dream PC we saw packs all of the functionality expected of a mid-tower PC, plus the mobility, but without the expansion possibilities.

Companies large and small routinely set their expectations of computer systems according to the capabilities of Intel-based x86 computers and 32-bit Windows. We’re due for a shift in standards.