One of the recent trends in notebook computers has been for manufacturers to distinguish their products not just through the specifications but through the design as well.

That’s led to all sorts of outlandish designs as well as tie-ins with car manufacturers to produce garishly coloured computers.

Fujitsu Siemens has largely stayed away from such frivolity, concerning itself with producing good computers at good prices. However, the Amilo Si 2636 represents a step in the direction of style – it’s moderately outlandish, if such a thing is possible.

In fact, it’s fairly normal in design except for the bright red metallic trim along both sides and the front. Other than that, and the fact that the bottom of the screen tapers inwards slightly on both sides for a pleasing curved effect, it’s pretty standard, with a gloss black cover and grey-black styling elsewhere.

The computer is loaded with Windows Vista Home Premium and uses an Intel Core 2 Duo T8100 processor, which runs at 2.1GHz. There is 2GB of memory and a 250GB hard disk.

The memory is a reasonable amount, although we’re starting to see computers with more, and the hard disk is more than adequate for almost all users. Likewise, the processor is impressively fast and shouldn’t be too slow for anyone.

One sticking point might be the graphics – while they are fine for most uses including video editing and DVD playback, this computer can’t really cope well with recent games or high in-game detail settings. However, it’s fair to say that notebooks of this kind and at this price aren’t designed for gaming in any case.

The screen measures only 13.3in across the diagonal, which is smaller than the 15in found on similar models. However, it’s hard to discern the difference and in fact the screen feels just as big as larger models when it’s in use.

While the screen is crisp and clear, the keyboard and mouse trackpad are merely adequate. The keys aren’t very deep, so heavy typists will find their fingers hurting after a while. The trackpad is a little small, and it’s circular rather than rectangular, which is a bit confusing at first. The curved buttons aren’t very well designed either.

The Amilo Si 2636 comes with Bluetooth and wireless networking capabilities as well as a wired network port, two USB ports and an eSata socket for connecting newer external hard disks.

The only video output, should you want to hook it up to a TV or monitor, is an HDMI port. That’s fine for those with high-definition TVs, but others will need an adapter to connect to a standard monitor, adding £10 or so. The smaller screen makes it easy to pick up and carry, and battery life is impressive.

Design

MacBook Air is nearly as thin as your index finger. Practically every detail that could be streamlined has been. Yet it still has a 13.3-inch widescreen LED display, full-size keyboard and large multi-touch trackpad. It’s incomparably portable without the usual ultraportable screen and keyboard compromises.

Features

The incredible thinness of MacBook Air is the result of numerous size- and weight-shaving innovations. From a slimmer hard drive to strategically hidden I/O ports to a lower-profile battery, everything has been considered and reconsidered with thinness in mind.

Wireless

MacBook Air is designed and engineered to take full advantage of the wireless world. A world in which 802.11n Wi-Fi is now so fast and so available, people are truly living untethered — buying music and TV shows online, downloading software, and sharing and storing files on the web.

A USB adapter with a removable external aerial that’s ideal for desktop PCs

There are dozens of wireless network adapters on the market today, with more and more connecting to a computer’s USB socket.

This is certainly convenient, but if you use a desktop PC tucked under a table it can cause problems as the adapter and its aerial are often hidden behind the PC, obstructing the wireless signal.

Hawking’s HWUG1 adapter has a simple answer: it has an external aerial that can be turned around into the best position or even replaced with a larger one if needed.

The HWUG1 supports the older 802.11g wireless standard rather than the newer, faster 802.11n, but this is reasonable at its price. It works with Windows XP and Vista but like many manufacturers Hawking annoyingly insists on including its own program to manage wireless connections.

We think it’s simpler to just let Windows deal with networks, and in fact on our Windows Vista PC the Hawking program caused problems. After removing it the adapter worked well.

Otherwise the HWUG1 performed excellently. Notebook users may prefer a more compact adapter with a built-in aerial, but for desktop PC users this is a good buy.

Microsoft’s Lifecam NX 3000 is designed for use with Windows Messenger and skinny notebooks – skinny because the webcam attaches to the top of the screen and will work on nothing thicker than about 2cm.

It is a 1.3megapixel webcam that, in addition to video, takes impressively clear still shots. The camera was easy to set up: we installed the software, signed in to Windows Messenger and plugged it into a spare USB port. Once installed the camera uses its own dashboard, which has three buttons for snapping photos and recording audio or video clips.

Along the bottom of the window are shown the most recent photos and video or audio clips. On the top of the camera is a call button to quickly ’speed dial’ people and start a video call. The lens swivels up and down, should you need to move the notebook’s screen.

Video from the camera was very clear and we were impressed with the noise-cancelling feature, which was particularly effective at getting rid of extraneous sound. For £30 the NX 3000 does its job well and has some clever extras.

If the music tracks, digital photographs and video on your computer rarely get to see the light of day, a media streamer (a device that grabs them off the PC to play it on the TV or hi-fi) could set them free.

Linksys’s DMA2200 Media Center Extender is one such device and, as the name suggests, extends Microsoft’s Media Center software to a TV, allowing users to access all the media stored on PCs from the comfort of the sofa. The PC will need to be running Windows Vista Ultimate or Home Premium and needs to be switched on whenever the DMA2200 is in use.

What makes the DMA2200 stand out is its usability. Setting it up is a breeze and, with the Media Center display, browsing a media library is simple, with everything presented in a logical manner. Within seconds we had a slideshow of holiday snaps on display with a selection of handpicked tracks playing in the background.

Streaming video is just as easy and, since format support is determined by what Media Center can handle, few files won’t play. A selection of online video is also available, including free content from MTV along with subscription-channels. And, if the PC running Media Center has a TV tuner installed, you can also watch, pause and record live TV.

One gripe is that the interface isn’t as smooth flowing as Media Center on a PC, with a short pause often occurring before DMA2200 reacts to a button press on the remote. The DMA2200 can be hooked up to a network using wired or wireless connection.

Linksys has furnished it with the ability to talk using the latest 802.11n wireless standard, which boosts speeds and makes it possible to stream high-definition video wirelessly. However, unless you own a wireless router that supports the same standard, you’ll have to stick to slower wireless speeds, which are fine for streaming standard-definition video.

The box also squeezes in a DVD player. A non-DVD version (DMA2100) is available for £30 less, but this player is able to upscale standard DVDs for high definition screens. It’s no substitute for a Blu-ray video disc but it does make films look better. The jewel in the DMA2200’s crown is undoubtedly its ease of use.

We’ve seen plenty of technically impressive media streamers in the past that were let down by lacklustre user interfaces. Much of the DMA2200’s impressive usability is down to its close ties with Media Center. This is, however, its one big flaw – if you don’t have a Vista PC with Media Center up and running, you won’t be able to use it.

Microsoft has officially unveiled Windows Server 2008 at a ceremony in Los Angeles, kicking off a series of 225 global launch events.

The platform is Microsoft’s first server operating system since Windows Server 2003.
Initially known under its ‘Longhorn’ code-name, Server 2008 was scheduled for release in late 2007 but suffered delays and was not released to manufacturers until 5 February.

Microsoft touted several improvements in the operating system, including tighter security against memory-overflow attacks and a better system for recording and reporting errors.

“The overwhelming response from thousands of IT professionals and developers around the world is that Windows Server 2008 is the most secure enterprise platform we have ever delivered,” said Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer.

Microsoft also released Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008 at the Los Angeles event.

A series of 225 ‘Heroes Happen Here’ events designed to sell the new releases to IT professionals will be attended by more than 4,000 people, according to Microsoft.

The world’s first and only fire resistant and waterproof hard drive.  Direct USB connectivity to a laptop or desktop computer.  Enables backup of critical data in the event of crash, computer failure and fire and water-related disasters.  Encased hard drive provides protection from dust and dirt.

If your Sentry®Safe hard drive experiences fire or water damage, we will attempt to recover your data free of charge and send you a new unit.

Features:

• USB Y-Cable included

• USB 2.0 bus powered

• Back up software included

• Security features include password protection & data encryption

• After Fire and Water Data Recovery Support Program

• LED power indicator light

• Durable high gloss silver finish

You could listen to music, watch movies or browse digital photos on your PC, but the chances are that they’d look and sound a great deal better on a television screen. A media streaming device such as the DMP-1120w plugs in to the TV and connects to a home network (wired or wireless), so you can browse your media library from the sofa with the supplied remote control.

The DMP-1120w certainly looks good, its white casing and rounded corners giving the product a Mac Mini feel that will sit happily in most living rooms. Setup was easy too, with Scart, component and composite video, and analogue and digital audio available. There’s no hard disk and the lack of an HDMI port means you can forget high-definition films, but that’s no surprise on such a cheap product.

We powered it up and after a lengthy pause it located libraries of files on our two test PCs, connected wirelessly. The DMP-1120w also connects to media software such as TVersity or Twonkymedia, which means you’re not stuck with the supplied software, and can use it with a Mac or a Linux box.
Whether you’ll want to make the effort is another question.

The interface is limited and mostly text based, so there’s no album art when listening to music. And a Media Player quirk meant our music collection was sorted in alphabetical order by song title, which made browsing rather less convenient than we’d hoped – most such devices allow you to search by artist name.

You’ll run into problems if music is saved in OGG or WMA formats, too: the DMP-1120w only plays MP3, AAC and WAV files. There are similar limitations on the video side: MPEG, DIVX and XVID files played faultlessly in our tests, but there’s no support for WMV movies.

Still, the basics of the DMP-1120w work well. It connected to our wireless network without problems, video playback was smooth, and there’s a wired network connection if you need it. The memory card slots are a welcome bonus, too. If value for money is your top priority, and you can live with its limitations, then the DMP-1120w is a good choice.

Plustek’s Opticfilm range of film (negative and slide) scanners tend to give good results, but it takes a little tinkering to make the most of the scanned images.

The new 7300 is no exception. It’s easy enough to use – having install the driver and the supplied Silverfast scanning software, you can scan images to disk or to a program such as Photoshop Elements (not supplied). The Silverfast software is comprehensive and allows a wide range of adjustments and fixes, at the expense of ease of use – it can be hard to figure out which button to press when, for instance.

The scanning guides supplied (into which you slot a strip of negatives or a set of mounted slides) are sturdy and easy to use. But it’s too easy to allow the negative or slide to move just a touch, resulting in a tilted image. This can be fixed easily enough but it’s still a hassle. Scan times are similar to competing film scanners, but the lack of batch scanning – each frame must be scanned individually – is a problem.

The resulting scans were impressively detailed with good colour balance (again, after fixing in software), but overall we were more impressed with the ease of use of the Canon 8800F

Maxtor’s Onetouch external hard disks are popular because of their simple approach: users can back up all of their important files just by pressing the little Onetouch button on the front of the unit.

That button is still there on the new Onetouch 4 Plus, although the device itself has been completely redesigned otherwise.

Instead of the lumpy concrete-slab design of the Onetouch 3, this new model has a more slimline, upright design that looks a lot neater sitting on a desk.

Our review unit was a 500GB model, priced at a very reasonable £100. That should be enough storage for most home users, although there’s an even larger 750GB model available for about £150 (there’s a compact portable version coming out too, although this will only offer 80-160GB of storage).

Installing the drive is very straightforward - you just plug in the power supply and connect it to a USB or Firewire port on the computer. The Maxtor Manager program that controls the disk has already been placed onto it, so it can quickly be installed onto the PC (or Mac, for that matter) just by double-clicking on it with your mouse.

The Manager program allows the user to specify which files and folders to back up when the Onetouch button is pressed. There’s also an option for synchronising folders between two computers, which will come in handy should you ever need to transfer files between a desktop and a notebook computer, for instance. You can also set the Onetouch button so that it launches a different program, such as perhaps video player software, if you use the drive to store lots of video clips.

This approach certainly makes the Onetouch easy to use. Our only complaint is that, ironically, there’s no backup copy of the Manager software supplied on a disc. If anything goes wrong during the initial installation or you delete the file, you have to send an email to Maxtor’s technical support department to request another copy of the software.

That’s only a minor criticism, though, and the Onetouch drive’s easy-to-use design and attractive price make it a very good choice for anyone who needs some extra storage for their important files.

Vista Compatible: Yes

The Toshiba A200 notebook offers an impressive array of features, notably an HD DVD drive for watching high-definition (HD) movies.

In addition to watching films on the 15.4in screen it also includes a socket for connection to a high-definition television.

The computer uses Intel’s Core2 Duo T7500 processor and has 2GB of memory, making it a fairly powerful notebook. It also has a separate graphics card, an ATI Mobility Radeon HD2600.

A 200GB hard disk should be enough to store lots of music and video, and a memory card reader, internal webcam and s-video output ensure it’s nicely up to speed in terms of handling media. Bluetooth and wireless network access are built in, although there’s no support for the latest 802.11n wireless technology.

Weighing in at under 3kg it’s nicely designed and is light enough to lug around. We liked the black finish but the inside is bland with few customisable function keys, although the keyboard is nicely responsive keyboard. The open lid folds back over the rear panel so all of the sockets are on the front and sides.

In general tasks the A200’s performance was impressive, and it is powerful enough to play some recent games, albeit at reduced quality. After trying out a few HD movies we had mixed feelings about its capabilities. Such films can’t be viewed using Windows Media Player - you need Toshiba’s software (supplied) to watch. The program is fairly light on features but it’s capable enough for playing films. The notebook comes with Windows Vista Business, which although it might sound daunting, is much the same as Vista Home Premium.

The screen did a reasonable job of showing off high-resolution films without truly impressing us: pictures were sharp and detailed but the colours were muted and there seemed to be a faint grey hue over the image. Sending the content through the HDMI output to a suitable television is very easy, and the image was picked up straight away on our television.

We were initially very impressed by the vibrancy of the Windows desktop, and the appearance of games and other PC software on the larger screen didn’t disappoint. HD video didn’t fare as well, though, and suffered from the same issues as on the notebook’s screen. If you are after a high-performance alternative to a standalone player, you shouldn’t expect to see the same results here.

The Toshiba A200 certainly scores points as a good all-rounder, being able to handle all sorts of typical day-to-day tasks, gives decent games performance and does offer the option of HD video. At just over £850 it’s not badly priced either, but if you’re primarily attracted by the HD DVD drive, don’t expect to be able to use it as a true alternative to a dedicated player.

Choosing a good notebook bag is very important; spending an extra £10 or so may mean there’s no need expensive repairs or even for replacement.

The Brenthaven Prolite III is a tough-looking bag with more padding than most. It also has enough extra pockets to handle paper documents and extra gadgets.

The bag is big enough for notebooks with a 17in widescreen display, there are smaller and slightly cheaper bags for 13.3in and 15.4in notebooks.

There is padding on the sides of the notebook as well as the front and back. We were happy to subject our notebook to the rigours of the daily commute and were not disappointed. The main notebook pocket is just big enough for the notebook, avoiding the temptation to pack other bits and pieces with it that could scratch or damage the notebook.

The shoulder strap is comfortable with a well padded bit in the middle to help ease the strain of carrying a notebook. We were a little disappointed that there are no backpack-like straps.

The secondary section of the bag has a double zip system so it is in theory possible to keep it closed with a simple padlock. It’s a shame that the same is not true of the notebook section. It’s not that likely that someone will slip the notebook out without anyone noticing but it would give some more peace of mind.