Nov 95 First Impressions

BY: Ian Etra

Color them green--your audiophile friends, that is. With a seven-disc quad-speed CD-ROM changer and a CD-R recorder, you can have a top-shelf CD-ROM studio on your desk--and a sound system that will put your stereo to shame.

Assuming your SCSI card is properly installed, setting up the CDJ 7004 should be a snap. Under Windows 95,

I didn't have to install any software; the drive was immediately recognized by the OS, drivers were installed and drive letters automatically assigned. The CDJ 7004 has RCA audio jacks on the back for hooking up to a sound card or amplifier, and a headphone jack on the front. There are seven eject/load buttons on the front, each of which pops out the same tray for simple, caddy-less loading of discs.

The jukebox's drive comes with two Windows applications that are automatically installed. CD7 CD Player simulates a rack-mount audio CD player, with controls for continuous or randomized play across all seven discs. The other application, DiscInfo, simply keeps track of which disks are currently loaded. It intelligently polls the CD-ROM drive by request, only checking those discs which it knows have changed. Depending on how many new discs are in the jukebox, this process can take anywhere from seven seconds to a minute and a half, during which the computer is unavailable.

One note of caution: Under Windows 95, all seven discs would be reloaded every time I changed even a single disc. I grew very familiar with the sound of the disks being shuffled internally as I sat helpless in front of my computer. On the whole, though, I loved the experience of having easy access to seven discs at once.

Of course, with so many CDs at your fingertips, you'll soon grow tired of manufactured discs and be ready to start recording your own. That's where the CD-R 1002/C comes in; it's a dual-speed CD-ROM recorder that can double as a CD-ROM reader. It comes with one standard blank CD-R disc, which can hold about 640MB of data, 71 minutes of music, or any combination of the two. The drive supports all major CD-ROM standards, including CD-XA, Photo-CD and CD-DA. It also writes in the industry standard ISO-9660 format, so you can create CDs that are readable by platforms other than DOS/Windows. The unit can record single-session CDs for mastering purposes, or multisession CDs for applications such as incremental backups.

I encountered no snags in setting up the CD-R 1002/C, although unlike the jukebox, the installation is complicated and time-consuming. The CD-R 1002/C comes bundled with Corel CD Creator, which places greater emphasis on Friendly than Smart. (Both the CD-R 1002/C and the CDJ 7004 are capable of digital audio extraction.)

Once you run through the system tests, CD Creator brings you to a "disc wizard" screen that can walk you through every stage in the recording process, from gathering files to creating a CD. You can add data files to a CD by dragging and dropping them from File Manager, or browsing through a dialog box. You can also prioritize individual data files, which will be automatically rearranged on the CD for quicker access times. Audio tracks are equally easy to add to your layout; the program prompts you for the artist and title of each track, and can print out a jewel-box insert with all the information. The program provides no facilities for audio editing, though you can combine several different tracks into a single continuous one or rearrange the order of the tracks to your heart's content.

Recording CDs can be an unforgiving process, and any write errors that occur are at best permanent and, at worst, fatal. Fortunately, CD Creator can simulate a recording session in which you actually go through the entire process, including simulated writes to the CD. I encountered no errors in either the simulation or when cutting a mixed data/audio disc. The actual recording process was very slow, however--it took me more than three hours to cut my disc.

While the $1,729 price tag of the CD-R 1002/C is very competitive, the technology is still a little expensive for the mass market. But if you're willing to lay out the cash, Smart and Friendly is a great way to get into the arena.

--Info File--
CDJ 7004
Price: $429
In Brief: This CD jukebox can juggle seven discs at once and play them back at 4x speed.
CD-R 1002/C
Price: $1,729
In Brief: The CD-R 1002/C makes CD recording accessible to consumers at any skill level.
Smart and Friendly
800-959-7001, 818-994-8001

BY: Joel T. Patz

The old question about how you can make a good thing better is answered by Intuit's release of Quicken 5 and Quicken Deluxe 5. Improving on this well-known and widely used application takes some doing, but now it's even easier to hone your money management skills, take advantage of online banking and access one-stop investment information. With the Deluxe version you receive personalized advice from two financial experts, Jane Bryant Quinn and Marshall Loeb.

If you bank with one of Quicken's online partners (currently 21 financial institutions), you can download information on checking and savings accounts as well as credit card and ATM transactions. Paying bills with Quicken's new online bill payment service couldn't be easier. It's possible to schedule payments and choose the accounts from which you draw funds. Transferring funds between accounts is practically foolproof with the Transfer Funds dialog box.

The Deluxe version's Mutual Fund Finder, using data from Morningstar and Callan Associates, looks for funds that meet your criteria and puts information at your fingertips. You select the type of funds, specify parameters for load, rating, risk and yield, and add additional criteria such as minimum investment amounts, expense ratio and performance. Quicken Deluxe 5 then presents a detailed summary of each fund's performance and history in tabular or graphic format. You can purchase updates on disk as needed or subscribe for quarterly updates.

The Investor Insight online feature, free for the first month, brings Wall Street right to your desk. Data on highs, lows, volume and closing prices for your selected stocks and mutual funds is available on a 15-minute delayed feed from S&P ComStock. News from Dow Jones, PR Newswire and BusinessWire round out the available information. You can establish portfolios and custom indexes easily by following the prompts.

To help you manage your stock portfolio, Quicken 5 has improved support for brokerage cash management accounts, including creation of transfers to purchase stock. Furthermore, you can now choose which stock lot to sell to maximize gain and minimize loss. You sort your portfolio by security name, type, symbol, market value or estimated income.

Quicken's user interface changes are most welcome. The opening screen, now called Homebase, offers push buttons for the principal financial tasks: account lists, reports and graphs, investments, online banking and bill payment, and so forth. As you work with these tasks, Quicken adjusts to your work habits and builds a set of QuickTabs to facilitate moving among frequently performed tasks. The Record, Edit and Splits buttons are now on the actual line of the entry you're working on in the two-line mode of the check register. The new Feature Explorer shows you how to take everyday advantage of Quicken's many features. Other tutorials are also included. On the Deluxe--CD-ROM--version, Finance 101 offers text and animation to help you understand financial terms and concepts, such as how mutual funds work.

Easy Reports generates reports in response to frequently asked questions such as: How much am I worth today? How did I spend my money? and What taxable events occurred during a specific period of time? You can drag the mouse to change column widths on the report and show or hide any column. Reports can be made to fit the width of a printed page and you can change report orientation from the Print Reports window, sidestepping Printer Setup. The Reports menu shows the names of the last four reports used.

These new Quicken versions continue Intuit's tradition of easy-to-use, attractive, efficient applications. The familiar functions are still there, in many cases improved, and the new functions make your financial life even easier. The online financial features, improved user interface and breadth of financial planning tools continue to support Quicken's well-deserved reputation as an industry leader.

--Info File--
Quicken 5 and Quicken Deluxe 5
Price: Quicken 5, $39.99 (street); Quicken Deluxe 5, $59.99 (street); upgrade rebate, $5, Deluxe, $10
In Brief: This highly improved financial management application offers online banking, bill paying, charge card management and investment research.
Disk Space: Quicken 5, 14MB; Quicken Deluxe 5, 36MB
System Resources: 25%
RAM: 4MB; Deluxe CD-ROM, 8MB
Intuit
800-816-8025, 415-322-0573

BY: Lori L. Bloomer

Once the barest, most basic home or small office needs are fulfilled--a computer, printer, fax modem--your thoughts will often turn lightly toward ... no, not love, but color scanners.

It's not as hard as you might think to satisfy both these desires. The Agfa StudioScan IIsi is an affordably priced 30-bit flatbed color scanner you could easily love. Its fairly simple setup makes it a good bet for the novice who wants a scanner but not the headache of installing one.

The StudioScan has a true resolution of 400x800 dots per inch, which can interpolate resolutions as high as 2400dpi. The 30-bit color capability gives your scanned images an added depth of realism that goes beyond that of a typical true-color scanner.

The Agfa has a one-pass scanning system that takes much less time than the triple-pass scanning method. The unit has a rated scanning speed of 10 milliseconds per line for color scans. It's also much speedier than its older cousin, the StudioScan II. Agfa claims a 17-second full-color preview for the IIsi, and my tests held within the 15-to-20 second range, on the average.

The colors on the scans were reasonably true to the original in our tests, although there was some occasional erroneous color variation, and a few instances where color accuracy was off in scans that incorporated many shades of the same color. When you scan an image, be careful to view it with your screen set to true-color mode if you want to gauge accuracy, because anything less will not allow you to evaluate the colors properly, given the color depth this scanner can achieve.

Software bundled with the StudioScan includes Adobe Photoshop LE, FotoSnap simple driver/scan manager, FotoLook 2.07 (the more advanced and demanding scanner manager), FotoTune Light (a color calibration utility), FotoFlavor (which adds depth and dimension to your images) and Caere's Omnipage Direct OCR.

Hardware includes an EasyPlug SCSI card and cabling in the retail package. The test model didn't include the SCSI card, however, so I linked it to a BusLogic SCSI bus-mastering card already in the test system.

The FotoLook software is really the brains of this scanning setup. FotoSnap is Agfa's included Windows 3.x ASPI (advanced SCSI programming interface, a standard language for SCSI devices) compatible utility for acquiring images. You can also use any TWAIN (Tool Without an Interesting Name--a standard for scanner devices) source as well. In other words, you can acquire images directly within Photoshop, for instance.

Setup is reasonably simple: first unscrew the locking mechanism. Plug the SCSI cable into the scanner, then into your PC's SCSI card. Plug in the power cable. Turn on your system and make sure the scanner is recognized. Install FotoSnap and the other software. If all these steps worked successfully, you're now up and running.

Unfortunately, under Windows 95, getting the scanner running was not as easy. All the Agfa-designed software was stable as a table under Windows 3.x, but when running under Win95, there were intermittent crashes. The company has stated that it intends to distribute a Windows 95 driver soon, so this problem is likely to be solved shortly--probably by the time you read this.

Under Windows for Workgroups 3.11, there were few problems, and the StudioScan performed like a trouper, quickly processing and cranking out images. The single-pass scanning capability is a quicker alternative to the traditional three-pass scan.

Though the StudioScan won't replace a drum scanner for prepress publishers, it's certainly up to most desktop imaging tasks. I designed a Web page, for instance, and used the StudioScan as a means of getting the JPEG images I used. Its output looks fantastic on a color printout, or in a multimedia presentation or slide show.

If your needs aren't as demanding as a professional publisher's, and you want an efficient and inexpensive means of acquiring images, make a date to try out the StudioScan IIsi in your SOHO. It might just be love at first scan.

--Info File--
Agfa StudioScan IIsi
Price: $999 (street)
In Brief: This one-pass, 30-bit color flatbed scanner will satisfy all but the most demanding prepress requirements.
Disk Space: 15.2MB, 3.8MB minimum
System Resources: 12%
RAM: 4MB minimum, 8MB recommended
Agfa Division, Bayer Corp.
800-685-4271, 201-440-2500

BY: Rich Castagna

The instinct to survive is basic, but the ability to survive is far from basic. Sidekick, after establishing its DOS dominance, made a late but successful Windows debut about a year ago. After testing the beta of Sidekick 95, I predict that this popular PIM's leap into Windows 95 will be equally auspicious.

Sidekick's transition was accomplished deftly. More importantly, the new features Sidekick picked up en route to Windows 95 didn't compromise its trademark ease of use. Current users will find themselves on terra that is both firma and cognita. New users should experience the almost instantaneous productivity that the intuitive interface avails.

Sidekick's cover page has been replaced by the Reminder view. This screen lists all your daily agenda tasks, including to-dos, phone calls and meetings. Each reminder is identified appropriately by its activity type in a sortable list that includes descriptions, dates and durations for timed events such as meetings. Double-click on an item, and the related list area, such as your calendar of appointments, will appear. You can print your reminders and view today's roster of events, as well as those for tomorrow, next week or next month.

Peripatetic PIM users will appreciate Sidekick's two other new views. EarthTime is a map of the world with local times for cities worldwide. You can display the time for eight cities around the edges of the world map, and when you right-click on one of them, a pop-up menu lets you select it as the local or home clock and change its color configuration. The same menu will show you the time difference between the selected city and your home city, and pop up a window with some key facts for the selected city, such as currency, population and international dialing codes.

Time isn't the only travel issue this PIM addresses. Sidekick gives money equal billing with its new Expense view. On the right side of this view, you enter individual expense items, such as airfare, hotel and meals. When you finish each entry, it gets tucked into an expense file on the left side. Sidekick can sort the expense file by account, amount, date or expense type. The pick lists that drop for some field entries will remember what you typed in and add those choices to the lists. You can also use the Setup dialog to customize the pick-list options. Click on the Go to Report button and you see your expenses formatted on a basic travel expense form. The expense forms are broken down by calendar weeks, with tabs at the bottom of the screen to switch among the weeks. You can also split expenses and allocate them to different accounts, and then show only individual accounts on your travel expense form.

Sidekick's phone dialer is better in this version, too. You can control the elapsed time clock and dial manually by clicking on the keypad in the dialog box. The notes you type in the window above the keypad can be logged and saved with the contact record, with Sidekick adding the time and date, call duration and a notation that you made the call.

Version 2.0's modest Notes feature lets you create correspondence and other documents drawing on information from your contact records. You can still do this with Sidekick 95's Write module, but your missives will no longer be missing the character effects that version 2.0's unadorned text lacked. It's now possible to add bold or italics, choose any installed typeface and change text color. Paragraph indenting and alignment are available, along with automatic bullets and underscores. Finished documents can be spell checked and then saved in .RTF, .TXT or Sidekick's own format.

Just about all Sidekick modules have been tweaked in one way or another. For example, the Calendar now has a list view so you can see all your bookings without looking at the empty time slots. In the Cardfile, the label and envelope printing dialogs have been improved with wizardly dialogs that step you through the process.

Current Sidekick users will be comforted to know that their favorite PIM is ready to move to '95 with them.

--Info File--
Sidekick 95
Price: $49.95
In Brief: Updated for the Windows 95 environment, Sidekick 95 adds new features without sacrificing ease of use.
Starfish Software
800-765-7839, 408-461-5800

BY: Michelle Tyrrell

I love my desktop PC, but if I had to give it up for a laptop computer, the WinBook XP and docking station would suit me just fine.

This is the most comfortable laptop I've used, due in part to the super-sensitive ALPS touchpad embedded in the 3.25-inch wrist rest below the keyboard. The touchpad puts an end to hand contortions by eliminating the need to reach for click-buttons. Touch the pad ever so lightly, and the cursor moves quickly and accurately. A simple single or double tap on the pad produces the same effect as mouse-clicks. Although every WinBook XP ships with an integrated eraser-style pointing device (located between the G and H keys) and buttons, the touchpad and a trackball are add-ons ($79.99 and $29.95, respectively). The sloping Lexmark keyboard with full-size keys is also extremely comfortable.

The laptop's active-matrix screen is a full 10.4 inches, with brightness and contrast controls near the bottom of the screen rather than buried in the function keys. Two speakers are located at the top of the screen and a third speaker sits in the wrist rest, making the 16-bit audio sound better than average.

An LCD indicator below the screen displays system status information, and the power switch and microphone are conveniently located below the screen as well.

The WinBook ships with 1MB video RAM and a 32-bit local bus. It comes with 4MB of RAM upgradable to 32MB (mine had 16MB), and a removable 340MB hard disk upgradable to 810MB (mine had the maximum).

The left side of the unit contains a 1.44MB floppy disk drive, an internal 14.4KB per second fax modem, a PCMCIA compartment that accommodates two Type II cards or one Type III card, and audio in/out jacks. The back of the unit sports a PS/2 mouse/keyboard port; parallel, serial and VGA ports; and the docking station connector.

The docking station makes it simple to add more disk drives (it has two ISA 16-bit bus slots and two 5.25-inch bays) or use the WinBook with a full-size monitor or keyboard. My docking station had a quad-speed CD-ROM drive and another empty bay. The back of the station features an AT keyboard port, a stereo/audio output jack and a PS/2 port, plus parallel, serial and VGA ports.

The WinBook XP measures 1.7 by 11.3 by 8.5 inches and weighs in at 6.1 pounds; the docking station measures 2.7 by 13.2 by 14.6 inches and weighs 8.8 pounds. The whole 14.9-pound package fit comfortably in my lap, and the unit never got more than slightly warm during a session that lasted nearly two hours (the cooling vents on the back of the docking station work nicely).

The model I tested had a DX4/100 processor and, although it was not upgradable to a Pentium, it was plenty fast for most jobs. The Word 6.0 benchmark score was 53 seconds. On the WINDOWS Magazine Wintune 2.0 benchmarks, the CPU scored 48.5MIPS and 10.9MFLOPS, hard disk access was 8.6MB per second, and the unit scored 4.2Mpixels per second on the video torture test.

WinBook's nickel metal hydride battery lasted 2.05 hours with no power management features turned on, and it charged fully in about the same time. The red status light atop the cover flashes while the battery charges and glows constantly when the unit becomes fully charged. You can also charge the battery, albeit very slowly, when the WinBook is in the docking station.

Software includes MS- DOS 6.22, Windows 95 and WinFax Lite. The unit ships with an AC adapter, a power cord, a phone cord if a fax modem is installed, and extra covers for the pointing device. The docking station ships with a power cord and device drivers for the CD-ROM drive.

The WinBook XP is light and loaded with features, has a beautiful active-matrix screen and a long battery life compared with other laptops, and is easy to set up and use. It's enough to make me consider ditching my desktop.

--Info File--
WinBook XP with docking station
Price: $4,557.90 (as reviewed)
In Brief: This is one classy package, and with the $399 docking station, it's amazingly complete.
WinBook Computer Corp.
800-468-2162

BY: James E. Powell

Caere not only improves the quality of OmniPage Pro's text recognition with each new version, it also manages to come up with a techno-talk description of the technology. For version 6.0, it's Quadratic Neural Network logic that turns Caere's OCR package up a notch.

The technology improves the identification of all text, but it's especially adept at discerning poorly formed characters in low-resolution documents. I tested a beta of OmniPage 6.0 and the program performed admirably on a variety of documents, including a received fax with a small typeface and lots of "noise."

OmniPage works in three stages: it scans the document, determines the text and the graphics sections, and performs the OCR. A click on the Auto button launches all three steps, or you can perform them singly. An indicator shows the scan's progress. The AutoZone feature divides the page into sections and makes intelligent choices about which areas contain text or graphics. You can, however, override the program's choices by drawing your own zones, which is helpful for eliminating logos, letterheads and other areas that you don't want to OCR. You can also use AutoZone to find the zones, then exclude zones from the OCR by clicking to deselect them.

During the OCR process OmniPage opens a text window in which you can check recognition using the spell-checker-like feature to verify words that OmniPage finds questionable. You can see the questionable words in context and save the file after making your changes. OmniPage uses a feature called Language Analyst to figure out unclear words. In my tests, Language Analyst was extremely accurate.

Of course, the improved character recognition and correction features take time, so just how fast is version 6.0? Very fast, and more accurate than the previous version. In fact, when OCRing several test documents, it only tripped up on technical terms that were not in its dictionary and it had some trouble with dashes. But these are minor problems.

Scan Manager, a new feature in version 6.0, lets you install only the scanner drivers that you need, saving hard disk space. The program supports over 100 models.

I tested OmniPage using a Hewlett-Packard ScanJet IIcx and, after telling Scan Manager the make and model, the software and hardware worked together without a hitch.

Direct Input is also new to this version. It launches OmniPage from within other applications. You can even set Direct Input to automatically start the scan/OCR process and paste the results into your document. You can select the applications to work with Direct Input. OmniPage 6.0 doesn't support Direct Input with 32-bit applications under Windows 95, but Caere says it is working on that capability.

OmniPage's tutorial gives you enough information to get started. Most of the remaining documentation is organized by menu option, not function, with separate chapters on improving performance and using True Page (a feature that retains the original formatting during the OCR process) and Direct Input.

OmniPage offers enough options--such as brightness control for scans--to handle most documents. It's a sophisticated program and you might have to do some tweaking at first, but you should have it operating smoothly in short order. Version 6.0's improved accuracy makes it even less likely that manual intervention will be required. Going from scan to editable text is fast and almost totally automatic.

--Info File--
OmniPage Pro 6.0
Price: $695; upgrade for any Caere OCR application, $149
In Brief: OmniPage 6.0's highlights include improved accuracy and direct input into applications.
Caere Corp.
800-535-7226 x110, 408-395-7000

BY: John Perry

The WinWriter 150c can color your world whether it's corporate or casual. Combining clean, crisp characters with colorful graphics, the WinWriter prints at resolutions as high as 600x300 dots per inch. And should you run into trouble, the printer driver will tell you--literally--what needs to be done by speaking through the unit's voice capability.

Lexmark ships the WinWriter with CorelDRAW 3.0 on CD-ROM. The WinWriter is the master of a multitude of media, including transparencies, labels, envelopes and almost any size paper. And you can put together a complete color presentation for only pennies a page.

The WinWriter can handle paper sizes from 3 by 5 inches up to 9 by 14.33 inches, and up to 150 sheets of standard 8.5 by 11 for automatic feed. Measuring 17 by 11 by 12 inches, the WinWriter is not exactly the smallest printer in its class, but it's still compact enough to fit on the corner of your desk. The printer's exit tray takes up a lot of extra room, though.

Setup and installation take only about 10 minutes. The unit needs less than 5MB of hard disk space, which surprised me considering that the print driver--Lexmark's ColorFine 2--works for both Windows 3.1x and any DOS application that runs under Windows. It also voices--that's right, speaks--print error alerts, offers a multitude of print controls and provides an elaborate apparatus to help you monitor print status.

The WinWriter houses dual ink cartridges--one with three colors, one with black--which means you no longer have to pop the top to remove a cartridge when switching between color and black-ink jobs. Lexmark reports that the color cartridge can print 200 pages at 15 percent coverage for a cost of less than 16 cents a page, while the black cartridge can pump out 1,000 pages at 5 percent coverage at a cost of just under 2 cents per page. With printing prices like these and a street price of $349, the WinWriter is competitively priced for home users ready to conquer the wonderful world of color.

The ColorFine 2 driver, developed in conjunction with Software 2000 Ltd., makes the WinWriter easier to use than any other color ink jet printer I've seen. A tabbed dialog box opens to the status page, which shows the ink level in both cartridges, job progress, time, warning messages and a Cancel Print Job button. A quick click of the Options tab lets you enable the sound effects, run the program minimized, pop it up when an error occurs or activate many other features. You can use the Cartridge tab to perform maintenance such as aligning the cartridges, cleaning the nozzles or installing new cartridges.

The WinWriter's ColorFine 2 driver also offers advantages that many of Lexmark's competitors don't. For instance, you can replay a print job over and over without re-creating the job each time. The driver uses your PC's CPU to create each page image, offering speedy printing that will only get faster as you upgrade your system. And the CPU is released before print processing is completed, which lets you get back to work in a flash; doing so does greatly reduce the speed of the print job in progress, however.

Speaking of print speeds, the WinWriter takes between two and seven minutes per page for color output, but can push out up to three pages per minute for black-ink draft prints.

Lexmark has a complete listing of driver updates for all its printers on its CompuServe forum (GO: LEXMARK). The inclusion of Windows 95 drivers is a nice touch, too. The product comes with a two-year warranty, and extensions are available for up to three additional years.

The only question I have about the WinWriter is: "When will it be Windows NT compatible?" Currently, it can't run on either Windows NT or OS/2. Still, if you're using Windows 3.1x or Win95--as most SOHO users are--this printer will make you happier than a hot pepper.

--Info File--
Lexmark WinWriter150c
Price: $349 (street)
In Brief: Compact, affordable and easy to use, this printer makes color available to home and office alike.
Lexmark International
800-358-5835, 606-232-2000

BY: Hailey Lynne McKeefry

I'll admit it, I'm spoiled. I want laser-quality output and the space-saving convenience of an all-in-one unit. Poor print quality has traditionally been my biggest complaint about multifunction office machines that combine a fax, printer, copier, scanner and fax modem. Well, someone's been listening: The Brother MFC-4500ML provides 300-dot-per-inch laser output at 6 pages per minute, bringing it well within the performance range of many inexpensive standalone laser printers.

The MFC-4500ML looks like a plain-paper fax machine, with a handset at the left side and a variety of controls on a centrally situated panel. The control panel includes a 10-key keypad for dialing functions, a bank of buttons for autodial numbers, a line of printer controls and a line of copy controls. A strip of controls across the top of the panel allowed me to set and clear functions and control the unit's mode and resolution. An LCD provides status information on copy, fax and printer functions.

The machine's footprint measures about 14.5 by 12 inches. Paper feeds through a straight paper path from the feeder at the top of the unit, which holds about 200 sheets of letter- or legal-size paper. Setup was straightforward, requiring only that I install the printer drum and toner cartridge, multipurpose sheet feeder, handset and document trays.

The unit's printer portion is controlled through a regular parallel cable (not supplied), while the scanner demands a (supplied) serial cable. I had to disconnect my modem in order to free up the necessary serial port. If your system uses a serial mouse and you use an external modem, you may have to add another serial port to use the scanner. The unit comes with all of the appropriate printer drivers, as well as Brother Missing Link scanning software.

The printer creates clear, dark images that will rival just about any 300dpi laser printer output. The paper takes a straight path through the printer, which minimizes jamming and curling. The unit features 512KB of memory, which can be expanded to 2MB. It comes with 45 fonts and lets you print on legal-size paper, 3- by 5-inch index cards, envelopes and heavy paper stock, in addition to 8.5- by 11-inch paper. The unit does not have an on/off switch, but can remain plugged in at all times since it automatically goes into a sleep mode when not in use. Once in sleep mode, it takes about half a minute to a minute to warm up when you want to use it.

In copy mode, you can specify up to 99 copies and reduce the original to 93, 87, 75 or 50 percent of the original or enlarge to 120, 125 or 150 percent. I copied thermal and plain-paper faxes, glossy originals and a variety of other documents and found that the speed and quality for all these media were more than acceptable, particularly if you copy infrequently and don't need large numbers of copies or the ability to collate.

The scanner was also easy to figure out and use. The scanning and fax utilities include a viewer, an outbox, an inbox, a finder, a control panel, an address book and an automatic scan file command. Although not heavy-duty software by any means, these utilities pretty much accomplished what I needed to do. If you want to use OCR software, though, you must first convert the scanned image to a TIFF file. I used Xerox's TextBridge Professional Edition 3.0 OCR software.

The machine's fax portion features 512KB of memory (expandable to 1.5MB), which lets you store up to 20 pages of text for broadcast fax. The document feeder, which is located just in front of the paper bin, holds 30 pages. The unit's memory stores up to 124 fax numbers for autodialing.

The Brother MFC-4500ML is just the ticket if you are setting up a small office and don't want to clutter up your limited space with every office machine imaginable. If you already own some office equipment, Brother also offers a less expensive three-in-one model that faxes, copies and prints. The MFC-4500ML provides good professional-quality black-and-white documents and is also robust enough for a small office's copying and faxing demands.

--Info File--
Brother MFC-4500ML
Price: $999
Brother International Corp.
800-276-7746, 908-356-8880

BY: James Bell

You shouldn't need a degree in fine arts to make a good-looking organizational chart. That's the idea behind Drag 'n Draw, a program for creating organizational charts, flowcharts and other business diagrams.

A minimal install of Drag 'n Draw can fit on a single diskette, but you'll probably want to do a full install to take advantage of the program's 30 templates and 1,000 SmartDrawings.

Most people don't create charts every day, and even fewer are graphic artists. Drag 'n Draw addresses both issues by stressing ease of use and automating much of the design process.

Help options appear everywhere: There are tips in the start-up dialog box, pop-up hints for most tools, and descriptions that appear when your cursor hovers over an icon. Experienced users can turn off any of these features.

You can create a new diagram from scratch or by modifying one of Drag 'n Draw's templates. Add objects to your page by dragging one of the 24 shapes from the toolbar, importing a graphic (.WMF, .PCX, .TIF, .BMP or .GIF files) or by dragging images from the SmartDrawing library.

You can link objects with straight, segmented or curved lines. Once anchored, these lines will adjust to follow an object if it is moved. You can also add text labels directly on the page, or inside an object that will grow or shrink to accommodate text.

The program provides rulers, guidelines and a keyboard "nudge" option to help you position objects precisely. These options, however, could be implemented better. Guidelines appear only temporarily on your page, so you can't use them to align objects. You can't change the ruler's scale either, which makes drawing floor plans and spacing diagrams difficult.

On the other hand, Drag 'n Draw provides useful controls for grouping, aligning and locking objects. You can adjust objects to match each other in size, or adjust the space between objects. Text can be rotated in 90-degree increments, but you can only flip graphics.

Clicking on the right mouse button brings up formatting options for selected objects. You can add arrowheads to lines, control line thickness and style, and pick fill and line colors from a fixed 48-color palette. You can also choose shadows and 3-D effects.

Faster formatting is available through Drag 'n Draw's styles, which provide global formatting presets that the program applies to an entire drawing. You can reformat individual objects after applying a style, but you can't apply a style to specific objects or use two styles with the same chart.

Drag 'n Draw's SmartDrawings are organized into libraries ranging from office furniture to computer equipment to generic symbols. Up to four libraries can be open simultaneously. A SmartDrawing is "smart" because you can control its default size when you place it in a chart, whether it can be sized proportionally or only in specific directions, and where text labels should appear. You can also specify the placement of connector points for an object. You can build your own SmartDrawing libraries by dragging objects from an existing library or the current page, or by pasting them from the Clipboard.

Drag 'n Draw's workspace is 50 by 50 inches, so you can create large diagrams and print them using the program's tiling controls. Another handy feature is the hierarchical drawing feature which lets you link a drawing to an object in another drawing. In a company-wide organizational chart, for instance, you could attach more detailed charts to each department's symbol and bring up the attached information with a click on the symbol.

Drag 'n Draw charts can also be embedded in other applications via OLE 1.0, and you can export charts to .WMF, .PCX, .TIF, .BMP and .GIF formats. All in all, Drag 'n Draw's simple interface and intelligent tools make it a smart choice for your structured drawing needs.

--Info File--
Drag 'n Draw 1.0
Price: $79.95 (street)
In Brief: Easy-to-use tools and 1,000 pieces of "smart art" make producing flowcharts, organizational charts and other business diagrams a snap.
Disk Space: 1.3MB (minimum); 7.7MB (full installation)
System Resources: 27%
RAM: 4MB
DeltaPoint
800-446-6955, 408-648-4000