Nov 95First Impresssions

BY: Michelle Tyrrell

If you work in a CAD environment, you'll probably enjoy the fact that Lexmark's Color Jetprinter 4079 Plus easily handles tabloid-size (11- by 17- inch) paper. In addition to PostScript Level 2 emulation, it also ships with IBM-GL Plotter emulation and will autoswitch between the two. If you can live without those features, you'll probably opt for any number of printers for a fraction of the cost.

For $3,199, you'll get full, rich colors and true black for monochrome printing. The printer comes with specially coated paper that makes a world of difference on the color-test page. Try it, and you'll never want to use any other paper for color output.

Everything about this printer was easy. The setup procedure took about two minutes for hookup and software installation. The LED indicator on the unit's front alerts you to any problems (paper jams and so forth). The four ink cartridges were preinstalled, but simple enough to remove and reinsert.

The resolution for color and monochrome printing is 360x360dpi, and output is 1ppm for color and a painfully slow 1.7ppm in monochrome. The printer can handle envelopes, transparencies and single-sheet paper, but the paper tray holds a scant 100 sheets of standard 18- to 24-pound paper.

Like most full-size color printers, the 4079 Plus has a large footprint. It measures 6.7 by 20.5 by 16 inches; with the output tray installed and the paper tray unfolded, it measures 11.25 by 20.5 by 23.25 inches. The unit weighs 22 pounds.

The 4079 Plus autoswitches among parallel, serial and LocalTalk interfaces. It ships with 4MB of RAM (expandable to 36MB), has 39 resident typefaces and runs on a 25MHz RISC processor.

I tested the 4079 Plus with Windows for Workgroups 3.11 and the 16-bit driver, which worked well. Full 32-bit Windows 95 drivers should be available by the time you read this. If you need both PostScript and 11- by 17-inch output in a color printer, Lexmark's Color Jetprinter 4079 Plus is a good, if slow, choice.

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Lexmark Color Jetprinter 4079 Plus
Price: $3,199
Lexmark International
800-891-0331, 606-232-2000

BY: James E. Powell

The Boca Voyager 64 is a speedy graphics accelerator that adds ease of use and Windows 95 compatibility to its attractive package. I tested this video board using drivers shipping with Windows 95's gold beta version. It can handle 11.548Mpixels per second in 640x480 resolution, 256-color mode, as measured by our Wintune 2.0 video test, and an equally strong 11.872Mpixels per second in 800x600, 256-color mode, a common mode for balancing color quality and speed. The Voyager can support as many as 16.7 million colors in 800x600 mode.

The Voyager ships with 2MB of DRAM and displays up to 256 colors at 1600x1200 and noninterlaced refresh rates up to 75Hz. When testing, I installed the board and started Windows 95 on a 120MHz Pentium machine. Windows 95 sensed that the video hardware had been changed and installed the appropriate driver.

The Trio64's 64-bit memory interface provides 228MB per second bandwidth. The board ships with drivers for AutoCAD and Windows 3.x. Driver support for the S3 chip is built into Windows NT.

The Voyager also works with the EPA Energy Star specification if your monitor is DPMS-compliant. The user documentation is exceptionally clear and offers a good troubleshooting section along with plenty of technical specifications.

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Boca Voyager 64
Price: $189 (street)
Boca Research
407-997-6227, fax 407-994-5848

BY: Sara G. Stephens

If Intellicomp were intended to mean "smart technology," then this company has truly lived up to its name with the Multimedia Quad Station. This system combines a 100MHz Pentium, a PCI bus, a quad-speed CD-ROM drive and a killer audio system--all for $2,000 and change.

The Soyo Technology motherboard features four ISA slots and four PCI slots, but only one PCI slot and two ISA slots were open. Once you get into the six-screw case, everything is within easy reach. The case holds four 3.5-inch drive bays and two 5.25-inch drive bays.

One of the 5.25-inch bays houses the MQS' quad-speed CD-ROM drive, which features a headphone jack and volume-control slide. The drive connects to two 100-watt speakers with smartly arranged control buttons, including one that controls the surround-sound feature.

The MQS' hardware is supported by useful software and utilities. You can set up multiple screens of varying resolutions with the Mach 64 video and switch between these screen-resolution settings without ever leaving Windows.

I was disappointed with the MQS' user-manual grab bag. Although Intellicomp did provide a manual for every component, no single manual appeared with the label Multimedia Quad System.

Most importantly, this is one fast machine. The MQS smoked WINDOWS Magazine's Wintune tests, with incredible 104.2MIPS and 21.5MFLOPS CPU scores. The graphics test fueled the fire, too, with a speed of 9.9Mpixels per second. At 11.1MB per second, the drive access test was a little less impressive, but still ahead of the pack.

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Intellicomp Multimedia Quad Station
Price: $2,049 (street)
Intellicomp Technologies
800-468-3696, 818-582-8096

BY: Janice J. Chen

Learning to share can be really hard, but the QMS 1660E Print System makes it easier. Not only does this high-resolution monochrome laser printer offer easy network connectivity, but it's also fast--16 pages per minute--so you won't be waiting around for your coworker's print job to finish.

Flexibility is the key to keeping sharers happy. The QMS 1660E supports three print resolutions and 14 media sizes. Resolutions are 300x300, 600x600, and either 1200x600 or 1200x1200 depending on the amount of RAM and whether a daughterboard is installed. Media sizes range from A3 and postcard to full bleed 11- by 17-inch pages.

The unit I received for review had 48MB of RAM as well as the 1200x1200dpi daughterboard installed. It came with QMS' CrownNet interface for Ethernet connectivity. Ethernet comes standard, but the 1660E also provides optional Token Ring and LocalTalk connectivity.

Two PCMCIA card slots allow you to add font cards and a security card. You can insert either type of card in both slots. The printer also comes with flash ROM for easy system code upgrades. An optional internal IDE-SCSI disk drive board will support a 2.5-inch IDE hard disk and up to three external SCSI hard disks.

The 1660E is enhanced to simulate 256 gray-scale levels and it supports four resident printer emulations: HP PCL 5, HPGL, line printer, and PostScript Level 2 emulation and Level 1 compatibility. It's also Energy Star compliant.

The unit shipped with drivers for Windows 3.x, and although they worked fine with 16-bit apps I had trouble printing from Microsoft Office for Windows 95. A call to tech support directed me to the QMS Internet home page, where I was able to download a beta driver for Win95 that resolved the problem.

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QMS 1660E Print System
Price: $5,999
QMS
800-523-2696, 334-633-4300

BY: Jim Forbes

I've used pivoting monitors for the PC and Macintosh for a long time. If you live in a word processor, do lots of desktop publishing, or frequently switch between a spreadsheet and a word processor or text editor, it's a good investment.

Portrait Display Labs' new 17-inch color pivot monitor deserves serious consideration. Though it takes up a lot of desk space, this monitor provides unparalleled flexibility and extremely crisp images. The Pivot 1700 is a multifrequency monitor capable of delivering a maximum non-interlaced resolution of 1280x1024 pixels at 60Hz and 1024x768 pixels at 76Hz.

The unit's Hitachi cathode ray tube easily rotates on its axis to accommodate your work. You can also rotate the image electronically by invoking a user-definable keystroke combination. The tube has a nearly flat front and a dot pitch of 0.26mm. I particularly liked its vivid colors and razor-sharp monochrome images. You'll find a full set of controls on the front of the tube to adjust contrast, color, brightness, shape, position and other attributes. A degaussing button, which you must use whenever you switch orientation, is also located right up front within easy reach.

I tested the Pivot 1700 with four desktop machines and was surprised by its compatibility. The only machine that balked at working with the monitor used a Cirrus Logic CLGD546X graphics chip, which is used by Compaq and a handful of other companies on desktop computers. There may well be other graphics chips that are also incompatible, however.

If your job involves manipulating text and high-resolution graphics, the Pivot 1700 can surely make your life easier. Overall, I recommend this monitor--provided that you can deal with its somewhat large 19-@19-inch footprint and its more than substantial weight.

Most importantly, before you plunk down $1,000 for the Pivot 1700, call the manufacturer and make sure it will work with your computer's video adapter. Better to find out for certain before you haul it home.

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Portrait Display Labs Pivot 1700
Price: $999 (street)
Portrait Display Labs
800-858-7744, 510-227-2700

BY: Philip Albinus

Sometimes a business presentation calls for the heavy artillery. For a large audience, a standard LCD projection panel may not provide the image you need, but an LCD projector might do the trick. The LitePro 580 LCD projector from In Focus Systems is a strong candidate despite a lackluster menu system.

Setting up the LitePro 580 is easy. Plug the power cord into an outlet and attach the VGA cable to the LitePro and your monitor port. Hook up video or sound peripherals and you are ready to begin your presentation.

The LitePro 580 ships with a remote control unit and has a projector control panel built into the top of the unit. Unfortunately, the remote control and built-in control panel are not easy to navigate. To activate the menu, you point the remote control at the unit's infrared receiver and then click on the menu button. The remote control's trackball handled awkwardly and it's easy to activate the wrong menu setting or leave the menu altogether. On the plus side, the LitePro 580 has a sharp, legible image.

The 5.5- by 11.2- by 18-inch unit is well designed. The 17-pound LitePro 580 has a carrying handle that comes in handy. Its fan exhaust grill gives off a fair amount of heat, though it's quieter than an LCD projection panel and overhead projector combined.

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In Focus LitePro 580
Price: $9,999
In Focus Systems
800-294-6400, 503-685-8888

BY: Philip Albinus

Fast, memory-rich notebooks often cram the desktop image into a tiny 8-inch display. If you're looking for the big picture, the Austin Vista from IPC Technologies is a good place to start. With an impressive wide screen and a pair of built-in audio speakers, the Vista is a good platform for small-scale business presentations.

Unfortunately, the Vista's speedy 100MHz 486DX4 processor does not make for a speedy machine. Its video scores were especially poor at 1.236 Mpixels per second, which is doubtless why our Word 6.0 and Excel 5.0 macros took so long to execute, at 220 and 205 seconds, respectively. The Vista clocked in at 47.0 MIPS and 10.7 MFLOPS on our WINDOWS Magazine Wintune 2.0 benchmarks. Disk scores were middling, at a data transfer rate of 4.554MB per second.

The Vista is available with either a 10.4-inch active-matrix display or an 11.3-inch dual-scan display. The screen on the dual-scan model I tested displayed several faint, ghosting lines emanating from the corners of Windows applications. The active-matrix display should be free of such ghosting.

The system I tested shipped with 8MB of RAM (expandable to 32MB) and had a 742MB hard drive; a 1.3GB hard disk is available. The full-size keyboard has nicely spaced keys that offer a responsive feel. The Vista incorporates a stickpoint device and has one Type III or two Type II PCMCIA slots for peripherals.

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IPC Austin Vista
Price: $2,890, as tested
IPC Technologies
800-874-7182, 512-339-3500

BY: James E. Powell

As you search for a high-performance, Windows 95-ready system, take a look at the Acma P120 Pentium desktop. Equipped with the Triton chip set, the mid-tower unit I tested has 16MB of EDO RAM (expandable to 128MB), a quad-speed Mitsumi CD-ROM drive, 256KB of level 2 cache, a Conner 1.2GB EIDE hard disk and much more.

The multimedia-ready Acma ships with a Creative Labs Sound Blaster 16 sound card, a pair of Altec Lansing speakers and an STB Velocity 64 PCI video card loaded with 4MB of VRAM. The video card, together with its Impression 17-inch noninterlaced SVGA monitor, provides crisp, clean graphics and text.

The system performed at the top of its class in our Wintune 2.0 tests. The CPU pumped out 129.6MIPS and 25.87MFLOPS, and the video turned in an outstanding score of 16.9Mpixels per second. That showing is just a hair under the Micron P120 Millennia we tested recently, the fastest Pentium 120 we've reviewed (First Impressions, June).

I do have a couple of quibbles. I'd prefer a 28.8Kb-per-second modem, not the 14.4Kbps internal fax modem supplied, though it does include a voice mail/fax back system preloaded. The company doesn't have a great deal of bundled software. Though the Acma comes with Encarta 95, Works 3.0, Money 3.0 and the Best of the Microsoft Entertainment Pack, it lacks an office suite. The unit I tested--before Windows 95's official launch--came with MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows for Workgroups 3.11.

To test its Windows 95 performance, I replaced the video board with a Boca Research Voyager 64 video card. The Plug-and-Play BIOS worked just as expected, replacing the video driver with the one the user guide recommends.

The well-written user guide provides all the info you'll need. I tested dozens of Windows 95 applications on the Acma. Performance was universally excellent. The Acma P120 is a superior choice for top speed at a very reasonable price.

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Acma P120
Price: $3,599 (direct)
Acma Computers
800-786-6888, 510-623-1212

BY: James E. Powell

Now you can have voice mail, a full-duplex speakerphone and a solid 28.8Kb-per-second V.34 fax modem all in one with CyberPhone from Prometheus. The external unit I tested with the included CyberWorks software--which handles most of the telephony chores--was quick, easy and error-free.

All the features you'd expect are here. You can call in to retrieve your messages (with passwords for security), forward a message or be paged when you receive a message or fax. Caller ID lets you know who's trying to reach you. You can view a pop-up alert when incoming calls are received, record a memo as a message or set up a mailbox to make announcements only. You are also able to send or receive faxes, which can be marked, rotated, exported or printed.

A status window shows you which messages have been opened, and the color of each line indicates the type of message. You can also use the product as a speakerphone (a microphone is included and plugs into the back of the modem). The microphone additionally lets you record voice-mail greetings if you're tired of using your telephone's handset.

The modem is Radish VoiceView-compatible, a technology that allows data and voice communications to be handled simultaneously over a single phone line. The modem also supports standard data-compression and error-correction standards.

With its easy setup, 28.8 speed and simple-to-understand software, CyberPhone sounds good to us.

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CyberPhone
Price: $299
Disk Space: 3MB
System Resources: 5%
RAM: 4MB
Prometheus Products
800-477-3473, 503-692-9600

BY: Jonathan Blackwood

Cloaked inside the Cobra XL DX4 series from Robotech is 100MHz or 120MHz of 486 power that purrs like a Pentium.

The systems I tested had 16MB of RAM, a 1GB Micropolis hard disk and 256KB of level 2 write-back cache. The peripherals included a Sound Blaster 16 sound card, a quad-speed Creative Labs ATAPI CD-ROM drive and a Number 9 GXE64 video card that pushed pixels around with blazing speed. The units also have three externally accessible 5.25-inch drive bays (two available) and four 3.5-inch bays (two external and two internal, with one of each available). Four 16-bit ISA slots and three PCI slots round out the package.

Cobra models ship with Novell's PerfectOffice suite.

These systems are housed in Robotech's well-designed case, which provides no-screw access to practically every component. My only complaint about the case is that on more than one occasion, my absent-minded fingers accidentally hit the power switch when I reached for the CD-ROM eject button. This could easily be resolved by moving the CD-ROM drive to the middle bay.

The Cobras' performance, though, is the real grabber. Our WINDOWS Magazine Wintune 2.0 benchmarks showed Pentium-like performance. For the 100MHz unit: 55.7MIPS, 11.1MFLOPS, 24.8MB-per-second average data transfer rate to RAM, 3.4Mpixels-per-second video, and 11.7MB-per-second data transfer rate on the hard disk. The 120MHz unit, not surprisingly, did better: 64.5MIPS, 16.3MFLOPS, 28.9MB-per-second data transfer to RAM, 3.8Mpixels-per-second video, and 10.77MB-per-second hard-disk data transfer rate. Times on our Word 6.0 and Excel 5.0 macros were equally fast, at 46 and 42 seconds on the Word benchmark and 32 and 29 seconds on the Excel benchmark, respectively, for the 100MHz and 120MHz models.

There are plenty of good reasons to choose a Pentium over a 486--such as better multimedia performance. But the Cobra XL series' numbers--equivalent to those of a 60MHz or 66MHz Pentium--make these systems worthy of a long, hard look.

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Robotech Cobra XL DX4-100 and XL DX4-120
Price: DX4-100, $2,599; DX4-120, $2,619
Robotech
800-533-0633, 801-565-0645

BY: James Alan Miller

Buying a notebook as your only computer has become quite common. With the power and expandability of today's notebooks, a desktop system isn't necessary.

One way to maximize your notebook's effectiveness is through utilizing PCMCIA cards. And one way to get the most out of your limited number of PCMCIA slots is to combine more than one function into a single card. That's what ActionTec has done with the ComNet 28.8, a PCMCIA card that combines a speedy V.34 28.8Kbps fax modem and an Ethernet adapter.

To install the card, first determine if the PCMCIA card services software is correctly installed, make some minor changes to the start-up files and run the installation program, which installs the software and drivers to a target directory. You install either the NetWare V3.x/4.x Workstation drivers or the NDIS drivers, which are necessary for Microsoft Windows networking. The NDIS driver handles only one protocol at a time, so running NetWare and the Windows network together is impossible.

It's disappointing that NDIS2 drivers, which support multiprotocol sessions, aren't included. However, ActionTec is currently working on an NDIS3, as well as a Windows 95 driver, either of which would solve this problem. The manual and installation guide instruct you on how to best configure the card's modem component, as well as on how to set the card for modem use only. The modem I tested performed well.

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ActionTec ComNet 28.8
Price: $599
ActionTec Electronics
800-797-7001, 408-739-7000

BY: David Gabel

If only all your computer's companions could be as pleasant to install, use and live with as the Okidata OL810e LED page printer. This small (7.9- by 12.8- by 14.6-inch) printer goes just about anywhere in the office and begins printing immediately. I installed it in a crowded spot in a very crowded office, and it settled right in. I merely followed the manual's clear installation instructions, which included removing some packing materials and properly installing the toner cartridge. Then I pressed the key sequence for printing a test page. Nary a hitch! A page showing the various fonts available churned from the output slot onto the top of the printer.

You have the option of faceup or facedown output. The facedown mode changes the paper path so you can print envelopes without fear of paper jams.

It's possible to load up to 250 sheets of standard letter paper into the built-in tray. The printer also handles single sheets, envelopes, mailing labels and transparencies, although I didn't test it with these stocks.

The printer comes standard with 2MB of RAM, expandable to 34MB, which should be enough to satisfy the most ardent high-density printing freak.

The included diskette contains drivers for Windows 3.x, Word 2.x and WordPerfect. I wasn't using any of them. I installed the printer under a beta of Windows 95, and selected the OL810 printer driver included in the OS. Everything proceeded like clockwork.

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Okidata OL810e
Price: $999
Okidata
800-OKIDATA, 609-235-2600

BY: Arthur H. Germain II

From the comfort of your home office, try picturing the perfect PC. It should be fast with plenty of RAM and a roomy disk. Fax is a must, along with voice mail--and maybe even a speakerphone with caller ID. AT&T has packed all of those goodies and more into its Globalyst 380TPC.

The mini-tower unit has a 120MHz Pentium processor, 16MB of RAM, a 1.08GB hard disk, a 3.5-inch floppy disk drive and a quad-speed Toshiba CD-ROM drive. It also has four ISA slots, two PCI slots and one shared expansion slot in its sturdy chassis.

But AT&T's telephony personal computer (TPC) expansion card really makes this system home office heaven. The card provides 14.4/19.2Kb per second data/fax, a full-duplex speakerphone and 16-bit wavetable synthesis audio capabilities.

I used the Globalyst's Personal Communications Center to create a voice-mail greeting and mailbox (up to 999 boxes are possible). The speakerphone sound was clear.

The system's onboard video--S3-based, with 1MB of VRAM--isn't a screamer, but at 800x600 resolution with 256 colors, the 380TPC clocked a quite respectable score of 10.4Mpixels on WINDOWS Magazine's Wintune 2.0 tests. The 17-inch monitor provided a sharp edge-to-edge image.

The 380TPC is an attractive choice for small offices.

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AT&T Globalyst 380TPC
Price: Without monitor, $2,699; with 17-inch monitor, $3,499
AT&T Global Information Solutions
800-447-1124, 513-445-5000

BY: Cheryl Dominianni

The very word "bibliography" can send shivers of terror up the spine of anyone who ever struggled with a term paper. The bad news is that in these post-college years, you still may have to grapple with bibliographies when preparing annotated technical papers and research reports. The good news is EndNote Plus 2.0.

EndNote Plus takes the fear out of writing when you are working with referenced material. It should interest researchers, students, academic writers and anyone else who writes annotated documents. This dual-purpose software package acts as both a bibliographic-reference database manager and a bibliography builder.

EndNote Plus runs under Windows 3.x, Windows NT and Windows 95, and is compatible with Microsoft Word, WordPerfect, Lotus Ami Pro, Rich Text Format and ANSI text.

The program manual's Guided Tour walked me through the application's basic functions. Included were instructions on a variety of basic concepts and tasks such as opening a library and making new entries, searching for and exporting specific references from the library, inserting citations while writing a document and generating the final bibliography for the completed work.

As you use your word processor to write your document, EndNote Plus runs in the background. When you encounter something that needs to be cited, switch to EndNote Plus and enter the reference into the library.

You can enter about 32,000 references per library, and each reference field can accommodate up to eight text pages. Once the reference is in the database all you need to do is paste it at the appropriate text location and then EndNote inserts a temporary citation.

When you're finished writing, a couple of simple commands format your document, convert the temporary citations to conform to bibliographic styles that you've previously selected and generate the bibliography. Finding an appropriate style shouldn't be a problem because EndNote Plus 2.0 comes with over 200 predefined styles in more than 15 disciplines. If necessary, you can create a new style from scratch or modify one of EndNote's to suit your specific needs.

EndNote Plus won't write your document for you, but it'll make it a lot easier to add the appropriate citations to your masterwork.

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EndNote Plus 2.0
Price: $299
Disk Space: 3.5MB
System Resources: 7%
RAM: 4MB (8MB recommended)
Niles & Associates
800-554-3049, fax 510-559-8683

BY: James E. Powell

You can make all your PCMCIA cards do double duty. The same functionality that a PCMCIA card adds to your notebook can be tapped by your desktop system with the TSE-200 twin-slot external PCMCIA card reader. The small unit accepts two Type II cards or one Type III card, and connects to your PC with a 42-inch cable and its own 16-bit ISA card.

The installation program adds drivers to your CONFIG.SYS file and installs Card and Socket Services. After installation, the CardWizard software tells you what's installed and how, such as ports, interrupts and drive letters. When you insert or remove a card, the system gently beeps. I tested the unit with a Type II fax modem card and a Type III 130MB hard disk card. It worked the first time and every time, without requiring any hardware tweaks.

The TSE-200's Hot Swap feature lets you change cards without rebooting. It measures 2.4 by 4.6 by 6.5 inches and weighs just over a pound. The unit has a power and activity light, and a low-power standby mode for green PCs.

The TSE-200 is a cost-effective solution for taking your act on the road as well as for staying in the comfy confines of home.

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ACMA TSE-200
Price: $299 (direct)
ACMA Computers
800-786-6888, 510-623-1212

BY: Joel T. Patz

Business is fueled by money. B-Plan Business Planner aims to stoke your firm's furnace with the necessary guidance and financial analyses to develop a convincing business plan that will communicate your ideas clearly to potential investors.

B-Plan's Easy Start option provides four plan types: manufacturer, developer, reseller and service. Choosing the one that most resembles your business sets up the financial planning dialog boxes and spreadsheets you'll use to supply information that will, in turn, generate reports and graphs. You then enter business-related variables, such as general expenses, interest rates, taxes, salaries, unit cost and prices, plant and equipment costs, marketing expenditures and R&D costs.

Once the initial data has been entered, you're ready to analyze it and view the financial picture you've established. Profit and loss, cash flow, balances and financial ratios are ready at the click of the mouse. You can perform what-if analyses by changing the parameters of key indicators such as price, quantity, capital equipment and operating expenses.

B-Plan offers a variety of Analysis, Budget and Data reports, including Plant and Equipment, Break Even and Capital Sources. Eight types of graphs can also be produced from your data and integrated into the plan's final form: pie, 3-D pie, 2-D and 3-D vertical and horizontal bar charts, single line and filled area charts.

You develop your business plan's text by exporting a template to your favorite word processor and filling it in. You're guided through the process but you have to delete the italicized directions before the text is usable--a significant hindrance. You also have to manually verify font consistency throughout the template, and cut and paste the reports and graphs to produce a completed document.

Most of B-Plan's spreadsheets provide only 30 lines for data entry--a limitation for highly detailed plans. While the reports and graphs are quickly produced and data entry is easy, B-Plan doesn't provide the sophisticated document production or user education found in similar programs, such as Business Plan Pro (see First Impressions, March).

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B-Plan Business Planner 2.0
Price: $199
Disk Space: 4MB
System Resources: 20%
RAM: 4MB
B-Plan USA
800-782-1955, 201-784-0900

BY: Jim Forbes

The 486 may not be the newest or even the best processor, but AMD's DX4 120MHz version of this chip proves it can still pack a punch. I tested a DirectWave AS4P120 system powered by the DX4 120. The AS4P120 had 16MB of RAM, a Quantum 1080AT IDE hard disk, a Diamond Stealth 64 PCI video adapter with 2MB of RAM, a quad-speed CD-ROM drive and a sound card. The mini-tower system also included Windows for Workgroups 3.11, DOS 6.22, a Microsoft mouse and a 15-inch monitor with digital controls. All DirectWave models will offer Windows 95 by the time you read this.

The AS4P120 cranked out 65.8 MIPS and 13.2 MFLOPS, according to our Wintune 2.0 benchmarks. Its video adapter churned out 11.2 Mpixels, and the Quantum hard disk turned a throughput rating of 12.16MB per second. Our Word and Excel benchmarks clocked in at 32 and 15.6 seconds, respectively. Installing Windows 95 required updating the IDE drivers for the Quantum drive.

Overall, DirectWave's AS4P120 proves that the 486 still has a lot of mileage left in it. And there's more good news: Prices for 486 systems are likely to fall during the holiday buying season.

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DirectWave AS4P120
Price: $1,995 ($1,729 without multimedia peripherals)
DirectWave
909-390-8098

BY: James E. Powell

Help is on the way. The WinHelp Office suite offers a battery of tools centered on RoboHelp, an easy-to-use help-authoring system that works within Microsoft Word.

The WinHelp Video Kit lets you add multimedia elements to a help system by integrating video (.AVI) and sound (.WAV) into your help application. The kit also includes a tool--similar to Lotus ScreenCam--for capturing screen activity and turning it into a video file.

WinHelp HyperViewer lets you do full-text searches, then displays the matching topics and highlights the search term within the text. You can use HyperViewer to print multiple topics. There's also a tool for creating a hierarchical outline of your help file.

If you don't have the source for a help file, use WinHelp's decompiler to create a source document from a .HLP file. A BugHunter helps you find broken or incorrect context-sensitive help-file links. The Inspector tool lets you snoop around a help system and displays information such as a help file's topics and keywords.

The Moving to WinHelp '95 Kit is really a book that prepares you for the transition to Windows 95. However, it does not include a Windows 95 help compiler.

The only sour note in this suite is that the tools aren't integrated. It's more of a money-saving software bundle than a set of linked tools. Separate installation programs create two separate program groups or smooth, menu-option transfers from one tool to another.

The sweet side of the deal is that WinHelp's tools are among the best you'll find and are well supported by good documentation. A generous helping of samples will get you started, and you can learn all about help systems while using one to create your own.

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WinHelp Office 1.5
Price: $599
Disk Space: 9MB
System Resources: Varies (15% maximum)
RAM: 8MB
Blue Sky Software Corp.
800-459-2356, 619-459-6365

BY: Philip Albinus

You have a top-of-the-line, red-hot PC, but you're still squinting at an undersized 14-inch monitor? Get with it. The SuperScan Elite 21 from Hitachi is a spectacular 21-inch monitor that puts Windows in a whole new light. Whether you're doing intricate CAD work or cruising the Web, you won't miss a thing with the SuperScan.

At first glance, the SuperScan is all glass; it has one of the narrowest and least obtrusive bezels of any monitor on the market. The monitor's EasyMenu runs along the lower portion of the bezel and offers standard functions such as controls for moir@ degauss, display position, trapezoid, rotation, parallelogram, pincushion, contrast and brightness. The controls are easy to use and yield a nearly perfect image with minimal geometric distortion.

The SuperScan offers a crisp display with vivid colors. It has a 0.26mm dot pitch, an Invar shadow mask and a horizontal scanning range of 30KHz to 95KHz. Maximum resolution is 1600x1200, at an ergonomic 75Hz vertical refresh rate. The SuperScan complies with VESA's DPMS Power Saving Energy Star guidelines, and it's also Windows 95 Plug and Play-compliant. The unit measures 18.7 by 19.2 by 21 inches, including the base. It weighs in at 73 pounds.

With a list price just under $2,100, the SuperScan Elite 21 is geared toward high-end Windows, CAD and document-imaging users--and it's worth the investment. If you're looking for the big picture, the SuperScan Elite 21 is the perfect solution.

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NSA/Hitachi SuperScan Elite 21
Price: $2,095
NSA/Hitachi
800-441-4832, 617-461-8300

BY: James E. Powell

Your papers will be in order if you use Guide Passport to turn your word processing files into electronic documents for distribution and viewing. You use Passport to create an index, to provide a well-designed viewing application and to translate your document's styles into electronic formats.

Passport's Translator utility converts input documents into electronic form using templates that you control. For example, you can specify how Microsoft Word text styles are translated and displayed (font, color, alignment and so on). The program generates a hierarchical table of contents and, optionally, an index of words based on those you indicated in your original document, as well as a searchable index. You can add pop-up notes, buttons to execute commands using the LOGiiX scripting language, and reference buttons to trigger jumps to other documents and graphics.

A royalty-free runtime is provided to view Passport documents. An optional reader that allows greater control, such as the ability to add annotations, is also available.

The translation process is speedy and the performance of the viewer, including its search engine, is very good. There's no disputing Passport's power, especially considering its roots as a $45,000 professional version. However, the program's nonintuitive interface hinders learning and using the product. Passport is further hampered by a tutorial that has several glaring errors, inadequate examples, and screenshots that are poorly chosen or don't match their captions. The tutorial is also poorly organized and insufficiently illustrated for a product this complex.

Some of the program's defaults are bothersome as well. If you set the title bar of your text window to something other than the filename, your query results window displays the title bar name, not the filename. Thus, if your electronic document consists of six files, your query results list shows six entries, all with the same name. It's very confusing.

Passport is a potpourri of power and puzzlement. Its strong features are sometimes overshadowed by usability deficiencies.

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Guide Passport
Price: $1,875
Disk Space: 20MB
System Resources: 9%
RAM: 2MB
InfoAccess
800-344-9737, 206-747-3203

BY: Jim Forbes

When the accoutrements of computing start to crowd you out of your office, you can reclaim some space with the Platinum Sound MSK-200 multimedia keyboard. The MSK-200 keyboard features two powerful 4-inch speakers with a 13-watt amplifier; volume, balance and tone controls; and an omnidirectional microphone.

The MSK-200's speakers are rated at 16 watts. They produce good mid and high tones. The bass quality, however, was a little disappointing and a music file's first note would sometimes get clipped. Still, the speakers are adequate for office environments. You adjust the speakers' volume, balance and tone with sliding controls; LED displays show the settings.

The keyboard's tactile response is on the soft side. It has the familiar inverted "T" cursor control pad and is large at 3 by 19 by 11.25 inches. It took a couple of days for me to get used to its hefty size.

Setting up the MSK-200 was a breeze. The speaker and keyboard cables are bundled together, which makes plugging it into the keyboard and sound card connectors easy. The combined cables are 4 feet long, so they may be a little short if you stow your system on the floor or away from your immediate work area.

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SC&T Platinum Sound MSK-200
Price: $150 (street)
SC&T International
800-408-4084, 602-470-1334