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• Displays

  By Ed Tittel LaCie 324 24” LCD Monitor with Hood and Calibration Software $1,240, available from PCConnection.com When it comes to flat panel displays for PCs, some are better than others, and they usually sport price tags to match. The main reasons for the high cost of high-end displays are their ability to reproduce color accurately, and also their overall resolution. More expensive monitors lend themselves well to photo editing, series computer graphics work, high-resolution animation and other graphics intensive applications. The best such monitors cost $3,000 or more, but this 24” LaCie monitor offers excellent color handling, 1920x1200 resolution, and even includes color calibration software, all for the relative bargain price of around $1,100. Students learning about computer graphics, graphic arts, photography and so forth will find the LaCie 324 eminently well-suited to support their studies and related graphical interests. The unit also supports 10-bit gamma correction, offers two HDMI ports plus DVI-D and conventional VGA inputs, and even supports Faroudja Directional Correlation Deinterlacing (DCDi), to smoothe out the processing of rapidly moving images on-screen, which are common in action movies, sporting events and computer games. It even offers a snazzy picture-in-picture (PIP) capability, that permits easy repositioning of the PIP frame, and makes source selections for the main and PIP image feeds easy. The calibration software included on CD-ROM with the unit permits users to select specific color profiles to drive the display, and to save their own custom profiles as needed. Display options include four zoom and aspect ratio modes, including Dx2D, which magnifies the source to 1920x1200 resolution. You’ll also find accessible controls for brightness, contrast, color temperature, gamma, noise reduction and so forth. Overall, this monitor is a great tool for your graphically inclined student! For more info, see the LaCie 324 product page Samsung 245BW SyncMaster 24" Monitor About $430, available from CDW.com For those who don’t need serious graphics capability or color accuracy, the Samsung SyncMaster 245BW makes a great and affordable widescreen desktop monitor. At a price of around $400, it’s one of the cheapest 24" LCDs available. Despite the low cost, though, the 245BW offers 1920x1200 resolution, excellent brightness (400 cd/m2), a high contrast ratio (1000:1, 3000:1 dynamic), and excellent response time (5 ms). With HDCP support, even though this monitor lacks an HDMI port, it can still play back Blu-ray discs given the proper hook-ups using DVI-D or an HDMI to DVI-D adapter or cable. Its speedy response time also makes this monitor excel at computer gaming. Samsung manages to keep the price down by skipping many of the features commonly found on 24" monitors. There are no USB ports, memory card readers, built-in loudspeakers or other frills (though some may argue that omitting HDMI is going too far). That said, unlike the LaCie 324, the 245BW offers less color capability and accuracy, by approximating 16.7 million colors rather than offering them directly and discretely. Also, this unit is best viewed straight on, as it offers a modest 160° viewing angle. But for typical Windows use, serious gaming, and light-duty graphics, students will find that the 245BW offers them a fabulous amount of screen real estate at a great price. For those seeking to watch videos, play games, or run standard Windows applications on the big screen, the Samsung 245BW offers an excellent compromise between cost and capability. For more information on this monitor, please consult the Samsung product page . Dell Ultrasharp 2408WFP Widescreen Flat Panel Monitor $679, available from Dell.com The Dell Ultrasharp LCD monitor family is nearly 10 years old; the latest model numbers end with an 08 suffix. We wanted to include the 27" model here, but it won’t be available until later this year, so we can’t share pictures or stats on it yet. The 2408 model is a smaller but still capable monitor that shares most of the same features its bigger cousin will also sport. Both units feature a resolution of 1920x1200, response time at 6 ms, color support at 16.7 million colors and 110% color gamut, with a 1300:1 contrast ratio. What makes the 08 Ultrasharps interesting is their inclusion of Dell-driven VESA standard DisplayPort technology. Though it hasn’t been universally adopted by monitor makers, its royalty-free, license-free, digital audio and video interconnect capability seeks to give license- and royalty-required HDMI technology a run for consumer loyalty, if not for as much of their money. (For more information about DisplayPort, see the VESA press release .) Dell, however, hedges its bets on the 08 series by including both HDMI and DisplayPort hook-ups, as well as DVI-D, VGA, component video, S-Video, and composite video inputs. The 2408WFP excels at gaming and at DVD playback, including Blu-ray content. It’s also great for conventional display activities from the Windows desktop. At just over $600, it costs half again as much as the SyncMaster 245BW, but its bells and whistles, plus ports and connectors galore, mean there’s ample added value to offset extra costs. Particularly for entertainment oriented students, the 2408WFP delivers an excellent combination of features and functions. For more info on this display, please consult the Dell product page . eVGA UV Plus+ USB VGA Display Port $65-$80, available from CompUSA.com The eVGA UV Plus+ is a USB device that offers support for an additional display on a notebook or desktop PC. Simply plug the UV Plus+ into an available USB port, attach a display, and you can extend your Windows desktop from your current monitor onto that display as well. Essentially, the UV Plus+ adds another graphics adapter to your PC via USB, thereby extending your desktop real estate without loading down your existing graphics circuitry. The UV Plus+ comes in two models: the UV-16, which supports display resolutions of up to 1680x1200, and the UV-12, which supports display resolutions up to 1440x900. The UV-16 costs about $80 while the UV-12 goes for around $65. Either device offers a peachy way to extend your desktop, particularly for notebook PCs where simply plugging in an external monitor may either blank out the built-in display, or put too much strain on the built-in graphics processor. Both models work with Vista’s Aero mode, support 16.7 million colors, and include a DVI port with a VGA-to-DVI adapter for VGA-only monitors. The device draws less than 500 mA at 5V, so it may be safely powered through the USB port even on a notebook PC. Reduced battery life shouldn’t be much of an issue, especially given that the external monitor needs a wall socket anyway! eVGA claims you can add as many as six UV Plus+ devices to a single PC, for up to 7 monitors in all. Needless to say, even at 480 Mbps, this could bog down a USB root hub pretty well! For more information on the UV-16, see its product page , likewise for the UV-12.

• Student-Oriented Software

  By Don Reisinger Jott.com Free, Available at jott.com For students on the go, nothing could be easier or more useful than being able to use their own voices to send emails, dial numbers, send text messages, or simply to get some of the more annoying issues in life out of the way as soon as possible. With the help of Jott, the troublesome need to dial numbers, type emails, or send text messages while driving or when your hands are tied up is eliminated. Signing up with Jott couldn’t be easier: in a matter of minutes, you run through the sign-up process and start using the service. First you’re required to input your name, email address, phone number, and zip code for location purposes. Once you receive the confirmation email, you need only call a designated number to confirm that your phone is actually tied the service. You’ll quickly realize that Jott is not only a neat little service with a lot of promise, but one that makes some of the complexities of life easier for students, professionals and the less tech-savvy. One of the main issues facing students today is that they are overwhelmed with too much work and busy social lives, and tend to lose sight of the fact that services are available to help make the transition from student to social butterfly a bit easier. Jott is one of these services. Think of it this way: a forgetful student who was just assigned homework for the next meeting of a class is hurrying her way out of the classroom room and forgets to write the assignment down. Usually, that assignment would probably go uncompleted. But with the help of Jott, a quick vocal note to add the assignment to her to-do list makes it all the more likely to be done on time. One irksome feature is Jott’s inability to accurately guess what you are saying when you want to dial people or recite an email. I was forced to repeat myself and slow down my speech more often than I liked, to ensure that the service understood me. The service also makes you spell all proper nouns to ensure the messages are transcribed properly. Although that made things a bit more difficult and quickly became an annoyance, it did make for a more accurate message. All in all, Jott is a great service for people who don’t mind spending time trying to make sure a message is properly reproduced. But with the inclusion of a link to an audio file that allows the recipient to hear your message, some of those problems are easily assuaged. And for the student on the go who doesn’t mind spending some time reciting back assignments and notes, Jott is the perfect service to do just that. Google Docs Free, available at Docs.google.com Students who don’t want to spend hundreds of dollars on an Office suite have a slew of alternatives available to them. And although not all are created equal — and there really isn’t any true replacement for Microsoft Excel — Google Docs is a fine alternative that comes with an attractive price (it’s free!) It also performs many of the tasks you would expect from Microsoft Office without all the extra frills that make it bloated and overbearing. At its very heart, Google Docs is designed with the less-sophisticated user in mind. Sure, it’s capable of spell-checking your work and making sure the grammar is correct, but it’s mostly designed to ensure that your experience with it is as easy as possible. Much like Jott, downloading and using Google Docs is quick and easy: all you need to do is to sign up for a Google account, click the Docs link, and start using the service. Those students with professors who require the use of .DOC or .XLS files shouldn’t be worried about Google Docs — it fully supports all of the file types they will need. Google’s word processing application is versatile and wonderfully responsive. Much like Microsoft Word, the word processing application lets you check grammar and make sure everything is spelled properly. With a healthy offering of font styles and editing options, it’s a great alternative to Word. And because it’s online, it also allows for collaboration in real time, meaning that students can work in groups and finish products much more quickly no matter where they are in the world. Google’s spreadsheet application isn’t as great. Unlike Excel, which offers a relatively limitless number of options and modifications to ensure that you’re getting the most active spreadsheet, Google’s spreadsheet application is quite basic and won’t allow you to perform nearly as many tasks. For example, Google’s spreadsheet application only includes a handful of important formulas, and doesn’t support pivot tables. For those students who want to use a Powerpoint alternative, they probably won’t be too impressed by Google’s Presentation platform. Although it offers much of the basic functionality you would expect from a presentation application — like slide design and the ability to embed video — it’s severely lacking in the number of designs available, and the lack of transitions make the results sometimes seem strangely under-developed. But for a beta product, Google Docs isn’t bad. It offers much of the functionality we’ve come to enjoy from Microsoft Office for free, and tries to cut down on all the added fluff. For those students who don’t need anything special and want to save some cash on an Office suite, Google Docs is still a perfect solution. Windows Live OneCare $49.95 per year, available from onecare.live.com For the students with both music downloads and schoolwork on their minds, ensuring that the computer is safe and free from harmful applications and malware may not be their top priority. Although security should be of paramount concern to students, they rarely find time to worry about it. Because of this, a solution like Windows Live One Care for Windows users is a great application. It not only attempts to keep students safe from malware, but does so in the background, so they don’t need to worry about it. Of course no one program is fully capable of stopping all virus and spyware threats. More often than not, the only way to ensure the safety of data is to change habits and use a handful of programs to try to keep the computer safe. With that in mind, Windows Live One Care isn’t the only solution to consider in securing a computer, but it’s a great first step. Unlike most applications that only specialize in one area of security or another, Windows Live OneCare does it all. From spyware removal to printer sharing and backup and restore of attributes, Live One Care is fully capable of addressing the boring daily routines of ensuring that a computer is running properly. After using it for quite some time, I can say that it works extremely well. Instead of trying to manage everything myself, I quickly realized that Live One Care is fully adept at ensuring that all the processes in the computer are working up to the level expected of them. In fact, after downloading it and using it for a while, I found myself relying on it more often, even starting to modify my daily routine and trusting that it could handle more of the load. Windows Live One Care works well in the background on an XP machine with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor installed. I was quite pleased by the fact that it never slowed me down, and rarely became an annoyance. And although it would have been nice to use a product that could stop all security threats before they became a problem, that’s probably asking a bit too much, and I found that Live One Care actually does a fine job of protecting my computer. Unlike Jott and Google Docs, Windows Live One Care will set you back a bit — $49.95 per year. Although that may be more than some are willing to pay for a program that you don’t interact with every day, it’s well worth the cost, and should be a staple on any student’s machine. Carbonite $49.95 per month, available from Carbonite.com Amid so many hours of schoolwork and personal web tasks, students rarely consider the fact that much of their data is at risk — it needs to be backed up. From term papers to presentations, a hard drive failure is a relatively common occurrence, and if those documents are not copied someplace off-site for safekeeping, it’s impossible to say how much damage the loss could do to a student’s academic career. Realizing this, Carbonite has instituted a new way of storing data that not only makes it much easier to handle, but ensures that even if the entire dorm building burns down, none of your precious data will be lost in the ashes. Unlike other backup solutions that save data to your desktop or another area on your hard drive, Carbonite lets you store an unlimited amount of data on their servers online for just $49.95 per year, and even offers a free trial for those who aren’t too sure at first if it’s the best option for them. After signing up for the service, I got down to the business of backing up the mission-critical data on my hard drive. Doing so was quick and easy, and I was quite pleased with Carbonite’s ability to make it an easy and downright pleasurable uploading process that left me without a headache. In a matter of minutes after signing up, I was not only uploading important documents to the service, but doing so in such a quick way that it actually felt like fun. Perhaps most appealing aspect of Carbonite is not that it is such a great online backup tool, but that it can back up data without you even knowing it’s happening. Unlike most other online backup tools, Carbonite installs a program onto your computer that runs in the background and constantly looks for new and changed files. When your computer is in use, Carbonite goes to sleep to ensure it’s not slowing down the performance of the machine. But when it recognizes that your computer is idle, it goes to work finding the aforementioned files and automatically backing them up to the online storage space. In other words, you’ll never need to go back to the Carbonite site except to potentially restore data back onto your computer, or to check to make sure that everything you wanted was backed up. If you really don’t like accessing files online, Carbonite also allows you to restore all data directly from your desktop. In a matter of a few clicks, you can access the files stored online and add them back to your computer. All in all, Carbonite is a great service that makes for the best backup solution available to students. By running in the background and ensuring that everything gets done without any user input, it’s an ideal solution for students who can’t find the time to perform basic backups themselves.

• Sleepless In Cleveland

  From: Will Dudziak I wish I had a picture... but this is a short story about an 'old school' computer mod. My grandfather was a PhD physics student back in the 1950s at Case Western Reserve University. He had many friends that did a lot of work on computers back then. It so happened that one of the more dedicated students was having so many problems getting his code to run correctly that he decided to 'camp out' in the computer room until he got it to work. Often, the run-times for applications were measured in hours. Because my grandfather's friend couldn't monitor the output while he slept, he set up a speaker system to make a sound based on the last few bits of the instruction pointer. Now, normally this meant that the speaker output was fairly random, producing almost white noise. But if the speaker started making a solid tone that awakened him, he knew the program had gotten itself into an infinite loop. 5 MB Hard Drive Connected To Golden Space Helmet From: weblurker When you wrote the bit about the SOL-20, I realized that "PC" didn't just mean an 8086 based computer. So I have a story from prehistoric times. Yet the story also touches on something from the modern day. Way back in the early 1980s, I knew someone in Toronto who owned an electronics store. He often sold surplus equipment. One day I went into his store and saw that he was selling 5 megabyte hard drives connected to a giant 2 foot diameter golden space helmet containing a colour monitor. I asked about that machine. It turns out a defunct company called "Zap Systems" had tried to make a computer based kiosk system for selling vacations. They had hoped to show videos of exotic destinations. The company failed and everything was sold off. It turns out they had built an 8080 cpu out of AMD 2900 series bit slice ALUs. The 8080 instruction set was microprogrammed using 2900 microinstructions burned in many PROMs. The cpu boards were S-100 based. As far as I know, they also built their own high resolution colour video card, since none existed at the time. Why use 2900 bit slice ALUs? Apparently because they ran at 10Mhz, much faster than the 2Mhz 8080. I guess they needed the extra speed to play video clips. They managed to get CP/M running and wrote their own BIOS to run the hard drive.