New motherboard products keep hitting the market, yet their features do not change that fast, unless there are fundamental platform changes such as Intel's Socket 775 introduction. Usually, motherboard value- added propositions involve adding a new feature while removing one that is obsolete. However, Jetway offers a unique capability: the MagicTWIN mobo allows for two users to work on a single computer simultaneously.

The groundwork was laid by Microsoft WindowsXP, which theoretically makes it possible to log on several users at the same time on a single PC. However, in practice, the capability hasn't worked, even when two monitor and input devices were available. Jetway finally found a way to get around this limitation and calls the new feature MagicTWIN, which is a software add-on. After installing it, two users can log on to two different Windows consoles.

First, you will need a graphics card that comes with two display outputs. Fortunately, this is the case with almost every graphics card today. A second keyboard and mouse can be attached via a PS/2 splitter cable or via USB. Needless to say that MagicTWIN will share all the system resources such as the CPU and graphics processor, optical drives and hard drive capacity. For this reason, the MagicTWIN feature will never be able to replace two full-featured computers, particularly if you have got high performance requirements.

However, running such a twin user system at home or in an office environment may be absolutely sufficient, since today's hardware usually is not pushed to its limits using common office and multimedia applications.