PC Magazine - 2009 04.pdf - Libertad Zero - Blog

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PC
4 feedback
front side
5 Is Google’s Street View violating
your privacy?; the future of technology
at DEMO 09; the best of
our blogs; best free PC games; top
photo apps for your vacation pics.
voL. 28 no. 4
c ov e r s to r y
Ultimate Networking Guide
30 Chances
3
oPinions
first Word: Lance Ulanoff
26 John c. dvorak
27 inside track: John c. dvorak
28 sascha segan
29 dan costa
40
soLUtions
staying safe on facebook
What you need to know to protect
your identity and privacy.
42 at Work
44 office
46 security
48 tech tips
50 the best stUff
APRIL 2009
are, you already have a home network. But does it run the way it
should? Is your router or laptop constantly dropping your Wi-Fi signal? Does
your network have the latest security protocol enabled? Can you stream
video and music effortlessly from one device to another? Our definitive guide
to networking takes you through the basics—as well as giving you some
power user tips on how to get the most out of your network.
The Future of
Networking
37 Now
that 802.11n is the norm,
what’s next? We take an indepth
look at where wireless
technology is headed, including
the much-anticipated
802.11z standard.
first Looks
9 hardware
ASUS EeePC 1000HE
Pacific Image Electronics Memorease
Digital Film Converter
Western Digital My Book Studio
Edition II
Acer Aspire One (10-inch)
Plus Quick Looks at Dell Inspiron
Mini 12, iZ3D LCD, and more.
13 consumer electronics
Amazon Kindle 2
Samsung Memoir SGH-T929
Helio Ocean 2
Samsung LN46A850
Panasonic Lumix DMC-G1
Garmin nüvi 265T
Plus Quick Looks at the AT&T
Quickfire, Cowon S9, and more.
19 business
Lenovo ThinkPad USB Portable
Secure Drive
Eizo ColorEdge CG222W
Quicken Home & Business 2009
Intacct for Small Business Fall 2008
Bill.com (Fall 2008)
QuickBase
22 software
Apple iLife ’09
Skype 4.0
Google Earth 5.0
Plus Quick Looks at Flower (for
PS3), PC Armor 2.2, and more.
PC Magazine Digital Edition, ISSN 0888-8507, is published monthly at $24.97 for one year. Ziff Davis Media Inc., 28 East 28th Street, New York NY 00 6-7940.
Cover illustrations by David Foster; illustration above by Otto Steininger
APRIL 2009 PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION

Editor-in-ChiEf, pC magazinE nEtwork Lance Ulanoff
Editor Stephanie Chang
dirECtor of onLinE ContEnt, EXECUtiVE prodUCEr Vicki B. Jacobson
EXECUtiVE EditorS Dan Costa (reviews), Jeremy A. Kaplan (features)
art dirECtor Richard J. Demler
EditoriaL prodUCtion dirECtor Nicholas Cosmo
pC LabS dirECtor, SEnior Editor (hardwarE) Laarni Almendrala Ragaza
SEnior EditorS Sean Carroll (software, Internet, networking), Wendy Sheehan Donnell (consumer electronics), Carol Mangis (blogs),
Kyle Monson, Sarah Pike (Solutions), Erik Rhey (Digital Edition)
SEnior writEr Eric Griffith
rEViEwS EditorS Gary Berline (software, Internet, networking), Tony Hoffman (hardware), Matthew Murray (consumer electronics)
Copy ChiEf Elizabeth A. Parry Copy EditorS Margaret McVeigh, Ann Ovodow
pC LabS LEad anaLyStS Cisco Cheng (laptops), Tim Gideon (audio and video), Robert Heron (HDTV and home theater),
Mario Morejon (networking and small business), Michael Muchmore (software), Neil J. Rubenking (security), Joel Santo Domingo (desktops),
Sascha Segan (mobile devices), M. David Stone (printers and scanners) anaLySt Dan Evans (DIY, gaming)
jUnior anaLySt PJ Jacobowitz (digital cameras and camcorders)
prodUCt rEViEwS Coordinator Zachary Honig inVEntory ControL Coordinator Nicole Graham
Staff photographEr Scott Schedivy
pCmag.Com managEr, onLinE prodUCtion Yun-San Tsai
prodUCErS Gregg Binder, Mark Lamorgese, Whitney A. Reynolds
nEwS Editor Mark Hachman nEwS rEportEr Chloe Albanesius
aSSoCiatE EditorS Jennifer L. DeLeo, Brian Heater (blogs)
Staff EditorS Corinne Iozzio (reviews), Nicole Price Fasig (reviews) aSSiStant Editor Sean Ludwig
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®

Over the years, I’ve made jokes about using
old technology and living without technology,
but I’ve really never done either. Then,
a few weeks ago, I took a vacation. No, not
a staycation or a working vacation, but a
real, leave-the-country, exit-the-electronsphere
kind of sojourn—one in which
phones don’t work and there is no Internet
connectivity.
Okay, that’s not entirely true. I could
have turned on my phone and even
accessed the Internet on this cruise, but
both acts would have emptied my bank
accounts within a few days. So, I turned
my Treo off and pulled out the battery. I
also left my laptop sequestered snugly in
my cabin.
It soon became apparent to me that
previously I had been using technology,
especially my Treo, to shield myself from
inactivity and boredom. Typically, when
I’m in a line or waiting, say, for people to
join me at a dinner table (or rejoin me
when they’ve perhaps taken a bathroom
break), I’ll pull out the phone and check
Google News, attack my steady stream of
e-mail or, more recently, check Twitter and
add an update or two. At home, my laptop
is ever present. I usually pop it open when
I get home at night and later leave it on an
end table so I can pick it up at any moment
and engage in all the aforementioned activities.
Of course, there’s also ad hoc work.
I’ll jot down some column notes in a Word
file, go on TweetDeck, work on a budget
spreadsheet, or maybe just noodle around
on the Internet. My family often makes fun
of me and tells me I should have the thing
attached to my lap. That might be kind of
nifty, especially if the lid is spring-loaded
to pop open every time I sit down.
During my vacation, however, I had
no digital diversions. I’d be standing in
the salad-bar line and my hand would
reflexively reach for my pocket—searching
fruitlessly for the phone that wasn’t
there. I felt unmoored. On a typical day I’m
in contact with two dozen or so people in
FIRST WORD lance ulanOFF
A Tech-Free Vacation
my office and hundreds more around the
world (via e-mail, Twitter, and Facebook).
On this vacation it was me, my family, and
my fellow cruisers. Despite all the hundreds
of people, I was often alone with my
thoughts.
In that first day or two, I suffered mini
panic attacks. I felt as if I was living in a
bubble. I had no idea what was happening
at the office and received scant information
about world events. There were local
and national news programs on TV, but
since I rarely use those sources for local,
national, and international information on
all the topics I track, I felt as if I was try-
ing to suck a potato through a straw. There
was no way I’d ever get the same information
blast from that narrow pipe.
It wasn’t until the anxiety attacks and
cold sweats stopped that I understood I
was going through digital detox. I honestly
didn’t know how to function without
instant access to a world of information
(personal and public). People around me
likely noticed my pallid, sweaty appearance
and darting eyes—surely that’s why
they cut a wide berth around me. However,
by the third day, I had stopped looking
down at my empty hands and wondering if
I could take out a small loan to pay for one
full day’s Internet access. I started to take in
my surroundings. My family looked upon
me as a welcome acquaintance whom they
hadn’t seen in a very long time.
I’ll admit that the anxiety would still
creep up every once in a while, and I’d
have to shake my head and stare at the bril-
liant blue ocean until the feeling subsided.
It always did, and I can remember long
stretches of time where I didn’t once think
about my phone, my computer, Twitter,
Facebook, or the Internet. In those times,
I read, drew, engaged with my family, and
lived a blissfully tech-free, 20th-century
lifestyle.
When the vacation ended and we
arrived back onto U.S. shores, I did what I
knew I would do and turned on my phone.
Within minutes it began gagging on a flood
of 500 or more e-mails. I stared down at
the screen in wonder. My thumbs fluttered
over the keys but did nothing. I just let the
On a typical day I’d be in contact with two dozen or
so people in my office and hundreds more around the
world (via e-mail, Twitter, and Facebook). On this
vacation, it was me, my family, and my fellow cruisers.
mail arrive while I savored the final few
moments of my digital-free vacation.
Seventy-two hours later, my phone was
in my pocket, my computer was on my
lap, and I could hardly remember those
precious hours when I lived without 24/7
connectivity and interaction with a vast
population of technology elite, enthusiasts,
followers, and friends. I don’t know when
I’ll do that again, but I’m certainly glad for
the memory.
Digital Edition Update
In an effort to continue improving PC Mag
Digital Edition, we’ve taken your comments
and suggestions to heart. We’re in
the process of redesigning PC Mag Digital
to make it even easier to read and navigate.
Follow mE on TwiTTEr! Catch the
chief’s comments on the latest tech developments
at twitter.com/LanceUlanoff.
APRIL 2009 PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION

Feed
Debate Over Digital Edition
I have tried, believe me, I have tried to
navigate through both the February and the
March digital issues of PC Magazine but
wind up being completely frustrated. It is
unfortunate enough, but understandable,
that you no longer publish a printed edition,
and I’m willing to attempt to read the
magazine online, but only if it’s a rewarding
experience. My problem is that the navigation
is sorely lacking in ease of use, and
few of the shortcuts seem to work the way
that they are supposed to. Also, I am unable
to close the “Useful Keyboard Shortcuts”
window that pops open and will not leave.
And just to let you know, the March
issue took over a week to appear on my
Library page from the time that I received
your e-mail notification. My local newspaper,
the Detroit Free Press, recently converted
to a digital edition. At first I dreaded
going to the paper’s Web site, but soon I
discovered that it is really slick, intuitive,
and easy to navigate.
I would really like to continue enjoying
your magazine and will do so if it becomes
a pleasant experience rather than a case of
stressful frustration.—Carl Eggers
Carl, thanks for your comments. After
receiving lots of feedback—both positive
and negative—about the Digital Edition,
we’re in the process of a redesign that we
are confident will improve readability,
navigation, and other issues you address in
your letter. We take very seriously the input
of folks like you—not just as PCMag readers
but also as tech enthusiasts who clock
many hours using and interacting with
hardware, software, and Web sites and
services. If you’d like to check out a sneak
preview of a new and improved PCMag
Digital page, click here. (Note that this link
will take you to the sample page at PCMag
.com.)—Stephanie Chang, Editor
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prefer PC Magazine in its former print
format, the Zinio option is a very good
alternative. I’m glad it still feels like a
magazine and not just another Web page.
I also find the embedded links valuable.
—Novel Hernandez
Thumbs-Up to Neil
I want to thank Neil Rubenking for his
insight in “Can’t Copy to Half-Full Thumb
Drive—Why?” This problem has been driving
me crazy for a long while. I thought I
had only one thumb drive that I could back
up my Microsoft Money files to (which I
do just about daily). Your article has shown
me how to back up to any thumb drive
I want, as long as there’s enough room!
—Linda Erthal
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E-mail pcmag@pcmag.com. All letters become
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individually.

Front
What’s New from the World of Tech
Are You on the Map?
Virtual mapping programs, such as Google’s Street View, have raised
questions about privacy and security.
Online mapping has come a long way since
the days of primary-colored, slow-to-load
MapQuest images. Google and Microsoft
have taken online mapping to a new level
of realism, thanks to satellite imagery and
multilens cameras mounted on the tops
of nondescript cars and vans trolling the
streets of a town near you. This virtual
mapping technology has appeared in services
such as Google Maps’ Street View
and Microsoft’s Live Search Maps, letting
users see a panoramic, photographic
view of a location, often with overlays of
navigational map data. For the cartographi-
cally challenged, virtual mapping has been
exceedingly helpful, letting them see what
destinations look like in real life.
But along with photographing streets
and buildings, the roving cameras are also
photographing people. In most cases, those
captured in a virtual mapping image are
simply going about their daily lives—strolling
down the sidewalk or crossing an intersection.
But the rooftop cameras have also
caught people engaging in embarrassing or
potentially criminal activities, including
walking into an adult bookstore, urinating
behind a parked car, and climbing the steel
gate of a house in what looks to be a breakin
attempt. Street View has a built-in feature
to blur faces, but many say it does not
work consistently. And what about capturing
your license plate number, house number,
or your kids playing in the front yard?
Some argue that virtual mapping is a violation
of privacy, since those photographed
are unaware, and they are taking companies
like Google and Microsoft to task.
Pittsburgh residents Aaron and Christine
Boring sued Google in April 2008 for
privacy, trespassing, negligence, and unjust
enrichment after photographs of their
APRIL 2009 PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION

home showed up on Street View.
The photographs in question were
taken at the foot of the Borings’
driveway and show the couple’s
house, a pool area, and a detached
garage. Despite the Borings’ claims,
Judge Amy Reynolds Hay of the U.S.
District Court for Western Pennsylvania
dismissed the suit, saying
that in order to prove invasion of
privacy, the Borings must demonstrate
“mental suffering, shame, or
humiliation.”
Along with privacy concerns,
there are those who believe virtual
mapping is a security risk. Republican
California Assemblyman Joel
Anderson recently crafted a bill mandating
that virtual mapping programs blur out
schools, places of worship, government
buildings, and medical facilities or face
hefty fines and possible jail time. Anderson
wrote the bill after it was revealed that
PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION APRIL 2009
frontside
terrorists in Israel and Mumbai used mapping
programs to help plot terror attacks.
“All I’m trying to do is stop terrorists,”
Anderson told the Associated Press. “I
don’t want California to be helping map out
future targets for terrorists.”
Looking into the Future
An inside report on this year’s DEMO show.
sTreeT visioN Anonymous cars specially outfitted with
multilens cameras capture images for virtual maps.
For the past 18 years, the annual DEMO show has been
dedicated to start-up companies and brand-new products.
Forward Thinking blogger and former PCMag
editor-in-chief Michael J. Miller was on the ground at
the spring DEMO ’09 show, last month in California.
Here’s his roundup of the show’s highlights.
Reflecting the changes in the economy, there are
fewer new products here than in any year in recent
memory, but I’m still expecting to see a variety of
new things, ranging from gadgets to consumer Web
services to enterprise software. I’m struck, however,
by the number of products designed for personal
productivity, an area that has been overshadowed in
recent years.
For example, I saw Symantec’s Project Guru, an
online tool that includes remote diagnostics, network
monitoring, and online remote access for tech-savvy users—you
know, people like us—to offer tech support to friends and family.
This will be a closed pilot initially, and the company hasn’t
announced pricing, but it’s a very interesting concept. Also at the
show was Gwabbit, an inexpensive add-on for Microsoft Outlook
that finds and captures contacts from anywhere within an e-mail
message, and then turns them into contact records in your address
book. There are a number of other e-mail–based tools slated to be
introduced, including the Asurion Mobile AddressBook and Cc:
Betty, which is touted as a “personal email assistant.”
Xandros Presto ($19.95), from the Xandros Linux folks, promises
to cut any Windows machine’s start-up time by offering an
“instant on” feature. AppZero is another interesting product that
By all indications, Google has
cooperated with requests to take
down or blur Street View photographs
that others object to. But the
company has no intention of removing
Street View. In the past year, it
has added more than 40 cities as
well as national parks and recreation
centers. Google has also rolled out
a crowdsourcing feature in which
users can post their own street
photos. Believing the service’s benefits
far outweigh any potential risks
or privacy infringements, Google
included its own reality check in its
motion to dismiss the Borings’ suit.
“Complete privacy does not
exist in this world except in a desert,” the
statement read, “and anyone who is not a
hermit must expect and endure the ordinary
incidents of the community life of
which he (or she) is a part.”
—Chloe Albanesius and Erik Rhey
sNeAk Peek Among the products displayed at this year’s DEMO show were the
Always Innovating Touch Book with detachable screen (left), Coveroos customizable
cell phone covers (center), and the Avaak Vue personal video system (right).
claims to turn server-based applications into cloud-based applications.
Three products at DEMO that are designed to improve Web
searching are ensembli, Primal Fusion, and Xmarks.
On the hardware side, there were a few products that looked
particularly interesting, including the Touch Book, a portable
device that works as both a netbook and a touch-screen tablet, and
Qualcomm’s mirasol Display, which claims to use significantly less
energy than competing display screens. Another compelling display
technology was the Avaak vue Personal video system, which
the company describes as “a revolutionary wire-free video system
that allows remote viewing of anything from anywhere.” And it may
not be a big technical advance, but Coveroos may entice people to
customize their cell-phone covers.—Michael J. Miller

Best of our Blogs
geArlog
isimple Tranzit Connects iPods to FM Car
stereos
iSimple has unveiled the TranzIt, a universal
interface that allows iPod and iPhone owners to
connect their devices to their car stereos via an
antenna bypass.
This device claims to offer static-free listening
through any FM car stereo. You set the radio preset
as an iPod channel (such as 87.9 or 88.3 FM),
plug in the iPod, and turn on the Tranzit. Once
connected, you can browse and select tracks
using the iPod directly. An iPhone owner could
conceivably stream Internet radio via Pandora
Mobile, AOL Radio, or Last.fm as well. The connection
also offers battery charging while the
iPod or iPhone is docked.—Jamie Lendino
seCuritY WAtCH
Worm Targets
Facebookers
A new variant of the
Koobface worm is
making the rounds.
Facebook users need
to be aware of this
and other attempts
to use clever social
engineering related
to Facebook to trick
them into installing
malware. Like the earlier
versions of Koobface,
this one starts
out as a Facebook
message from a friend
that includes a link to
a Web site with something
enticing like “a
video of you.” As with
the old ones, in order
to view the video you
have to apply what
purports to be an
update to your Adobe
Flash player but is in
fact the malware.
—Larry Seltzer
goodCleAnteCH
Green Gadget for Hackers
At the Greener Gadgets 2009 conference in
New York, there was a competition to find the
best green gadget—and it’s not at all what you’d
expect. In fact, it’s not even really a gadget. Heck,
it’s an anti-gadget. Tweetawatt uses a modified
Kill A Watt device to monitor and update your
power usage, automatically and wirelessly, for all
of your friends and followers to view on Twitter.
The theory goes, if everyone knows your power
consumption, you’ll behave better. That’s all well
and good, but I like the side benefit: It makes
Twitter useful. The device was designed by Limor
Fried of Adafruit Industries and Philip Torrone of
MAKE Magazine.—Jeremy Kaplan
@WorK
New Business switches Netgear announced a new line of Prosafe FSM Layer 2 Fast Ethernet switches for small and midsize companies.
The FSM72 E, FSM722 RS, and FSM72 0RS are stackable switches that are designed for edge-of-network connectivity
in small IT shops. The SMB switches come with many enterprise features, including support for 802.1x port-based authentication,
ACL (access control lists), QoS with VoIP prioritization with Layer 2 through Layer 4 support, and IGMP feature for video surveillance.
The FSM72 E is priced at $299.99, the FSM722 RS at $399.99, and the FSM72 0RS at $ 79.99.—Mario Morejon
extremeteCH
The Best Free PC Games
The crew at ExtremeTech uncover some of the best gratis games.
Puzzle Pirates
One of the more popular free
games on the Net, Puzzle
Pirates is a persistent MMO with
a very casual bent. You create a
cute pirate that looks like a Playmobil
figure and sail the seas in
search of pieces of eight. The
catch is, each activity (and there
are many, like manning the guns,
repairing the ship, and bailing
out bilgewater) is performed
with a simple puzzle game.
Click here for more.
Freeciv
It’s Civilization, and it’s free!
Okay, so maybe this free and
open-source strategy game
“inspired by” the beloved Civ
doesn’t have all the nice UI
features or pretty graphics of
Civilization IV. But once you get
the hang of the keyboard commands,
it’s really addictive.
Click here for more.
Chalk
Joakim Sandberg’s Chalk is
good for a couple hours of free
fun. The premise is simple—you
guide your character around a
chalkboard by right-clicking, and
draw chalk lines with a left-click.
Use your chalk lines to deflect
bullets from enemies, remove
obstacles, etc. The catchy tunes
and sound effects help bring it
all together into a nice, polished,
scrolling “draw-er” of sorts.
Click here for more.
F.E.A.R. Combat
As you get ready for the PC
release of F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin,
why not brush up on your
skills with the free multiplayer
component of the original
F.E.A.R.? The graphics hold up
great—F.E.A.R. Combat is one of
the best-looking free games on
the Net.—Jason Cross
Click here for more.
APRIL 2009 PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION 7

Best
of the Internet
yourFoNTs
This cool, free font
generator lets you
transform your handwriting
into custom
hand-lettered type. Just
print, fill in, and scan the
template, then upload
it to YourFonts.com to
preview, download, and
install.—Jen Trolio
PluQ
This social planning tool
allows you to engage
your friends or coworkers
in scheduling a
party, lunch, or major
event, free. It gives you
a calendar on which you
can mark certain days
with different colors to
indicate to your friends
whether they’re good
days, preferred days, or
bad days.—Alan Henry
DoorFly
DoorFly is a service that
lets you build a profile
of what you’re looking
for in a home and watch
real estate agents bid
against one another to
work with you on your
housing search. Each
DoorFly agent can create
a custom profile
page.—AH
For more cool Web sites
and handy utilities and
apps, visit PC Mag’s
blog AppScout (www
.appscout.com).
8 PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION APRIL 2009
frontside
ConneCted tr Aveler
Create Great Travel Pics—Free!
Make the most of your point-and-shooter’s output with these free tools
for editing, managing, and sharing your digital images.
If you’re a PCMag reader, it’s a good bet you own a
digital camera that you use heavily on vacation or
business travel. You may not be a digital darkroom
junkie who spends hours tweaking adjustment
layers in Adobe Photoshop, but you want your pictures
to look good, and you want an easy and inviting
way to share them with friends, family, and
colleagues. Luckily, there’s a good selection of free
software out there these days that can do many of
the things Photoshop can.
When choosing one of these free apps, here are
a couple things to consider: How easily does the
photo editor let you transfer pictures from your
digital camera to your computer? How effective
and simple are its tools for editing your photos?
And how easy does it make sharing photos online?
Speaking of putting photos online, Picasa
3 (beta) (top left, l l l l h ) is one of the best
choices out there. This new version keeps what’s
good about the old and adds some new killer capabilities,
such as retouching, face recognition, and
movie editing. The installed software works seamlessly
with your Picasa online galleries, and the
two can even be synced automatically. It makes
working with scanners, webcams, and screen captures
simpler, too.
To organize your pics, Windows live Photo
Gallery (Wave 3) (top right, not rated) has a unique
people-tagging feature and the ability to upload to
Flickr and other services. You can group pictures
based on folders created for each import session
and virtual albums of pictures selected from these.
From there you can organize them by date or tags.
If you want an online-only option, check out
Picnik (bottom left, l l l l m) . This quirky editor
has some super-cool features, such as a button to
automatically fix the blue- or red-eye in pet photos.
Not even Adobe Photoshop Elements can do
that automatically. It also integrates with your
favorite social networking sites like MySpace,
Flickr, and Facebook.
Mac users, of course, have the old reliable,
iPhoto ’08 (bottom right, l l l l m). It is still one of
the best consumer photo-editing options around.
In addition to the blemish remover, flexible sharpness
feature, and noise-reduction filters, this version
has a new “straighten” command that lets you
rotate a photo freely until it’s right. Its division of
your photos into Events also works well. If you
want to share your pictures on Web galleries with
iPhoto, however, you’ll need to spring for the $100a-year
MobileMe service.—Michael Muchmore

First
our rATIngs kEy: l l l l l EXCELLENT l l l l l m VERY GOOD l l l l m m GOOD l l l m m m FAIR l l m m m m POOR
ASUS EeePC 1000HE
$400 street
L l l l h
Pros Effectively concealed
six-cell battery. Excellent
battery life. Uses the newest
Intel Atom processor. Price
is as competitive as that of
the Acer Aspire One. New keyboard
design. Gesture touchpad.
Cons No real performance benefits
over the N270 processor.
Click here for more.
ASUS EEEPC 1000HE
A Winning Netbook
ASUS is well into the double digits in the number
of netbook variants it has launched, and this seasoning
has finally paid off with its best one yet. The
1000HE dethrones the MSI Wind as the leader of the
pack of pint-size laptops. What puts it on top is not
its revamped keyboard, its elegantly tucked-away
six-cell battery, or its Intel Atom N280 processor
(an industry first)—although these do help. The
1000HE earns an Editors’ Choice because it delivers
all of these things at a low price.
The EeePC 1000HE resembles the vast majority
of netbooks, though a closer examination will reveal
some design tweaks. In line with its rivals from MSI,
Acer, and Samsung, the 1000HE offers only two color
choices, solid black and navy blue. At 3.2 pounds, the
1000HE is heavier than most of its competition. The
frame is designed around the six-cell, 63-Wh battery,
so the awkward protrusion you see on the backs of
others are eliminated. Other design improvements
include mouse buttons that are substantially larger
than those of the Aspire One and MSI Wind and a
gesture-based touchpad (a netbook first).
The 1000HE’s 1.66-GHz Intel Atom N280 processor
is rated slightly faster than the 1.6-GHz Intel Atom
N270 CPU found in its rivals, but on our benchmark
tests I saw little speed difference. The new CPU
allows for a bigger battery, however, and the 1000HE
did excel on battery life, turning in a score of 6 hours
36 minutes and 7:26 with the Power Saving settings.
All of these enhancements wouldn’t mean a thing
if the price weren’t right. The 1000HE makes fewer
compromises than other netbooks, and the value you
get with design, typing experience, and battery life is
tough to beat.—Cisco Cheng
Specs: 1.66-GHz Intel Atom N280; 1GB DDR2 SDRAM;
160GB, 5,400-rpm hard drive; Intel Graphics Media
Accelerator 950; 10.1-inch, 1,024-by-600 LED widescreen;
3.2 pounds; three USB ports; 63-Wh, 8.6-Ah, lithium ion
battery; Windows XP Home Edition.
PErForMAnCE TEsTs
L High scores are best.
M Low scores are best.
Bold type denotes first place.
MoBiLeMark
2007 L
hr:min
SYSMark 2007
overaLL L
InsIDE
ASUS EeePC 1000HE 6:36 35 4:24
Acer Aspire One (10-inch) 8:46 n/a 4:34
MSI Wind 2:24 40 5:00
Samsung NC10-14GB 5:50 41 5:02
reD denotes editors’ choice. n/a: not applicable—The product could not complete the test, or the test was not compatible.
9 Hardware
13 Consumer
Electronics
19 Business
22 Software
MULTiMeDia
WinDoWS MeDia
encoDer M min:sec
APRIL 2009 PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION 9

Pacific Image
Electronics
Memor-ease Digital
Film Converter
$129.99 direct
l l h m m
Pros fast film scans
(slides and negatives).
scanning is simple and
fully automatic.
Cons Relatively low resolution
for film. no control
over scan settings.
Click here for more.
WesteRn DIgItAL my Book stuDIo eDItIon II
Zippy, Voluminous
External Storage
10 PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION APRIL 2009
first looks HArDWArE
PAcIfIc ImAge eLectRonIcs memoR-ease
DIgItAL fILm conveRteR
Fast Film Scanning
I really liked the Western Digital My Book Mirror
Edition, which yokes two 1TB hard drives together
to provide a terabyte of mirrored (RAID 1) storage.
Think of the Western Digital My Book Studio Edition
II as the Mirror Edition’s fraternal twin. But
while the Mirror Edition emphasizes protected
storage, the Studio Edition II is all about speed and
capacity. It’s just the thing for video-heavy creative
types who would enjoy having 2TB of transportable
storage by their desktops. It’s Mac-friendly out of the
box, though it will work with Windows PCs, too. In
terms of dollars per GB, this is more expensive than a
single-mechanism drive, but it’s cheaper than a portable
drive.
Within its case, the Studio Edition II has the same
pair of Green Power 1TB hard drives as the Mirror
Edition, and as with that product, the user can replace
one of the Studio Edition II’s drives if it fails. The Studio
Edition II comes formatted for HFS+ (Mac format)
and with RAID 0. (You can reformat to FAT32
or NTFS if you like.) This means it can fully support
the faster FireWire 800 and eSATA interfaces.
If you’re like most people, you probably have some
boxes sitting around filled with photos from your
pre-digital life. Well, if the photos in those boxes
are on 35mm slides and negatives, the Memor-ease
Digital Film Converter could be right up your alley.
Though it’s speedy and simple, the device is clearly
designed for the kind of casual photographer who
approaches photos primarily as captured memories,
The Studio Edition II proved speedy on our test
MacBook, taking only 49 seconds to copy our 1.2GB
test folder via USB, 38 seconds via FireWire 400, and
32 seconds with FireWire 800. If all you need is a
secure, protected place to store your backups, then
get the (slightly) cheaper Mirror Edition. But if you
have a home business or other small business or are
a graphics professional, the Studio Edition II should
float to the top of your buy list.—Joel Santo Domingo
rather than someone who worries about things like
composition and photo quality.
The Memor-ease is just 3.7 by 4.3 by 6.7 inches
(HWD) and weighs less than 3 ounces, so finding
room for it won’t be a problem. It comes with a
USB cable, Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0, and the
scanner’s Twain driver for Windows XP and Vista.
You also get a film holder for up to four 35mm slides
and another for one 35mm strip of film with up to
six frames. The Memor-ease is a converter rather
than a scanner, so it operates like a camera, with a
5-megapixel sensor that captures the entire image at
once. The final result is an 1,800-pixel-per-inch (ppi)
image, indistinguishable from an 1,800-ppi scan.
And thanks to its sensor, the Memor-ease delivers
that image at an impressively fast speed.
Unfortunately, the Memor-ease doesn’t score as
well on image quality as on speed. The relatively low
resolution doesn’t hurt the image much for printing
at 4 by 6 inches, but it will make a noticeable difference
at larger sizes. Though I can’t recommend the
Memor-ease unequivocally, for now it’s a good solution
for casual photographers who are happy with
snapshot quality.—M. David Stone
Western Digital
My Book Studio
Edition II
$429.99 list
L l l l h
Pros capacious
storage. speedy.
Low power consumption.
Quiet.
easy to replace
internal hard
drives. capacity
indicator.
Cons A little
pricey on a dollar-per-gB
basis. Install
disc contains crapware.
capacity indicator
requires software installation.
Backup is data
oriented, not disasterrecovery
oriented. esAtA
cable not included.
Click here for more.

Six-cell battery
sticks out from
the base
first looks HArDWArE
AceR AsPIRe One (10-Inch)
Acer’s Recession-Busting Netbook
By late last year, the Acer Aspire One had beaten
out ASUS’s combined offerings to become the topselling
netbook—or so market research firm Display-
Search concluded. The One reached this pinnacle
because of its low price—despite a smaller-thanaverage
(8.9-inch) screen and a pair of awkwardly
placed mouse buttons. This Aspire One is the longoverdue
update, and as its name implies, the screen
size has finally grown to the more-popular 10 inches.
Also, the mouse buttons have been relocated. It’s not
as well equipped as the ASUS EeePC 1000HE (see
page 9), but the price is still right.
Design isn’t one of the One’s strengths. It’s a bit
thicker, bigger, and heavier than most of its rivals (in
part owing to the six-cell battery sticking out an extra
inch), and its case is not as flashy as theirs. Although
the mouse buttons are better placed than in the previous
version, they are still tiny and difficult to press.
The One’s keyboard, at 89 percent of full size, hasn’t
yet caught up with those of its peers. Not much has
changed in the feature set: You get three USB ports,
VGA-out, an Ethernet port, a 1.3-megapixel webcam,
802.11g Wi-Fi, and a 4-in-1 card reader. The hard drive
has been bumped up to 160GB, however.
In performance, the Aspire One was on a par with
its competition, but battery life was mysteriously
impressive. Although its six-cell battery capacity (59
Wh) is less than that of the ASUS 1000HE (63 Wh),
the Aspire One somehow produced 8 hours 46 minutes
of battery life, compared with 6:36 for the ASUS.
If you don’t mind the keyboard and navigation issues,
and price is of the uppermost concern, the Aspire
One is worth a look. Otherwise, spend the extra $50
for our EC, the ASUS EeePC 1000HE.—Cisco Cheng
Specs: 1.6-GHz Intel Atom N270; 1GB DDR2 SDRAM;
160GB, 5,400-rpm hard drive; 128MB Intel Graphics
Media Accelerator 950; 10.1-inch, 1,024-by-600 display;
2.9 pounds (3.5 pounds travel); three USB ports; 59-Wh,
5.8-Ah lithium ion battery; Windows XP Home Edition.
PERFORMANCE TESTS
L High scores are best.
M Low scores are best.
Bold type denotes first place.
MoBiLeMark
2007 L
hr:min
SYSMark 2007
overaLL L
Acer Aspire One (10-inch) 8:46 n/a 4:34
ASUS EeePC 1000HE 6:36 35 4:24
Lenovo IdeaPad S10 2:27 39 4:38
MSI Wind 2:24 40 5:00
reD denotes editors’ choice. n/a—not applicable: The product could not complete the test, or the test was not compatible.
Acer Aspire One
(10-inch)
$350 street
L l l l m
PROS Phenomenal
battery life. six-cell
battery is standard with
the price. still the most
affordable netbook
around. Ten-inch widescreen
and mouse buttons
are consistent with
everyone else’s.
CONS Its 89 percent
keyboard has some
catching up to do.
Mouse buttons were difficult
to use.
Click here for more.
MULTiMeDia
WinDoWS MeDia
encoDer M min:sec
APRIL 2009 PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION 11

DESKTOPS
LAPTOPS
DISPLAYS
first looks hardware
Quick looks
Visit pcmag.com for the full reviews of these and scores of other hardware products.
ASUS Eee
Top 1602
$599 list
l l l h m
iBuypower
Video Pro
$1,799 direct
L l l m m
Gateway
UC7807u
$800 street
l l l h m
Dell Latitude
E4300
$2,789 direct
l l l l m
Dell Inspiron
Mini 12
$524 direct
l l l l m
HP EliteBook
2530p
$2,099 direct
l l l l m
Toshiba Qosmio
X305-Q725
$2,699 direct
l l l h m
iZ3D 22-inch
LCD Monitor
$399 list
l l l m m
Gateway FHD2401
$469.99 list
l l l m m
12 PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION APRIL 2009
PROS CONS BOTTOM LINE SPECS
• Compact all-in-one PC
• Runs Windows
• Nice styling
• Touch screen
• Quad-core power and speedy
memory for video editing
• Blu-ray burner
• Decent expansion possibilities
• Comes with VHS-to-DVD
converter and Adobe Premiere
Elements
• Well designed
• Attractive price
• HDMI port included
• Slot-loading DVD drive is a
nice touch
• Full-size keyboard is responsive
• Color options
• Huge hard drive selection
• Very good performance
• Very good battery life
• Rugged
• Excellent keyboard
• Big 12-inch screen
• Good resolution
• Very thin
• As light as its 10-inch netbook
peers
• Top-notch Ubuntu Linux OS
• Multiple battery options
• Standard and extended battery
together yield over 20 hours of
battery life
• Built-in optical drive
• Very good keyboard
• Dual pointing devices
• Multiple wireless technologies
• Runs an Intel quad-core
processor
• Fierce Nvidia 9800M GTX graphics
card
• Integrates both spinning and
solid-state drives
• Excellent gaming scores
• Very good 3D effects
• Wide viewing angles
• Great color and text reproduction
• Good motion handling
• Stylish design
• Only 1GB of RAM
• Smallish mouse lacks back
button
• Weak 3D graphics
• Screen is single-touch only
• Loud fans
• Lacks eSATA
• A little pricey compared with
similar hardware
• Too heavy for a 13-inch form
factor
• Mouse buttons are too resistant
• Trails the competition in
performance
• SSDs make it pricey
• Stiff pointing stick
• Slow, 4,200-rpm hard drive
• Expensive for a netbook
• VGA is the only video-out port
• Weak speakers
• Battery life without the extended
battery is unimpressive
• Resolution should have been
higher at this price
• Could use a higher-capacity
battery
• Weak light grayscale performance
• Limited image adjustments
• Lacks multimedia/entertainment
features
• Narrow viewing angles
• Lacks multimedia ports
• Tilt-only stand features
The Top 1602 is the first truly
integrated all-in-one nettop. It
may create a new category—an
Internet terminal that replaces
your desktop.
The Video Pro is a system that
is at the tipping point between
fairly priced and overpriced. If
you plan to upgrade components,
the Video Pro will work for you.
If you’re still starting out, try a
cheaper alternative.
The UC7807u’s basement price
and desirable design can make
customers, especially online
shoppers, look past its overfed
frame.
The E4300 is a powerful business
ultraportable that lets you choose
from a trio of fashionable colors,
and its 13-inch widescreen is a
first in the Latitude line.
Sure, the Mini 12 costs more than
other netbooks, but it’s the only
one with a 12-inch screen.
If battery life ranks high on your
list of business needs, the Elite-
Book 2530p won’t disappoint.
While the Qosmio X305-Q725’s
fiery design may not appeal to
everyone, its quad-core processor
and an Nvidia GTX graphics card
are parts that extreme gamers
yearn for.
The iZ3D does a super job of
displaying 3D images and works
with many of today’s gaming
titles, but you don’t get much
in the way of connectivity and
image adjustment options.
This monitor delivers bold colors
and very good text readability,
but its grayscale and viewing
angle performance are subpar.
1.6-GHz Intel Atom n270 processor;
1GB DDR2 SDRAM; 160GB,
5,400-rpm SATA hard drive;
128MB Intel GMA 950 integrated
graphics; Windows XP Home.
2.83-GHz Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550
processor; 8GB 800-MHz DDR2
SDRAM; two 500GB, 7,200-rpm
SATA hard drives (RAID 0); 512MB
ATI Radeon HD 4850 graphics
card; DVD±RW drive; Blu-ray
burner; Vista Home Premium.
Intel Core 2 Duo T6400 (2.0
GHz); 3GB DDR2 SDRAM; 250GB,
5,400-rpm hard drive; 32MB Intel
graphics; 13.3-inch, 1,280-by-800
CCFL screen; 5.3 pounds (6.0
pounds travel); 49-Wh battery;
Vista Home Premium.
2.4-GHz Intel Core 2 Duo SP9400;
2GB DDR2 SDRAM; 128GB SSD;
64MB Intel Graphics Media
Accelerator 4500MHD; 13.3-inch,
1,280-by-800 display; 3.9 pounds
(4.8 pounds travel); 60-Wh
battery; Vista Business.
Intel Atom Z530 (1.6-GHz); 1GB
DDR2; 60GB; 4,200-rpm hard
drive; Intel Graphics Media
Accelerator 500; 12.1-inch, 1,280by-800
LCD widescreen; 2.7
pounds (3.2 pounds travel); 24-
Wh battery; Ubuntu Linux 8.04.1.
1.86-GHz Intel Core 2 Duo L9400;
3GB DDR2 SDRAM; 80GB SSD;
64MB Intel Graphics Media
Accelerator 4500MHD; 12.1-inch,
1,280-by-800 LCD; 3.7 pounds (4.6
pounds travel); 55-Wh battery;
Vista Business.
2.0-GHz Intel Core 2 Quad Q9000;
4GB DDR3; 384GB (320GB, 7,200rpm
hard drive and 64GB SSD);
1GB Nvidia GeForce 9800M GTX;
17-inch, 1,680-by-1,050 LCD, 9.2
pounds (11.4 pounds travel); 58-
Wh battery; Vista Ultimate 64-bit.
22-inch LCD; 1,680-by-1,050
native resolution; DVI-D and
analog VGA inputs.
24-inch LCD; 1,920-by-1,200
native resolution; HDMI, DVI-D,
and analog VGA inputs; 16:10
aspect ratio.

Amazon Kindle 2
$359 direct
L l l l h
PROS Super-thin.
Improved screen.
Better button layout.
2GB capacity (1,500
books). Free integrated
cellular modem. Text-to-speech
capability. Buying new titles is
dead simple. Wide selection of
books, magazines, and blogs.
CONS Still no touch screen.
No native PDF or DOC support.
Reads only proprietary e-book
format. Interface could be more
intuitive.
Click here for more.
Handy 2-in-1 charge cable
AmAzON KINDLe 2
A Darn Good Read
With a new look, an enhanced screen, text-tospeech
capability, and a host of additional design
improvements, Amazon’s Kindle 2 offers everything
that made the original Kindle a best-seller—and
more. The price remains high, but avid readers will
make back some of that cash on discounted e-books.
Although I would love to see a more open file format,
the Kindle 2 is still the best e-book reader you
can buy. With an ever-increasing catalog of magazines
and blogs coming to the platform (see the sidebar),
the Kindle 2’s appeal will extend far beyond the
bookstore.
This version shares the original’s general form
factor, but it’s slimmer and lighter, and it features
an improved keypad arrangement. The Kindle
2 weighs 10.3 ounces and measures 8 by 5.3 by 0.4
first looks CoNsUMEr ElECtroNiCs
inches (HWD), which is much thinner than a paperback
book and about half the thickness of the first
Kindle. Although it still has the same white plastic
frame, the rubberized back has been replaced with
brushed aluminum. This Kindle feels more solid
than its predecessor, but the Sony Reader PRS-700’s
mostly metal construction still feels more durable
than either Kindle iteration.
The Kindle’s proprietary roller wheel has been
replaced with a more useful five-way joystick. Also
gone are the too-large page-turn buttons, replaced by
new, smaller Next Page buttons that are still situated
on both sides of the device. The QWERTY keyboard
sets the Kindle apart from other e-book readers, but
it’s mainly intended for searching keywords, making
notes, and occasionally entering a URL. Perhaps the
Only 0.3 inch thick
APRIL 2009 PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION 13

14 PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION APRIL 2009
first looks CoNsUMEr ElECtroNiCs
Kindle 2 Alternatives
Amazon’s Kindle sequel may be the shiniest new e-book reader on the block,
but it’s not the only game in town. Here are some alternatives.—Corinne Iozzio
eReader 1.3 for iPhone
Free
l l l h m
The eReader does a decent job of
presenting books on your iPhone,
but acquiring reading material
needs to be made easier, and the
software should support more file
formats.
Click here for more.
BEYOND BOOKS
biggest upgrade is the new 6-inch, 600-by-800 electronic
paper display, which shows 16 shades of gray
instead of just 4. Amazon claims the new display is
also 20 percent faster, but I wasn’t able to detect any
significant difference. As cool as this display is, it’s
still not a touch screen.
One genuinely new feature is text-to-speech
functionality. Select any book or magazine, and the
Kindle 2 will read that selection aloud to you. The
voice is pretty robotic—more Stephen Hawking
even though the Kindle 2 is referred to as an e-book reader, it lets you
access a lot more than just your favorite paperbacks. Currently, you can
subscribe to more than 31 newspapers and magazines via the Kindle.
Thanks to its wireless capability, each new issue will load automatically
when you’re in Wi-Fi range. Also, there are a selection of blogs that you
can access via the Kindle—for a fee of $1 to $2 a month to port the content
to the Kindle platform. Here’s a few of the choices:
Newspapers
•Le monde
•The Independent
•The New York Times
• The Wall Street
Journal
•USA Today
Stanza for iPhone
Free
l l l l m
With support for a broad
range of content, Stanza
is the most versatile
e-book application for
the iPhone.
Click here for more.
Magazines
•Fortune
•The Atlantic
•The New Yorker
•Time
• U.S. News & World
Report
Blogs
•BoingBoing
•Gawker
• Huffington Post
•Slashdot
•TechCrunch
Sony Portable Reader
System (PRS-500)
$250 street
l l l h m
When we first saw the PRS-500,
we dubbed it the “best e-book
reader that has ever been made.”
While it’s still among the leaders
of the pack, it’s been eclipsed by
the newer PRS-700. Regardless,
it’s still a solid reader—and you’d
be hard pressed to beat its new
street price.
Click here for more.
Sony Reader Digital Book
(PRS-700)
$399.99 direct
l l l l m
The Sony Reader PRS-700 is an
elegantly designed, easy-to-use
device for e-book fans. As long as
you can deal with the steep price
and the lack of wireless book buying,
it provides a good reading
experience.
Click here for more.
than HAL—but it works. Options let you control the
tempo of the reading and choose a male or female
voice. This feature doesn’t really compete with the
fluid, emphatic storytelling of audiobooks, which the
Kindle 2 also supports, but it’s nice nonetheless.
Although the Kindle 2 costs the same as the
original, it has eight times the storage. There is no
memory card slot, but the company claims you can
store more than 1,500 books on its 2GB of internal
flash memory (1.4GB is available to the user). And all
your book and magazine purchases are also backed
up online. The Kindle 2’s design does not let us perform
a battery rundown, but during informal testing
I ran it for a week with the wireless radio on before
the battery drained completely. In terms of file format
support, it supports AZW, TXT, Audible, MP3,
Unprotected MOBI, and PRC (natively), and DOC,
JPEG, GIF, PNG, and BMP (through conversion).
The notable missing letters there are “PDF.”
All in all, the Amazon Kindle 2 looks like a worthy
follow up to its popular predecessor. The quirky
design choices of the original have been ironed out,
and the device has been made easier to use and
read. It’s still on the expensive side, and I would
love to see a touch screen, a more elegant interface,
and support for an open publishing platform (like
ePub), but I'm confident that those things will come
in time.—Dan Costa

Samsung Memoir
SGH-T929 (T-Mobile)
$299 list and up with
two-year contract
L l l l m
Pros best camera-and-video
phone in the u.S.
excellent video
player. lots of
features. Fun to use.
Cons Web browser is a
bit sluggish. bad shutter
lag. buggy on a couple
of tasks. expensive.
Click here for more.
Helio Ocean 2
(Virgin Mobile)
$149.99 list with
two-year contract
l l l l m
Pros Push e-mail.
brings together contacts,
iMs, and e-mail
messages from multiple
accounts. gPS. Plenty of
additional features and
apps.
Cons Very bulky.
Default Web browser
is slow. requires a
two-year Virgin Mobile
contract.
Click here for more.
first looks consumer electronics
SaMSung MeMoir SgH-T929 (T-Mobile)
The Best Camera Phone
In the U.S.A.
The Samsung Memoir SGH-T929 (T-Mobile) may be
the phone that gets you to leave your digital camera
at home. This 8-megapixel shooter is full of surprises,
including support for two decent Web browsers, a
fun widget-based interface, and 640-by-480 video
recording. The Memoir is expensive compared with
other T-Mobile feature and camera phones, but if
price is no object, this Samsung can’t be beat.
The Memoir, which measures 4.7 by 2.1 by 0.6
inches (HWD) and weighs 4.4 ounces, resembles a
Samsung Behold mated with a point-and-shoot digicam.
The face has a 3-inch, 240-by-400-pixel touch
screen with Send, End, and Back buttons sitting in
a row below it. The back looks a lot like a digital
camera, with a protruding autofocus lens, flash, and
slightly textured grip.
As a phone, the Memoir is adequate. Reception
on T-Mobile’s 2G and 3G networks is very good; the
phone also works on 2G and 3G networks in other
countries, though it can’t access AT&T’s 3G network
anywhere. Earpiece and speakerphone volume are
both decent, though the earpiece tends to distort at
top volume. Transmissions through the microphone
Helio ocean 2 (Virgin Mobile)
The Pre Palm Pre?
One of the coolest elements of Palm’s highly anticipated
Pre has arrived early: Contact synergy comes
to the masses in the form of Virgin Mobile’s Helio
Ocean 2. This new feature merges address books
from several different sources to let you e-mail, text,
or instant message all of your friends quickly and
easily. Synergy on the Ocean doesn’t go as far as it
does on the Pre, but it’s here now, it’s inexpensive,
and it’s a pretty cool device for messaging friends.
There’s no getting around the fact that the
Ocean is huge. At 5.9 ounces and 4.7 by 2.3 by 0.8
inches (HWD), this is no slim-and-light handset.
The phone opens two ways: You can slide the
screen up to get a traditional phone keypad or slide
it sideways to get a full QWERTY keyboard. Navigating
is done by means of a four-way rocker with a
trendy optical sensor in the middle. You also get a
2-megapixel camera and 2.6-inch, 320-by-240 LCD.
Battery life came in at 6 hours 44 minutes of continuous
talk time.
Sure, the Ocean 2 is a fine voice phone, but really,
you’re not buying a warship like this to talk on—it’s
all about the messaging. The phone lets you com-
sound a bit muddy on the other end, and a lot of
background noise tends to come through, although
there’s remarkably little in-ear feedback of your own
voice. The Memoir’s battery life, at 5 hours of talk
time, is passable.
The big deal with this phone, of course, is the
camera, which is better than that of any other
carrier-subsidized phone in the U.S.—both for
photos and for video. It’s not on a par with top
dedicated still cameras like the Editors’ Choice
Canon PowerShot A1000 IS, but it competes
with lesser cameras like the Casio Exilim z250.
Even though the Memoir doesn’t have full smartphone
capabilities, its superior ability as a camera
phone lead us to award it an Editors’ Choice.
—Sascha Segan and PJ Jacobowitz
bine all your contacts from a free 100MB Helio webmail
account, AOL, Microsoft Exchange, and Yahoo
into one master address book. E-mail and IM run in
the background and automatically push messages
to you as soon as they arrive (except for messages
from generic POP/IMAP accounts). The one bump
in the road is that the Ocean 2’s Web browser is painfully
slow. Though it is not as sleek as the upcoming
Palm Pre, the Ocean 2 is worth a look for heavy
messagers who are willing to jump to Virgin
Mobile.—Sascha Segan
aPril 2009 PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION 15

Samsung LN46A850
$2,599.99 list
l l l l m
Pros Excellent
picture contrast.
Network multimedia
streaming.
Thin cabinet
design.
Cons Poor picture uniformity
compared with
other Samsung models.
Incorrect scaling on
some test video files.
Click here for more.
PORTS INCLUDED
CableCARD 0
Component 2
Composite 2
DVI 0
Ethernet 1
FireWire 0
HDMI 4
RF 1
RS-232C 0
S-Video 1
USB 1
VGA 1
16 PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION APRIL 2009
first looks CoNsUMEr ElECtroNiCs
SAmSUNg LN46A850
Slim and (Mostly) Sublime
At a mere 1.9 inches, the 46-inch Samsung LN46A850
is the company’s thinnest HDTV yet. What’s more,
the LN46A850’s colors are brilliantly accurate,
its video black inky-dark, and its reproduction of
standard- and high-definition sources admirably
detailed. And the LN46A850 is loaded with useful
extras, including support for network streaming of
multimedia content. All in all, it’s a tempting—and
competitively priced—slim-cabinet television.
The stylish glossy black frame surrounding
the LN46A850’s screen is enhanced with a subtle
reddish-amber line along the outer edges (Samsung
calls it a “Touch of Color”). The LN46A850’s
swivel-action table stand is constructed from a
rectangular-shaped sheet of tempered glass that
nicely complements the TV’s frame. A good, stylish
TV deserves a quality remote control, and the
LN46A850 includes two—a standard model with
backlit keys and a mini remote. An Ethernet port
lets you stream video and audio from a DLNAcompliant
server or Windows PC (via the included
Samsung PC Share Manager software). I streamed
DVD video files successfully, except that the aspect
ratio of the video was incorrect.
Using calibrated picture settings, I found that the
LN46A850’s average picture contrast was an impressive
3,487:1. This result is one of the best I’ve seen
among fluorescent-backlit LCDs, second only to
the LN52A750’s contrast result of 3,725:1. A picturerelated
issue I found with the LN46A850 unit I tested
was poor bright and dark uniformity. But I wouldn’t
say this issue is representative, necessarily, of the
entire series; it’s likely a defect on the unit I received.
The fast, 120-Hz refresh rate technology featured
in the LN46A850 is configured by default to smooth
out video motion to enhance picture detail. With
the set’s film detection enabled, its ability to upconvert
standard-definition video (480i) to the screen’s
1080p format was exceptional. HD satellite TV as
well as Blu-ray movies and test material (a mix of
1080i and 1080p24) were as detailed as I’ve seen on
any LCD television.
Premium plasma and LCD flat-panel televisions
will continue to push the limits of cabinet thinness,
picture quality, and energy efficiency—and the
LN46A850 sets the current benchmark for what
you should expect from an affordable, ultrathin
HDTV.—Robert Heron

Panasonic Lumix
DMC-G1
$799.95 list
l l l m m
Pros uses new micro
Four Thirds standard,
which allows for a
smaller body and lens
than comparable entrylevel
D-sLRs. solid image
quality at iso 100-
800. Large, articulating
3-inch LcD. HDmi-out.
Cons not much smaller
than a D-sLR. no optical
viewfinder. Excessive
noise at higher isos.
Longer shutter lag
than traditional D-sLRs.
no video-recording
capability.
Click here for more.
Given the current state of the economy, not everyone
has the budget to spring for a GPS device. Fortunately,
the 265T, one of Garmin’s entry-level nüvis,
offers an amazing amount of bang for the buck.
The 265T measures 2.8 by 3.8 by 0.8 inches
(HWD) and features a 3.5-inch, 320-by-240-pixel
screen. For an additional $50, you can opt for the
nüvi 265WT, which has a 4.3-inch, WQVGA 480-by-
272-pixel screen.
Both the 265T and 265WT feature Garmin’s
familiar “Where to” and “View Map” user interface
and have the same destination input options as on
the midrange and even the premium 800 series.
Input options include: Address; Go Home; Points of
Interest (16 categories); Recently Found; Favorites;
Intersections; Extras; Cities; Browse Map, and Coordinates.
The 200 series doesn’t have Garmin Locate, a feature
that remembers your last-known location when
you remove the device from the bracket. The series
also lacks players for MP3s and audiobooks, as well
as an FM transmitter to send voice prompts to your
car’s FM radio. Still, the 265T and its siblings do have
the “Where Am I” feature, a picture viewer, a world
first looks consumer electronics
Panasonic Lumix Dmc-G1
A Pioneer, but Not
a Game Changer
GaRmin nüvi 265T
The Garmin Experience
at a Bargain Price
Dreaming of the day when you can have the performance
of a D-SLR in the body of a compact camera?
It may be closer than you think. The 12.1-megapixel
DMC-G1 is the first camera to incorporate the Micro
Four Thirds standard, which shrinks the lens diameter
and forgoes the mirror box you’ll find in a traditional
D-SLR, making it more compact. While
the DMC-G1 delivers good image quality, the competitively
priced Canon EOS Rebel XSi ($799.99 list)
gives you sharper images with less noise for about
the same price—and the G1 isn’t that much smaller.
Panasonic says it didn’t shrink the body of the
DMC-G1—at 13.6 ounces—as much as it could have,
for fear of scaring off anyone shopping for an SLRquality
camera. As a result, there’s a great deal of
dead space inside. Still, the DMC-G1’s overall build is
quite nice. It’s available in black or blue, but our test
camera was a fiery red. It features ergonomic curves
for a solid grip, and its dials have raised bumps for
easy control. All of the camera’s controls are right at
your fingertips, which allows for quick access to the
many features.
clock, a simple calculator, and a unit converter.A free
upgrade called ecoRoute calculates your estimated
fuel cost for each trip and provides you with fuel and
mileage reports; it even adds a “Less Fuel” option to
your Route Preference choices.
Though it lacks some of the bells and whistles of
Garmin’s top-shelf products, the 265T still delivers
the Garmin navigation experience, with a complete
set of maps, text-to-speech, free lifetime traffic, picture
navigation, and ecoRoute to boot. And you just
can’t beat the price.—Craig Ellison
What D-SLR users will miss most on the DMC-
G1—and other upcoming Micro Four Thirds cameras,
for that matter—is a true optical viewfinder.
Since the new standard loses the mirror box that
reflects the image through the lens, it has to simulate
one. The DMC-G1 achieves this with a tiny LCD
where the viewfinder would normally be. It works
okay for displaying photo information like ISO and
shutter speed, but I found motion blur to be particularly
distracting.
Panasonic’s Lumix DMC-G1 is a solid first stab
at a Micro Four Thirds camera, but you’ll probably
want to wait for the second generation of products,
or simply go with a traditional entry-level SLR like
the Canon EOS Rebel XSi.—PJ Jacobowitz
Garmin nüvi 265T
$249.99 List
l l l l m
Pros includes
maps for the
u.s. and canada.
Text-to-speech.
Lifetime free
traffic. ecoRoute feature
can save you money on
gasoline.
Cons no multisegment
routing or Lane assist.
Bluetooth interface
didn’t read contacts/call
history.
Click here for more.
aPRiL 2009 PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION 17

first looks Consumer eleCtroniCs
Quick looks
Visit pcmag.com for the full reviews of these and other consumer electronics products.
RED denotes Editors’ Choice PROS CONS BOTTOM LINE SPECS
SMARTPHONES
DIGITAL CAMERAS
PORTABLE MEDIA PLAYERS
SPEAKERS
BLU-RAY PLAYER
GPS
MEDIA EXTENDERS
AT&T Quickfire
$99 direct (with
two-year contract,
after rebates)
l l l m m
T-Mobile Shadow
(2009)
$150 street (with
2-year contract,
after rebates)
l l l m m
Pentax K2000
$599.95 direct
l l l l m
Cowon S9
8GB, $199.99 list;
16GB, $239.99
l l l m m
SanDisk Sansa
slotRadio player
$99.99 direct
L l l m m
Altec Lansing
Expressionist
Classic FX2020
$79.95 list
l l l m m
LG BD300
Network Blu-ray
Disc Player
$349.95 list
L l l h m
TomTom One
130-S
$249.95 list
l l l h m
Blockbuster
2Wire MediaPoint
$99 direct
l l l m m
• Comfortable QWERTY keyboard
• Roomy LCD
• Includes Web browser, IM, and
e-mail clients
• Solid multitasker
• Attractive
• Free calls via UMA-based Wi-Fi
• Comfy hybrid QWERTY
keyboard
• Takes sharp pictures
• Fast operation and autofocus
• Help button provides useful
information
• Includes additional flash
accessory
• Strong audio file support
• Touch screen
• Built-in accelerometer
• Video output
• Line-in, FM, and voice recording
• Excellent battery life
• Compact design
• Easy to use
• No PC needed
• Comes with a microSD card
with 1,000 songs from Billboard
charts
• Affordable
• Upward-angled for desktop
listening
• Intriguing, attractive design
• Fast disc load times
• Solid DVD upconversion
• Supports Netflix instant
streaming
• Maps for U.S. and Canada
• Easy to use
• Text-to-speech
• Live traffic updates
18 PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION APRIL 2009
• Supports HD files, HDMI-out
• Easy setup
• Intuitive, simple user interface
• Wi-Fi compatible
• Useful remote
• Finicky touch screen
• Weak reception
• Lacks a standard 3.5mm headphone
jack
• Poor Web browsing and video
playback
• Some UI-related snafus
• Useless video-recording mode
• Images can be noisy at or above
ISO 800
• Camera recycle times slow
down after a few shots in a row
• LCD can’t be used as a
viewfinder
• Touch screen is not very
sensitive
• User interface can be difficult
to navigate
• Volume controls are disabled in
some screens
• Monochrome display
• Can’t skip backward
• No auto-off when no earphones
are plugged in
• Distortion at high volumes
• No remote control
• Speakers are hardwired to one
another
• BD-Live functionality requires
external USB-based storage
device
• Some on-player controls are
difficult to operate
• Mounting bracket is a bit
awkward to use
• Low speaker volume
• No SD card slot for map
expansion
• Limited selection of titles
• Downloads take a long time
• No WPA2 wireless
The Quickfire misses the mark
as a music phone, though it’s an
effective Sidekick clone for those
with AT&T.
T-Mobile has smoothed over
some of the rough edges of the
original Shadow, but it’s still
tough to recommend this device.
Although the Editors’ Choice
Canon EOS Rebel XSi produces
better shots in low light, the
Pentax K2000 has comparable
speed and image sharpness—and
it costs a hundred bucks less.
The S9 is designed to resemble
the iPod touch, but the player
lacks the grace and Wi-Fi connectivity
necessary to be a true rival.
If modern radio hits are your
thing, the tiny Sansa slotRadio
player is a great value—1,000
songs (plus the device) for $100.
Just be prepared for a no-frills
listening experience.
The FX2020 speakers are by no
means powerful, and you don’t
get a lot of bass. But a cool
design and a low price make them
ideal for the office.
The BD300 is the fastest Blu-ray
player we’ve tested, and its support
for Netflix instant streaming
is a nice bonus that comes with
this solid value.
TomTom’s new entry-level GPS
offers a lot of bang for the buck
from a navigation leader.
Despite some limitations, the
MediaPoint makes a nice complement
to Blockbuster’s DVD and
online offerings.
GPRS, EDGE, UMTS, HSDPA data
networks; 2.8-inch, 240-by-320
TFT LCD; 1.3MP camera; 4.3
by 2.2 by 0.7 inches (HWD); 4.8
ounces.
Windows Mobile Pocket PC;
GPRS, EDGE, UMTS, HSDPA data
networks; 2.2-inch, 240-by-320
LCD; 2MP camera; 4.1 by 2.1 by
0.6 inches (HWD); 5.3 ounces.
10.2MP resolution; 2.7-inch LCD;
accepts SD flash memory; 3.6
by 4.8 by 2.7 inches (HWD); 1.7
pounds.
16GB flash memory; 3.3-inch
screen; 480-by-272 maximum
resolution; supports FLAC, MP3,
OGG, WMA, and WAV audio
formats; 4.2 by 2.2 by 0.5 inches
(HWD); 2.7 ounces.
microSD card included; 1.5-inch
screen; MP3 and WMA audio
formats supported; 1.9 by 1.9 by
0.6 inches (HWD); 1.3 ounces.
Computer speakers; two channels;
7.5 watts RMS per channel;
5 by 5 by 6.5 inches (HWD).
Composite, component, and
HDMI video outputs; Toslink
and coaxial, HDMI, and stereo
RCA audio; Ethernet port; 2.3 by
16.9 by 10.9 inches (HWD); 6.8
pounds.
Supports Secure Digital and
MultiMediaCard flash memory;
3.5-inch touch-screen display;
3.8 by 3.2 by 1.0 inches (HWD);
7.2 ounces.
Remote control; 8GB internal
flash memory; 802.11g Wi-Fi;
two USB ports; composite,
component, HDMI, and RCA
outputs; Ethernet port; 1.0 by
8.0 by 8.0 inches (HWD).

Lenovo ThinkPad USB PorTaBLe
SecUre drive
Lockable, Portable
Hard Drive
Drive security is getting to be a hot-button issue; witness
the recent story about a lost MP3 player with
military data on it being resold in a pawn shop. The
problem with so-called “secure” hard drives has traditionally
been that they have too many limitations.
This Lenovo external drive transcends those limitations
by internalizing its security—it looks just like
a plain old hard drive to Windows or Mac OS X. It’s
hardware-encrypted (with 128-bit AES) and easy to
use—what more could you ask for?
At first glance, the 0.5-by-3.5-by-4.5-inch (HWD),
320GB Secure Drive looks like a USB numeric keypad.
An LED indicator tells you the drive’s status,
and the casing is clad in the same rubberized coating
that gives Lenovo’s ThinkPad notebooks their distinctive
and sturdy feel. You can add up to ten users
(in addition to the administrator), each with a unique
access code. That way, the drive can be passed from
person to person while remaining secure, with each
user having access to all the data on it.
In testing, the Secure Drive scored very well
on PCMark05, turning in 3,126—exceptional for an
external storage drive. It was also fast in simple dragand-drop
copying, taking only 52 seconds to transfer
our 1.2GB test folder. To be sure, FireWire and
eiZo coLoredGe cG222W
A 22-inch Display for
Imaging Pros
The CG222W is not your typical 22-inch desktop
monitor, nor does it claim to be. Instead, this display
is aimed at photographers, graphics artists, and
designers who demand consistent and accurate performance
and are willing to pay a premium for it.
The CG222W uses a 22-inch, wide-gamut S-PVA
(Super Patterned Vertical Alignment) panel with
a maximum resolution of 1,680-by-1,050 and a 16millisecond
pixel response rate (black-to-white).
In testing, the display delivered as promised. Color
swatches from our DisplayMate tests were vivid and
bright and appeared uniform across the color scale.
Unfortunately, this monitor does not offer HDMI
connectivity, but you do get dual DVI-I ports, as
well as three USB ports. I was also very impressed
with the CG222W’s viewing-angle prowess. Images
remained clear and bright from all sides (horizontally
and vertically) out to around 175 degrees.
The main difference between the CG222W and
mainstream displays has to do with color calibra-
first looks BUsiNEss
eSATA drives have the potential to be faster, but the
Secure Drive pays no performance penalties for its
security. At about $0.68/GB, the drive is a bit pricey.
You can get a nonprotected 500GB drive for the
same total price as the Secure Drive (about $0.44/
GB). But for its target audience, the extra security
is worth the money. If you’re a businessperson who
needs to pass sensitive data physically from one
computer to another, or if you want to back up your
files with another layer of security, the Secure Drive
is a perfect choice.—Joel Santo Domingo
tion. This monitor uses the more accurate (and more
costly) ColorEdge technology, which calibrates by
programming the monitor’s internal circuitry to
change the way colors are reproduced on the screen.
To take advantage of this, however, you’ll need
EIZO’s proprietary Color Navigator software and a
colorimeter. Although expensive, the CG222W is a
boon to imaging professionals.—John R. Delaney
Lenovo ThinkPad
USB Portable Secure
Drive (320GB)
$319 list
L l l l h
Pros deadsimple
security.
Supports up to
ten users. no
software install
needed. Mac compatible.
nice keypad feel.
Permanently attached
USB cable. intelligently
designed carrying
pouch.
Cons Pricey on a dollarper-GB
basis. no software
included. needs
included USB auxiliary
power cable for heavy
write sessions. Some security
experts may consider
its numerical code
system too simplistic.
Click here for more.
EIZO ColorEdge
CG222W
$1,499 list
l l l h m
Pros very good
color quality. Great light
grayscale reproduction.
color calibration capabilities.
Fully adjustable
stand.
Cons Lacks hdMi input.
expensive. does not
support auto-rotation.
dark grayscale performance
could be better.
Click here for more.
aPriL 2009 PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION 19

Quicken Home & Business 2009
Easier to Use than Ever
When Intuit’s Quicken was first introduced, it was
built around a familiar graphical paradigm: the
checkbook. You can still find checkbook imagery
built into Quicken Home & Business 2009, but
now it’s just a small part of what has grown to be a
comprehensive financial management program.
Although the company has worked hard to bump up
the ease of use on this version, Quicken still isn’t for
everyone. Those without a home business to worry
about will do better to choose Quicken Starter Edition,
Quicken Deluxe, or Quicken Online. But to
track personal finances as well as those of your home
or small business, you can’t beat this edition.
You see the changes to the new Quicken right
away, thanks to a new Setup tab. Other new features
include improvements to the Add Account workflow
and to bill management and reminders. More significant,
though, is a new sidebar that provides access to
the Quicken online community and to tools—your
to-do list, add-on services, and more. Intuit has also
organized Quicken’s primary tasks into tabbed sections:
Bills, My Pages, Banking, Business, Investing,
Net Worth, Planning, Tax, and Quicken Picks.
One tab that you’re sure to spend a lot of time on
is Banking. Income and expenses from other parts
intacct for small Business
fall 2008 edition
What’s After QuickBooks?
QuickBooks is an exceptional small-business
accounting program, but it can be stretched only so
far. Before you reach that limit, you’d better think
about taking the next logical step—moving to a midrange
accounting product, such as Intacct for Small
Business.
Like QuickBooks, Intacct is an accounting program—but
it's one of a very different sort. The base
program contains many of the features QuickBooks
offers, such as Accounts Receivable and Accounts
Payable, but it’s not an out-of-the-box solution.
You’ll most likely need to work with Intacct to find
a reseller who can help you with, at the very least,
setup and implementation, if not training. And, as
you’d expect with a growing business, the accounting
expense will be commensurate with a system
that can handle more sophisticated needs—Intacct
estimates that a typical installation will cost roughly
$10,000 a year. But attempting to get along with an
underpowered solution will be far more expensive.
Because it’s Web-based, Intacct has an immediate
advantage over QuickBooks: Employees can work
with the accounting system anywhere—a boon for
mobile workers. Intacct’s base modules are Accounts
20 PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION aPril 2009
first looks business
of the program automatically flow into here, so you
see simple, effective windows that display totals
for money coming in, money going out, and what’s
left. You can create and track numerous types of
accounts, including checking and savings, credit
card, investing/retirement, and loans. Individual
bills are handled capably under Quicken’s Bills tab.
You can also set up a portfolio and download stock
market information. In short, Quicken is well worth
your dollars if you want money management that
takes in all aspects of your small business and personal
financial life, including your taxes, your portfolio,
and your plan for the future.—Kathy Yakal
Payable, Accounts Receivable, Cash Management,
Company, General Ledger, Customization Services,
Employee Expenses, Inventory Control, Order Entry,
and Purchase Orders. Like QuickBooks, Intacct has a
dashboard feature, but where QuickBooks has just
one dashboard—the Company Snapshot—Intacct
lets you build an unlimited number. This package
also provides other features that go beyond Quick-
Books Pro, including automated billing and collections
management, as well as the ability to allocate
and analyze cash in real time.
Moving to Intacct represents a huge step. I’d recommend
Intacct for businesses that are currently
using QuickBooks but need to expand, and for midsize
and complex small businesses.—KY
Quicken Home &
Business 2009
$79.99 direct
L l l l h
Pros covers all
major elements
of personal
finance. interface
simplifies use.
Helps prepare for taxes.
manages home-based
businesses. downloads
financial data.
Cons too big for basic
users. Bill section can be
confusing.
Click here for more.
Intacct for Small
Business Fall 2008
Edition
$400 direct and up
L l l l m
Pros unlimited dashboards.
clean, understandable
interface.
Graphical navigational
flow charts. comprehensive
records and transactions.
strong integration
and customization.
excellent help files.
Cons requires considerable
time to learn.
Click here for more.

Bill.com
$25 per month for one
user; first ten payments
per month are free,
$0.99 per payment
thereafter; $10 per user
per month for 2 to 11
users; $5 per month for
each additional user.
L l l l m
Pros clean, simple
interface. Saves money
and time. Reduces paper
and paperwork. integrates
with QuickBooks
and intacct.com. Audit
trail.
Cons Takes some time
to understand the workflow.
could use more
reports.
Click here for more.
QuickBASE (FAll 2008)
Database in the Cloud
QuickBase puts your company’s database applications
online, so anyone in your organization can get
customized, secure Web access to anything from
inventory to contact lists to product management.
You probably won’t want to use it as an enterprisescale
database, but for almost anything else, it’s an
impressive Web-based substitute for a server in
your office.
QuickBase is not cheap, but those who can afford
it have access to a surprisingly simple and elegant
application. This simplicity becomes clear within
your first few minutes of using the app. The straightforward,
no-clutter Web-based interface has helpful
prompts and explanations everywhere. I found it
easy to get started either by using one of more than
300 prebuilt database templates—many contributed
by real-world users—or by building a simple
database from scratch. From there I found it simple
to perform all the sorts of tasks the average user will
want from an online database, including adding multiple
tables, setting up tabular and graphic reports,
and fine-tuning access permissions for users.
What I like most about QuickBase is its clear
interface, obviously the result of years of experience
with consumer-level products like Intuit’s Quick-
Books. The document library app is impressive,
first looks business
Bill.com
Bill Tracking Made Easy
Small-business accounting packages have matured
tremendously, but there are still gaps in SMB procedures
for enterprising software designers to fill.
Bill.com successfully exploits one of those gaps with
a Web site that expands on the accounts payable
functions of your accounting application—assuming
you have one. Bill.com can serve either as a
standalone application or as an integrated add-on to
QuickBooks. The service tracks and stores vendor
thanks to a built-in revision-tracking feature that can
store multiple versions of the same document.
One limitation to keep in mind when using
the document-storage system is that QuickBase
doesn’t work like “live” Web services, in which you
can open an attached file in the browser and save
it again directly to the Web. When you open a file
attached to a database and make revisions, you
have to save it locally first before uploading the new
version to QuickBase. For serious, business-class
database needs with the convenience of online
access, QuickBase is the service we recommend. In
fact, it is the database app we use here at PCMag.
— Edward Mendelson
bills due, routes your vendor payments through the
approval process, and dispatches checks to your
payees. It does so through a combination of faxes,
e-mail, and electronic data storage, using a simple
Web site with a clean design.
If you’re using QuickBooks or Intacct, you can
integrate Bill.com data with either service. If you
follow the simple directions, syncing the two products—moving
your chart of accounts, vendors, and
classes—should go without a hitch. Once you’ve got
Bill.com set up, the life of a typical bill goes like this:
A vendor mails you a bill. It goes to your A/P clerk,
who faxes it to your Bill.com fax number. Once the
bill is in the system (Bill.com handles the OCR), you
can add approvers, and once they’ve approved, you
can pay bills in full or partially, online (using the bank
account you’ve set up) or off-line.
Bill.com’s two most noteworthy features are the
audit trail (in which every entry into the system is
tracked and recorded) and the home page, which displays
a monthly calendar with scheduled payments
on the appropriate days. For security, the site uses
the same encryption scheme that your bank does.
In short, I haven’t seen a Web-based application in
this price range that carves out this exact niche and
implements it as well as Bill.com.—Kathy Yakal
QuickBase
(Fall 2008)
Free 30-day trial; subscription,
$250 direct
per month and up
L l l l m
Pros Powerful,
fast, reliable
online database.
Extremely easy
to use, but
with elaborate options
for user permissions,
document storage, automated
e-mail notifications,
multiple tables,
customized reports, and
charting. Rich selection
of prebuilt applications.
Cons Attached document
files can be exported
only one by one.
charting can’t handle
some complex data.
Click here for more.
APRil 2009 PC MAGAZInE DIGITAL EDITIon 21

Apple iLife ’09
$79 direct
L l l l h
Pros Five
strong apps,
tightly integrated.
Terrific value.
Connects to a
variety of Web services.
Cons iphoto competitors
are nearly as good,
at no cost. No update to
iDVD, which has no Bluray
support. awkward
handling of multiple
iMovies.
Click here for more.
apple iliFe ’09
22 PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION april 2009
first looks software
Your Digital Life,
Apple Style
iLife is still the best suite out there for combining
your photos, videos, and audio doodlings into gorgeous
projects to show friends and family. iLife ’09
isn’t really a huge upgrade from iLife ’08, and the rise
of alternatives to a few of its apps means you may
actually want to think twice before dropping $79.
But if you intend to use all the pieces together, you’ll
be spoiled for any other suite. Why? Because the
strength of iLife is its integration. Each component,
individually, is good. Together they’re unbeatable.
Media flows effortlessly from one app to the other,
letting you put your photos, movies, or songs into
the hands of friends and family half a dozen ways.
Five components make up iLife: iPhoto, iMovie,
GarageBand, iWeb, and iDVD. The free download,
iTunes, is pretty much the sixth part and is necessary
if you want to take advantage of the suite’s
integration. iWeb and iDVD exist mostly to let you
publish material you collected or created in iPhoto,
iMovie, GarageBand, and iTunes. With iLife ’09,
Apple has unyoked the software a bit from the $99a-year
MobileMe online service, giving you more
options to put your photos, videos, and Web sites
online with Flickr, YouTube, and other hosting services—a
welcome and much-needed move. For its
tight integration and continued feature innovation,
we award iLife ’09 an Editors’ Choice.
Finding FaCes in
the Crowd iphoto
’09’s best new feature
is the ability to sort
photos by who’s
in them, known as
“Faces.”
iPhoto ’09
Once, iPhoto had no peer. But now Google’s free
Picasa 3.0 has taken a lot of the wind out of iPhoto’s
sails, matching the new face-detection and geotagging
functions in iPhoto and one-upping it on speed.
If you intend to print your photos or export them
into iMovie, iPhoto is still the best choice.
As before, iPhoto imports images into datebased
collections called events, but you have two
new photo-sorting capabilities: Faces and Places.
The Faces feature scans through your photos identifying
human faces and then asks you to tag them
with names. With our 4,500-image library, the process
took about 90 minutes. Places is striking but a
little less useful. It lets you plot the locations where
you took your photos on a Google Map, and zoom
in to look at collections of images you shot in the
same area. There are a few other enhancements, but
they’re too minor to change your buying decision. If
you’re just looking for a photo organizer and a way to
put your slideshows on the Web, look to Picasa. But
iPhoto still reigns for folks wanting to do more with
their photos.
iMovie ’09
iMovie ’09 keeps its predecessor’s radical clip-based
interface but adds a bunch of missing features that

advanced users will welcome. For example, clicking
on the corner of a clip gives you a list of advanced
features, such as a frame-by-frame precision editor
that helps—a little—with iMovie’s lack of timecodes
and frame markings. Also, the new iMovie supports
two video tracks—sort of. You can cut away
to a second while playing the audio from the first,
embed one track in another to create a picture-inpicture
display, or do simple green-screen compositing.
Like most of iMovie’s features, these could be
more flexible. Two features that improve iMovie’s
integration with iPhoto are Themes (to add titles
and transitions) and Edit to Music (which lets you
synchronize transitions with the beats or lyrics of a
musical score—handy for customized slideshows).
The application still lacks one big capability:
HD support. While you can import HD movies
from most video cameras, you can’t output in HD.
If you’re using a Mac, though, iMovie is pretty much
your only cheap video-editing option.
garageBand ’09
It’s the fifth anniversary of GarageBand, and Apple
seems to be taking a new approach to this recording
app that is part toy, part tool. No one will ever
confuse GarageBand with Pro Tools, and Apple
seems to embrace the difference. In its latest iteration,
GarageBand seems more of a learning tool than
anything else. Sure, you can record some demos on
it, with either real instruments or supplied samples,
adding sounds and loops track by track. But Apple
seems more concerned with showing you the fundamentals
of simple composing, digital recording, and
learning an instrument. It does the last through basic
video lessons called “Learn to Play.” Non-celebrity
lessons are free, but getting Norah Jones to teach you
piano, for example, costs $4.99. The payoff is that
Jones delivers a verse-by-verse how-to in panoramic
widescreen. Underneath her video, the ivories she’s
caressing light up on a virtual keyboard.
Apple has also added virtual amps and pedals
for guitarists to run their recordings through. The
less-compelling change to GarageBand is a feature
that lets you set up a band on a fake stage, choose
the style of music and instruments, and put songs
together. If you want basic music lessons and to get
your feet wet with basic recording-and-looping software,
GarageBand is worth your consideration.
iweb ’09
iWeb has finally grown up and gotten more flexible.
Apple’s easy-to-use, template-based Web site creator
used to have one big downside: It could publish
directly only to MobileMe. But now you can publish
to any server that accepts FTP, which includes most
Web hosts. You can also manage multiple sites, with
each one uploaded to a different location.
iWeb is still not an enterprise-class, or even a
small-business-class, Web-design program. You can’t
get at the basic HTML of your Web pages, and everything
you do must be based on one of the iWeb’s 28
graphical themes and 8 page types. You can insert an
“HTML snippet” as a widget, but it must play nice
with Apple’s existing code. Other widgets let you
drop in RSS feeds, a Google AdSense box, photos
and videos from an iSight camera or YouTube, and,
bizarrely, a graphical countdown. iWeb’s real function—like
iDVD’s—seems to be to create showcases
for your other iLife content, and the program does
that admirably.
idVd 7.0.3
There’s no upgrade to iDVD in iLife ’09. The
upgrades come in iMovie, which now lets you send
projects to iDVD without compressing them to MP4
first, improving the quality. You can also set chapter
stops in iMovie, but you can’t send multiple videos to
iDVD without an intermediate step.
Apple has missed a lot of opportunities here,
such as Blu-ray support and providing a simple way
to consolidate multiple iMovies and iPhoto slideshows
onto one DVD. You can do that, but it involves
exporting, dragging, and dropping—at which point
you might as well use something else. If you’re looking
for a DVD-burning program to use with anything
except iMovie, Roxio’s Toast 10 Titanium is far
superior. But as a way to burn your iMovie projects
to beautifully themed DVDs, it’s still a good choice.
—Tim Gideon and Sascha Segan
Building out Your
site iWeb lets you
drop widgets onto
your page to add complex
objects—such as
rSS feeds—to your site
quickly.
hoMeMade hollYwood
iMovie ’09
supports dual video
tracks, to a limited extent.
You can drop in a
second track while still
playing the first’s audio
or create a greenscreen
effect.
april 2009 PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION 23

Skype 4.0
Video Chat Keeps
Getting Better
Though we still categorize Skype as voice over IP,
Version 4.0 puts video front and center. The service,
which offers free voice and video calls between PCs
and low-cost calls to standard phones, has always
had a refreshingly clear interface, but now the UI has
been redesigned with a focus on video calling. The
quality of its combined voice and video exceeds that
of other available options such as SightSpeed, Tok-
Box, and Windows Live Messenger. This, along with
the great new interface, makes Skype our video-chat
Editors’ Choice.
Skype is convenient for making and receiving
calls via your PC, but we don’t recommend it as a
landline replacement or as a substitute for VoIP
services such as Vonage. That’s because if your PC
goes south, so will your ability to make or receive
Skype calls. You can remedy that with a dedicated
Skype phone, but options run anywhere from $100
to $300. Note, too, that Skype doesn’t provide emergency-number
(911) service or actual human tech
support.
GooGLe earth 5.0
The World at Your
Fingertips
With the latest update of its virtual exploration app,
Google now lets users dive into the ocean, zoom over
to Mars, and even travel back in time. Google Earth
still lags behind Microsoft’s LiveSearch Maps when
it comes to local search capabilities and 3D rendering.
However, it provides far deeper, richer environments
to explore. Google’s offering is just more fun
to use, and the latest version only propels it further
ahead.
Google Earth 5.0 maps both the ocean surface
and the seafloor. When you zoom close enough on
a body of water you’re hovering over, you dip under
the surface. At that point, you see a topographical
view of the underwater terrain. (Note that your computer
needs a fairly robust graphics system to take
full advantage of the ocean view.) Google Earth 5.0
also offers 21 new layers dedicated to ocean exploration,
with content such as articles, images, and video
for specific regions. The cool Animal Tracking feature
even lets you swim along with tagged, satellitetracked
sea creatures.
Another noteworthy feature in the new Google
Earth is Historical Imagery. Clicking on the clock
icon lets you view newer and older satellite images
from around the globe, so you can observe changes
24 PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION aprIL 2009
first looks software
The new Silk codec makes Skype’s sound quality
noticeably better for voice calls than when we last
tested the service. Calls I made to landline phones
from Skype sounded full and fine, though not quite
as clear as those over landline-only connections.
Video quality is slightly improved, though I still
experienced occasional stutter owing to bandwidth
issues. Skype doesn’t have some features of other
services—such as a Web-based version and group
video chatting—but it’s still the best free service out
there.—Michael Muchmore
for a region over time. For example, I checked out a
patch of the Nevada desert as it looked in 1950, then
watched as it became today’s Vegas strip.
And when you want to just get away—really,
really far away—there’s Mars 3D. A Global Map
layer lets you view different map overlays of Mars,
showing the orb’s infrared signature or surface
elevation in color-coded form. It’s these features as
well as a massive amount of new data and an equally
huge number of places to explore that make Google
Earth 5.0 a shoo-in for Editors’ Choice award.
—MM
Skype 4.0
Basic service, free
L l l l m
Pros Free pCto-pC
calls. Low
rates for landline
calls. Improved
quality.
Cons Default windows
are too large. No built-in
call recording. No Web
client. No 911 service.
Click here for more.
Google Earth 5.0
Basic, free;
pro, $400 direct.
L l l l h
Pros Many new
places to explore,
including
the ocean and
surface of Mars.
New touring feature lets
you record and narrate
your virtual adventures
and share them with
others
Cons requires a fairly
robust graphics system
to take full advantage
of ocean exploration
features.
Click here for more.

first looks software
Quick looks
Visit pcmag.com for the full reviews of these and scores of other software products.
RED indicates Editors’ Choice. PROS CONS BOTTOM LINE
MOBILE APPS
Classics (for iPhone)
$2.99 direct
l l l h m
Photo Lab 1600
(for iPhone)
$2.99 direct
l l l h m
SimCity 2009
(for iPhone)
$9.99 direct
l l l l h
SlingPlayer Mobile for
BlackBerry (Beta)
$29.99 direct
L l l l m
SECURITY
PC Armor 2.2
$39.95 direct yearly
l l l h m
Ad-Aware Pro –
Anniversary Edition
$39.95 direct
l l l l m
MUSIC
Slacker.com
(January 2009)
Free
L l l l h
Pandora
(Winter 2009)
Free
L l l l m
ACCOUNTING
CompleteTax
Premium 2008
$29.95 direct (free e-file);
state, $19.95
L l l l m
GAMING
Flower (for PS3)
$9.99 direct
L l l h m
• Beautiful presentation of books
• Chapters and bookmarks
• Best page-turning animation
• Wide range of photographic tweaks and
artistic effects
• Some great creative modes
• Image auto-rotation
• Brings addictive fun of SimCity series
to iPhone
• Nice retro graphics
• Useful help section
• Smooth, sharp picture over Wi-Fi
• Clear, easy-to-navigate interface
• Controls TiVo and cable-company-issued DVRs
• Tracks all file and Registry changes made by
a program installation
• Can completely uninstall any monitored
program
• Warns about known malware-hosting sites
• Speedy and accurate malware removal
• Blocks access to known malware URLs
• Includes useful tools for advanced users
• Slick new interface
• Flexible station creation lets you choose
multiple artists
• Great sound quality
• Robust music-choice algorithms
• Lots of genre stations
• Few ads
• Killer iPhone app
• Intuitive interface
• Excellent help options
• Good coverage of tax topics
• Affordable
• Players can play at own pace
• Beautifully rendered
• Nonviolent—a rarity among games
• No formatting options
• Very limited number of books to choose from
• No transfer of your docs from PC to iPhone
• Unwieldy interface
• Puny, hard-to-adjust slider button
• “Hover” pop-ups disappear erratically
• Requests reboot of iPhone before first use
• Expensive for an iPhone app
• Works only on AT&T and T-Mobile BlackBerrys
for now
• Sometimes slow to respond to key presses
• Program warns that 100 percent cleanup of
“clutter” may destabilize the system
• Highly dependent on initial update, which
malware can block
• Viewing or changing a recommended action
is awkward
• Lots of display ads
• Occasional 30-second audio ads
• Some minor interface glitches
• Lacks customization options
• Slightly subpar sound quality
• Doesn’t download data from brokerages
• Review process is time-consuming
Classics’ page-turning animation and sound are
without peer in the iPhone book-reader crowd, but
don’t expect any control over your book’s appearance,
or the ability to buy any current works.
Sudobility’s Photo Lab provides a solid combination of
photographic and artistic effects, though implementing
them can be frustrating because of interface
problems.
The iPhone version of SimCity puts most of what
made the city-planning title a classic into your
pocket.
It’s been like pulling teeth, but Sling Media has finally
released its impressive SlingPlayer Mobile app for
(some) BlackBerry handsets. If it works on yours and
you have a Slingbox, it’s a must buy.
PC Armor records the changes made by every
program that installs on your system. The only time
it needs attention is when a program tries to install a
driver or some other action that could interfere with
its monitoring.
Ad-Aware protects against spyware, viruses, and
all types of malware. It’s effective both at cleaning
infested systems and blocking malware attacks.
Slacker is a top-notch way to listen to music online.
The service gives you plenty of customization options
and a sleek interface that informs while doing its job.
Pandora still rocks, and iPhone owners should
download the mobile app immediately if they haven’t
done so already. Desktop listeners, though, may find
the main site a bit inflexible.
CompleteTax should be on your list of online tax-prep
sites to explore. It comes from a very reliable source,
and its interface and guidance systems are on a par
with those of its competitors.
• May cause motion sickness Flower straddles the line between art and gaming,
giving players the feeling of moving around in a large
landscape painting.
APRIL 2009 PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION 25

Every business has its share of buzzwords
and terms that help insiders spot other
insiders and members of the milieu. It’s
useful to throw these terms around arbitrarily
so others who may be lurking can
identify you as a fellow traveler (or, conversely,
someone they want to avoid).
Years ago there was a cultlike personal
growth training system called EST
(Erhard Seminars Training). One of its
catch phrases was, “They don’t ‘get’ it!” It
was code for outsiders not in the loop. The
term still lingers in Silicon Valley, which
was heavily caught up in this cult and
many of its ideas. So it’s no surprise that
everyone in the Valley is so comfortable
with insider and exclusionary code words,
many of which make no sense.
One of the great businesses in history is
the semiconductor industry, and it set the
standard for code words and code words
within code words. Here is a partial guide
to the typical terms you’ll hear, and what
they generally mean.
One of these words—“chip”—has
become accepted by the public at large
and serves no useful purpose as a term of
exclusion anymore.
Glossary
The roadmap At first glance, if someone
told you they had the Intel roadmap, you’d
think it was driving instructions on how
to find the offices. But no, the roadmap is a
code word meaning a chart or diagram that
shows the generational outline and development
schedule of upcoming chips in the
form of a time line. It should probably have
a better name than “roadmap.”
john c. dvorak
Chip Biz Buzzwords
It’s no surprise that everyone in the Valley is so
comfortable with insider and exclusionary code
words, many of which make no sense.
26 PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION APRIL 2009
The campus You’d think this had
something to do with school, no? But this
is actually the compound of buildings that
house most of a company. It should be
called an office park or compound.
The process This is usually used in
conjunction with either the size of the chip
trace lines, such as the 42nm process, or as
a generality referring to the overall manufacturing
process type, such as the CMOS
process.
The sTraTeGic parTners This term
peaked when Intel announced the Itanium
microprocessor. The idea was to make an
announcement and then sucker any number
of other companies to do a simultane-
ous press release saying that they are in
bed with you and think this announcement
of yours is just fabulous. It’s fallen out of
vogue since it can be embarrassing, which
is what it was with the Itanium.
parTs This generic term is used by the
semiconductor industry as a synonym for
“chip.” You’ll hear a sentence such as “Do
they make all the parts for it?” This actually
means “Do they make all the chips for
the product?” It’s got nothing to do with
parts such as screws and the printed circuit
boards.
GLue/supporT” chips These are
the chips (parts) needed to make the centerpiece
chip, usually a microprocessor,
work. I have never been able to tell what
sort of person uses the word “glue chip” as
opposed to those who use “support chip.”
pin-compaTibLe This means a chip
that fits into the socket (see below) meant
for another chip. It implies that the chip is
compatible with the chip that was origi-
nally designed for the socket.
sockeT The receptacle for a plug-in
chip, usually a microprocessor.
archiTecTure An outsider would
immediately think this was about buildings.
But in Silicon Valley, the sentence
“What do you think about the architecture”
would almost always bring to mind
the inner workings and design of a microprocessor
or an entire computer. Each
company has an architecture, and the term
Intel architecture, for example, is generally
used to describe its version of a microsprocessor,
or it is sometimes a synonym
for the x86 architecture in general.
code name In the semiconductor
business, code names are commonly used
not to hide or conceal a product under
development but to describe products that
have no official name. This sort of convention
is also used by software companies
such as Microsoft.
Wafers These are not cookies but
slices of a silicon crystal that has been specially
doped with contaminants to become
the foundation for a semiconductor “chip.”
The wafer, which tends to be 300mm in
size (but isn’t always) could have hundreds
of chips etched onto its surface.
fab A truncation of the word “fabrication,”
it refers to a factory or fabrication
plant that manufacturers semiconductors.
It consists of a long line of extremely
expensive precision equipment into which
a blank wafer is introduced at one end and
is processed and eventually chopped up to
make individual chips. Today’s fabs often
cost over $1 billion to build.
There are even more terms than these,
but consider this a basic bluffer’s guide to
get you through most geeky conversations.
Ask someone how much wafers cost nowadays,
and watch them go off! Have fun.
dvorak Live on The Web John’s
Internet TV show airs every Wednesday
at 3:30 ET on CrankyGeeks.com. You can
download back episodes whenever you like.

Inside
Nokia and Netbook Mania Dept.: When I first heard about
Nokia considering getting into the netbook game, I made an
offhand joke that it would be interesting unless the company
ran Symbian as the OS. I figured that, like every other netbook,
it would be running Windows or Linux. So you can imagine
my shock when I was reading an article in which the Nokia
folks seem to be indicating their netbook will indeed be running
Symbian. What?!? Is the device just going to be a huge
phone? It’s ridiculous. Stop now, guys, before it’s too late!
Meanwhile, there’s more and more talk on the streets
about Google porting its Android OS—actually a specialized
distro of Linux—to its own netbook. This makes a lot more
sense than using Symbian, that’s for sure. If Google puts its
resources behind Linux on the desktop,
I think we could actually see a platform
shift. This would be the time to do it since
Microsoft seems to be distracted by both
cloud computing and making money selling
advertisements. The cash cows are what
should be getting the attention, but many
companies neglect them. Poor cows.
As the netbook scene heats up, you
have to wonder: Exactly where is the Sony
netbook? The company has released a few
smallish machines they say are netbooks,
but one, for example, with a Blu-ray drive
is $2,700. This misses the point of a netbook,
which is the low cost. It should cost
about $299. Expect to see some major changes at Sony now
that its European boss, Howard Stringer, will be running the
whole show, as he got rid of one more top executive. It will be
a magic act if Sony can somehow get back into a position of
influence. The entire netbook genre had Sony written all over
it, but the company could not execute. Kind of like with the
iPod and the iPhone. These would have been Sony products
in the 1970s.
Meanwhile, the term “netbook” itself is under legal
attack by Psion Teklogix, a company that actually coined and
trademarked the word in the 1990s. It is sending out cease-anddesist
letters, and Dell, Intel, and others have decided to attack
back. The thinking is that because Psion Teklogix abandoned
the name more than five years ago, it cannot now reclaim it.
We’ll see. The industry might just change the name to mininotebook
or something else. Who cares?
How long will a DVD last? This always worries me, so I back
up most of my writings and photos on both DVDs and two hard
disks. I’m paranoid owing to bad experiences with machines
crashing, drives blowing up, and old CD-ROMS becoming
unreadable. I ran into a cache of 5.25-inch floppies recently and
only half were readable. I’m not sure what was on the other
disks and what I might have lost. These disks are from the mid-
1980s, so they are 20 to 25 years old and failing.
Most of the old 1X CD-Rs that I burned in the 1990s are
failing. Back then we were told that these discs would last
40 years with no problem. By my calculations we were told
wrong. Now when I have critical data, I turn to the expensive,
specially formulated DVD-R and CD-R Archival Grade discs
from Verbatim. They cost about $1 each! And apparently there
are special materials inside, including a gold reflective layer to
prevent corrosion and a hard-coat plastic. These are nice discs
and are supposed to last 100-plus years.
What you have to also note nowadays is that most of the
normal 25-cent-or-cheaper media is now manufactured all
over the place, and all the brands are jobbing out too much.
The exact same brand of disc could be made in China, India,
or Japan. It’s a mess with inconsistent quality.
Most people agree, though, that the two
highest-quality brands are Verbatim and
Taiyo Yuden. Taiyo Yuden has an interesting
product with its unusual “Watershield”
printable DVD; inkjet printing on the label
seems to be impervious to water and won’t
smudge if gotten wet. You pay for the quality,
though, at about 60 cents per disc.
Is the economic downturn over? The
semiconductor folks always have a pretty
good handle on this and they almost all
think that this economic event is ending
with the first quarter, and many are talking
about a “U”-shaped recovery beginning in
the second quarter. If that happens things could really rock,
since there is a huge pent-up demand for tech gear that
keeps building and building. Let’s hope they are correct.
The Smallest Projector Coming to a Cell Phone Near You
Dept.: Have you been following the story behind those little
pico/pocket projectors? They’re minuscule and can typically
project a 480-by-320 image at various sizes, usually up to 60
inches. If you’re thinking of dropping the $300 to $400 for one
of these things, you may want to wait, as the second generation
pico DLP is being developed by Texas Instruments. The
new display is 854 by 480.
Speed Demon Dept.: If you’ve been following the progress
insofar as SOHO and networking speed are concerned,
you’re probably waiting for 10-gigabit-per-second Ethernet.
Now it looks as if we’re beginning to see development on the
generation after that—40 Gbps. Sounds good to me! Meanwhile
Juniper Networks has developed a new network processor
that looks as if it can crank along at 604 Gbps. This would
mean downloading an entire Blu-ray HD movie in less than a
second. This development will be fun to watch unfold.
WANT MOre DVOrAk? John writes a weekly column for our Web
site, too. Log on to go.pcmag.com/dvorak. You can also e-mail
him at john_dvorak@pcmag.com.
APRIL 2009 PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION 27

The biggest flaw in Apple’s near-perfect
iPhone has always been the network it’s on.
So as rumors have arisen once more (based
on an old story from September) of Apple
developing an iPhone for Verizon Wireless,
the most reliable cell-phone network
in the U.S., the Internet has been going
absolutely nuts. Of course Apple wants
to develop an iPhone for Verizon. At this
point, Apple wants to develop an iPhone
for everyone. There’s just one problem:
the hideous, mysterious, Faustian contract
Apple signed with AT&T. And that one is a
showstopper.
Apple’s exclusivity contract with
AT&T was an attempt to rewrite the eco-
nomics of the cell-phone business. This
arrangement wasn’t about visual voice
mail or even, really, about branding. It was
about money and control. In exchange for
a bond of blood, AT&T would kick some
of its monthly subscription fees to Apple
and let Apple control retail distribution.
This was radical. This was unique. This
was a failure.
The iPhone sold well here, but the
United States is a fraction of the global
mobile market, and international carriers
weren’t too comfortable with Apple
cutting into their monthlies. It turned out
that mobile-phone carriers around the
world are much more comfortable kicking
in one-time subsidies than kicking back
monthly fees. So for the international market,
Apple went to a much more normal
system of accounting (normal for the cellphone
industry, that is), and as a result, the
iPhone has reached spectacular sales numbers
around the world.
28 PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION APRIL 2009
SASCHA SEGAN
iPhones for Everyone!
Along the way, Apple has also learned
that tying itself to one wireless carrier
damages, rather than reinforces, its brand.
This is because the quality of its product
becomes too tightly coupled to the quality
of that carrier. Notice that in many of
Apple’s “later” countries, the iPhone is
available on multiple carriers. Apple’s
acting CEO Tim Cook has clearly stated
that the company is not married to a one-
carrier strategy.
Apple has also gotten more flexible
in regard to pricing and distribution, two
major stumbling blocks when Apple first
tried to get Verizon interested in the firstgeneration
iPhone, at least if you believe
Developing a new iPhone for Verizon will take
a year or so. But Apple plans ahead: It’ll have that
phone ready when its AT&T contract is up.
USA Today. Heck, these days the iPhone
is available even at Wal-Marts across the
country. Apple of 2009, as opposed to
Apple of 2006, is much more willing to
work and partner with mobile-phone carriers
and third-party retailers.
Mobile-phone carriers have learned a
couple of things in the past few years as
well. Everyone’s dabbled with visual voice
mail. Phones like the T-Mobile G1 and the
Palm Pre have made U.S. carriers more
comfortable with phone manufacturers’
taking a starring role in product rollouts
and software updates, though Apple takes
that kind of control to a new level. Two
years have also proved that the iPhone is
a unique phenomenon that everybody
wants in on.
So Apple will put iPhones on everyone’s
network, but in the U.S. it will want
to put them on Verizon’s first. Verizon is
now the largest carrier in the country. Also,
Sprint has what Apple would consider
an unhealthy relationship with Palm, and
T-Mobile has that Google Android thing
going on.
If the iPhone were to go to Verizon
before 2010, Apple would have to build a
version for Verizon’s CDMA network. That
would have been a great chore back in 2007.
Apple isn’t actually that big a company;
developing two cell phones from scratch
would have been a big deal for it. But Apple
is going on its third phone by now, and it
has a few years of experience. The company
could pull it off at this point.
Developing a new phone for Verizon
will take a year or so (especially considering
the tasks of getting it through the FCC
and Verizon’s own hellish network-testing
process). But Apple plans ahead: It’ll have
that phone ready when its AT&T contract
is up. Verizon will likely demand a threemonth
CDMA exclusivity agreement,
to which Apple will consent. Sprint and
T-Mobile will follow after a few months.
If the AT&T contract lasts past 2010,
a Verizon launch gets even easier. The
iPhone could be one of the first devices
on Verizon’s new LTE network, which will
use a fourth-generation technology that
Verizon will share with AT&T, T-Mobile,
and dozens of international carriers. An
LTE iPhone would eventually be an almost
universal device.
Apple’s AT&T contract is still shrouded
in mystery. All we know about the terms is
that the contract is a “multiyear.” Under
the most liberal interpretation, that means
Apple could be out from under AT&T’s
thumb by July. But USA Today reported
in separate stories that the contract runs
through the end of 2010 or even 2012,
which puts the Verizon launch firmly in
the LTE zone. I’m pretty sure that whenever
that clock goes ding, a whole lot more
people will be able to buy iPhones.
STAY PHONE-SMART Keep up with the
latest on smartphones by reading Sascha’s
column at go.pcmag.com/segan.

About a year ago, PCMag.com’s networking
analyst walked into my office, put a
small plastic box on my desk, and told me
that we had a new Editors’ Choice for VoIP
solutions: the YMax magicJack. The value
proposition was obvious: clear calls anywhere
in the U.S., dead-simple operation,
and, best of all, the box cost only $40 (plus
another $20 a year for service). Sure, it
sounded too good to be true, but after a lot
of testing, we found that the product actually
worked as advertised. Fast-forward a
year, and even though the magicJack’s network
and firmware have been upgraded,
our opinion of the product is considerably
lower. The magicJack’s story should serve
as a cautionary tale for the entire technology
industry.
Truth be told, we started getting complaints
about the magicJack as soon as
we published our review. Not just a few
unhappy users, but dozens of them. There
were also plenty of poor Better Business
Bureau reports. Turns out the primary
problem isn’t with the product itself—it’s
with the company’s technical support. And
for many would-be buyers, the issues that
are coming to light are deal breakers.
My colleague Sascha Segan has already
written about the limits of professional
product reviews in his column. Reviewers
have products for only a short period
of time before they send them back to the
vendors. This makes it impossible either
to perform long-term testing or to evaluate
build quality across an entire product line.
In the case of the magicJack, however, we
tested four different units over the course
of a year. Every time we came to the same
DAN COSTA
The Case of magicJack
conclusion: When it works, it’s great; when
it doesn’t, you shouldn’t expect much help
from the company.
YMax has been very busy since the
launch of magicJack in 2007. The company’s
aggressive marketing efforts have
put its product in the hands of pretty much
every technology journalist I know, and
the resulting reviews have generally been
quite positive. YMax has also blanketed
late-night cable TV with ads—stay up
past 1 a.m. and there’s a good chance you’ll
see a goofy infomercial for the magicJack.
The company even placed units into a
recent TED conference goody bag and
We tested four different magicJack units, and every
time we came to the same conclusion: When it works,
it’s great. When it doesn’t, don’t expect much help.
got its own football game: the magicJack
St. Petersburg Bowl.
All this press has been a boon for
YMax. All told, the company estimates it
has sold more than two million magicJacks
since the product launched, and it’s now
selling them at a rate of 250,000 a month.
At $40 a pop, plus annual revenues of $20 a
year, that’s a lot of cash rolling in. This also
means an enormous user base that needs
billing, technical, and customer support
services. This is where YMax, like many
start-ups, comes up woefully short. YMax
simply doesn’t answer phone calls. The
company doesn’t list a corporate number
anywhere on its Web site and offers no live
voice support, only live chat. And even live
chat is accessible only after you’ve been
repeatedly dumped into the site’s knowledge
base. Although the product often “just
works,” when it doesn’t, you’re in trouble:
Live chat is not an ideal medium for helping
a user adjust UDP ports or reconfigure
firewall settings.
YMax CEO Dan Borislow stopped
by our offices a couple of months ago to
talk about how the company has grown
and what it’s doing to improve customer
support. He even let me peek into its
chat-based support infrastructure, which
consists of real-time instant messaging
with service reps in the Philippines, who
are always on call and are graded based
on their performance. The system looks
pretty impressive.
In our real-world testing, however, the
live chat reps were not helpful. Worse,
we were directed to make changes to our
system Registry to solve routine networking
problems. As tech journalists, we can
handle that, but for the average user this is
a recipe for disaster.
It’s a mistake to think of YMax as only
a company that hawks a $40 adapter on
late-night TV. YMax is a phone company,
and a pretty big one. Yes, it uses VoIP, but
its business model is very different from
those of Vonage and other cable operators
that offer phone service. The magic-
Jack service has a nationwide network
of media gateways and session border
controllers, as well as CLEC (competitive
local exchange carrier) certifications
in all 50 states. YMax is a huge company
with a vast technical architecture to support.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be
spending enough to take care of that customer
base.
Sure, managing the explosive growth
that YMax has experienced in the past year
would tax any company. But YMax seems
to have lost track of its purpose. It isn’t just
selling an inexpensive gadget, it’s selling a
service. And providing a service requires
more than simply placing calls. Sometimes
it requires taking them.
What’s your experience with the
magicJack? We’ve set up a comments section
on Gearlog. Click here.
TALK bAcK To DAn E-mail your thoughts
to dan_costa@ziffdavis.com.
APRIL 2009 PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION 29

30 PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION APRIL 2009

Home
Networking:
A Refresher
Course
Rebuilding your
home network
doesn’t have to be
tough, if you follow
our steps.
By Oliver Rist and
Eric Griffith
If you’re reading this story, chances are very good that you already have a
home network. You’re a PC Magazine reader, after all. So why the refresher
course on why you need one and how to set one up? As we all know, the
times they are a-changin’ constantly in the tech world, and with so many
new products and services being offered, some of you may want to rebuild
your home network to accommodate all that you want to do with it.
You may also have a home network but have always wondered about its
mechanics—like what goes on in the brain of that little router of yours, or
how the router’s wireless radio actually works. We’re here to explain what’s
going on inside your devices.
Beyond the basics of letting you share high-speed Internet access with
computers and devices in the house, home networks allow you to control
what the kids are doing on the Web, share data and multimedia files, automate
backups for all of your PCs, and even use webcams to see what that
new puppy is doing in the living room while you’re at work. The bedroom
computer upstairs can print to the color printer in the downstairs study, and
the media PC in the living room can show a movie on the PC-connected TV
in the basement rec room.
Adding on network-oriented products and peripherals makes the setup
even more useful. Network attached storage (NAS) lets you create shared
folders for each family member; these folders can be accessed both from the
home network or from the Internet if you’re away from home. NAS devices
also make efficient places to store all those backup files. In this story, we’ll
review some of the hottest new NAS devices, as well as the newest routers,
network printers, and media devices, all for your home network.
APRIL 2009 PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION 31

New Wireless Routers
Add Speed, Drop Price
To really take advantage of your home network,
you’ll want a wireless router. A router negotiates
traffic between your network and the
Internet, and the switch and wireless access
point integrated with the router handles traffic
among the various devices in your home
network, be they PCs, laptops, media devices,
or whatever else you’ve plugged in or linked
up wirelessly. The latest crop add a slew of
neat features beyond mere speed, but speed is
definitely at the heart of these gadgets.
Today’s wireless routers are built around
the 802.11n specification, meaning they can
hurl data around your house at a incredible
gallop: 300 megabits per second (Mbps),
theoretically. In our testing, the routers we reviewed
actually moved bits at speeds ranging
from 63 Mbps to 133 Mbps.
Two of the routers we tested, the Netgear
RangeMax Wireless-N Gigabit Router
WNR3500 l l l m m ($119.99 list) and the
Belkin N+ Wireless Router (F5D8235-4)
l l h m m ($119.99 list) include Gigabit Ethernet
(GigE) connections, so wired connections
can really zip. The third product, the D-Link
RangeBooster N Dual-Band Router (DIR-628)
l l l l m ($99.99 direct), uses the more
common 10/100 Mbps Ethernet.
New routers like these place a real emphasis
on ease of setup. Many have a WPS (Wi-Fi
Protected Setup) button, such as the one
you’ll find on the Belkin and Netgear routers.
Press the buttons on the client adapter and
router simultaneously to automatically setup
networking between the two, without having
to set channel, SSID, and WPA encryption key.
For WPS devices without a button—like a laptop
with integrated Wi-Fi—you have to manually
enter a PIN code.
The Belkin router’s claim to fame is that it
provides an easy way to add network storage.
Simply plug an external hard drive into the
router’s USB 2.0 port. The included software
utility worked well and mapped the drive as
The Connection
Not only have most of us had high-speed
Internet for years, but we don’t know anyone
who doesn’t have it. In general, most
home networks get broadband from fiber
optics, cable, or DSL. For those in remote
areas, satellite TV is the way to go—it’s
still better than dial-up service. Those
living in rural areas should also consider
a WISP, or wireless Internet service provider.
WISPs act like upside-down satellite
32 PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION APRIL 2009
a local drive, letting you access it from anywhere
on the network. The combination of
this storage manager software and the port
provide a tremendously useful feature you
won’t find on many routers at this price.
The Netgear router’s wireless repeater
function takes networking up a notch over
its competitors. A repeater makes possible
wireless meshing of a sort—a way for Wi-Fi
devices to talk to each other wirelessly. It
establishes ad-hoc connections or direct connections
using MAC addresses, a very cool
feature. With the wireless repeating function
turned on, the router can extend the range
of your wireless network. When you add it all
up, the router can work well in a home or in a
small business.
The D-Link, our Editors’ Choice among
these routers, supports a wealth of fancy
features: channel auto-scanning for both
bands and mixed channel widths, a quality of
service (QoS) engine, VPN gateways and access
control policies. The router’s firewall even
supports IPsec VPN and includes some nifty
network address translation (NAT) filtering
capabilities to limit traffic at the protocol level.
In addition, the low price (just $119.99 direct) is
a sign that wireless-n, now at draft 2.0, is finally
hitting the mainstream.
D-LINK RANGEBOOSTER N DUAL-BAND
ROUTER
dishes, reaching down into the ground to
connect to fiber-optic lines, while longrange
wireless routers installed in each
customer’s house point sideways toward
the tower. If you’re considering switching
your provider, pick the one with the most
throughput (measured in megabits per
second, or Mbps) for the lowest monthly
cost, and you’re good to go. In our annual
Service and Reliability Survey, the favorite
broadband type among our readers, hands
BELKIN N+ WIRELESS
ROUTER
NETGEAR RANGEMAX
WIRELESS-N WNR3500
down, was fiber, which you can get via the
highly rated Verizon FiOS service (in very
select areas of the United States, that is).
Setting up high-speed Internet service
is much, much simpler than it used to be.
As a first option, you can make an at-home
service appointment with the phone or
cable company, then wait for that highly
precise, “anywhere between 8 a.m. and
4 p.m.” arrival time. Some providers may
require this, or at the very least insist that

you visit their local office to get the modem
kit, because they won’t allow the use of a
third-party modem.
If they do allow it, your other option
is to purchase a DSL or cable modem kit
at your local electronics store. It usually
includes a name-brand router, a definite
plus. You can find these packages at stores
like Best Buy or WalMart, and online at
Buy.com or Amazon. They’ll include the
modem plus a router—or one unit with the
modem and router integrated—as well as
setup instructions and info on how to register
your new service with the provider
automatically. Again, these kits used to be
a nightmare of bad instructions and nonfunctioning
automation. Today’s packages,
however, are easy-peasy.
Stick the Quick Start CD into your computer
and follow the on-screen instructions.
Typically, it will ask you to plug your
router into the phone or cable TV line first,
then it will take a minute or so to find itself
on the provider’s network (the Internet)
and register. After that, you’ll plug your
computer into the other side of the router,
fill out some identification and billing
information, make sure your computer’s
network settings are set to “Automatically
get an IP address,” and that’s it. You’ll be on
the Internet.
Any other computers you plug into the
back of that router will not only see the
Web, they’ll also see each other (or they
will after you run Microsoft’s home networking
wizard)—and hey, you’ve got a
basic network.
Networking and Windows
Once your router is functioning and your
computers are plugged in, you need to
make sure all the computers can see not
just the Internet, but each other as well.
For Vista and Windows 7 machines, you’re
not going to have to do much besides wait.
These versions of the Windows operating
system are much smarter about networking.
Vista PCs will simply find each
other on the network as long as they’re
all in the same IP subnet—a logical division
of a local area network, which is created
to improve performance and provide
security. If your computers don’t see each
other, Vista has a couple of network fix-it
wizards, as well as the “Set up a home network”
wizard for you to fall back upon.
Windows XP machines, on the other
hand, are a mixed bag. Those in the same IP
subnet should see each other, but there’s a
The Best Network Printers
INkjET ALL-IN-oNE
Epson Artisan 800
$299.99 direct
l l l l m
The Artisan 800 is weighted more toward
home use but can also be a good fit for a
home office with light duty needs. It includes
both Ethernet and Wi-Fi support, so it’s
easy to share. Photo output is high quality,
and you can print directly from PictBridge
cameras, memory cards, and USB keys. For
office users, it has a standalone copier and
fax machine, and it includes a 30-page automatic
document feeder (ADF) for scanning
and faxing multipage documents as well as
legal-size pages.
Click here for more.
MoNoChRoME LASER ALL-IN-oNE
Brother MFC 7840w
$225 street
l l l l m
Most printers in this category
at this price tend
to tackle only personal
tasks and connect only by
USB cable. But the 7840w
breaks the mold. Its talents include
printing, faxing, and scanning over
a network. It can send e-mail via a
PC, adding the scanned document
as an attachment to an e-mail message.
It also works as a standalone
copier and fax machine, and it includes
a 35-page automatic document
feeder (ADF),
Click here for more.
CoLoR LASER ALL-IN-oNE
Samsung CLX-3175 FN
$400 street
l l l l m
The CLX-3175FN is small enough to be a
truly personal color laser AIo, although the
network connector will also let you share it in
a small office. It prints, scans, and faxes, even
over a network, and also works as a standalone
fax machine, copier, and e-mail sender.
A 15-page automatic document feeder lets
you easily scan, copy, or fax multipage documents
as well as legal-size pages.
Click here for more.
INkjET ALL-IN-oNE
Canon Pixma MP980 Wireless
Photo All-In-One Printer
$299.99 direct
l l l l m
This photo-centric all-inone
printer can also function
as a standalone home
photo lab. It can print,
scan, copy, and e-mail—by
opening a message on your PC and
adding a scanned document as an
attachment. It can both scan and
print directly from 35mm slides
and strips of film, and print directly
from PictBridge cameras and
memory cards (but not USB keys),
letting you preview photos on a
3.5-inch color LCD display.
Click here for more.
APRIL 2009 PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION 33

The Best Network Media Devices
Blockbuster 2Wire MediaPoint
$99 direct; 25 free rentals, then $1.99 to
$3.99 per rental
l l l m m
This set-top box delivers movies to the
home via the Web and is a nice complement
to Blockbuster’s DVD and online
offerings. It is similar to the Roku Digital
Video Player (formerly known as the Netflix
Player by Roku) but does not allow
you to stream movies to a computer at no
additional cost; rentals on MediaPoint run
from $1.99 to $3.99 each.
Click here for more.
chance they won’t. You’re best off running
the “Set up a home network” wizard right
away for XP, which is available off the Network
Neighborhood screen. Just run this
wizard on every XP machine individually.
The most thinking you’ll have to do is picking
a workgroup name for your network.
(But that’s an important step: You can’t
share files or printers between PCs that
don’t have the same workgroup name.)
Understanding Your Router
The router is the heart of your home network—which
is good. That’s because it’s
doing several important jobs. First, it’s the
outward face of your Internet connection.
To the phone, cable, or satellite company,
your Internet account is represented by
just one Internet address. If you look on
your router’s basic setup or status Web
page, you’ll see that address at the top,
generally labeled something like “WAN
IP address” or “Internet IP address.” This
is all that the provider or anyone on the
Internet can see of your network. The
router maintains that external address
and simultaneously hands out a bunch
of internal addresses to the computers in
your house, using a different IP address-
34 PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION APRIL 2009
Apple TV
$229.00 direct for 40GB drive; $329 for 160GB drive
l l l l m
With an intuitive interface, plenty of iTunes video content (including movie rentals),
and a good price, Apple TV is a must-have networking device for the iTunes-addicted.
You can wirelessly stream content—music, TV shows, even high-definition movies—from
the iTunes libraries of up to six computers or play files directly from the device’s hard
drive. It also lets you download or stream audio and video podcasts, watch YouTube videos
from the Web, and view photos from online Flickr accounts and .Mac photo albums.
Click here for more.
ing scheme than the public one used by
your provider. The process of translating
traffic between the internal and external
addresses is called Network Address Translation
(NAT), and the process for handing
out those internal addresses automatically
is called the Dynamic Host Configuration
Protocol (DHCP).
NAT is used because the TCP/IP network
protocol was never intended to
support the millions of users, devices,
and Web sites that currently populate
the Internet. There simply aren’t enough
addresses to go around, so one per customer
is all ISPs can manage—and even
then they need to play cycling games,
so your WAN IP address will probably
change every few weeks.
On the internal side, you can set up
whatever IP addressing scheme you’d like
using your router’s DHCP settings. This
looks like Sanskrit, but don’t panic: For
the most part you can leave the default
settings. Most routers default to a 192.168.
X.X address scheme. It’s those last two Xs
—technically they’re called octets—that
concern you. The second-to-last variable
determines your subnet. So PCs addressed
as 192.168.1.X are all in the same subnet
Slingbox PRO-HD
$299.00 list
l l l l m
The Slingbox PRo-hD is one of the
best-performing, easiest-to-use media
extenders out there. It streams highdefinition
video over a home network
and near-hD-quality content over
the Internet (provided sufficient bandwidth is
available). So you can watch hD videos stored
on your cable box DVR or DVD player on your
computer, wherever you are as long as you
have an Internet connection. You can also
pause and resume live TV through the box,
TiVo-style.
Click here for more.
and should see and network with each
other just fine. One that’s addressed as
192.168.0.X will be left out in the cold.
That last octet will be different for every
device you plug into the network. The
router, for example, might be 192.168.1.1.
The first PC might be 192.168.1.2, your
laptop might have “.3,” the Xbox might be
assigned “.4,” and so on. That last octet can
be any number between 1 and 254, so you’ve
got plenty of addresses to go around inside
your home—so you needn’t worry about
running out.
The reason to stick with the default
192.168.0.X or 192.168.1.X scheme is because
that particular range is not routable on the
Internet. This means that anything hacking
past the firewall built into your router
will have some trouble accessing the PCs
behind it. Another non-routable addressing
scheme is 10.10.X.X. You can set your
scheme to run any way you’d like, but these
schemes are the safest.
Speaking of safe, your router, as mentioned,
is also your firewall, which is critical
to a safe network. A good firewall using
stateful packet inspection (which ensures
that all inbound packets are the result of
an outbound request) keeps the bad guys

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off your home network—and believe me,
the bad guys are out there. At PCMag
.com Labs, we once plugged an open PC
into a non-firewalled Internet connection
and recorded how long it took the PC
to become hacked or infected. The low
record was 20 minutes. Watch out.
You should also install a software firewall
on every Windows PC and make
sure it stays updated. Just open the app
every few weeks, and it will tell you if you
need a software update. That’s as easy
as downloading a file and hitting “save.”
Vista and Windows 7 have pretty good
firewalls included with the operating system;
for windows XP our Editors’ Choice
is Comodo Firewall Pro 3.0.
Setting Up Wireless
Probably the last thing your router is
doing is providing wireless access using
Wi-Fi. The giveaway used to be whether
or not it had antennas, but more and more
routers today remain stylish by hiding the
antenna—even multiple antennas—inside
the bezel. Actually, it’s hard to find a router
today that isn’t Wi-Fi-capable. PCs with
Wi-Fi will see the router almost immediately,
but you shouldn’t let it go at that.
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for à la carte rental ($3.99 for new releases, and
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Wireless networking works on RF
(radio frequencies), so it’s essentially a
radio: Anyone within 300 feet (indoors) or
600 yards (outdoors) can tune in to your
signal. Some people are quite open to sharing
their Internet connection this way, but
doing so can leave your PCs vulnerable.
Unless you want anyone parked outside
your driveway to know what’s on your network,
your PCs, your hard disks, and the
like, it’s a good idea to use some security.
Your router offers several wireless
security options. The two most popular
are WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) and
WPA2 (Wi-Fi Protected Access). Either
will give you enough basic protection,
though WPA2 is tougher. But many folks
still use WEP, because Windows XP has
trouble with more advanced forms of wireless
security. Also, if you’ve got any older
Wi-Fi products around your house using
802.11b technology, WEP is probably all
they support. WEP is easy to crack by anyone
with the right tools and the time to put
in, however, so don’t trust it for important
data. Windows Vista handles either with
aplomb, so stick with WPA2 there.
Setting up wireless is again just a short
series of steps. First pick a channel (you
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once you install Microsoft’s New Xbox Experience
(NXE) oS. NXE offers a solution to the
Arcade’s lack of storage space: It allows Netflix
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can stick to the default unless there are
a lot of other wireless routers around, as
there probably are in an apartment building).
Stick with channels 1, 6, or 11: They
don’t “overlap” and thus have less interference.
Set all your wireless devices to the
same channel. The router will then ask
you to name its wireless network; this is
called the SSID in Wi-Fi-speak. Definitely
do not to stick with the default here, which
is usually “Linksys” or “D-Link” or something
similar. Use something personal,
like “BobsWireless.” When asked which
security option you’d like to use, opt for
WPA2 if you know that all the devices on
your network support it. After that, simply
pick a security key, which boils down
to a password-type phrase. Try and go
strong here. Use not just “password” but
“P4ssW0rd1234”—because a mixture
of capitals, numbers, and symbols with
letters is much harder to crack, let alone
guess. Avoid words found in the dictionary.
The balance here is to come up with
something easy to remember. Even then,
it’s a good idea to change that security key
every few months.
Save that and all you have to do is go to
each of your wireless computers and let
APRIL 2009 PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION 35

them scan for the SSID (BobsWireless).
When a device finds it, it will ask you for
the security key. Type it in, hit Save, and
those PCs will automatically connect
whenever they’re turned on and in range.
Last Thoughts on Wires and Ports
Once your home network is running, those
wireless computers should be able to see
each other as well as any wired computers
you have plugged directly into the back of
the home router. And speaking of wired,
stick with Category 5e or Category 6 Ethernet
patch cables. Both of these are capable
of running Gigabit-speed Ethernet (GigE).
The highest-end home routers have GigE,
which has a data rate of 1,000 Mbps—ten
times faster than “Fast Ethernet.”
Gigabit Ethernet will be especially
useful if your network winds up carrying
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36 PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION APRIL 2009
movies and hi-def TV content around the
house, or if you play multiplayer games.
And who doesn’t? If those ports on the
back of your router aren’t enough, drop $30
or more on a GigE-capable switch. Plug it
into a GigE port on your router, and then
all the ports on the switch will function the
same as those on the router. You’ll instantly
go from four available GigE ports to 8, 12,
or 20 depending on how big a switch you
choose. You can even plug a second switch
into the first.
If you have areas of the house where
Wi-Fi won’t reach and you don’t want to
thread Ethernet cable through the walls
or around doors, you can sometimes take
advantage of existing wires in the walls.
If you’re lucky enough to have coaxial
cable running from room to room, a set
of MoCA-capable adapters (short for
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multimedia over coax) on either end will
use the wire as if it were Ethernet. You
can even do the same with power lines in
your house, using adapters that support
HomePlug technology. Those are even
easier, because they just plug into existing
outlets, then have an Ethernet cord that
comes out to attach to the router and distance
switch.
There are plenty of ways you can now
add to or modify your home network. You
can add more wireless security, another
wireless access point, media devices to
share photos and videos, webcams for
watching the house while you’re away,
parental controls so the kids stay safe on
the Web, picocells that use the Internet to
extend the range of your cellular phone,
and the list goes on and on. But this is the
foundation for everything else to come.
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The Future of Wireless
Home Networking
802.11n networks have
been the standard at
home for years (even
though 11n still isn’t fully
ratified). It’s time to
move on, already!
Wi-Fi’s future holds faster
speeds, better ad hoc
connections, and more.
By Eric Griffith
Illustration by Otto Steininger
When wireless Internet access really took
off en masse, say about 2003, we were
mesmerized by the technology. Imagine,
browsing the Web at home, untethered! It
didn’t take long, however, for the wonderment
to wear off and impatience to set in.
We wanted more—faster speeds, better
security, more stability. Fortunately for
us, the technology and standards governing
wireless home networking don’t stand
still. New innovations are in the works all
the time. Here’s a glance at what’s to come,
in the short and the long term, in wireless
networking at home.
Device-to-Device Connections
Wi-Fi networks have two basic modes of
operation. One is called infrastructure;
here client devices (like laptops or hand-
helds) connect to one access point (AP)
that facilitates communication among
them. This is by far the most popular way
to connect—you’re probably using it at
home right now if you have a Wi-Fi router.
The other mode, called ad hoc, allows
client devices to communicate directly.
That functionality can be handy, albeit a
pain to implement. Furthermore, ad hoc
networking can be a security nightmare:
Scammers can easily trick you into connecting
to them by pretending to be an
AP. That’s why, when you use a wireless
connection in a hotel or coffee shop, you
should always be sure about the SSID (network
name) to which you’re connecting.
Ad hoc networking may be getting a
much-needed shot in the arm. The Wi-Fi
Alliance—the industry group that tests all
APRIL 2009 PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION 37

802.11-based products for interoperability—has
two task groups working on these
instant peer-to-peer (P2P) communications.
The first group is looking to improve
the existing ad hoc protocol, according
to Kelly Davis-Felner, marketing director
for the Alliance. The second is developing
a “soft AP,” software that makes a client
device like a laptop appear and work
as an infrastructure AP. That way, multiple
devices can connect to it directly.
The soft AP approach may be getting an
assist, since Intel is backing it. At the Consumer
Electronics Show (CES) in January,
the company—whose Wi-Fi chips power a
huge number of laptops—showed off a soft
AP under the name My Wi-Fi. The software
ran on laptops with Intel Centrino 2
chipsets, making each laptop the center of a
personal area network connecting as many
as eight Wi-Fi devices at once. The laptop
maintained a separate connection to a real
AP, however, so it could, for example, share
an Internet connection with all attached
devices. Reports say My Wi-Fi also can be
used to connect peripherals, even audio
receivers for streaming from the laptop.
Key for both Alliance groups is making
sure these P2P connections are secured
using Wi-Fi Protected Setup, the simple,
one-button security configuration created
by the Wi-Fi Alliance
to improve on Wi-
Fi Protected Access
(WPA2), which is in
turn based on the IEEE
802.11i specification.
The layers upon layers
of support in this arena
are mind-boggling.
Why two groups? The Alliance doesn’t
know which technology the industry will
prefer. It doesn’t even have a name for this
enhanced P2P connection yet. Another
consideration: Who would use it? Davis-
Felner believes consumers would like it
for quicker content transfers, file synchronization,
and more, and that big corporate
enterprises could expect it to help with
direct connections to peripherals like printers
and projectors. “Enterprise IT people
should feel comfortable with it,” she says.
IEEE: More Speed (Eventually)
The IEEE (Institute of Electrical and
Electronics Engineers) may be the most
democratic organizational body ever conceived—sometimes
to a fault. Every member
gets a say, which is partly why, almost
38 PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION APRIL 2009
five years after debates began on the initial
proposal, the “High Throughput” standard
for wireless networks—better known
as 802.11n—is still not ratified. In fact, it’s
unlikely to be ratified by the IEEE’s 802.11
Working Group for another year.
802.11n is done enough, however, and
that’s why there are plenty of 11n-based
Wi-Fi products on store shelves, satisfying
those who need increased speed and
range. So tabling that discussion, what
might the IEEE have up its sleeves for after
11n? Plenty, it turns out.
Let’s be clear on the terms. Within the
IEEE there are working groups for all types
of technologies. Wireless LAN (WLAN)
just happens to go by the name 802.11,
whereas Ethernet goes by 802.3. Within
each working group are task groups, usually
identified by a letter, such as the “n” of
802.11n; these groups are actively working
on technology specifications to amend
the original. Before a task group can exist,
it is a study group, wherein members toss
around the idea and see if anyone even
cares enough to pursue it. Then there’s
balloting, editing, and changes, ad infinitum—sometimes
for years.
The reason 11n has been so important
for so long is because it’s about increases:
more throughput and better range on wire-
WI-FI ThroughpuT: WhaT’S avaIlablE NoW
Specification throughput frequency compatibility
802.11b 11 mbps 2.4 ghz Works with 802.11g
802.11g 54 mbps 2.4 ghz Works with 802.11b
802.11a 54 mbps 5 ghz Works with 802.11n
802.11n ranges from 150 to 600 mbps either 2.4 ghz or 5 ghz Works with 802.11a, b, or g
less networks—boosts that everyone wants.
Thus it’s no surprise that not one but two
task groups were spawned from the “Very
High Throughput” study group—there’s
TGac and TGad. The TG is for Task Group;
these may eventually translate to 802.11ac
or 802.11ad, if they go anywhere.
According to Bruce Kraemer, chair of
the 802.11 Working Group, TGac “might
double what we have now” for WLAN
speed by increasing the total data throughput
available to a cluster of users in a
relatively dense environment. It won’t do
much for an individual, but the difference
for a large number of users could be significant,
possibly in a business or even in a
cluster of users at an airport hot spot.
TGad is a whole different beast, as it
will venture into radio-band frequencies
new to Wi-Fi: the 60-GHz spectrum. Like
the 2.4-GHz and 5-GHz frequencies used
today, 60-GHz is unlicensed by the Federal
Communications Commission, so anyone
can use it. (Wikipedia says 60-GHz is useful
for short-range data links of 1.7km (1.06
miles) with throughput of up to 2.5 gigabits
per second.) Kraemer says while “ac might
go to a 2-to-1 increase, ‘ad’ could bring a
data-rate increase of 10 to 1.” However,
using new spectrum means an entirely new
radio technology, so there will be no backward
compatibility with existing Wi-Fi.
When can we expect to see 11ac or 11ad?
Not for a while; in a year or more they
might be out of the initial discussion stage.
Of course, there’s a lot more cooking
than just those two potential amendments.
There’s also 802.11s, a mesh-networking
specification that’s been on the drawing
board since September 2003. (It probably
won’t be final until September 2010.) Laptops
and other devices with 11s support will
function as mesh points (or MPs) and form
links with each other, allowing packets of
data to skip from device to device across
the network as needed.
Mesh has been around for a while in
many proprietary forms, and is important
not only because it can extend a network’s
range but also because it has self-configuring
abilities: Mesh
devices can move about
without impacting
overall performance.
In such a network, data
will hop around from
mesh point to mesh
point along the shortest
path to where it needs
to go. Actual 11s is already in use in at least
one product: the One Laptop per Child
project’s XO laptop uses it to communicate
with XS school servers, in some tests over
distances as great as 2km (1.2 miles) with
802.11s data hops from device to device.
802.11u will provide a Wi-Fi device
with methods of connecting securely to a
network, based on the external network’s
type. For example, if you have access to the
cellular connection that provides Internet
access to the Wi-Fi router on a bus, 11u will
keep that connection secure. It will also
allow a Wi-Fi device to discover more
information about that external network,
such as whether it’s free of charge or not.
11u could be published by March 2010.
Finally, 802.11z “Direct Link Setup”
is the 802.11 Working Group’s take on

ThE FuTurE oF 802.11: SpECS oN ThE DraWINg boarD
Specification type DeScription expecteD publication Date
802.11ac throughput categorized as a “very high throughput” specification, 801.11ac would increase throughput over 802.11n
by a ratio of 2 to 1. its spectrum would be 5 ghz.
802.11ad throughput also a “very high throughput” specification, 802.11ad would increase throughput 10 to 1 over 802.11n. it
would reside on the 60-ghz spectrum.
802.11s mesh networking this specification would allow devices such as cell phones or laptops to serve as mesh points, forming
wireless links with each other.
802.11u Security Known as “interworking with external networks,” this specification would enable secure connections for
Wi-fi devices based on the security protocols of the external network the device is using, whether that
network is cellular, ethernet, uWb, or something else.
802.11z ad hoc networking this “direct link setup” specification allows two Wi-fi devices to securely connect to each other in peer-topeer
mode by using the security credentials of a larger network’s access point.
improving ad hoc connections, at least for
business users. Entirely unrelated to what
the Wi-Fi Alliance is doing for device-todevice
communication, it allows two laptops
that would normally communicate
on a secure network to form an exclusive
P2P connection. This happens only after
they’ve authenticated security credentials
through an AP. It’s a super-secure ad hoc
that requires the right security setup.
Zigbee and Z-Wave: home Control
and More
Another 802 Working Group with growing
impact at home is 802.15. It’s a standard for
wireless personal area networks (WPAN)
using very-low-power radios to send small
amounts of data. Bluetooth is one kind of
WPAN; it’s based on 802.15.1. Some industry
groups have for years been using another
version, 802.15.4, to bring wireless home
automation and control to homes. Coupled
with Wi-Fi, these WPANs can create an
ecosystem that stretches from your laptop
all the way to your light switches.
The ZigBee and Z-Wave standards
are two of the most prominent uses for
802.15.4. An industry alliance with many
partners has formed to push each technology.
Both enable intelligent mesh networking,
so the more devices added to a WPAN
the better. Eventually, every light switch,
thermostat, and motor in your home could
have a chip that lets it communicate, and
you would control them all from a single
interface, whether a remote, an LCD panel
on a wall, or your laptop.
Recently utility companies have taken
notice of these technologies. In fact, several
are integrating ZigBee technology
into meters for electricity, gas, and water.
If meters could talk via ZigBee to a home
router or gateway with Internet access,
customers would gain access to real-time
rate information and utilities could automatically
read meters without sending
someone out in a truck. The potential for
saving money is tremendous. Of the 80 million
meters that need replacing, the ZigBee
Alliance won contracts to be in at least one-
third of them in 2008; the Alliance thinks
that number will grow through 2009.
ZigBee has a lead with the utility companies,
but Z-Wave (owned by Sigma
Designs) is still in the fight for your home
automation. At CES this year, Z-Wave partners
demonstrated energy management
systems to help both utilities and consumers,
as well as the usual home controls—
picture your ADT monitoring panel
doing much more than just sounding the
alarm. One of the cooler items: lock maker
Schlage is adding Z-Wave remote access to
its wares, so you could someday use your
cell phone to lock all your doors at night.
Or imagine doing that with the same universal
remote you use for your TV.
Will ZigBee and Z-Wave overlap with
Wi-Fi? They do today, but if you have
either 802.15.4 technology, it likely came
as a value-added feature from your broadband
provider, which supplied a residential
gateway/router with WPAN tech built
in. Telcos desperately want to horn in on
that security market, and they know that
ZigBee or Z-Wave can help, giving them
another reason to charge customers extra
per month and letting them up-sell you
on new products for that wireless ecosystem—everything
from water-spill monitors
to window alarms to thermostats.
Both groups think that you’ll soon be able
to walk into Best Buy and get a router from
a name brand that includes both Wi-Fi and
ZigBee or Z-Wave.
802.15.4 may appear soon in your phone,
too, to provide extra telecom services.
Korea and some European countries are
doing this already. And ZigBee is pursuing
a personal health strategy, using devices
like the phone to monitor people’s health
status in a non-invasive way.
DlNa: linking More Devices
Another interesting networking story to
come out of CES this year was the Digital
Living Network Alliance (DLNA), a fiveyear-old
consortium of industry companies
that’s only now getting serious attention.
The interest centered on news of full sup-
2012
2012
September 2010
march 2010
January 2010
port in the upcoming Windows 7 operating
system. This move puts Windows 7 devices
at the heart of an ecosystem of DLNAapproved
consumer electronics.
According to DLNA president Scott
Smyers, a senior VP for early supporter
Sony, DLNA certification is all about
interoperability. DLNA itself is based on
Universal Plug and Play (UPnP), but that
protocol only goes so far when handling
discovery between network nodes and
providing access. DLNA is the layer that
makes sure streaming-media formats can
work across nodes and providing “link
protection” for commercial content using
yet another standard: DTCP-IP, or Digital
Transmission Content Protection over
IP, which will someday prevent copyprotected
digital content on a home network
from going out over the Internet.
DLNA has been tied closely to other
networking standards, such as Wi-Fi and
MoCA (Multimedia over Coax, for networking
across coaxial cable). In fact, if a
networking product aims for DLNA certification,
and it uses wireless 802.11, it must be
certified for interoperability by the Wi-Fi
Alliance before the DLNA will give it a seal
of approval. There are 240 DLNA member
companies, and scores of products at CES
had the logo. To date, the DLNA has certified
4,000 products, including computers,
printers, HDTVs, stereo equipment, DVRs,
and digital picture frames.
Windows 7 may be the catalyst needed
to get DLNA off the ground. Windows 7
users will be able to right-click a media
file and send it instantly to any DLNA
player device on the network. That already
sounds like a step up from finding files
using Windows Media Center.
That said, will DLNA support make it to
all Media Center hardware? The PlayStation
3 is DLNA-ready, like most Sony products,
but Smyers is not sure whether DLNA
is coming to the Xbox 360. That’s a question
for Microsoft. Adding the support via
a software upgrade can only help the Xbox
communicate with Windows 7 computers
of the future, so it seems like a no-brainer.
APRIL 2009 PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION 39

Solutions
problems solved this issue
42 at Work
• Learn how to set up accounting
software
44 office
• Learn hidden tricks in OpenOffice.org
46 security
• Keep your smartphones secure
keep it private Before you start posting anything, go into
your privacy settings and decide whom you want to be able to
see your photo albums, videos, profile, status updates, and so on.
Staying Safe on Facebook
Grown-ups, take note! Here is what you need to know before “friending” your first
Facebook connection. By Bill Dyszel
Recent news stories have reported a litany
of Facebook horror stories from geriatrics—you
know, people over age 30—who
dented their dignities, if not their careers,
through careless social networking. Some
people think that the post-collegiate crowd
is simply too fuddy-duddy for Facebook.
Others insist that the site is now as essential
as e-mail and phone service, if not air
and water, and nobody of any age should
be discouraged from squandering time on
40 PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION APRIL 2009
48 tips
• Find your toolbar in Word for Mac
• Align image in Word
• Tweak default start times in
Outlook’s calendar
• Improve Power-line performance
• Turn your cell phone into a modem
• Take shortcuts to Internet searches
Facebook. Even Bill Gates is reported to
have a half-hour-a-day Facebook habit.
A typical Facebook humiliation scenario
involves having someone post something
questionable to your “wall,” the public
Facebook page, and then having that item
inadvertently and automatically blasted
to everyone you know via Facebook. That
group often includes business associates
and other people with whom you’ve cultivated
an illusion of respectability. Horrors!
• Use Speed Dial in Firefox
• Get the best HDTV image quality
• Choose the right HDTV ports
• Properly place your speakers
• Calibrate your camera’s monitor
Because the Internet offers so many
paths to public humiliation, it’s not entirely
fair to single out Facebook. In the site’s
defense, you have to be a Facebook member
to see all of the truly embarrassing items on
another member’s page. Besides, Google
can reveal more dirt about a person than
Facebook does, and that includes material
over which an individual has little control.
But if you have a professional reputation
to protect, a Facebook account creates

a risk. Those two are natural enemies, like
eggs and bowling balls. Facebook is simply
not designed as a tool for business. If you
feel that you have no choice but to dillydally
on Facebook, consider these facts:
• Facebook was designed by adolescents,
for adolescents with adolescent
goals in mind. Only a few years ago, a
.edu e-mail address was a prerequisite to
a Facebook account, a requirement that
effectively limited membership to college
students. That sensibility remains part of
Facebook’s DNA. A site designed to help
you publish photos of yourself barfing over
a beer keg is unlikely to help burnish your
reputation in business.
• Facebook’s opaque user interface,
the result of its fundamentally collegiate,
video-gamer sensibility, is not designed
to be an effective business tool. Mistakes
are far easier to make and harder to correct
than you’d expect in an application
designed for actual work.
• You can’t predict or control who will
ask to “friend” you on Facebook. What do
you do when your boss or an important client
asks to become your Facebook friend?
If your Facebook page includes the names
of everyone in your witches’ coven, do you
want important potential clients to see
that? Or will you insult some bigwig by
refusing a friend request? It’s not exactly
the dilemma of the ages, but it’s certainly a
potential social headache that adults need
to consider when joining Facebook.
• Facebook developers often spring new
features on users without warning. Not
long ago a new “beacon” feature tracked
members’ online shopping transactions
and broadcast details to the world. The
feature was dialed back after a firestorm
of protest as well as some huge lawsuits
over privacy violations, but the impulsive
sensibility of Facebook developers augurs
similar surprises in the future. And it raises
the creepy question of why Facebook is collecting
that information in the first place.
• Facebook phishing is beginning to
surface. In one scenario, scammers hijack
the Facebook log-in of a friend of yours and
then pretend to be that friend with an urgent
need for money. They contact you via chat
and start the scam from there. To you, it
looks like a request from a person you actually
know, often embellished with personal
information gleaned from your own Facebook
entries. If anyone asks you for money
on Facebook, use your head—don’t do it. At
the very least, insist on direct contact in
solutions social networking
pitfalls of finding friends You can easily find out who on your contact lists
are on Facebook. Think twice before adding business contacts to your network.
person or via a phone call that you originate.
You need to be sure that you’re dealing
with a moocher you actually know, not
some unknown scammer. You should also
contact the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint
Center, at www.ic3.gov, to file a complaint.
In some other cases, a phony Facebook
friend invites you to view a video that
requires you to download a player. Naturally,
that player is infected with malware.
Obviously, this same scam could be delivered
by e-mail or ordinary Web surfing, but
the familiarity of relationships on Facebook
induces people to lower their guard.
Don’t despair. You can maintain a reasonable
level of safety on Facebook. A few
common-sense precautions can reduce
your risk of problems. For starters, look
over your privacy settings by selecting Privacy
Settings from the Settings drop-down
menu in the upper right-hand corner of the
screen. You can adjust every detail of your
privacy settings, including who can see
pictures, postings, personal information,
and work information. You can also adjust
what individual members see, so your boss
or ex-spouse might not see things that the
rest of the world does. There’s some wisdom
in allowing only people you actually
know to view your profile.
One part of the “Find Friends” feature
is a service that asks for the log-in and
password of an online e-mail account such
as Gmail or Yahoo; it pulls the account’s
address book information into Facebook.
Good sense says that you shouldn’t pull a
list of business contacts into Facebook if
you think there’s a risk of embarrassment.
You might also consider who’s allowed
to see photos that other people have tagged
with your name. You may not want certain
photos to be seen by certain people. It’s
also possible for people to tag photos with
your name that aren’t actually you, so it’s
probably best to set your privacy level to
limit tagged photo viewing to your friends,
not the whole network.
Let’s face it, Facebook is a time sink.
Be prepared to spend an hour or so setting
up your account when you first join.
It doesn’t take that long to get an account
established, but it does take some time to
configure your account to make it suitable
for use by a grown-up.
A bit of social engineering can also help
you distinguish business contacts from
social friends. If an important business client
wants to “friend” you, suggest that you
connect on LinkedIn or one of the business
networking services instead. That way you
don’t have to insult someone by refusing
to be a friend, and you can position your
relationship as something more important
than a casual encounter on Facebook.
APRIL 2009 PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION 41

Last month we tackled the question, “Does
your business need accounting software?”
Those of you who answered yes will find
that taking the time to set up your software
right will pay off in time saved every day of
your working life.
First, you must choose an application.
We recommend Microsoft Office
Accounting Professional 2008, MYOB Premier
Accounting 2008, Peachtree by Sage
Complete Accounting 2009, or Intuit’s
QuickBooks Accounting Pro Edition 2009.
Running a few sample reports with whatever
system you choose will help you get
warmed up. Once you’ve done this, you’re
ready to follow these next steps.
1. Use the opening setup tools.
MYOB MYOB’s New Company File Assistant
gets your company file started, while
the Setup Assistant takes you much
deeper. You start with general customization
options, then move through each section
(such as Accounts and Sales).
Office AccOUnting Use the Quick Start
window. After you’ve entered your company’s
contact information, selected your
Chart of Accounts type, and saved your
company file by clicking through the wizard,
the Quick Start window should open.
solutions at work
Eight Steps to Setting Up Your
New Accounting Software
Is the biggest roadblock between you and a modern accounting system fear of plunging in?
Try these eight first steps to get started. By Kathy Yakal
42 PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION APRIL 2009
You can complete all of your setup tasks
here, or you can access the setup functions
anytime from menus.
PeAchtree After Peachtree runs you
through its opening paces (fiscal year,
Chart of Accounts, and so forth), it pops
open a setup guide. You can either follow
the links to some of the necessary steps or
access them through the menus.
QUickBOOks Use the EasyStep Interview.
This multistep wizard, which should take
only a few minutes to complete, starts
you on the path to setting company preferences.
It asks questions about whether
you’ll be using inventory and paying
employees, for example, and if you will be
it turns those features on. But it doesn’t do
everything.
2. set company preferences.
MYOB Despite the depth of the automated
setup, you should still go into the preferences
window at Setup | Preferences.
There are plenty of options to choose
from there.
Office AccOUnting Go to Company |
Preferences. Most of this material is selfexplanatory.
You’re turning features on
and off, setting a default interest rate and
minimum finance charge, approving or
PAYrOll setUP
Payroll is probably
the most complex
module to set up
for all packages,
including Microsoft
Office Accounting
Professional (left).
Be sure to have
complete information
about your
employees’ pay
rates and withholding
before you start.
cUstOMized rePOrts Peachtree
makes it easy to design your own reports.
changing assigned accounts, and so on.
PeAchtree Go to Options | Global to set
preferences for things like spell-check,
decimal entry, and transaction sorting.
QUickBOOks If you’ve gone through the
EasyStep interview you’ve already done
some of this work, but some remains. Go to
Edit | Preferences, and click down the list,
making your wishes known.
3. secure your audit trail.
MYOB In Setup | Preferences | Security,
check the box next to Use Audit Trail
Tracking. In the same window, click the
User IDs button to assign access to specific
parts of the program to individual users.
Office AccOUnting If you want an
audit trail, check the Use Change Log field
in Company | Preferences. To give users
access only to specific parts of the program,
go to File | Manage User and Roles.
PeAchtree The audit trail in the
Peachtree versions that contain it is on
and cannot be turned off. Go to Maintain
| User Security to assign roles and permissions.

Online BAnking MYOB incorporates online banking services
through the Bank Register at its Bank Command Center.
QUickBOOks The audit trail in Quick-
Books is on and cannot be turned off. To
assign user access, go to Company | Set Up
Users and Passwords.
4. establish your sales tax.
MYOB This task is handled in the Setup
Assistant.
Office AccOUnting After you’ve set
up sales tax codes, you can create groups
that contain related codes that are often
charged together. For example, if you sell
products in the Seattle area, you could
make a group that contains the local and
Washington state taxes. You might also
want to set up a code for customers in
other states who don’t need to pay your
sales tax. Click Company | Sales tax.
PeAchtree Click the Customers & Sales
button on the left, and then the Sales Tax
icon. Follow the wizard to set up sales
agencies and taxes.
QUickBOOks Go to Edit | Preferences |
Sales Tax. Click the Company Preferences
tab, and then click the Yes button if it isn’t
already selected. Click Add Sales Tax Item
to set up your sales tax agencies, and then
answer the other questions that appear in
the window.
5. customize your forms.
MYOB Go to Setup | Customize Forms.
Select the form you wish to modify, and use
MYOB’s layout designer tool, which helps
you add fields and shift them around.
Office AccOUnting You can modify
the templates included for forms, such
as those for invoices, credit memos, and
purchase orders. Click Customers | Manage
Word Templates, and select a template
type (say, Invoice) from the list on the left,
then the precise document and color (for
example, Invoice Service–green.doc). Click
the Modify button and the document will
open. Use Word’s editing tools to add a
logo or make any other changes you like.
PeAchtree: Click Reports & Forms |
Forms. Select the form that you want to
customize and click Customize. You can
use Peachtree’s layout designer tools to
make changes to any of the forms that are
supported.
QUickBOOks You can modify the boilerplate
form templates by going to Lists |
Templates, selecting the form you want
to modify, and either clicking on the Templates
pull-up list in the lower left-hand
corner for options, or double-clicking on
it. Use the customization tools and layout
designer to make your changes.
6. create cover letters for e-mails.
MYOB Use MYOB’s OfficeLink tool to
modify prefab Word templates (you must
go to Word to make any modifications).
Back in MYOB, go to the Card File Command
Center and select Create Personalized
Letters to initiate the mail merge.
Office AccOUnting Office Accounting’s
integration with Word also helps you write
boilerplate cover letters to go along with
forms. Go to Customers | \Write Letters and
follow the wizard’s steps.
PeAchtree Click Reports & Forms |
Forms. Select the letter you want to edit
and click Edit Letter Template. Click Edit
in the window that opens to create your
alterations.
QUickBOOks Integration with Microsoft
Office makes creating personalized mailings
easy. Go to Customer Center and click
on the Word drop-down menu. Select
Customize Letter Templates and follow the
wizard.
QUickBOOks sYsteM MAP QuickBooks uses a flowchart
navigation system to guide you easily from task to task.
7. set up online banking.
MYOB You can download banking statements;
first go to your bank’s Web site to
learn how. When that’s set up, go to the
Banking Command Center and click Bank
Register, then Get Statement.
Office AccOUnting Click on Banking
| Banking Home and you’ll see all of the
options for this function. If you’re going to
use online banking, click that button and
walk through the wizard.
PeAchtree Click Tasks | Account reconciliation.
Select the account to reconcile, and
click the arrow next to the Banking icon to
set up online statement download.
QUickBOOks Go to Banking | Online
Banking | Set Up Account for Online Services.
8. import company data from excel
MYOB This is handled in the Setup Assistant,
though you must first convert your
file to a TXT document.
Office AccOUnting If you want to
import, for example, a customer list, click
File | Import Excel data. You may have to
massage your existing database to get
it in shape for Office Accounting. Click
the Open Folder button in the wizard that
opens to see the spreadsheet templates, or
simply follow the wizard’s steps to see the
mapping tool.
PeAchtree First, save your Excel file as
a CSV (comma-separated values) document.
Then in Peachtree, click File | Select
Import | Export, then click Import to see
the order of mapping fields.
QUickBOOks Go to File | Utilities | Import |
Excel Files. You’ll be able to copy and paste
your spreadsheet’s columns into a specially
formatted spreadsheet, then import
that data into QuickBooks.
APRIL 2009 PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION 43

OpenOffice.org 3.0 costs absolutely nothing,
yet its features and functionality probably
make it Microsoft Office’s biggest
rival. Even though OpenOffice.org—which
is, yes, an application suite, not just a Web
site—can’t do everything Office can, it can
do quite a bit, and it has some of its own
tricks that even Office can’t manage. Here
are a few of those tricks that may not be
so obvious, as well as a few ways you can
make OpenOffice.org less annoying upon
install.
1. Edit two or more parts of a document
at the same time.
Microsoft Word has a nifty split-window
feature that lets you divide the current
window into two panes, so you can edit
page 5 of your document in the top pane
and page 505 in the bottom. To switch from
one pane to the other, you don’t have to
waste time scrolling back and forth—you
44 PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION APRIL 2009
solutions office
Seven Cool Things You Can Do
with OpenOffice.Org
Even Microsoft Office can’t manage some of the tricks that OpenOffice.org—a free application
suite, not just a Web site—has to offer. By Edward Mendelson
simply click in the other pane.
OpenOffice.org doesn’t let you split
a window into two panes, but it offers an
even better feature. Click the Window
menu, then New Window, to open a new
window that displays the same document
you’re working on. You can open as many
windows as you want, each at a different
place in your document; any change
you make in one window is immediately
reflected in all others.
You can reduce screen clutter by turning
off toolbars in one or more windows
(use View | Toolbars). To tile or cascade the
windows, right-click on the OpenOffice
.org button on the Windows taskbar.
2. Turn off the blinking lightbulb.
By default, a lightbulb icon appears in a
tiny window whenever OpenOffice.org
does anything that isn’t exactly what you
typed—for example, when it replaces two
OnE bETTEr Than a SPlIT wIndOw PanE Use Window | New Window to open as
many windows as you like on the same document. Note that you can display different
toolbars, or no toolbars at all, in each window.
hyphens with a dash. It doesn’t exactly
blink, but after the third or fourth time it
opens, you may think of it as “that blinking
lightbulb” (you might use a word
other than “blinking”). To turn it off permanently,
go to Tools | Options, and then,
in the left-hand pane, expand the menu
tree by clicking the plus sign next to Open-
Office.org. In the General dialog, remove
the check mark next to Help Agent.
3. Use OpenOffice.org to open
legacy documents.
Years ago, older versions of Microsoft
Office could open documents created by
almost any of the myriad word processors
and spreadsheet programs that were
widely used before Microsoft monopolized
the market. Recent versions of
Office can’t open many of those older
formats—including files in old Microsoft
Word versions, such as Word 6.0. By contrast,
OpenOffice.org continues to open
Word documents dating back to Version
6.0. OpenOffice.org also opens WordPerfect
documents, including files created
in WordPerfect for the Macintosh 3.5
Enhanced, which not even WordPerfect
for Windows tries to open.
By the way, there’s something confusing
about OpenOffice.org’s claims. The
product purports to support at least one
format that never existed: The list of supported
file types in its File | Open dialog
includes “Microsoft WinWord 5.0,” even
though there never was such a version.
Word for Windows skipped from 2.0 to 6.0
in its version numbers.
4. Play a vintage Space Invaders
game.
Remember the days of software “Easter
Eggs”? These were not-very-secret
keystrokes or mouse clicks that brought
up silly graphics in some programs and
games in others. Even Microsoft Excel

SPacE InvadErS In a SPrEadShEET OpenOffice’s Calc
gives you the satisfaction of destroying alien invaders when you
can’t bear to look at your financial planning worksheet.
used to have a secret game built in before
Redmond lost its sense of humor. Open-
Office.org’s Calc spreadsheet program still
includes a 1990s-era shoot-’em-up Space
Invaders game. Open the Calc app, and in
any cell enter
=GAME(“StarWars”)
Make sure to copy the capitalization
shown here. Calc will open a StarWars
game in which you shoot down a fleet of evil
alien ships. The explanatory text is in German
(the original version of OpenOffice.
org was written in Germany), but you don’t
need to know German (or even English) to
play the game. Calc has a slightly Teutonic
attitude toward fun-and-games, however:
After you quit the game, you’ll need to shut
down Calc and start it up again before you
can play a second time.
5. Save files in Office formats by
default.
By default OpenOffice.org saves files in its
own format, which most Microsoft Office
users can’t open. You can save individual
files in Office format by using OpenOffice
.org’s File | Save as… menu and selecting a
Word format from the Save as Type dropdown.
But you can tell OpenOffice to save
in Office formats by default by choosing
Tools | Options, then find the Load/Save
category, and the General subcategory. In
the Document Type drop-down, choose
Text Document, and in the Always Save
As drop-down, choose Microsoft Word
97/2000/XP. Then, in the Document Type
drop-down, choose Spreadsheet, and in the
Always Save As drop-down, choose Microsoft
Excel 97/2000/XP. These choices will
create files that can be read by any modern
word processor or spreadsheet.
6. automate actions easily.
Many advanced Microsoft Office users
take advantage of macros that run automatically
when you open, print, or close a
file, but Office’s interface doesn’t provide
built-in clues for creating an AutoClose
macro that will run whenever you close
a document. OpenOffice.org goes Office
one better by providing a menu-driven
interface that lists all the actions that
can automatically trigger macros—and
these include a wider range of actions
than the ones that can be automated easily
in Office. For example, you can create
a macro that is triggered every time the
number of pages in a document increases
bUIldIng macrOS Tools | Customize brings you to this dialog,
where you can attach any macro to an action, such as saving or
printing a file. Make sure to record your macros first, and then
come back to this dialog.
and that inserts a header with a page number
if the number goes above, say, 2.
Other actions that can automatically
trigger macros include saving a document
under a different name and running a
mail merge. To use this feature, record the
macros you want to use, then go to Tools |
Customize | Events and assign your chosen
macro to specific events.
7. Fix those single quotes.
By default, OpenOffice.org Writer creates
good-looking, curly “typographic” double-quotation
marks as you type, but for
some reason, when you type a single quotation
mark (or an apostrophe) it uses a
vertical line, as if you were still using your
grandfather’s manual typewriter. You can
fix this by going to Tools | AutoCorrect…,
then going to the Custom Quotes tab and,
under Single Quotes, adding a check mark
next to Replace.
FIxIng qUOTES Use
Tools | AutoCorrect…
to open this dialog,
and add the check
mark next to Replace
near the top. If you
click the button to the
left of Default, you get
the dialog shown here,
where you can make
sure that the program
has chosen the correct
quotation mark.
APRIL 2009 PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION 45

Mobile Device Security Measures
Even the simplest cell phones carry enough data to be dangerous in the wrong hands.
By Matthew D. Sarrel
Everyone is mobilizing. Our lives, not just
business but also personal, have become
entwined with our cell phones (or is it
vice versa?). “Cell phone” isn’t even the
right term anymore for many people, who
use their BlackBerrys, iPhones, and other
smartphones almost as much as they use
46 PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION APRIL 2009
solutions security watch
their computers. This makes our mobile
devices and the data they contain just as
important as our laptops and desktops.
Add a direct Internet connection (which
very few people secure)—and the likelihood
of physical loss or theft—and you’ve
got a recipe for disaster.
You may have some help from your
security suite; some of these now include
mobile features, although at this point
we’re not sure they’re necessary.
However, there are a number of things
you can do yourself to avoid a data-theft
disaster.
BlackBerry (System 4.5 and higher)
Go to Options, then Security Options, then:
1. PaSSword-Protect Start-uP. Under General Settings,
set Password to Enabled. You may also want to change other settings
here, such as the number of password attempts allowed
before the device is locked, and whether the device should automatically
lock on holstering. Commit your changes by pressing the
Back button (the half-circle arrow) and enter your new password
when prompted. Choose a password you’ll remember and that will
be quick and easy to type. Confirm that password, then exit to the
main menu. Lock your phone by pressing and holding the * button
to confirm that it has been password-protected.
2. encryPt data. Scroll past General Settings to Content Protection,
and enable it. Under Strength, you can select Strong (80
bits), Stronger (128 bits), or Strongest (256 bits). Use Stronger for
faster encryption/decryption or Strongest for the most security.
Selecting Yes for Include Address Book will keep your contacts
secure but will also result in disabling caller ID when the phone
is locked. Circle-arrow back out, then create an encryption key
by randomly moving the trackball and typing characters. A good
practice is to regenerate an encryption key every two to four
weeks: Under Security Options | General Settings, click on any service,
then click Regenerate encryption key.
3. Secure PaSSwordS. Never save usernames and passwords
in your mobile device’s browser. Anyone who finds your device
could gain access to all of your online accounts. Instead, use the
Password Keeper utility to store and encrypt this info.
4. Lock down BLuetooth. By default, Bluetooth is on. In
addition to wasting your battery, this leaves you open to Bluetoothbased
attacks. From the Home screen, go to Set Up Bluetooth. When
prompted to Add Device select Cancel. Press the Menu button,
then select Options. Set Discoverable to No, so other devices can’t
find your BlackBerry, and set Security to High—or if the Bluetooth
devices you use with your BlackBerry support it, set Security to
High + Encryption to encrypt Bluetooth data transmissions. From
the checklist, enable only services you think you’re going to use
with Bluetooth—most commonly headset and hands-free.
5. cLear memory. Also under Security Options, memory clearing
can delete sensitive data, such as unencrypted e-mail messages
and username, password, and other certificate-related info. You can
set the BlackBerry to clear memory under certain circumstances—
for example, when you holster your BlackBerry or lock it.

Smartphone (windows mobile 6)
1. PaSSword Protect Start-uP. Go to Start | Settings | Lock and
configure a password. Check the box next to Prompt if the device is
unused for and then select a time period from the drop-down box,
something in the 5-to-30-minute range. You can set your password
to be a simple four-digit PIN or a strong alphanumeric string and
then enter the password in the boxes below. You can also set a hint,
but remember that this can be read by anyone with physical access
to your phone. At this point, it would help to go to Settings | Today,
click the Items tab and check the box next to Device Lock to provide
a quick locking option on your Home screen.
2. encryPt data. Under Settings | Security | Encryption, check
the box that says Encrypt files placed on the storage card, then
click OK. A storage card can actually contain both encrypted and
nonencrypted data, but encrypted data can be read only from the
device in which it was encrypted and written, or from a Windows
PC using ActiveSync and Windows Mobile Device Center. There’s
also a big gotcha lurking: If you have to perform a hard reset of
your device or update the ROM, you will lose the encryption key
stored on the device, and with it, access to your data. Companies
can push encryption policies to Windows Mobile devices using
Exchange Server 2007.
3. Secure PaSSwordS. This requires a third-party solution,
such as KeePas or some other eWallet type of encrypted password
manager.
4. Lock down BLuetooth. Go to Start | Settings, then the
Connections tab, then Bluetooth. On the Mode tab you can enable or
disable Bluetooth and make your device visible; Off and Not visible
are the more secure settings. Scroll all the way right to the Security
tab and check the box to require authentication for data beaming.
5. cLear the memory and cache. In Internet Explorer,
go to Menu | Tools | Options; in the Memory tab you can set a history
retention time in days or clear the history manually. Click the
Delete Files button to clear the Web cache. Navigate to the Security
tab and click the Clear Cookies button.
iPhone
Unfortunately, you won’t find a list item
called “Encrypt data” below. At this point,
there doesn’t seem to be any encryption
available for iPhones.
1. enaBLe PaSScode Lock and
auto-Lock. Click the main iPhone Settings
icon, and then click the General
tab and select Auto-Lock. Select the time
period you want, and then exit out to the
Home screen. Once Auto-Lock locks the
phone, Passcode Lock will require you to
type a four-digit PIN to unlock it. Click the
iPhone Settings icon, then the General tab,
then Passcode Lock. From there enable
Turn Passcode On. Enter your passcode.
Tap Require Passcode and then choose
Immediately.
2. Secure PaSSwordS. There’s no
native way to do this, so you’ll have to use a
third-party password manager.
3. Lock down BLuetooth. It’s great
that Bluetooth is off by default on iPhones,
but you should also set yours to require an
eight-character PIN for connections with
Macs. Turn on Bluetooth only when you
need it.
4. cLear the memory and cache.
Back on the Passcode Lock screen, you can
disable SMS Preview while the device is in
its locked state, and also turn on the Erase
Data function. This will wipe the iPhone
clean after ten failed passcode attempts.
You can clear cookies, browser cache, and
history from the Settings menu in Safari.
APRIL 2009 PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION 47

SOluTIONS
Tips
Useful tidbits from PCMag editorial staff, Labs analysts, and readers
MICROSOFT OFFICE
Restore a Disappearing Toolbar in
Word for Mac
Recently my oft-used formatting toolbar in
Word 2008 for Mac went missing. One day
it simply disappeared, despite the fact that
the Formatting box under View | Toolbars
remained selected—how to get it back was
a frustrating mystery. I trolled every menu
option in Word, looking for the box that I
could check to recover it. At last I noticed
a small, nondescript oval button in the top
right-hand corner of my document window:
Clicking on it made my toolbar magically
reappear. Turns out that this little
bubble expands and retracts Word’s toolbars.
In fact it appears all over Apple’s OS
X, in Finder, browser, and other programs’
windows, and it does the same thing in all
of them. Who knew? Thanks, Apple, for
making this option so puzzling!—Wendy
Sheehan Donnell
Align Images in Microsoft Word
It’s easy enough to get an image into Word
2007—just copy it to the clipboard and
paste it in, or choose Insert | Picture. But
once the image is in there, you may find it a
balky old thing. You can’t move it around,
and you can’t put text alongside it; it’s
an albatross! The key to unlocking your
pasted image lies in the Text Wrapping setting.
By default, it’s set to In Line with Text,
which might be handy if your image is an
arcane rune not found in any font—then
it would flow with the text and stay in just
the right place. Most of the time, though,
you’ll want to choose a different setting.
Right-click the image, choose Text Wrapping
from the context menu, and choose
Square or Tight (or any of the other wrapping
options). Now your pasted image is
48 PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION APRIL 2009
no longer locked in place. You can move
it wherever you want, and you can decide
how the text should behave around it.
You’ll find other helpful options in the Picture
ribbon that appears when you select
an image.—Neil J. Rubenking
Set New Time Increments in
Outlook’s Calendar
Outlook’s calendar divides days into hours,
which are in turn broken up into half-hours,
with appointments starting and ending on
the hour or half-hour. You’re allowed to
type odd times in (down to the minute), but
for people whose classes, appointments,
or other calendar items regularly start and
end at 15 or 45 minutes past the hour, scheduling
can become tedious. Having fielded
questions from such folk, I scoured Outlook’s
calendar options, to no avail.
The answer was out there, however,
lurking in a context menu—thanks, Microsoft,
for putting a random option nowhere
near the Options dialog. Here’s how to make
Outlook respect your schedule: Right-click
somewhere in your calendar (somewhere
within a day, not in the left-hand pane) and
choose Other Settings.... Then, next to Time
Scale, choose another time increment—say,
15 minutes. In addition to seeing your hours
divided into four segments instead of the
default two, your scheduling drop-down
will display times in 15-minute increments.
You can’t type in a custom increment, but
being able to choose 5-, 6- (6-minute increments?
Seriously?), 10-, 15-, 30-, or 60-minute
increments is a start.—Sarah Pike
NETWORKING
Improve Power-Line Performance
If you are getting less-than-stellar performance
with your power-line network, it’s
MISSING TOOLBAR?
If your toolbar in Word
2008 for the Mac goes
missing, click on the
gray oval box in the
right-hand corner.
probably because your adapters are connected
across two circuit breakers. For
best results, make sure the power-line
adapters are on the same circuit. Note that
networking performance can also degrade
if your electric circuit is overloaded, so
try not to use the hair dryer, refrigerator,
and air conditioner all on the same one.
—Mario Morejon
Turn Your Cell Phone into a Modem
Wishing you could get on the Internet
from your laptop without having to find
a Wi-Fi hot spot? Don’t want to pay $60
per month for a cellular broadband connection?
You can probably use your current
cell phone as a modem for your
laptop—and at a significant savings compared
with implementing a separate PC
card, ExpressCard, or USB solution. Head
over to Smart Device Central’s Modem
Tethering Guide for information on setting
up this kind of connection: There are
instructions for each carrier using a PC
laptop, and one specifically for Mac laptop
users.—Jamie Lendino
CAMERAS
Calibrate Your Monitor
Ever wonder why some of your friends’
pictures look better than yours? Well,
maybe it’s not your camera; it could be
your monitor. Calibration tools and software
can help you optimize your monitor’s
contrast and brightness settings so
that your pictures can come out looking
detailed and accurate. Expensive tools like
the Spyder3 can adjust your monitor for
you automatically. And software calibration
tools like DisplayMate can help you
fine-tune your monitor’s picture to your
eye. A quick Google search will turn up

a bunch of free basic-calibration images
you can try as a way of getting your feet
wet.—PJ Jacobowitz
MulTIMEDIA
Get the Best Image Quality from
Your HDTV
Most HDTVs provide several picture presets
that can be selected for quickly and
easily optimizing the picture quality for a
particular viewing environment—such as
daytime or nighttime viewing. An HDTV’s
default picture mode usually produces its
brightest picture, which would be suitable
for use in a sunny or otherwise brightly lit
room. For a more accurate and naturallooking
viewing experience, particularly
in a dimly lit environment where the eye
is more sensitive to detail, picture presets
such as Movie, Cinema, or Natural are better
choices. —Robert Heron
Choose the Right Port for Your
HDTV
Video sources such as Blu-ray players,
cable and satellite set-top boxes, and console
game systems provide an array of connection
options to use with an HDTV. For
optimal picture quality, always use the best
port that the source and the TV share. For
instance, if an upscaling DVD player and
a HDTV both have HDMI ports (a singlewire,
digital audio/video connection), then
always use the HDMI ports. The next best
port option would be component video
input (a three-cable analog-video-only system).
Ports such as composite (the yellow
RCA-style port) or S-Video (a four-wire,
single-cable video connection) do not sup-
port HD formats and should be avoided
when connecting HD-compatible gear. If
you have no choice but to use composite or
S-Video, opt for the latter: It will provide a
more detailed picture.—RH
Improve the Quality of Your Music
Library
With MP3 player capacities increasing
every year, most devices have more room
for “lossless” files now. Lossless files act
like ZIP files—they use far less compression
but take up much less space than
the originals, and sound a lot better than
lower-bit-rate MP3, WMA, and AAC files.
In iTunes or Window Media Player, you
can choose to import files as either Apple
Lossless or WMA Lossless. Or, using free
software available online, you can convert
audio into FLAC (free lossless audio
codec)—just make sure your player can
support FLAC first.—Tim Gideon
Optimize Sound Through Proper
Speaker Placement
Stereo is mixed in two channels, and if you
want to hear the same balance the mix engineer
heard, make sure your head forms an
equilateral triangle with your two speakers’
tweeters (high-frequency drivers). You
want your ears to be at the same height as
the tweeters, so buying the right height of
speaker stand is essential. Speaker height
can be problematic at a desk if the speakers
aren’t upward-angled. There are desktop
speaker stands, however, that eliminate
this issue—or you can use phone books
or CD cases, just as long as you place both
speakers at the same height.—TG
INTERNET
Speed-Dial Your Nine Favorite Sites
Using Firefox
A reader named Gregory T. wrote to me
recently saying that he wished Firefox
would mimic a feature from Opera, his
favorite Web browser: Speed Dial opens
new tabs to a grid of nine user-chosen
sites. With it, your most-visited sites are
a single click away. (Gregory also finds
Firefox faster than Opera, which surprises
me, as Firefox is often the worst
performer on my speed tests.) Good news!
For devoted Firefox users and Opera users
who have to open Firefox for the occasional
incompatible site, an extension,
also called Speed Dial, adds just such an
option to Firefox.—Michael Muchmore
This Just In: Google’s Not the Only
Internet Search Provider!
I always use the Google box in the upper
right-hand corner of my browser to do
a search, rather than taking the time to
go to Google.com or whatever. And I’m
always looking for keyboard shortcuts to
avoid having to move my hand over to the
mouse and back. Here’s one: Put your cursor
in the box, type some text, and then use
the Ctrl-Down Arrow or Ctrl-Up Arrow
to scroll through the various installed
engines, rather than using the pull-down
menu. Awesome! —Jeremy A. Kaplan
GREAT IDEA! Got a tip to share? Find a cool
new trick in your favorite gadget or app?
Send it to tips@pcmag.com. We’ll run it
through the PCMag Labs wringer and print
our favorites on this page.
SPEED DIAL This
Firefox extension allows
users to open new tabs
to a grid of nine sites of
their choice.
APRIL 2009 PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION 49

Desktops
mainstream
Hp pavilion elite m9400t
$843 list
BuDget/Value
lenovo ideaCentre k210
$449 direct
gaming/ multimeDia
Velocity micro raptor
signature edition $6,999 direct
nNEW Dell studio Xps 435
$1,769 direct
all-in-one
sony Vaio VgC-Js130J/p
$1,099.99 list
Business
Dell optiplex 755 $1,183 direct
laptops & noteBooks
mainstream
apple macBook pro 15-inch
(penryn) $2,899 direct
gaming
alienware m17 $2,059 direct
multimeDia
Hp HDX16t $1,790 direct
meDia Center/Desktop replaCement
lenovo thinkpad W700
$4,240 direct
acer aspire 6930g-6723
$1,020 street
Dell studio Xps 16 $1,804 direct
netBook
nNEW asus eeepC 1000He
$400 street
Business
lenovo thinkpad t400
$1,580 direct
BuDget
Hp pavilion dv2800t
$1,049 direct
storage
portaBle
nNEW lenovo thinkpad usB
portable secure Drive
$319 list
nNEW Clickfree HD325 $180 list
Desktop
Western Digital my
Book studio edition ii
$430 list
netWork-attaCHeD storage
Hp storageWorks aio400t
$3,799 list
lCD monitors
lenovo thinkVision l200x
$499.99 list
Dell ultrasharp 2408WFp
$689 direct
proJeCtors
editors’ Choices
in key Categories
For the complete
reviews of these
products and more
Editors’ Choices check
out go.pcmag.com/
editorschoice
Canon realis X700 $2,500 list
neC Vt800 $1,000 street
Dell m109s $499 direct
50 PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION APRIL 2009
Best
printers
monoCHrome laser
samsung ml-2851nD
$150 street
Color laser
lexmark C544dn $499 direct
stanDarD inkJet
Canon pixma ip4300
$99.99 direct
all-in-one inkJet
Canon pixma mp980
Wireless $299.99 direct
pHoto printer
Hp photosmart a636
Compact photo printer
$149.99 direct
netWorking
netgear powerline adapter
kit (XaVB101) $130 street
smC smCgs8p $300 street
HDtVs
plasma
Vizio Vp505XVt $1,499.99 list
lCD
samsung ln52a750
$3,999.99 list
oleD
sony Xel-1 oleD Digital tV
$2,499.99 list
Digital Cameras
CompaCt
Canon powershot a1000 is
$349.99 list
D-slr
nikon D300 $1,800 street
(body only)
Canon eos rebel Xsi $699 list
(body only)
superzoom
panasonic lumix DmC-Fz18
$399.95 list
Digital ViDeo Cameras
Creative Vado pocket
Video Cam HD
$299.99 direct
sony HDr-sr11
$1,099.99 direct
reaDing
is Fun again The
Amazon Kindle 2 has a slew
of new features for bookworms.
Digital pHoto & ViDeo
multimeDia suite
adobe Creative suite 3
$999 direct
ViDeo-eDiting soFtWare
Cyberlink powerDirector 7
ultra $119.95 direct
pHoto eDiting
adobe photoshop Cs4
$1,150 list
picasa 3 (beta) Free
Digital pHoto Frame
sony Vaio VgF-Cp1 $299 list
mp3 players
HarD Disk
microsoft zune 120gB
$249.99 list
FlasH
apple ipod touch 8GB,
$229 direct
apple ipod nano 16GB,
$199 direct
samsung yp-u3 (2gB) $90 list
speakers/DoCks
Chestnut Hill sound george
$549 direct
Hercules Xps 2.1 lounge
$60 street
logitech pure-Fi Dream
$200 direct
meDia eXtenDers
sonos Bundle 150 $999 direct
slingbox pro-HD $299 list
gaming Consoles
sony playstation 3 $399 direct
gps DeViCes
nNEW garmin nüvi 265t
$279.99 list
gaDgets
nNEW amazon kindle 2
$359 direct
Cell pHones
alltel
rim BlackBerry Curve 8330
From $229.99 with contract
at&t
apple iphone 3g
From $199.99 with contract
sprint
rim BlackBerry Curve 8330
$179.99 with contract
t-moBile
nNEW samsung memoir
sgH-t929 $299 direct
Verizon Wireless
samsung knack sCH-u310
$39.99 with contract
unloCkeD
nokia n82 $629 direct
HeaDsets
BluetootH
aliph new Jawbone
$129.99 list
HeaDpHones
ultimate ears ue 11 pro
$1,150 list
oFFiCe & proDuCtiVity
adobe acrobat 9 pro
$449 direct
nNEW QuickBase
$250 direct/month
nNEW skype 4.0 Free
speeCH reCognition
Dragon naturally
speaking 10 $99.99 direct
Desktop puBlisHing
adobe illustrator Cs4
$599 direct
ipHone apps
air sharing $6.99 direct
stanza Free
photogene $2.99 direct
entertainment
pandora (for iphone) Free
rhapsody From $12.99/month
nNEW slacker Free
nNEW apple ilife ’09 $79 direct
nNEW google earth 5.0 Free
nNEW simCity 2009
(for iphone) Free
seCurity
antiVirus
Webroot antiVirus with
antispyware 6.0 $39.95 direct
you.
suite
norton internet security
with it
2009 $69.99 yearly
parental Control
bring
net nanny 6.0 $39.99 yearly
and
BaCkup
sos online Backup (beta)
page
$19.95 direct
this
FinanCial
Print
QuickBooks accounting
pro edition 2009 $199.95 list
wisely.
nNEW Quicken Home
& Business 2009 $79.99 direct Shop