Nov 95 First Impressions

BY: James Bell

Using a computer to get your work done can be fun, and DataCal is out to prove it with Design Shop. Design Shop isn't quite a full-fledged desktop publishing package, but you can use its templates to create business cards, letterheads, calendars, posters and banners. Or you can just cut loose and make some greeting cards or coloring books.

Design Shop is easy to use, with clearly labeled options and dialog boxes that include a preview capability. The program also provides up to 99 levels of undo and redo, which makes experimenting simple and safe.

Design Shop's first screen is a dialog box that lets you select a blank page or predesigned template. The software package includes 65 templates, broken down into eight output categories. Output forms range from four-sided greeting cards to banners as big as 7 by 9 feet to coloring books of up to 60 pages. Most of the output categories include page size and orientation variations, and Design Shop adds cut- or fold-lines for special layouts. The templates are adequate, but the program is actually capable of producing much more sophisticated materials than the examples indicate.

Editing tools are plentiful, but haphazardly scattered about the screen. Buttons across the top are for adding text, pictures, borders and calendars (annual, semiannual, monthly, weekly and daily) to any layout, and for controlling alignment. There's a fixed toolbar on the left for changing magnification levels, and a floating toolbox for adjusting font sizes, styles, fill colors and patterns, and adding special effects.

Design Shop uses two tools for text--one for single lines of text and another for paragraphs. With both, you type your text in a dialog box instead of directly onto your design project. A single line of text--up to 40 characters--is treated much like a graphic. You can't adjust font size or alignment, but you can stretch and size it with the mouse, and add colored borders, shadows and other special effects, such as 3-D and warp effects.

Special effects can't be applied to paragraph text, but you can use font size, style and alignment controls, and you can import ASCII text. Design Shop ships with 26 TrueType fonts.

The program's graphic offerings should appeal to nonartists. For basic shapes, there is a Simple Editor with lines, boxes, ovals, diamonds, spirals and other symbols. Another toolbar includes a wide variety of arrows that you can drag onto the page. For more detailed illustrations, Design Shop includes 500 pieces of clip art in color and black and white. You can also import .BMP, .PCX, .TIF, .WMF and .CGM graphics.

While you can align, size, layer and flip graphics, editing options are almost nonexistent. You can copy graphics into the Simple Editor and color them there, but without a group/ungroup option, even the coloring capability's usefulness is limited. This is too bad, especially considering the sophisticated color and fill patterns available.

Colors, which can be applied to text, text frames and the overall page, can be selected from an initial palette of 48 predefined colors. You can also specify up to 16 custom colors using RGB or HLS (Hue Lightness Saturation) selectors. Fill patterns apply only to an entire page and include a variety of color and black-and-white patterns. You can create your own patterns, including repeating symbols, images or gradient colors. A selection of fancy borders for outlining pages is also available.

More advanced users can create their own custom templates, picture catalogs and color libraries (though the latter is not easy, requiring you to edit a file using a text editor). You can also export selected objects or entire pages from Design Shop as .BMP, .PCX, .TIF or .WMF files. Versions of Design Shop that include more clip art and an image manager program are available on diskette and CD-ROM for $69.95.

Despite a few shortcomings, DataCal's Design Shop is an easy and enjoyable way to design all sorts of simple documents.

--Info File--
Design Shop 1.3
Price: $49.95
In Brief: Design Shop makes it fun to create business cards, letterheads, greeting cards and other simple page designs.
Disk Space: 3MB (minimum), 11MB (full installation)
System Resources: 5%
RAM: 4MB
DataCal Corp.
800-223-0123, 602-813-3100

BY: Hailey Lynne McKeefry

My scanner came with a basic utility that let me stumble through document scanning. TextBridge Professional Edition 3.0, with its easy-to-use interface and strong OCR capabilities, makes that same journey a virtual walk in the park.

The program's interface is simple and clean-cut. Eight control-bar buttons provide access to many of TextBridge's features, including Start/Continue Processing, Stop Processing and Cancel Current Page. From this control bar, I could bring information into the program directly from a file or from a scanner. I could also specify whether I wanted to preview the scan before the OCR, defer OCR or train the OCR.

With the Instant Access OCR feature, you can access TextBridge from within any of about a dozen applications. Among my array of applications, TextBridge provided this support for Sidekick, Microsoft Word 6.0 and Microsoft Mail. By using Instant Access, I was able to "register" my most-often-used apps so that the TextBridge OCR command was added to each one's File menu. By keeping the Instant Access feature running but minimized, the OCR command stays active on the File menus so you can launch TextBridge quickly without leaving your current work.

Despite some of its rather sophisticated features, TextBridge simplifies document scanning. Place the page in your scanner, click on the GO button and the software activates the scanner, acquires the image and reads the document. At the end of the process, the software prompts for additional pages. You can save the output in any of 30 formats, including Microsoft Word 2.0 or 6.0; WordPerfect 4.2, 5.1, 6.0 or 6.1; Lotus Ami Pro 2.0 or 3.0; Microsoft Excel 3.0 or 4.0; and PostScript. (I saved the test documents as Word 6.0 .RTF files.)

TextBridge's preview allows you to create text zones on the page and choose only certain document parts for OCR processing. With the Image Zone tool, you indicate which scanned-image parts are graphics that should be saved without OCR processing. Doing OCR training on the document--defining consistently misinterpreted text--improved the already acceptable accuracy substantially and was no more time-consuming than spell checking a document. I was also able to rotate misscanned documents so that they were positioned correctly for OCR.

The included TextBridge Proofreader lets you perform post-recognition proofreading from within Word or WordPerfect. These proofreaders are more powerful than the OCR training. Suspect words are color coded, based on the program's confidence in its best guess: green for high, dark yellow for medium and red for low. The Proofreader lets you choose to Stop At or Accept All words in each confidence category. As with a spell checker, there's a Replace All button for those times when a term or phrase is consistently misrecognized. Show Image displays a bitmap image of incorrect words in their context.

Document Recomposition is, perhaps, TextBridge's most powerful feature. There are two recomposition modes: text-only, for documents with tables that should be output as cell tables; and text and automatically detected graphics mode, which outputs the page with original column and art layout intact. Very complicated layouts confound this feature, so it may be necessary to manually zone the text and images.

TextBridge Professional is a sophisticated OCR application that is probably overkill for those who need to scan only occasionally. But the program's straightforward interface belies its powerful capabilities.

--Info File--
TextBridge Professional Edition 3.0
Price: $249 (street); upgrade, $149
In Brief: TextBridge is a sophisticated yet easy-to-use OCR package.
Disk Space: 13MB
System Resources: 1%
RAM: 8MB
Xerox Desktop Document Systems
800-248-6550 x3, 508-977-2000

BY: Sara G. Stephens

On the way to Oz, the Cowardly Lion, Scarecrow and Tin Man might pick up a new wayfarer: the phone-bound executive searching for a voice-activated PC. But he doesn't have to go as far as the Emerald City to find a wizard. Speech Systems' SpeechWizard kit adds voice activation to applications, and even the most nontechnical users will have their PCs responding to voice commands in short order.

SpeechWizard requires a 486 or Pentium processor, and a permanent swap file of at least 24MB is recommended. Included in the kit are SpeechWizard Workshop and SpeechWizard Executive, both of which work with an included .WAV-compatible sound board, the PE500 Interactive Speech Card (ISC). The kit also has a monaural headset with an adjustable boom that you plug into the ISC card to record and play back .WAV files.

SpeechWizard's concept is simple. You provide the context (required conditions) for the app you want to voice activate. Then compile it and load it. After setting the gain control, simply Alt+Tab to your Windows app and start speaking your way down computing's yellow brick road. SpeechWizard simplifies some pretty sophisticated programming without sacrificing flexibility. For example, a Voice Options box lets you choose whether to make the Windows app totally voice-activated or controlled first by keystrokes, then voice. With the former, you can program SpeechWizard to recognize spoken keywords that will trigger the app's voice activation.

Alternatively, you can clear the Voice Activation box in the Voice Settings option. With this option disabled, when you want to speak a command first right-click your mouse. This helps prevent your applications from responding to background sounds in noisy environments.

SpeechWizard uses OLE for context creation. Open an app and press a key command to copy the context for the app's navigation, menu and button commands and paste into your Workshop space. SpeechWizard tells you the syntax it has assigned to each command you select for voice activation. Keep the default syntax or change it to suit your needs. After confirming the syntax, click on Rebuild to compile the code.

SpeechWizard also lets you create new custom commands that can be activated by voice instructions. Simply name and describe the command in the Workshop, then capture the keystrokes in the app to define the activity. Upon returning to Speech Wizard, the code and syntax appear in the context file, awaiting compilation.

I was impressed with SpeechWizard's accuracy. If I kept the headset microphone about 0.25 inch from my mouth, my speech was reliably recognized. When the mike slipped, however, I had to reset the gain to maintain recognition accuracy. At one point, I spoke the phrase "We come in peace," and it was recognized as "Set phasers to stun." This error--potentially fatal, in this case--was due either to a maladjusted gain or to the fact that my default speech model was set to male rather than female.

This is not to say I had a glitch-free experience with the wizard. A faulty file prevented me from building dictionaries in the Wizard Workshop, but a friendly tech-support representative was quick to modem a patch to me. A heel-click from there and I was right back in business.

Free tech support is offered for 90 days, after which you must buy a maintenance agreement from Speech Systems. Fortunately, support is offered in various formats: voice, fax, BBS and World Wide Web. The package also includes an effective User Manual, with plenty of screen shots to keep you on track and a well-grounded troubleshooting grid that helps you solve any programming problems that may arise.

--Info File--
SpeechWizard
Price: $795 (includes development tools, headset and card)
In Brief: SpeechWizard marries BASIC, GUI and speech technology, empowering nonprogrammers with voice-activated Windows apps.
Disk Space: 12MB
System Resources: 10%
RAM: 8MB

Speech Systems
303-938-1110, fax 303-938-1874

BY: Rich Castagna

Back in the good old days, you could cobble a quick presentation by banging away at the typewriter and then copying your pages to transparencies. You could practically do it in your sleep. Then your audience could catch up on their sleep when your less than artful slides hit the screen. With ASAP, putting together a presentation requires even less effort--but the polished results are far from snooze-inducing.

ASAP, which I tested in beta, is designed for the occasional presenter or for those who can't commit the time to learn one of the more potent presentation packages. The program's point-and-click approach is a panacea for the artistically impaired.

The program's clean interface is dominated by the work area with its three tabs--one for a presentation outline, a second to assemble and view slides, and the last to run your slide show. Most of each tab's related activities are accessible via a handful of toolbar buttons.

You start out on the Outline tab where a fresh page is ready. Next to the page symbol, you type in your first slide's title. Click on the Insert Point button and enter the first major topic. To fill in the rest of the slide's information, you click on the Insert Sub-Point button for each additional line. After typing the slide text, you can drag the lines around to rearrange them or change their emphasis. For the second and all subsequent slides, just click on the Insert Page button.

With your outline complete, you switch to the Preview tab where--voila!--ASAP has turned your jottings into presentation-quality slides. If you like the style choices that ASAP has made, you're done. Otherwise, it's possible to change the look of your slides by choosing from ASAP's 22 layout templates, 13 design templates and 17 color schemes. You can select from among these by scanning the thumbnail representations and clicking on them or by dragging them onto the slide. You could--given the time and the desire to build the perfect presentation--click your way through the nearly 5,000 combinations that these presets provide.

If you've already composed your outline in Microsoft Word, you can import it lock, stock and Roman numerals into ASAP. Without making you retype a single subtopic, the program will turn your outline into a presentation. ASAP will accept text, .RTF and WordPerfect files, too. And if you tend to work along your own lines, you can eschew the outline altogether and type directly on the slide templates.

ASAP knows that words alone can spell disaster in a presentation. You can put pizzazz in your presentation by pasting pictures on slides. ASAP accepts seven graphics file formats: .PCX, .BMP, .WMF, .GIF, .TIF, .EPS and .DIB. You can also use graphics as backgrounds or as logos that appear on all slides, and import WordArt text effects from Microsoft Word.

Tables and charts are also well accommodated by ASAP. When you select Insert/Special/Chart, ASAP switches you to Excel in its chart mode. You can create any Excel chart based on spreadsheet data and it will be plugged into your ASAP presentation slide. If you make changes on the Excel sheet that affect the chart, the copy in your presentation will reflect those changes.

Similarly, you can add a table to a presentation by copying it from Word and pasting it onto a blank slide. The inserted table retains its format, but its content can be edited in ASAP. A quick click on a layout thumbnail will reorient a table by swapping its columns and rows. If you have a long list of items on a slide, ASAP will automatically break it up into snaking columns with bullet graphics highlighting each entry. If the list items' sequence is important, you can click on the Show/Hide Numbers button to replace the bullets with sequential numbering. After you add or delete items, ASAP automatically rearranges and resizes them for the best fit on the slide.

If you choose ASAP over one of the heftier presentation programs you do give up some snappy features like fancy transition effects. But you'll save yourself some grief (and even gnashing of teeth), and you might have the time to read that trashy novel you brought along.

--Info File--
ASAP
Price: $99 (street)
In Brief: ASAP provides a lickety-split route from ideas to polished presentation.
Software Publishing Corp.
800-234-2500, 408-988-7558

BY: Jonathan Blackwood

Six months after introducing the 63MHz Pentium OverDrive chip, Intel has upped the megahertz ante with an 83MHz Pentium OverDrive, intended for the 33MHz motherboard. When we looked at the 63MHz version, we found its performance lagged behind a 100MHz 486DX4 OverDrive chip even though the Pentium chip at the time cost about $100 more.

The 83MHz chip provides a higher level of performance than the 63MHz model, but that's not the good news. The good news is that Intel has slashed prices enough to make the Pentium chips really affordable. The 83MHz model debuts at $299, and the 63MHz chip has been reduced from a stratospheric $449 to a reasonable $279. The 486DX4/100 OverDrive chip has been reduced to $229.

I upgraded a Gateway 2000 486DX2/66 machine equipped with a VESA local bus, Diamond Stealth64 VRAM video adapter, 16MB of RAM and a 540MB Maxtor hard disk. This system is a typical candidate for an upgrade--new enough, with enough RAM and storage to make it hard to discard, yet getting a little long in the tooth. Its Micronics motherboard also offers the advantage of a user-selectable clock speed, so I could lower the clock speed to 25MHz to compare it accurately with the 63MHz chip, which was intended for 25MHz systems. The test machine didn't have level 1 write-back cache capability, which Intel says provides a big performance boost for both Pentium OverDrive chips. Both OverDrives have 32KB of level 1 cache, compared to only 8KB for the typical 486 chip or 16KB for the garden-variety Pentium. Unlike standard Pentiums, which have a 64-bit data path to RAM, the OverDrives use the same 32-bit data pathway employed by 486 CPUs.

BY: Joel T. Patz

WinFax and its competitors have made computer-based faxing a reality. But even though you've become thoroughly familiar with using a fax modem, you still need a fax machine if you've got a piece of paper that needs to be faxed--until now. Delrina's new WinFax Scanner uses your fax modem to send and receive even hard-copy faxes, plus a lot more.

The product combines a Fujitsu-built scanner with WinFax Pro 4.0. Together, they enable you to scan, send, edit, file and copy paper documents right from your desk. WinFax Scanner offers a raft of new, time-saving ways to handle information.

If WinFax Scanner is open, just insert a document for scanning; WinFax Pro will automatically launch, and the dialog box for sending a fax will appear on your screen. In a few moments, you'll have faxed the document you just scanned.

With no boards to install, the scanner connects to your computer's parallel port. There's a second parallel port on the scanner for your printer. WinFax Scanner's 11.5-@4.2-inch footprint takes up hardly any room at all; in fact, the unit weighs less than four pounds. The 10-page automatic document feeder, which lets the unit scan up to six pages a minute, means virtually hands-free operation for the busy user. You can choose resolution levels from 100 to 300 dots per inch. Scanned documents can be saved in a variety of file formats, such as .BMP, .TIF and .DOC.

If you're in a hurry and need only a few copies of a document, scan it and use your printer as a copier. You can also set up the program to clean up documents automatically each time you scan. If a page tilts at a slight angle due to incorrect insertion or non-standard sheet size, the Straighten tool will set things right. You can also flip pages that were scanned upside down. When working with multiple pages, you can view thumbnail representations of scanned pages and use drag-and-drop to reorder them easily and quickly.

An outstanding feature is the program's OCR (optical character recognition), which uses Xerox's TextBridge OCR engine. This capability lets you convert a faxed document into a text file. You can choose to recognize an entire fax automatically or manually select only specific portions of a document for conversion. Then edit the text in your word processor or spreadsheet program. WinFax Pro provides application macros for WordPerfect 6.x, Word 2.0 and 6.0, Ami Pro 3.0, and Excel 4.0 and 5.0. If you wish to change text before saving it for formatting in another application, the program's Interactive Text Edit feature provides a split editing screen and a spell checker to speed your work.

If you have a logo or other graphic on one document that you'd like to use in another, simply scan the original document and use the included Leadview feature to cut and paste the graphic. A single click invokes stamps for faxed documents, such as Confidential, Draft, Approved, or happy or sad faces; you can even design your own stamp for special uses.

There are virtually no changes to WinFax Pro itself, and current users of the program can purchase the scanner at a slightly lower price. As long as WinFax Pro and Windows are running, you can automatically receive faxes on your computer if you've got a dedicated fax modem line. If you have only one telephone line for both fax and voice calls, manually receiving a fax takes a little extra effort, but the program performs like a champ. Win-Fax Pro also uses a dialog box to monitor the status of a fax being sent or received.

WinFax Pro also can be configured to automatically forward received faxes to another number. As a security measure, the software keeps a copy of the received fax in the Receive Log folder and a notice that it was forwarded in the Send Log folder.

For small and large offices alike, WinFax Scanner provides an economical, multipurpose solution to the proliferation of document-processing equipment.

--Info File--
Delrina WinFax Scanner
Price: $299; existing WinFax Pro 4.0 customers, $279
In Brief: The WinFax Scanner is the first complete PC alternative to the fax machine.
Disk Space: 9MB for WinFax Scanner and WinFax Pro 4.0; 14MB recommended with OCR option and Cover Your Fax cover pages; additional free space for files and faxes.
System Resources: 5%
RAM: 4MB (8MB or more recommended)
Delrina Corp.
800-268-6082, 408-363-2345

BY: Joel T. Patz

You need a flowchart--fast. Not just any flowchart, but a segmented diagram with curved lines, lots of different sized shapes and subdiagrams to illustrate the details. If this task sounds impossible, you haven't yet met up with DiagramIt.

DiagramIt is a very practical tool for designing charts, technical drawings, forms, family trees or just about anything you can think of. Within five minutes of installation, you'll be wondering how you got along without it. For business and home office users who question their graphics expertise, this program's flexibility and ease of use gets you from start to finish so quickly that you'll have time to pat yourself on the back for a job well done.

DiagramIt's Tool Bar and Object Bar put everything you need right on the drawing board. To add an object to a drawing, click on a shape--rectangle, triangle, polygon, ellipse or diamond--and point to where you want it to appear. You can resize an object or drag it to reposition it. If you want something special, you can import a bitmap into your diagram and then use DiagramIt to manipulate it. You can also export your DiagramIt creations to other applications.

Lines to connect your diagram's elements are available in different styles--solid, dashed, dotted, dashes and dots--and a variety of thicknesses. You can choose straight lines that are independent of objects, polylines that have two or more points beginning and ending in objects, or polysquarelines that maintain right angles as they bend. Lines can begin and terminate with arrows, boxes, diamonds and each can be solid or transparent. The same symbols can be attached to intermediate points of a multidirectional line. You can't, however, mix different symbols on the same line.

Adding text to your diagram isn't just easy, it's fun. You can locate text anywhere and then adjust it as you would any other object. You can tuck text inside shapes, or on top of or underneath lines. Dialog box selections let you rotate text to any angle, change the font and font size, change its color, pick an alignment and add effects such as underlining, italics or bold.

Only your video card limits your choice of background colors or the color of any object on the drawing board. If you decide to use special effects and apply shadowing to your shapes, choosing the color of the shadow can make a difference in your work's overall impact. Even before you choose a shape, you can pick its color and the color of the line surrounding it. If you're going to export the diagram into a black-and-white document, or if you don't have a color printer, simply toggle off the color to see it as a monochrome drawing. Diagrams tend to grow as you're working, so you can zoom in on sections of a diagram and work at a larger scale. Conversely, you can reduce the diagram's size so you can get an eyeful of what you've accomplished.

It's possible to animate a shape or line if you want to emphasize a portion of your work. The program's Status Box, movable anywhere on the screen, tells you which edit function, object shape, color and font are currently selected, a real plus when you're barreling along expressing your ideas. DiagramIt lets you add innumerable subdiagrams relating to a main diagram by using the Go To function. The supporting pieces can be identified with descriptions up to 128 characters long.

DiagramIt lacks a few key features. It doesn't have an undo feature other than Undo Delete, so it can be awkward to reverse mistakes. A snap to grid option would be helpful, too. Still, these are minor oversights. You'll create superior professional material with this well-designed, easy to learn, richly featured program. DiagramIt's intuitive interface, backed by context-sensitive help and a good user guide (if you need it), add to this charting program's outstanding ease of use.

--Info File--
DiagramIt
Price: $47.48 (street)
In Brief: This is a feature-packed diagramming product for the business or home office.
Disk Space: 1MB
System Resources: 7%
RAM: 4MB
Softcraft Technologies
206-643-7929

BY: John Perry

Digital Equipment Corp. has long been a familiar name in corporate America. More recently its systems have been turning up in previously unlikely places such as the shelves of Circuit City or even Sam's Wholesale Club. Adaptable, expandable systems like the Venturis 5120 are likely to prove useful and long-lasting for either the home or the office.

Venturis' slimline desktop is a marvel of modern design. The lockable cover can be removed with the turning of two thumbscrews and a gentle tug forward. Inside the case, the power supply and two front drive bays (one 3.5-inch and one 5.25-inch) rotate 90 degrees to reveal an additional 3.5-inch drive bay under the power supply. The EIDE drive controllers are built into the motherboard. This slick, space-saving design gives the Venturis the expansion potential of a mini-tower in a slimline case.

The S3 764-powered video is also built into the motherboard and comes standard with 1MB of RAM. Upgrading video memory is as easy as sliding two 512KB video memory DRAM chips into the designated sockets on the motherboard--you'll find they are clearly marked, both in the literature and on the board itself. The unit I tested came with 8MB of RAM. Two additional 72-pin, 32-bit SIMM sockets are available for memory upgrades.

A single riser card contains one ISA expansion slot; one PCI expansion slot and one combination ISA/PCI slot are located at the rear of the machine. This should be suffi- cient, considering the EIDE controller and video card don't consume slots.

The Pentium 120MHz CPU with crowning heat sink sits in a ZIF socket next to its removable voltage regulator. The socket and voltage regulator promise easy CPU upgrades in the future.

For those of us who haven't yet used some version of Windows 95, the Venturis comes with ICU (ISA Configuration Utility) software. The ICU identifies current resource allocations and lets the user assign the remaining resources. This works with both Plug-and-Play cards (PCI, PCMCIA and PnP ISA) as well as "legacy" cards.

Jumpers on the motherboard let you configure a wide range of options. These include CPU clocking options, Recovery Mode and Password clearing options, each of which is fully explained in the accompanying literature. The user manual covers every aspect of the Venturis, from inserting a diskette to replacing the CPU's voltage regulator. And it's one of the few manuals I've seen that offers a complete listing of POST error messages, including both text and audible beeps.

The Venturis comes loaded with lots of utilities, plus the Day-timer PIM. Don't get carried away--the Day-timer is a timed version that works only for 60 days. The desktop system also comes with the CD-ROM version of Microsoft Works for Windows, an integrated program that provides a word processor, a spreadsheet and a data base. The Venturis I tested included Windows for Workgroups 3.11 and MS-DOS 6.22, but should ship with Windows 95 by the time you read this.

The results of our WINDOWS Magazine Wintune benchmarks were mixed. The CPU and floating-point scores of 127MIPS and 25.4MFLOPS were more than respectable. The video score of 9.1Mpixels per second and the hard disk's 8.9MB per second data-transfer rate were both only middling. You may want to replace that on-board video with a faster PCI graphics accelerator board. It seems unlikely that you'd want to throw away a perfectly good 820MB hard disk, though.

One last detail I didn't like about the Venturis was the power switch, located right next to the floppy disk drive's eject button and flush with the cover when powered down. It's difficult to turn on, and easy to turn off when you're just trying to eject a diskette. That small complaint aside, the Venturis 5120 would make an awfully nice computing companion for the long haul.

--Info File--
Digital Venturis 5120
Price: With 15-inch monitor, $3,447
In Brief: The Venturis 5120 offers cutting edge technology comfortably contained in a quiet, slim and attractive desktop case.
Digital Equipment Corp.
800-642-4532, 508-642-6400

BY: Hailey Lynne McKeefry

When I picture mobile multimedia, I visualize bags loaded down with cords, cables, a CD-ROM drive and speakers. It's not a pretty sight. The Digital HiNote Ultra provides slimline multimedia that won't net you bulging biceps at the end of a multimedia tour.

The HiNote Ultra comes standard with a 75MHz Intel DX4 processor, a 528MB hard disk and 8MB of RAM (expandable to 24MB). In all, the HiNote weighs just 4 pounds (without the modular add-ins) and measures 1.2 by 11 by 8.5 inches. The 9.5-inch active-matrix (TFT) color display made working with this computer seem almost like using a desktop machine. The display colors were vibrant and remained clear and stable at whatever angle

I positioned the screen. The built-in trackball, which is slightly offset from the center of the wrist rest, proved to be well-situated and comfortable to use, as was the full-size keyboard. I immediately felt right at home as I started to type and maneuver the cursor. Other features include PCMCIA slots that are capable of holding two Type II cards or one Type III card, and a built-in infrared wireless port.

Most interesting is the notebook's sleek and modern modular design. The unit I looked at came with two modules: a floppy drive and a Mobile Media module (which included three speakers and a double-speed CD-ROM drive, as well as jacks for additional speakers, a joystick/MIDI port or other sound devices). Each unit attached easily to the bottom of the notebook and the different modules could be hotswapped.

Great multimedia does little good if the notebook loses steam in the midst of the presentation. No fear with the HiNote, which came with two lithium ion batteries. I got about three hours of heavy-duty work done before I had to change the battery. The batteries, which snap onto the outside of the notebook, are long and rounded so that they fit snugly into the back of the unit without adding to its height when either the multimedia or floppy disk drive module is installed. A small LCD icon panel on the right side of the notebook provides a variety of status information, including battery life, disk access and communications status.

The power supply was small, measuring 1 by 1.6 by 4 inches, making it an easy add to the carrying case for those times when batteries just won't do the trick. The power supply allowed enough cord length to let you work easily even with a faraway outlet.

WINDOWS Magazine's Wintune benchmarks found that the unit performed admirably in terms of CPU and system performance. The unit rated 36.4 Dhrystone MIPS and 8.1 Whetstone MFLOPS in our benchmarking. However, in the area of RAM performance, this notebook proved to be a bit of a tortoise with a score of 11.9MB per second. The HiNote needed little tuning according to Wintune, although the utility did suggest that I increase my 32-bit cache size. This notebook also performed fairly well on our Word and Excel benchmarks, with a 74-second score for Word and 41-second score for Excel.

A variety of business software, including MS-DOS 6.22, Windows for Workgroups 3.11, Microsoft Windows Sound System, Lotus Organizer, CompuServe Information Manager and Puma TranXit Wireless Communications, came preinstalled. The unit also came with a carrying case (which is optional) that easily and compactly held the notebook, both snap-in modules, one battery, the power cords and manuals.

The HiNote Ultra's slim design and easy multimedia capability make me almost itch to take my show on the road. This notebook packs just about every business multimedia function you could want into a diminutive case. It's ergonomically designed and comfortable to use, and the lithium ion batteries provide enough battery life to let you get your work done wherever you are.

--Info File--
Digital HiNote Ultra CT475
Price: $3,859; multimedia upgrade kit, $699
Digital Equipment Corp.
800-722-9332, 508-264-7977