Stories by Jon L. Jacobi

Network storage made easy and affordable

If you're tired of leaving your PC on continuously so that other machines in your house can access the files you store on it, you're ready to step up to network-attached storage. As you might guess from the name, NAS devices connect via ethernet dire...

EMC Retrospect Express HD 2.0

With so many users backing up to hard drives, it's a wonder EMC didn't start selling its super-easy-to-use Retrospect Express HD 2.0 backup program sooner. Previously available only when bundled with Maxtor's OneTouch hard drives, Retrospect Express ...

HP home media offerings impress

Like many companies, Hewlett-Packard is building bridges between your PC and your living room -- the most comfortable location for viewing digital media. The company's latest spans are its 37-inch SLC3760N MediaSmart television (US$2,199) and its mv2...

First tests: Fast 32GB flash hard drive

Are you ready for laptop storage with no moving parts to spin up, break, drain your battery, add weight, or make noise? That's what you get with Samsung's new 32GB SSD (Solid State Drive). Built using NAND flash memory, the SSD is the first consumer ...

Intel D915PBL

The D915PBL isn't quite as feature-laden as some of the more expensive Intel 925XE-based motherboards that support a 1066MHz frontside bus. The D915PBL only supports a maximum bus speed of 800MHz. Nonetheless, the performance difference between this ...

Gigabyte GA-8AENXP-D

Gigabyte's feature-laden 925XE-based GA-8AENXP-D is a rare board. It's one of the few we have yet seen to offer 800Mbps FireWire 800. It includes other touches as well: eight SATA ports, an additional RAID controller to augment the one in the 925XE c...

EPoX EP-9NPA+

The EP-9NPA+ Ultra is the prototypical nForce4 Ultra board, implementing exactly what the chip set offers-which is quite a lot--but nothing more.

ASUS P5AD2-E Premium

ASUS's P5AD2-E Premium, an Intel 925XE-based board, produced scattershot performance results during our tests. Though it was a very fast Pentium 4 board in our WorldBench 5 tests, it didn't distinguish itself in the gaming tests. Go figure. Neverthel...

ASUS A8V-E Deluxe

The A8V-E Deluxe uses VIA's K8T890 chipset, which turned out to be an adequate performer, producing WorldBench 5 and gaming scores right in line with the competition during our tests. The A8V-E Deluxe fell a bit short of its nForce4 counterparts in t...

Flash memory to speed up hard drives

No more long waits for your PC to wake up. Longer laptop battery life. Data that survives a drop. These are the promises of solid-state-memory disks (SSDs), which use flash memory to supplement or replace today's hard drives.

Even better backups: novabackup professional 7.2, backup mypc deluxe

We tested the latest shipping versions of two popular backup packages: NovaStor's NovaBACKUP Professional 7.2 and Roxio's Backup MyPC Deluxe. Both have undergone minor facelifts and feature lots of small, worthwhile improvements, but NovaBACKUP goes ...

Dantz Retrospect Professional 7

I've been using Dantz's Retrospect backup software for years, and while I've always prized the app's wonderfully powerful backup capabilities, the program's interface has long been a stumbling block. I had high hopes when Dantz said Retrospect Profes...

Intel joins the 64-bit desktop fray

Intel on Sunday announced the availability of Pentium 4 Extreme Edition and Pentium 4 processors featuring the company's EMT64 64-bit extensions. With the imprint of competitor Advanced Micro Devices's x86-64 64-bit Athlon 64 processors continuing to...

Pioneer DVR-520H-S

The more you archive video from this unit's 80GB hard drive to DVD-R, the happier you'll be that you bought it. With an 8X DVD recorder built-in, the Pioneer transferred movies to disc at a blistering rate during our tests.

Roxio’s friendly new look: Easy Media Creator 7

Roxio’s Easy Media Creator (for-merly Easy CD/DVD Creator), a set of programs that assist you in burning digital files to discs, has undergone an impressive makeover in Easy Media Creator 7. Gone is the hodgepodge of graphical user interfaces that ma...