Wednesday's Daily Hardware Buys

IF YOU know of any good value IT sales (auctions, rebates, one-off, clearance, surplus, classified ads) going around in the United Kingdom, France, USA or Singapore, don't hesitate to contact me, at least 24 hours before the sales end.

Walking down the streets of Whitechapel where Jack the Ripper used to live, I saw the TTEC DV7000 digital camcorder in an Indian Gift shop. It is sold elsewhere in the world under various brands as Wellink, Nikai or Valsons for prices as from $110. Basically, it is an upmarket Mustek DV series cousin.

It has the looks and the feel of a £400+ DV camera but yet costs only £90 at the Indian's place. The DV7000 has the same shiny finish as do many camcorders and sports a viewfinder as well as a pop-out 1.5-inch colour LCD screen. It has a 3X Digital zoom - of doubtful use - with a maximum interpolated resolution of 4.1 megapixels. Surprisingly, it comes with two lenses, one larger one which is fixed and another smaller one.

Handling it is no different from any mini-DV camcorder, the strap is firm and holds your hand well against the body of the camcorder. Another surprise is the rather large weather proof carry bag that was provided with the Nikai, a world of difference from the usual piece of PVC some far east manufacturers had adopted. I have not used it at all though. The videoclip function though should be no different from existing models. It does not capture in MPEG4 though, mainly in AVI at 320x240 with mono sound - crude sub VHS quality.

You can use it as a SD card reader, webcam, voice recorder, AV OUT or AV recorder - yes, you would probably be able to connect it to your Telly and enjoy films etc. A 32MB SD card is also provided and with 1GB SD cards widely available at cheap prices, amateur cameramen from all over the world will have plenty of shooting time. Problem though might come from the batteries. Instead of the high quality Li-Ion ones, you're left with two AA batteries to do the job. Still, a worthy purchase if you're looking for a combined digital camera/camcorder.

Audrey is the first name of the famous actress A. Hepburn but it is also the name given to one of the most interesting piece of hardware to be released. Launched in 2000, the 3Com Ergo alias Audrey met with an enthusiastic welcome from hardware reviewers but with little or no market. At that time, rumors that internet appliances would take over the world were rife, International Data Corporation forecasted that by 2004 i.e, this year, 90 million IA units would be sold, generating a 18-billion dollar industry.

The rest, as they say, is history. Still Audrey has attracted a number of geeks at that time, when it was offered for $500 and is bound to get even more attention this time around, now that it costs only $83.95 on Ebay. For that price, you get a Linen 3Com Audrey, a 3Com Ethernet Adaptor 3C19250, 45 day warranty by Trycatch Consulting and a choice of public images for your Audrey. We'll cover this bit later on. You also get a wireless keyboard and a stylus.

In a nutshell, Audrey is a curvacious tablet PC which would easily find itself at home in the kitchen above the Microwave next to the oven. It boosts a 7.1-inch colour VGA touchscreen, built-in sound with two speakers, a serial poert, two USB ports and a built-in modem. Break in apart and you will find a 200MHz Geode processor, remnant of the MediaGX era - remember that cool black PC sold by a company called Compaq. It also contains 16MB of ROM and 32MB of RAM. What makes it interesting to hackers is the fact thast it run on the QNX 2000 Operating system which happens to be Posix based just like Linux. The original version was a trimmed down one in order to prevent (un)voluntary hacking happening but soon, this was easily overcome. Audrey can be connected to your main computer, hence making it a grandad of current Tablet PCs. It has several applications ranging from datebooks, address books, notepad, internet browser as well as a mail application.

MP3 players, Palm sync software and graphic tools have also been added. This is done via images that can be installed which are basically the layer above the core code base consisting of the code, files, configuration and applications. However, all is not pink in Audrey's world, large file will not open in your email, hava applications will not work and 802.11x connectivity is still on the way. If you want to dab into the beauties of QNX2000 and get your hands under the hood, then Audrey is the platform of choice. Not for the faint heated.

Looking for a true budget gaming video card in Singapore, then head off to Video Pro to buy a S$ 149, less than £45 Gigabyte Radeon 9500 which has 64MB DDR memeory. For the same price you can get a Radeon 9550 but don't be fooled by the number, the 9500 is the absolute winner. It does support DirectX 9.0 and has a 128-bit memory interface as compared to the 64-bitness of many of its competitors.

The Maya II GV-R9500 comes bundled with Gigabyte's own overclocking tool, the VTuner. The R9500 turns out to be as quick as a Ti4200 in many applications. This is due to the fact that memory and clock speed are set rather high at 275MHz and 540MHz respectively, it does feature DirectX 9.0 support which will be lacking in a number of its competitors. It uses 64MB of Hynix memory clocked at 2.6ns and has a D-Sub, a TVOUT connector and a DVI one.

The card is as usual red to match your motherboard in many case and comes with a bright golden heat sink fan which cools only the GPU though. What's more interesting is that it can be easily fairly easily overclocked up to 690MHz for the memory and 360MHz for the core by hardwarezone, giving it the edge over the Geforce FX entry level cards - FX5200. FX5500 - by a wide margin. Your only bargain gaming card choice if you live in Singapore. µ

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