Daily Hardware Buys: Print, play, share cheap

For £212+VAT, you not only get the colour laser printer but also free mainland UK delivery and a free C86 inkjet printer. The C86 alone costs £57+VAT from Ebuyer. Hence, we can deduce that the printer on its own would probably cost less than £150+VAT. The offer ends in one month.

The Aculaser has a maximum resolution of 600x600dpi. Installed RAM is only 16MB compared with the usual 64MB. Printing speed is fairly slow paced at 4ppm for colour and 14ppm for monochrome. Rated monthly duty is around 35,000, which should get it running for some time. Intestingly, it is one of the rare colour laser printers to feature a native Linux driver.

The output prints were apparently good enough to earn it some nice words from pcworld back in April - "the Aculaser C900 serves extremely well as a mono laser that may occasionally be required to print high-quality colour documents." - They do reckon as the price per colour print goes through the roof after some times.

To alleviate this, we may say, Epson is now bundling the C86 colour printer for free. Far from being the entry level throw-after-use sort of printer, the C86 is an absolute stunner. It uses water resistant, pigment-based Durabrite ink which should guarantee more resistant prints. At 22ppm in black and up to 12ppm in colour, it is no slouch as well. Maximum resolution on Epson Premium Photo pape is a whopping 5760x1440dpi.

And before I forget, the C86 is capable of borderless printing. Needless to say, that we are very impressed by this bundle which caters for everyones need. The C900 printer might not provide with photo-quality printouts, but this is the C86's job which it does admirably. µ

USA
Running two users on one single machine has been a rather unexplored option until now. Zipzoomfly is selling a Jetway barebone which claims to do just that at only $160, including free shipping. It is the world's first multiuser enabled SFF solution. It uses proprietary circuitry onboard with its own software - Magic twin, to allow two uses to be connected and run two stations directly. The remaining PC is shared, even the IP.

Apparently, it needs Windows XP to run in this mode. No network admin is needed as everything is done automnatically. Also there is no obvious delays due to the tim e-slicing/multiplexing technology built in. As you may guess, a powerful system is needed - most probably a Celeron 2.8GHz is possible with 512MB memory.

The barebone is the MiniQ 435. It supports Northwood Pentium IV and Celeron. Two DDR memory modules are present. Chipset used is VIA's P4M266A and hence, graphics is the ill-fated S3 Graphics ProSavage 8. Fortunately, a PCI port and an AGP port are also present. Two 3.5" bays are present - one external and one 5.25" bay, also available external. The power supply is a beffy 230w one. Six USB2.0 ports but oddly enough one VGA port and one PS2 keyboard/mouse are present. The Magic Twin technology is also available in nForce socket A model as well as 865G with other accessories like a remote Control. Unfortunately, there does not seem to be any reviews about the Jetway 435.

However, Anandtech has a review on the 860Twin, a slightly higher version and says that "The Jetway 860Twin is a truly unique Small Computer that will definitely meet your needs if they include 2-users for one computer or a very low cost per user. There is nothing else on the market that provides the same features at such a low cost per user." µ

France
Six weeks ago, leaks over the internet confirmed that Nvidia was preparing a card that would cover the entry level of high performance cards. The 6800LE is already available in France at LDLC for €259.01, less than £150+VAT. Only eight pipelines are provided coupled with a 300MHz core and memory clocked at 700MHz. Seems that though the card was supposed to be OEMed only, some have succeeded in being brought on the retail market. This seems to be confirmed by the fact that the card, manufactured by Point of View, does not feature on the latter's website.

TBreak summarises the card's performance. "To sum up the 6800LE, it utilizes nVidia's latest core, performs faster than their previous core and costs less. Sounds like nVidia has a winning card in their hands." The card is a very good overclocker, with a 33% increase in Core speed and more than 20% in memory, which brings it in most benchmark to Nvidia's 6800 levels. µ

Singapore
One of the world's smallest commercial PC compatible computers is probably the ATOZ EZ Go 7041 barebone which retails for a hefty S$890 at Storagestudio . It supports Pentium 4 processors though its SIS651 chipset. What sets it apart from the competition is its sheer dimension, 198x161x62mm and a mere 1.2Kg. It can accommodate one hard disk, has two DIMM slot, and offers other goodies like four USB 2.0, two firewire ports, TV out, PCMCIA II as well as one Gigabit Ethernet port and one modem. Also in the box is ATOZ ezcooling patented heatsink. Basically, just put in the drives, CPU and keyboard and you're on the go. Haven't found any review of this small baby, any one bought one? µ