IN THIS ISSUE
- Lexmark C532n Color Laser Printer
- Washburn Rover Guitar
- DigiTech RP150 Modeling Guitar Processor
- Linksys WPS54G Wireless Print Server
- AVG Anti Virus 7.5
- Plextor PX-EH25L High Speed NAS Device
- DVD: Sherlock Holmes
- DVD: Stargate Atlantis Season 2
LINK TO THE FOLLOWING REVIEW
Lexmark C532n Color Laser Printer
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There are a lot of color laser printers, and perhaps not surprisingly, a great many of them appear to have been beamed into our time-space continuum by a race of extraterrestrial technology salesmen with the intent of driving humanity mad and softening us up for an invasion. In doing the research for this purchase, we passed on enough turkeys to serve thanksgiving dinner to the entire population of Texas with plenty of leftovers for late night sandwiches.
The Lexmark C532n is a remarkable color printer, especially considering its competition, and while not without its flaws, it was the best such device we encountered. It does what it says on the box, does it well and it doesn’t even cost very much.
One of the pleasing aspects of the Lexmark C532n is that it comes with all the toys a printer could want, without having to buy any additional cards, chips, adapters or accessories. It can be interfaced to through a USB adapter or connected to an Ethernet network. It has a capacious 250-sheet paper tray. It can print 22 pages per minute, with a ten second warm-up. It prints at 1200 dots per inch, and can simulate 4800 dots per inch with its variable pitch dot engine. It includes PCL and PostScript emulations.
We were also pleased to learn that the consumables for the Lexmark C532n aren’t unreasonably expensive – and a set of toner cartridges will print about 3000 pages.
The Lexmark C532n includes a sleep mode, which allows it to remain powered up all the time. It will wake up automatically when someone sends it a print job.
The output quality of the Lexmark C532n is among the best offered by any contemporary color laser printer – and this is true whether you ask it to print photographs or business graphics. It doesn’t suffer from the overly saturated colors, obvious dithering artifacts or pronounced color shifts that afflicted most of the other printers we looked at.
There is a catch to the Lexmark C532n, and while it’s ultimately surmountable, it’s worth keeping in mind. The hard-copy documentation for this printer consists of a large folded poster illustrating the setup procedure almost entirely with pictures. There’s hardly a word of English anywhere on it. The pictures aren’t entirely revealing, especially for someone unfamiliar with the inner workings of the machine.
We got it set up in time, but a more detailed startup manual would have had us printing a great deal sooner.
The documentation proper for the Lexmark C532n appears as PDF files on a CD-ROM. They’re somewhat less convenient than a paper manual, and they’re not terribly well organized. Everything you ever wanted to know about this printer is in there – your mission is to find what you’re looking for.
Our Lexmark C532n came out of its box requiring alignment of its print engine – a not-uncommon condition for color laser printers. The procedure for performing the alignment turned out to be largely effortless, and the resulting hard copy now looks like it was etched in glass. However, it took several hours of working through the PDF files for the Lexmark C532n to figure out what was wrong, and how to address it.
We also tried Lexmark’s e-mail customer support to deal with this one – they got back to us just over a month after our request for assistance, by which time the beast had long been slain, divided amongst the knights of the realm, barbequed and had its leftovers frozen for snacks.
The Lexmark C532n is an excellent color laser printer, and knowing what we do of it, we’d buy another one in a heartbeat. It may well be the best moderately-priced color printer available at the moment. Its documentation and support are unquestionably its greatest weakness, however, and a regrettable flaw in an otherwise superb bit of technology.
LINK TO THE FOLLOWING REVIEW
Washburn Rover Travel Guitar
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One of the inescapable concerns inherent in guitars is that they’re relatively large objects, and encased in enough wood or polyethylene to survive an airport’s baggage handling system, they become quite a lot larger still. If you find yourself traveling under circumstances which don’t avail you of unlimited space for your belongings, you might find yourself compelled to leave your guitar behind.
Unless you’ll be traveling by camel or kayak, the Washburn Rover travel guitar is a brilliant solution to the issue of the space occupied by a guitar, as it occupies very little of it. This may make whomever you’re traveling with a bit disappointed if he or she was hoping to use space concerns as a reason to compel you to leave your guitar in its closet. You’ll need to work this one out for yourself.
The Rover is a bit unusual to look at, but it fits in a case that’s under three feet long. A custom case is included with the instrument. The Rover’s case will fit in most airplane overhead storage compartments, although it’s still arguably a good idea to make sure the airline you’re planning to fly with will let you put one there.
Despite its limited dimensions, the Rover has a full-size fretboard and scale. It requires a few minutes of practice to get comfortable holding it – its body is substantially smaller than that of a conventional acoustic. Once you find a way to keep it from slipping through your fingers, it’s eminently playable.
The Rover has reasonable sound for a very small guitar – it plays with a slight twang, making it reminiscent of a banjo. It’s also considerably quieter than a conventional acoustic guitar, which probably isn’t a bad thing, especially if you’ll be traveling in a group.
Washburn crafts some really superb acoustic instruments, and it’s important to keep in mind that the Rover isn’t one of them. Knocked together in China, it’s reasonably well built as machine-made guitars go, but it’s cheap and it’s knows it. It might even be proud of it. It’s price arguably reflects its perilous existence. If somebody parks a 747 on your Rover, you won’t have to mortgage your dog to get a new one.
The Rover requires somewhat more work to set up than most guitars. To begin with, mine arrived with a set of somewhat economical strings that hardly did justice to the instrument. Two of them broke shortly after I initialy tuned up – I’d have replaced the factory strings even if they hadn’t. The neck action of my Rover was fairly high, which called for some adjustment to render it playable. The Rover includes not only an allen key to adjust its neck, but bridge and tail shims, should you really want to perfect its action.
The machine heads that ship with the Rover are economical. I’ve heard of several people replacing them with better machines – mine proved reasonably workable.
Once it’s been fitted with better strings, the Rover is surprisingly stable. Its sound isn’t displeasing, although it leans somewhat more toward C&W than I might have wished.
Unlike the Martin Backpacker, perhaps the most commonly-encountered travel guitar, the Rover has a truss rod, allowing its neck action to be adjusted, and a hard case rather than a large sock to protect it from the vicissitudes of a mobile existence. I should also point out that mine came with a “how to play the guitar” DVD, which was a nice touch. One of the nieces or nephews will no doubt appreciate it.
LINK TO THE FOLLOWING REVIEW
DigiTech RP150 Modeling Guitar Processor
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Honesty bids me say that had I been charged with designing a guitar effect that cranked everything up to ten and included every feature even tangentially related to playing a guitar through a box, I wouldn’t have come up with half the stuff in the RP150. Elegantly structured and flawless in its performance, the RP150 is a roomful of effects in a single pedal and a trained monkey to run it.
Beyond its high-end features and numerous additional gadgets, the effects available through the RP150 sound superb – by no means a common condition amongst effects pedals. In shopping around for something to make guitar noises more interesting, I tried several pedals that cost a lot more than the RP150 and sounded a good deal less sophisticated.
...and one that caught fire, which I won’t get into here.
The RP150 comes with fifty preset effects, ranging from the subtle to the truly obnoxious. Every one is a joy to play – not all of them probably need to be played in public.
As with most of the current generation of modeling effects, you can reprogram one or all of the effects offered by the RP150, fine tuning its existing sounds or wiping its brain and starting from scratch, as the mood suits you. Having said this, it’s worth noting that the original fifty present effects are duplicated in firmware, such that they’ll still be available even if you redesign every noise the pedal knows how to make.
Previous generations of modeling effects devices, while technically programmable, suffered from user interfaces that typically consisted of one button, two knobs and a handful of LEDs. Programming them was not dissimilar to trying to teach fruit to bark. The RP150 includes such a user interface, but you’ll never have to use it.
The RP150 also includes a USB interface. Plug it into a computer, download its free X-Edit software from the DigiTech web page and you can reprogram its sounds with an intuitive Windows or Macintosh editor application. Once you’ve configured the effects in the RP150 to your liking, you can save its sounds to your local hard drive and download your changes to the pedal.
The DigiTech web page includes a forum in which users of DigiTech's pedals can swap effects, and a growing collection of downloadable contributed effects, should you want to see what everyone else is up to.
The combination of the R150’s generous library of models – the virtual devices, such as compression, flanging and chorus, that act upon the sound passing through the pedal – and a quick, elegant way to configure them makes getting precisely the sound you’re after easier than finding a liberal politician in hell.
Finally, I’d be remiss if I forgot to mention the RP150’s built-in drum machine. I’m not sure it really belongs in there, but it’s a very good drum machine, with a variety of patterns and better drum sounds than usually pop and thump and crash from dedicated drum boxes. You can easily waste hours playing against it.
It also should be noted that the RP150 is made in the United States, and perhaps more important, its manual appears to have been written there. As such, it’s intelligible from cover to cover without even a suggestion that it was translated into English from the original Japanese by someone who only spoke French.
Costing about a hundred dollars, the RP150 was the least expensive effects pedal I tried, and yet, it blew me away with a detonation far more explosive than that of pedals costing several times as much and occupying vastly more floor space.
DigiTech offers a number of higher-end pedals – the RP250 and RP350 feature additional models and generally more toys. While more toys are always better, even with no fixed spending limit and all day to decide, I found the RP150’s ease of use and small size made it as close to perfect as anything with a power connector is likely to get.
LINK TO THE FOLLOWING REVIEW
Linksys WPS54G Wireless Print Server
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When we built our current digs, we had conduits buried in the walls to allow for all the cables and connectors that computers invariably need to communicate with each other, and with their innumerable peripheral devices. To date, not one of the outlet boxes for the conduit network has proven to be where it was needed.
Wireless print servers are designed to address instances of demonically poor planning such as ours. Assuming that some or all of your internal network runs on a wireless router – or that you’re prepared to blow fifty dollars on a new router to avoid having to duct-tape cables to your floor – you can locate your printer anywhere you like, subject only to the availability of electric power.
A wireless print server will also allow everyone on your network to share the printer connected to it.
The Linksys WPS54G wireless print server is arguably one of the more reliable of these devices – we’ve encountered several really cheap ones that required a toll-free number for God and an eight pound hammer to get them running satisfactorily. The Linksys server gets by with a very much smaller hammer.
Setting up the WPS54G isn’t as effortless as one might wish. To begin with, while it’s wireless in use, you’ll probably need to connect it to a computer with an Ethernet cable to configure it – probably entailing reconfiguring the network connection for your computer – and then restart it to make it communicate with your network. None of the procedures involved in doing so is likely to cause you permanent brain injury, but it’s a lot of clicking to deal with an installation that seems as if it should be a great deal simpler.
Once you get the print server configured and secure, you can communicate with it using a web interface. The web interface is reasonably intuitive as these things go. You'll probably find that some of its screens are sufficiently thick with network obscurities and other mysterious elements as to make you want to leave them alone.
The Linksys driver that ships with the WPS54G is easy to install and get on line as long as nothing goes wrong – it’s pretty inscruitable if your wireless print server doesn’t perform correctly the first time, as it offers few diagnostics.
The facility for locating your printer anywhere you like and making your colleagues or your family believe you have omniscient foresight is arguably worth both the cost and the setup issues of the WPS54G. Once it’s up and running, its indistinguishable from a wired connection, save that it has a cool antenna.
LINK TO THE FOLLOWING REVIEW
AVG Anti Virus 7.5
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Having ultimately given up hope of ever getting McAfee’s VirusScan 11 to behave itself – as chronicled in an earlier edition of Storm Gods – we began a brave and valiant quest for a suitable replacement. There’s a growing pantheon of security applications available... because there’s big bucks in paranoia.
We settled on AVG Anti Virus 7.5 by Grisoft, a developer in the Czech Republic. AVG Anti Virus 7.5 offers a powerful suite of security tools, an aggressively updated virus checker, advanced user controls and software support that actually supports their products – the latter being somewhat unique in the arena of security products.
AVG Anti Virus 7.5 includes a virus scanner, a resident shield, automatic e-mail scanning and pretty well all the toys a security package should include. We were pleased to find that they all worked extremely well, and imposed no measurable speed or performance penalties on the system AVG Anti Virus was installed on – an insurmountable issue with the McAfee VirusScan 11 product.
In addition, AVG Anti Virus 7.5 doesn’t get its undies in a bunch if you decide not to install one or more of its components. We ultimately decided to pass on the resident shield and e-mail scanner. It will warn you that you’ve omitted part of the protection it offers, but its warnings can be disabled.
The user interface for AVG Anti Virus 7.5 is uncluttered and can be mastered in seconds. It installs with an icon in the system tray area of Windows’ desktop – right-click on the icon to access a menu with items for the Test Center, to manually scan for viruses, and the Virus Vault, to deal with any suspicious objects the software turns up.
AVG Anti Virus 7.5 is an impressive security package – it generates few false positives, and can be easily configured to do as much or as little as you like. It’s easy to navigate, and we’ve yet to encounter anything that even resembled an interaction issue between AVG Anti Virus 7.5 and anything running on its host system.
Our initial e-mailed support questions were answered promptly, by an actual human being.
The ideal security application is one that you can almost forget has been installed – aside from its periodic automatic upgrades, AVG Anti Virus 7.5 comes pretty close to this standard. It does what it does well, and keeps its head down the rest of the time.
LINK TO THE FOLLOWING REVIEW
Plextor PX-EH25L High Speed NAS Device
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A network attached storage device is effectively a large hard drive with an Ethernet connector glued to the back – and some intelligence to drive the whole works, of course. Correctly configured, it can behave like a local file server. Multiple users on a private network can store and access files on it.
Unlike USB hard drives, a NAS drive isn’t hosted by a specific computer on its network, and as such, it won’t care which machines are powered up, or how their security is configured.
A NAS drive is a convenient place to store a common database; to maintain files that multiple users need to access without juggling Windows’ increasingly paranoid security features; to expand the storage of multiple machines with a pooled drive; and to keep all those downloaded music files and movies and other stuff no one’s supposed to know about.
Because it’s not connected to a specific computer, a NAS drive can offer a high degree of physical security as well. You can lock it in a secure room, or even confine it to a locked safe, and access it through its Ethernet interface. You can make the device, and hence the data on it, virtually impossible to steal.
The Plextor PX-EH25L NAS drive is a 250 gigabyte network storage server – a 400 gigabyte version is also available. It’s small, convenient, quick and quiet, and it’s quite reliable when it works.
It’s a first-order pig when it doesn’t work, however, and as you might imagine, ours didn’t. While we eventually overcame this, the struggle was decidedly epic.
The PX-EH25L is configured by logging into it with a web browser. If you do so, you’ll probably have your first indication that this is a product which could have used one more trip through the engineering department before it was hustled off to market. For example, here’s what its administration setup screen says:
Don't switch any workgroups if you use by the domain. After logon the domain, domain user or group sharing will be disable, thus you better backup something and delete sharing before. And after that, the previous domain user or group will not be used.
The internal software of our PX-EH25L was pretty thick with spelling errors and content mistakes that made understanding its more advanced features something of a challenge.
Initially configuring the PX-EH25L isn’t unduly nettlesome if you’re familiar with network hardware and protocols – we wouldn’t recommend it if you’re still having a hard time networking a few computers together. If your network uses DHCP – that is, if it takes care of assigning IP addresses automatically – you can plug the PX-EH25L into your router and be good to go.
If your network uses static IP addresses, such that each machine on it has a specific address assigned to it by an administrator, you’ll need to reconfigure one of them to be a DHCP machine, log into the PX-EH25L, configure it with its intended IP address and then reconfigure your computer to use its original fixed IP address. While none of this is likely to melt your brain, it constitutes a lot of clicking and banging.
Our original application for the PX-EH25L was to permit us to store sensitive information within the protection of a thousand-pound steel vault bolted to the concrete floor of our basement, on the assumption that if anyone broke in, got past the security system, the dogs and the locked internal doors, they’d need a plasma cutter and several days to actually get to the drive. We got everything stored on the PX-EH25L with room to spare, too… just before it stopped working.
We never did learn why our first PX-EH25L decided to leap off a cliff, save that thereafter, it refused to acknowledge any attempts to connect to it through its network interface.
To their credit, Plextor’s support staff were courteous and knowledgeable, but it became clear that we had something of a problem. They insisted that we send the drive back to them, even though they acknowledged that it was bound for an equipment crusher rather than for repair. Having loaded its hard drive with buckets of sensitive information, however, there was no way it was leaving the building.
We spent several weeks in discussion with Plextor over the PX-EH25L. We offered to send it back sans hard drive – they said that if we opened the case, the warrantee was toast and we’d have to pay to get it fixed. We offered to have it crushed locally and send them pictures, or the mangled case without the drive platters. They were horrified.
We resigned ourselves to eating the $299.95 the PX-EH25L had cost us – doing so was easily preferable to potentially disclosing all those sensitive files.
In the end, we cheated – we opened the case, voided the warrantee, wiped the drive in another machine, crossed our fingers and sent it off to be repaired. Plextor presumably crushed it without trying to power it up, as a new – working – PX-EH25L showed up a few weeks later.
To its credit, the replacement PX-EH25L has been running reliably for almost a year, and it does what it says on the box. It’s quick, quiet and really, really spacious. It has solved a number of internal storage and security issues for us, and made all our lives a bit easier.
LINK TO THE FOLLOWING REVIEW
Sherlock Holmes
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With Hollywood having largely forgotten how to make entertaining movies, we’ve found ourselves mining the past for DVDs. Ancient television shows have proven to be a remarkably productive vein in this regard.
Grenada Television’s impeccable recreation of nineteenth-century Victorian London as the haunt of the great detective is only one of the outstanding elements of this series. The actors portraying Holmes, Watson and a gathering of villains, maidens and Dickensian scoundrels are a treat to watch. Grounded upon Arthur Conan Doyle’s original stories but not mired in them, the episodes move at an approachable pace.
There are four DVD sets of one-hour episodes of Sherlock Holmes – sadly, Jeremy Brett, who brings Holmes to something larger than life, passed away shortly after finishing the final episode. A fifth set, of five TV movies, is also available. While The Hound of the Baskervilles has been adapted for film more times than can be easily counted, none of its predecessors have approached this one.
Dating back to the 1980s, the video quality of these DVDs is acceptable, but occasionally flawed. The audio is a bit dreadful at times, with noticeable background noise in a few episodes and distortion that makes the score – largely wrought by a solo violin, in keeping with Holmes’ preferred instrument – sound like a cat in a blender. While none of these issues greatly detracts from the performances, they’ll probably serve to remind you of the antiquity of the work.
For those of us who originally viewed these programs on PBS, it’s probably worth noting that they can be seen on DVD entirely devoid of pledge breaks. No one will try to hard-sell you a coffee mug for twelve easy payments of ten dollars a month.
LINK TO THE FOLLOWING REVIEW
Stargate Atlantis Season 2
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Easily the best science fiction on television, watching Stargate on DVD will make you appreciate that it’s really wasted on TV.
The second season of the second incarnation of Stargate is pretty well the most fun you can have with your clothes on. While its special effects are well wrought, its television budget clearly precluded its relying upon them – its creators have had to fall back on sharp writing, talented actors and clever plots.
Perhaps the most noticeable aspect of these episodes on DVD is their continuity. Viewed on the SciFi channel, they were incessantly interrupted by some of the most obnoxious commercials yet devised by the trolls of commerce – even fast-forwarding through the breaks disrupted the flow of the stories considerably. Watched in their entirety, they’re perfect micro-movies.
…and you don’t have to wait a week to see what happens next.
The DVD collection includes a generous mixture of additional material – interviews with the actors and writers, a variety of documentaries about the production of the show and other appeals to serious fans. The video and audio quality are impeccable. The thin-package box will be a treat for everyone who bought the first nine sets of Stargate in their original obese packaging.
The only drawback is that it’ll be a year ‘til season three…
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