The Sun : Thursday, June 10, 2004: Page 9D
PLUGGED IN
W HAT ’ S
H OT
New BlackBerry
has plenty of juice
as cell phone, PDA
The new RIM BlackBerry 7280
series ($400) is a solidly per-
forming pager, personal digital
assistant and tri-band phone
that works in more than 100
countries.
Tri-band telephones work
across the bandwidths or net-
works of the United States, Eu-
rope and the Far East without
requiring the user to change the
SIM (Subscriber Identity Mod-
ule) card in the phone.
Besides its global reach, the
4.8-ounce handheld unit has an
online calendar and e-mail serv-
ice that can be synchronized
with the popular e-mail pro-
grams such as Microsoft Out-
look and IBM Lotus Notes.
You can also view e-mail at-
tachments on its 240-by-
160-pixel screen, a feature that
was not available in the old
BlackBerry. The new model also
has excellent battery life. I
tested its reported 10 days of
standby time by fully charging it
and running the battery down. I
found that the BlackBerry
would be usable for more than a
week before it needed to be re-
charged. When using voice and
data services, the unit held its
charge after light-to-moderate
use for a typical business week
of about five days.
While the BlackBerry failed to
show some Web pages properly,
I wasn’t disappointed in its tele-
phone or PDA capabilities.
Information: http://www.
blackberry.com.
— Rasheim T. Freeman
Helpline
Tools ease
translation
of old files
By James Coates
CHICAGO TRIBUNE
Much of our office work was
saved on discs compatible with
the Ami Pro word processor on
our old Hewlett-Packard com-
puter and now need to be trans-
ferred into our new Windows
XP/Office XP system. Is it possi-
ble to program my new Dell
computer to accept my old AMI
Pro discs? Please don’t tell me
that they all have to be retyped.
A $149 upgrade to Corel’s new
WordPerfect Office 12 is exactly
the tool you need.
By contrast, as privately held
Corel Corp. struggles to get by
with about 5 percent of the of-
fice software market that Micro-
soft dominates, WordPerfect has
been tweaked to handle the for-
mats used by just about all of
the past victims of Bill Gates’
software giant.
WordPerfect therefore will not
only open stuff written in Lotus
Ami Pro, it also will save it in the
Microsoft Word 2003 format or
any other format of Word. This
includes the versions from Word
1 to Word 5 that no longer are
usable in Microsoft Word.
WordPerfect Office 12 will
handle a couple dozen formats
from the bad old days, including
such one-time stars as XyWrite,
Professional Write, Office Writer,
Volkswriter and WordStar.
As I said, $149 is the upgrade
price for WordPerfect Office 12,
but you certainly qualify be-
cause you definitely own Micro-
soft Word.
A second — but far less effec-
tive — option is to acquire soft-
ware called Quick View, which
will read those AMI Pro relics
and let you copy the words for
pasting into Office, but you’ll
lose all of the formatting con-
trols. As a result, the documents
will be far less useful in the fu-
ture.
If you do decide to go the
Quick View route, you can find
Quick View 8 Plus for $35 as a
download and $39 in a box.
The Chicago Tribune is a
Tribune Publishing newspa-
per. James Coates may be con-
tacted via e-mail at jcoates@
tribune.com.
Web sites offer
renters and
buyers aid
finding homes,
making
informed
choices and
setting up
house.
Souped-up laptops get better at how they play the games
By Dean Takahashi
KNIGHT RIDDER/TRIBUNE
There has been a lot of talk
about how laptops have evolved
enough to replace your bulky
desktop PC. This year, that talk
has spread to gaming machines.
I staged a shootout between
gaming laptops from Dell and
eMachines, putting them to the
test with Far Cry, a first-person
shooter game for the PC that re-
quires a ton of graphics power. I
also used the graphics bench-
mark from 3Dmark to measure
how well they can run graphics.
The Dell Inspiron XPS (start-
ing at $2,339) has a 15.4-inch
WUXGA screen, a 3.4-gigahertz
Pentium 4 microprocessor with
hyperthreading, an
800-megahertz, front-side bus
and a minimum of 256 mega-
bytes of DDR Dual Channel
DRAM that is expandable to 2
gigabytes.
It has an upgradeable
128-megabyte ATI Mobility
Radeon 9700 graphics chip. The
laptop features stereo speakers
and a subwoofer and comes with
a backpack emblazoned with a
skull logo.
Gamers can choose a 60- giga-
byte or 80-gigabyte hard drive.
Dell offers options for a DVD/
R W d r i v e o r C D - R W/ D V D
combo drive, and the laptop has
built-in 802.11b/g wireless card.
Also included is software such
as Dell Jukebox by MusicMatch,
Housing help
resides online
ments in an easy-to-read chart that shows the
number of bedrooms, price and city. If you click
on an apartment, you can find out the security
deposit required, set up appointments to see
the place or send questions by e-mail to the
leasing office.
Homes for sale
Homeseekers.com provides a wealth of infor-
mation on new and resale homes. In addition
to a description and a photo of a home, the site
provides the information on the ZIP code’s
demographics; crime statistics; housing prices;
family facts, such as the number of singles and
couples with children; education, such as the
number of area residents who have college de-
grees; unemployment rates; the number of
doctors in the area; and weather. This informa-
tion is updated quarterly, and you don’t have
to register to use the site. However, the only
contact information offered is an e-mail
address for the listing agent.
Realtor.com, which also allows you to
search for homes without registering,
gives you much less information on the
property but provides the listing agency
a n d a t e l e p h o n e n u m b e r. O n
homegain.com, you can search for new
homes by category: available now, un-
der construction, or ready to build.
Catalisthomes.com will offer a new
service this month: Would-be buyers
who provide an e-mail address and a de-
scription of the home they want to buy
will be alerted whenever a property that
fits their parameters is added to the Mul-
tiple Listing Service. The e-mail alert will
include the listing agent’s name and tele-
phone number, even if he or she is not a CataL-
ist Homes agent. But CataList may not receive
By Hang Nguyen the listings until 24 hours after the information
KNIGHT RIDDER/TRIBUNE pops up on the MLS.
Mortgages and calculators
L
ists of apartments for rent. Demo-
graphics of the area where homes Some Web sites can help you find out what
are for sale. Guides to buying mortgage rates local banks are offering and
foreclosed homes. Mortgage cal- calculate the monthly payment for different
culators. types of mortgages. At bankrate.com, you se-
The Internet offers that infor- lect the type of mortgage you want and a
mation and much more for con- search will produce a list of local banks, rates,
sumers interested in real estate. But if you phone numbers and links to the companies’
punch “real estate” into the Google search en- Web sites. You can choose to be alerted via e-
gine, it returns more than 17 million hits. How mail when mortgage rates hit a certain level.
do you find the sites you can rely on? Calculators tell you how much house you can
With help from real estate experts, here’s a afford and your FICO score range — a credit-
selection of recommended sites. rating number that lenders look at to deter-
Apartments
mine what mortgage rate to offer you.
Decisionaide.com helps borrowers figure out
If you’re a renter deciding whether to move whether they can afford a certain house. It also
into an complex, and you wish you knew some-
one who could give you the lowdown on the
place, apartmentratings.com is the site for
calculates and compares the monthly pay-
ments for five different types of loans.
If you are on the fence about whether to refi-
you. Renters go online to say good and bad
things about the communities where they live.
They rank the complex’s parking, mainte-
nance, noise, safety and office staff.
nance, the site can calculate how much money
you could save and when the monthly savings
would total the cost of refinancing. It also can
crunch numbers to help you decide on paying
“This is a scary one for our industry,” said
Lynn Klug, marketing director for Sares-Regis,
a large landlord in Orange County, Calif.
points (each costing 1 percent of your mort-
gage balance) to reduce your rate.
Domania.com estimates how much property
But site users should be wary, because com- tax you’d pay.
ments aren’t verified. “If nothing else, it pro-
vides for a few good laughs,” said John Burns, Foreclosures
real estate consultant in Irvine, Calif. Some sites list foreclosed properties and
Aaocconnect.com lets new renters and homes at risk of foreclosure. Purchasers of
homeowners change their address so their mail foreclosed homes often get a 20 percent to 50
will be forwarded to the new location and sign percent discount off market-rate prices.
up for telephone service, cable service and Realtytrac.com offers information on prop-
high-speed Internet access. The vendors on the erties subject to a notice of default (NOD) and
free site guarantee the lowest prices, and con- with a notice of trustee sale (NTS). You can
sumers can compare the prices from as many search by city or ZIP code.
as three companies. Depending on what area The NOD, the first step in the foreclosure
you live in, certain basic services aren’t avail- process, is filed when a loan is in default; these
able for online sign-ups. People who use the properties aren’t yet on the auction block. The
site to sign up for services can return there to site provides free information on square foot-
cancel when they leave. age, number of bedrooms and baths, and an
Rent.com offers $100 back for shoppers who estimated loan balance. If you want to know
find their apartment on its Web site. Like whether the current owner will sell, you must
many other rental Web sites, it lets you know pay a monthly subscription fee of $25 for the
what kinds of apartments are in the area; you contact information.
contact the landlord to see what is available. The NTS is filed when borrowers don’t pay
The search options are more advanced than what they owe within 90 days of the NOD filing.
some other sites; for example, you can narrow These homes are heading to public auction;
your search to find only places that will take the site’s free information includes minimum
dogs or cats. This is good because some sites bid amount and the date of the public sale. To
aren’t as specific — they only mention policies receive further auction information, you must
about pets in general. You can also search by pay the monthly $25.
type of parking (covered or detached) and lo- If the home doesn’t sell at the foreclosure
cation of the washer and dryer (inside the auction, the lender gets the home. It’s then cat-
apartment or in a separate room). egorized as “real estate owned” by lender
On apartmentguide.com, you can search for (REO) — the last step of the foreclosure proc-
units that offer disability access, short-term ess. On bankhomesdirect.com, lenders’ con-
leases, furniture, a dishwasher, a microwave or tact information for REO homes is available
a balcony. Searches produce a list of apart- free, though users must register.
LISA MERTINS : KNIGHT-RIDDER/TRIBUNE
McAfee security software and the Dell laptop has some signifi- Thankfully, it weighs in at a
Dell Picture Studio. cant trade-offs. It weighs 9 lighter 7.5 pounds.
The model I used, which had a pounds — enough to give you a The machine isn’t nearly as
60-gigabyte hard drive and a Wi- backache. The lithium ion bat- powerful as the Dell, but it does
Fi card, costs $2,880. tery lasts about 90 minutes, so the job on many current games.
The Dell laptop scored a re- it’s primarily for plugged-in play. It scored a fairly low 2,442 on the
spectable 3,360 on the 3Dmark The eMachines M6809 ($1,549 3Dmark benchmark, and the
benchmark for intense graphics with a mail-in rebate) has a colors looked slightly washed
applications, compared with 15.4-inch WXGA screen, a 3200+ out. The power cord was annoy-
6,316 for a top-of-the-line desk- mobile AMD Athlon 64 proces- ing because it kept slipping out
top from ABS that sported an sor, 512 megabytes of DDR of the laptop.
Nvidia GeForce FX 5900 Ultra SDRAM and an 80-gigabyte Loyd Case, technical director
with an AMD Athlon 64 FX-51 hard disk drive and an ATI Mo- at the tech enthusiast Web site
microprocessor. bility Radeon 9600 graphics Extremetech.com, says we’re a
What this means in terms of chip. The laptop also offers a generation or two away from
desktop vs. laptop gaming is built-in wireless 802.11g card laptops that are truly as good as
that on the desktop the colors and Ethernet. It has a re- desktop gaming machines.
are richer, the sounds more im- writeable DVD drive, a 6-1 me- And though the laptops I
mersing and the action just dia card reader and a boatload tried can put a lot of machines
seems faster. of software, including Microsoft to shame, I still prefer to play
While solid on performance, Works 7.0 and Microsoft Money. games on a desktop.