By Dr.

Lawrence Kingsley

E-book from Telepublishing Report

Cambridge,MA

© 2022
About Telepublishing Ebooks
Telepublishing Ebooks, an imprint of Telepublishing
Report, are analytic reports on IT theory and practice,
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lishingreport.com.
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction ........................................................... 1
Four Concepts:
Hierarchical ranking of products ....................... 1
Decision criteria ................................................ 2
Stereoscopic vision .......................................... 3
Watchdog publishing ........................................ 4
Distinction from Prevailing I.T. Publishing .............. 4

Macro Criteria......................................................12

Computer Products
Hardware .......................................................18
Software.........................................................46
 INTRODUCTION

Decision Criteria in I.T. Purchasing: Essential Products

sets forth simple principles, statistics, and heuristics that
can be used in evaluating the multitude of hardware
and software options in today’s market. This volume
is focused on desktop systems—volumes on mobile,
multimedia, Apple, and other sectors of technology will
follow. We make no claim of being complete, but cover,
we believe, more products than any one person, unless
fanatic or deranged, is likely to have on one desktop.
Our goal, first and foremost, is to discern category leaders
and the criteria on which they deserve consideration. Our
second goal is to present an alternative to the generally
abject state of computer journalism, discussed at the end of
this introduction. We acknowledge, nonetheless, that part
of what we do is not unique at all. Like many publications,
this work is published in print and online. Both versions are
grounded in the Freemium model of publishing, whereby
concise versions are free, and expanded versions are sold
by subscription. We add to this model four concepts that, we
believe, have never been brought together in the same way.

Four Concepts

Hierarchical ranking of products

The first concept is a hierarchical ranking of products

as determined by an informal panel of industry experts and
consensus of users, but also, at the final point, by our edi-
torial judgment. This kind of editorial judgment is implied,
if not always acknowledged, by a great many guides, in-
troductions, analyses, indices, prizes, crowd-sourced lists,
and so on in a variety of subjects. In disparate ways, for
 2

example, Zagat and Michelin guides, stock and mutual

fund ratings, Academy Awards and Nobel Prizes, Yelp.
com and RottenTomatoes.com, bestseller lists and the
once-popular Whole Earth Catalog, for example, show
how recognition of what is deemed important can emerge
from a welter of competing choices. The recognition im-
plies, but in no way denies, the existence of other choices.
Selectivity, as opposed to a bloated directory, is the
object here. Unlike Castle Connelley’s compilations
of best doctors and lawyers or Google Shopping, the
following pages will not show companies that have
paid for inclusion—we accept no advertising. We sell
no products, earn no commission from anyone’s sale,
and have no incentive of any type to promote a given
product. Instead, we try to earn our keep by being
opinionated, forthright, and, when warranted, iconoclastic.

Decision criteria
We not only rank the salient choices in popular
product categories, but also list what we consider to
be the principal factors that should guide you to further
research. We are skeptical that the final opinion about
whether you should acquire or ignore a product can be
rendered by anyone except you. Instead of pretending
that a product can be reviewed in the abstract, with
no knowledge of your goals, budget, tolerances, and
hardware or operating system constraints, we rather try
to give you a series of filters—i.e., criteria—that you then
can apply according to your needs and priorities. The
specification of these criteria is the essence of this study.
A mathematical representation of these criteria—e.g.,
score weighted by a subjective probability—might have its
place, but we abstain from this approach. No remote analyst
is in a position to guess the relative strength of your values. In
 3

recognition of the open-ended nature of this study, whereby

the final answer is supplied by you rather than us, we tend
to present the decision criteria in the form of a question.
Any vendor can devise criteria which make a given
product seem superior to its competitors, as we see so
often in grids purporting to compare features of competing
products. The grid may be helpful to a point, but invariably
resorts to selectivity and generalization contorted to
enforce bias. We abstain from this approach where there
is no breakaway favorite. In fact, as in sports, judicial
proceedings, or lotteries, sometimes there is no winner.
In these instances, instead of anointing an arbitrary
favorite, we only suggest criteria that you may wish to
apply according to your interests and requirements.
These criteria, stated as succinctly as we can, take the
form of the italicized headings in our Products section.
Indeed, succinctness is a major goal of this project.
Some of these criteria, like cost and intention, are
repeated for different products. We are not trying to derive
a unique filter for each product, but rather showing the
context or assumptions under which repetitive factors apply.

Stereoscopic vision
Where leaders can be discerned, we present two
contrasting points of view in a kind of stereoscopic vision.
The first point of view is the consensus of our informal
panel of experts. For the time being they are anonymous—
as industry insiders, often with corporate constraints and
conflicting allegiances, they are reticent about appearing to
endorse products on behalf of their companies. Admittedly,
as in split Supreme Court decisions, experts can disagree
with each other, and the panel of experts only provides
imput for the editors who take responsibility—and thus
blame—for the final editorial choices. More often than not,
a range of choices is given, rather than an arbitrary favorite.
 4

The second point of view, which will require time to

develop fully, is crowd-sourced opinion—your chance
to vote on our editorial choices or to add your own.
Here, however, voting is limited to subscribers. There
is a modest attempt at statistical correction for the
sake of accuracy, and all comments are subject to
editing, as for length and spam, but never point of view.
This dual perspective—from both experts and crowd—
is important since neither approach is foolproof. Experts
can be impeached, but crowds also can err, as in elections
(does the best candidate always win?), casinos (with
odds against you, every bet is a fool’s bet), financial
bubbles, or artistic preference (popular art tends to attract
more media attention than enduring art). We have only
to look at marriage to realize that the “the masses” can
go astray. The divorce rate in the U.S. is around 40-50%
(and would soar further if couples who are considering
divorce were counted).1 If, perhaps half of the time, we
cannot make the most intimate decisions of our lives
correctly, a reasonable skepticism should attach to vox
populai as the standard of correctness. Popular opinion,
however, matters to the extent that it reflects sales, for
without commercial success products will be short-lived.
Your vote, of course, matters, and we cordially invite
it, as well as any comments that you care to share.

Watchdog publishing
Once category leaders and the criteria by which
they should be judged are defined, the next object is to
determine necessary additions or subtractions from it, for
it is well-known that we live in constant change. Not only
are competitors always at work, trying to out-maneuver

1
See http://www.apa.org/topics/divorce/, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Divorce_in_the_United_States.
 5

and out-innovate successful products, but it is sometimes

difficult for products developed for a particular niche or
window of opportunity to keep growing with the market.
Bearing witness to the short celebrity of once-leading
products are Ashton Tate’s dBase, Zenith TVs, Apple’s
Newton, WordStar, Zip Drives, Pure Digital Technologies’
Flip Video Camera, and Qualcomm’s Flo TV, along with
products that may still be in use, but rapidly are passing
into oblivion—e.g., CRT’s, dial-up modems, Treos,
answering machines, and stereo consoles. Even such
powerful companies as IBM, Microsoft, and HP have had
their setbacks, while out of nowhere have come products
like the iPhone and iPad, social media, cloud services
and software, and, with them, new consumer habits
that upend prevailing business and computing models.
The determination of whether a leading product has
been overthrown or whether a new product category has
been created gives rise to the third concept of this study. The
concept has no name of which we are aware, but we will call
it “watchdog publishing.” We are not just ranking products,
but also monitoring changes in these rankings. We speak
up—“bark,” if you must say—only when there are changes
in the perceived hierarchy of products. Neither chasing
rumor and hype, echoing “the pack,” nor shooting down a
vendor’s claim to fame is what we propose. Rather we ask
for your attention only when there is obvious crowning or
dethroning of a market leader. It is then and only then that
we send out a dispatch because our belief is that you should
not have to read about the struggle of inferior products
to gain acceptance. That struggle is incessant, and so
would be your reading about these products—good for a
publisher who needs a constant stream of news against
which to sell ads, but tiresome for the reader who has no
idea whether most product reviews need to be read at all.
In this way, watchdog publishing spawns an “anti-
 6

magazine.” Traditionally, the magazine has offered a

combination of diversion and education intended to keep
you coming back week after week or month after month
for traditionally advertising was sold on the basis of
frequency and reach and still is. The publisher guarantees
the advertiser a certain number of readers, billed as cost
per thousand (CPM) that requires a certain number of
pages per year. Online advertising has a similar model,
whereby Web pages count as page views or clicks. The
anti-magazine, in comparison, does not expect you to
return on a regular schedule, for we come to you—not
as a magazine in the mailbox, but rather as a dispatch
when there really is news. News in this sense is not the
endless flow of stories that a newswire like Associated
Press puts out, but rather an announcement that the
hierarchy of products has changed and analysis of why.
Material for casual reading is not the product, but rather a
combination of the free guide and updates to it, where the
updates come effortlessly, typically by email or tweeted
link, and you no longer have to keep reading to determine
whether an item actually is newsworthy. Accordingly,
there is minimal attempt to entertain you, and the value
comes in lookups by you or bursts by us, as opposed to
long-form, cover-to-cover reading. The pursuit of news
nonetheless remains a primary objective that accounts
for the principal difference of the anti-magazine from
a reference work like a dictionary, index, or handbook,
which, in print at least, may go years without a new version.
Watchdog publishing has an affinity to alerts, but differs
in significant respects. Announcements from a vendor who
succeeds in signing up consumers for news releases tend
to come with more frequency than the consumer desires,
for most vendor “news” is really a way of staying in touch
with a prospective customer and raising the saliency of the
company or its publicist. Instead of cluttering up a mailbox
 7

with minutiae in this sense, our intention is to withhold

dispatches until there is actual news in the context of
our published criteria. In place of automated or largely
automated messages, which tend to become mere push,
there is human intelligence which separates wheat from
chaff. Instead of attempting to function as a newswire,
watchdog publishing aims, if only metaphorically, to be
a form of insurance—coverage of the risk that important
technological change will occur without your knowledge.
On our view, you should not have to spend any time at
all in reading about inferior products that are in no danger
of dislodging a market leader. Our assumption is that the
market leaders encompass most of the functionality of
the next best products—otherwise, leaders would not be
leaders. If ever they are overtaken by a competing product,
the “watchdogs” will let you know. Yet, if you have a special
interest that the general market fails to address, you
probably know already what product serves that interest,
and we make no claim of being able to address every need.
Contrary to marketers, who proclaim a revolution every
day, only a few products disrupt the status quo as defined
by the products that we list. However, when the world
changes, you should know about it at once, and it is here
that we sell subscriptions. Our survey of leading products
is a free service and, for a limited time as we get started, so
is a snapshot of the decision criteria which applied as of the
last printing of our guide. However, updates to the decision
criteria, notification of whether our pantheon has changed,
and access to our user forum entail a yearly subscription.

DISTINCTION FROM PREVAILING I.T. PUBLISHING

By definition, industry insiders, including developers,

product managers, strategic planners, consultants, and
sometimes investors, are in a different category from the
 8

non-specialist, and, while welcome, they do not comprise

the main market for this study. The IT specialist is never
satiated by too much industry news and gossip. In any
field insistence on the centrality of the specialist is a way
for the specialist to assert importance, gain influence,
and thereby promote career goals. Yet, just as war is
too important to leave to the generals, IT has escaped
the glass house and become integrated with everyday
life. We grant developers/IT insiders their due, and we
admire the creative work that goes into the products that
we cover. Indeed, no industry would thrive without its
producers and promoters. However, the rest of us use
computers and software, not as an end in themselves,
not as a full-time occupation, but to accomplish another
task, whether selling goods, practicing law or medicine,
trading financial instruments, writing reports, conducting
experiments, designing cars, completing coursework, and
so on. These real-world preoccupations take precedence
over learning—if one ever could—all the ins and outs of
new computer products. While experts and other insiders
want to be steeped in unending technical information,
the rest of world is content with a general knowledge of
a product category, what the leaders accomplish, and
which products are worth acquiring. The headaches and
finer points of each product will appear soon enough
after the product is purchased, and few of these features
even will be remembered prior to trying the product.
There are two exceptions to this thinking. One
is for products that achieve such notoriety that they
become a point of departure for conversation about new
technology—a new iPad or iPhone would qualify. Another
exception arises for research of a product when you have
narrowed down your choices to final options and are ready
to make a purchase. Otherwise, it tends to be useless to
read a verbose account of a product which only needs
 9

to considered on a thumbs-up or thumbs-down basis—

check it out or ignore it. That is not to say that there is
no value in learning whether a heavily advertised product
works as intended. Just as “Artists are the antennae
of the race,” in the words of Ezra Pound,2 computer
journalists have a role to play in the popularizing a product
and start of a reference database. We cite a number of
perceptive articles for documentation and further reading.
A famous polemic published in 1926, The Treason
of the Intellectuals by Julian Benda (La trahison des
clercs in French), accused writers of abandoning the
Hellenistic search for truth and lending their talents to
political pragmatism. In a similar vein there all too often,
though hardly universally, is a scandal in computer
journalism, as writers cozying up to vendors, relax their
presumed standard of independence and objectivity.
This scandal generally takes the form of over-reliance
on vendor announcements, often paraphrased as news or
even published word for word without attribution. The latter
is tantamount to plagiarism, but gleefully encouraged by
the vendors and their publicists. At least this legalized
plagiarism appears to be a minority strain in computer
journalism and is frowned upon by diligent journalists. A
traditional journalist interviews knowledgeable sources
and seeks a balanced point of view; in a war a feckless
journalist makes first-hand observations from the trenches
or dies trying. But when the computer product has yet to
be released, even under non-disclosure, the press for
competitive reasons tends to rely on one-sided assertions
2
See http://books.google.com/books?id=uOQMlH_zYNAC&pg=PA2
97&lpg=PA297&dq=ezra+pound+artists+are+the+antennae+of+the+
race&source=bl&ots=Q3FFCVnohD&sig=5MCGdkGSV_KkgKbAPN
OU9pMpldI&hl=en&sa=X&ei=jZS_UueTB7bJsQS0xoLoDQ&ved=0C
FMQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q=ezra%20pound%20artists%20are%20
the%20antennae%20of%20the%20race&f=false.
 10

from the vendor. No one wants to report old news or be seen

as less informed than the rest of the “pack.” Accordingly,
products known only second-hand can be trumpeted as
the next “big thing” in information technology. However,
products can be cancelled and companies can pivot before
widely touted products come to market—witness the
Plastic Logic tablet, the QUE proReader, which, despite
ample press, was overwhelmed by the iPad and never
shipped. The poor cousin to products that never make it
out of the gate is vaporware, a product that exists, if at
all, only in design phase which is never commercialized.
Sometimes vaporware announcements are a conscious
attempt to confuse competitors and to make them
spend money trying to solve intractable problems.
Naïve journalists can be taken in by the same con.
Part and parcel of the media’s toadyism to vendors is
the recognition that access to personnel, press events,
and products for review is dependent on favorable
relations with the vendor; just as financial analysts
who become skeptical of the “party line” have been
known to be shunned by companies that they cover,
a journalist seen as too hostile to the company may be
shut out of the festivities when new products are unveiled.
Enterprise products invite similar dependency on the
vendor for there is no way that a reporter living in a garret
can replicate an enterprise system for testing. At best the
reporter can check the interface, interview consultants,
and cite the experience of select customers, who may
or may not be representative. But in the exigencies of
deadlines, the reporter has little opportunity to develop
thorough research. The reporter then becomes susceptible
to guidance by the vendor to friendly sources—often
customers—who have their own interest in staying on good
terms with a supplier. In fact, there may be no research at
all, but only a reworded announcement from the vendor
 11

or uncritical interview with its chief marketing officer.

A computer review can suffer from further failings. For
one, there is a tendency to view the product in isolation,
when it is really part of a trend or group of products
attempting to accomplish the same result. Sometimes
these group associations are noted, but space limitations
militate against exploration of interrelationships that easily
could be seen as digressive, and passing references to
these interrelationships may not be able to do them justice.
We are not immune from this problem ourselves. A related
failing of reviews is a tendency to eschew a sense of finality.
Since today’s products are in constant threat of becoming
obsolete, judgment can only be tentative. Moreover, the
reviewer must pretend that every review is of equal interest
to the reader because if the reader were ever told, “Here is
a product which you can ignore,” the reviewer as expositor
of that product would have nothing to “peddle” and, to that
extent, be out of business. The idea is to keep the reader
returning issue after issue, page after page, to keep
readership, clicks, and advertising at maximum levels.
Our goal in new media is to break from this form of
publishing, conserve your time, direct you to the broad
consensus of category leaders, make explicit the criteria by
which the leaders should be evaluated, and to place no more
demands on your time than the news actually warrants.
 12

MACRO CRITERIA

We will start with a summary of general criteria that

apply to most products. These factors range from the
obvious to the arch, but how they are used, the weight
that should be attached to each, and, ultimately, whether
they should lead to a purchase decision can never be
defined in advance. As you would expect, different criteria
may apply in greater or less force to different products;
multiple factors may be at work simultaneously; and
factors that apply to specific products can overshadow
general considerations. The reason to list the macro
criteria here is to avoid reiterating them in the next
section except when they seem the predominant factor.

TCO
Total cost of ownership (TCO) includes not just
the initial purchase price, but such factors as yearly
maintenance, installation costs (e.g., setup time, need
for extra ports, sockets, cables, adapters, and desk
space), training and learning curve, cost of technical help,
environmental considerations (noise, cooling, amperage),
opportunity costs (re: alternative use of capital), downtime
(loss of business, damage to reputation), security
protection and vulnerability, storage, insurance, etc.3
Not the least of these costs is one’s own time in learning
a new system, dealing with headaches that arise in
compatibility and support, arranging for upgrades, and
so on. If you assign a market rate to your own time, the
TCO of a product can vitiate a common sense comparison
of products made only on the basis of acquisition cost.
And TCO can discourage the purchase altogether—
3
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_cost_of_ownership.
 13

the hype or particular set of features that grab attention

may not be worth the cost over the life of the product.

Budget
The choice of products is only wishful thinking until there
is a budget for the new product. We know that technology
is constantly evolving, and a percentage of personal or
corporate revenue must always be reinvested in equipment
upgrades and replacement. Just as there is a difference in
the decision criteria of Chevrolet and Mercedes owners,
discretionary spending limitations impose a difference of
opinion about what PC expenditures are justified. But as in
Apple’s AppStore, where many programs cost only a few
dollars, quality does not always correlate with high prices.

Branding
Branding is important in any field, and the premium
that the user pays for, say, IBM or Apple equipment, has
economic justification—the prestige and satisfaction of
owning the name band product and inference, sometimes
misplaced, that the brand has quality lacking in a generic
product. The market leader has a following of trained
users ready to put the product to work and happy to be
using products that potentially advance one’s employment
credentials. The qualification, however, is whether this
premium for an established product is worth the cost in
comparison to competitive products that approximate
or sometimes exceed the same specs. The old saw is:
“No one gets shot for buying IBM computers.” But just
as there is no free lunch, there is always a price paid if
high expenses prevent the organization from growing as
fast it should; these costs have to be recouped through
increased prices that detract from the company’s
competitiveness and thereby make both investors and
employees suffer in terms of growth opportunities.
 14

Redundancy
Though subject to budgetary constraints, it is always
wise to purchase somewhat greater capability than one
needs at present, because as new products evolve they
tend to require increased everything—speed, memory,
storage, bandwidth, resolution, etc. Even though
the user may not need the enhanced capability right
away, it is safer to acquire it from the beginning than
to go back and learn that one’s processor, operating
system, disk space, and so on were inadequate.
Redundancy applies not only to future hardware
requirements, but also to resources needed for peak loads,
outages, and backups. Especially in storage, all the eggs
should not be in one basket. Hard disks fail and become
corrupted, sometimes before the problem becomes known.
Malware, fire, theft, flooding, tornado, hurricane, and
earthquakes present risk to the entire installation, and it is
important to have more than one data repository containing
regular backups. The most likely risk, however, is human
error, including one’s own mistakes. Accidentally deleted
files, installation of incompatible software, reckless security
practices, and coffee spills are only some of the dangers.

Cloud versus local computing

The amount of internal hard disk storage is still
important, but becoming less so now that you can offload
large files to thumb drives (now 512 GB to 1 TB), SD
or microSD cards, and cloud services like
Dropbox, SugarSync, AWS Storage Gateway, Apple
iCloud, Microsoft OneDrive, and Google Drive. These
services offer a degree of free storage, such as 100 GB
at AWS or 1 TB at Flickr, and additional storage on a
paid basis. At least one’s most important data files can
be uploaded to these sites without cost. Then again,
system-wide disruption on a LAN, WAN, or remote site
means that cloud computing, however convenient most of
the time, is always uncertain at other times, perhaps
when you most need the data. Urgency of the task,
 15
availability of printouts, and portable storage are main
variables that might determine the extent to which you
can rely on cloud computing.

Warranty/Maintenance
A one year warranty, which is all that you would get
for free with a Dell, Lenovo, or HP notebook obviously
conveys a message radically different from the “life of the
product” warranty than SanDisk offers for its SD cards,
though even here, there is an upper limit—ten years.4 In a
sense, a warranty, especially an extended warranty, is an
insurance policy where there are huge exclusions that can
be overlooked until the claim is decided against you. You
need to know if the warranty is limited to a manufacturing
defect or can be upgraded for accidental damage.

Technical support
Whether from bugs, conflicts with other programs,
or unclear documentation, you may have need for the
vendor’s technical help. Among the factors that will affect
your TCO, as well as peace of mind, are the amount of
time required to reach a support specialist, whether the
call incurs a fee, and whether the vendor has outsourced
the support to foreign nationals who speak English in a
barely intelligible accent while reading a robotic script.
The vendor will not always have a cure for all of its bugs or
time to deal with you. HP installs software that lets you delete
all your files and restore the system to the factory settings
when you bought the computer. In our personal experience
4
Sandisk MP3 players have a one year warranty. This writer had
one which SanDisk replaced under warranty with another unit which
failed outside of warranty.
 16

Adobe came up with a similar solution to a documented

error in its Creative Cloud software.5 VStarcam in China
simply has ignored support/replacement requests for an IP
camera which has no remote access. Before purchasing a
product, you should search online for horror stories about
it, except that you never know the degree to which the
complaining customer is at fault. Minimally, you can sample
how long it takes the vendor’s technical help department
to even answer the phone—then you will surmise what
headaches await you, and you may pick a different product.
Similarly, you should visit the vendor’s Web site and
observe what updates are currently available and at
what cost. Observe, too, the oldest operating system for
which drivers are available. If the drivers go back only to
recent versions of Windows, plan on a future period of
obsolescence in the same length of time. Unfortunately,
some of the best vendors fall short in this area, such
as HP in scanner support or Lexmark in laser printers.

Diversity of the marketplace

It is important to recognize the diversity of the
market, not just in choices and functionality, but, first
and foremost, in intended uses for the product. There
also is diversity in expected duty cycle of products,
raising issues of replacement cost and sudden loss
of data. Finally, there is diversity in the support and
replacement policies of different vendors who have no
obligation to follow prevailing policies of U.S. vendors.

Active v. passive consumption

An extension of the notion of diversity, but worth
emphasis is the disparity between content creators

5
Re: MSVCP110.dll errors pertaining to former generation of Adobe
files.
 17

and “passive” consumers of it. Content creators need

special authoring tools that the average office worker
would never touch. Yet, these distinctions are not
absolute, for a Hollywood cinematographer, an eminent
content creator, might never edit “dailies” of the work
product, or a government worker who processes
forms all day may go home and use sophisticated
editing software for videos of the family vacation.

Reliability of the vendor

A judgment call is always needed about which
company has caught an upward or downward draft. You
always have to decide whether you should take advantage
of disruptive technology that could improve your market
position, or whether you should select an established
vendor in hopes that it is not going to shut down before
the warranty expires. Reliability is not the same as
prominence, as we have seen in successive releases of
Microsoft Windows, each requiring an endless stream of
patches and “service packs.” Nor is current market size
an indication of tomorrow’s leaders, for Apple, Google,
and others were once small. However, for support,
enhancements, compatibility, and assumed longevity,
the choice between an established company and upstart
usually tilts to the company with the best track record.

Learning curve
How long it will take you to learn a new product should be
researched from the beginning. For example, Photoshop,
CAD, video editing, and database programs which you
need to develop before using take skill and patience,
without which the purchase will be wasted. Each major
revision of a program typically will require new learning
on your part, and the learning tends to be continuous.
 18
Extent of usage
Along with TCO, features, and the difficulty of using
the product, one of the most prominent criteria in product
selection is the extent to which the product will be used.
Obviously, it makes little sense to spend “a fortune” on a
product that will be little used or whose payoff in terms of
facilitating a task never equals the effort and opportunity
costs of learning the product. Vendors like to overwhelm
you with the advantages of the product, but if you use it
so seldom that these advantages are only theoretical,
you have been talked into a bad bargain. The question
therefore must be asked whether you can justify the cost
of professional tools or whether a low-end product will
serve your needs. The qualification is that you may derive
personal satisfaction from completing a difficult task or
from gaining a job skill that at a future point, perhaps too
far away to be foreseen, could be extremely rewarding
to you. These considerations favor the high-end product;
frugality and immediate opportunity costs may argue a low-
end product, especially since you later can upgrade and
might even receive a discount for a competitive upgrade.

We turn next to factors specific to individual product

categories.
 19

HARDWARE

Computer Systems
Tower PC leaders: HP, Dell, Lenovo, Asus.6
All-in-one PC leaders: Above companies, plus Sony.
“Convertible” PC leaders: Lenovo, Sony.7
Gaming PC leaders: Dell, HP.8
Notebook/Ultrabook leaders: All of the above vendors,
plus Samsung.9
Netbook leader: Google Chromebook Pixel

We start with the obvious—before you can run any of

the software that follows, you need some kind of hardware.
Here we can be brief for two reasons. First, you likely have
a computer already and need to consider only an upgrade
or extra machine in a different form factor. Computers are
among the most heavily advertised products in consumer
electronics, and you probably are partial to one vendor or
another already. Secondly and curiously for this important
part of the industry, there is little variation among the major
vendors in each category except for branding and market
positioning. The Wintel (Windows and Intel) duopoly means

6
Asus would not object to Anglicized pronunciation of the name, but
in Taipei, where Asus is headquartered, the company’s name is pro-
nounced “Ah-soos” with emphasis on the second syllable.
7
Microsoft’s Surface could be added to this category; Dell’s XPS-12 was
an early example with a poor battery life and extra weight that later
models have shed.

8
After Dell bought Alienware, HP bought Voodoo.

9
We note again that Macs will be covered in a separate volume.
 20

that competing machines, in a sense, are cut from the same

cloth and differ chiefly in price for added components (e.g.,
the amount of memory, disk size, number of ports, high
resolution screen, relative capabilities of the processor,
etc.). Even support policies are more similar than different.
The decision criteria therefore involve the bundle of features
for which you are willing to pay, if the PC can be configured
before you buy it, or, on a premade model, which happens
to be offered at a particular time by a vendor whom you like.
If, unlikely, one could ignore prior experience,
recommendation of friends, and marketing campaigns, a
“sensible” hardware purchase might proceed as follows.
1. Form factor
First, the intended buyer would decide on the platform—
namely, Mac or PC, desktop or all-in-one PC, tablet,
notebook, or Ultrabook. An Ultrabook is basically a stripped-
down notebook computer inspired by the MacBook Air. An
all-in-one is simply a compact desktop computer whose
components later cannot be upgraded. A convertible PC
allows the screen to flip, swivel, or detach into tablet—
Lenovo’s IdeaPad Yoga and Sony’s Flip PC are examples.
Notebooks are always fragile in some sense and
at risk of being dropped, splashed at Starbucks, or,
crushed during travel, if not left at the airport. You can
get around the claustrophobic feeling of a notebook,
compared to a desktop system, by docking the notebook
(for use with a monitor, full keyboard, and mouse). A dock
minimizes the inconvenience of plugging and unplugging
the machine and helps to prolong the tightness and
reliability of the ports. A large notebook—essentially
a desktop replacement—overcomes some of the
claustrophobic feeling, but introduces a new problem—
extra weight. Ultrabooks, the new genre of notebooks,
go in the opposite direction about size, but tend to
eliminate ports and the optical drive that you might want.
 21

A prime advantage of notebooks compared to tablets

and smartphones is that the former includes a real keyboard.
Novels have been written on a smartphone, but if you expect
to use a portable device for serious composition, not just
messaging or lookups, most people will want a conventional
keyboard; even squished tight on an Ultrabook, a tactile
keyboard is more productive than a virtual keyboard.
Netbooks, using Intel’s Atom processor, were a failure
because vendors kept them under-powered so as not to
cannibalize notebooks. Google’s Chromebook—sold by
Samsung, Acer, HP, Lenovo, and Google itself—may turn
out to be an exception now that Google has replaced the Arm
processor with Intel’s Haswell processor. Google’s main
drawback is its cancer-like encroachment on our privacy so
that our demographic and assumed psychographic profiles
can be sold to the highest bidder. By scanning messages
in Gmail, encouraging the use of Location Services,
collecting and storing personal information locally, tracking
users across all Google products,10 etc., Google wants to
know “everything” about us, and we might reasonably
have concerns about Google’s use of the 1 TB (formerly
100 GB) given to Chromebook owners on Google Drive.
2. Processor
Next after the form factor is determined should come
a disciplined focus on the CPU—namely, Intel (i7, i5,
i3, Atom), AMD (e.g., Ryzen and Athlon ), or NVIDIA
(GeForce and Quadro) processors.11 Subject, as always,
to budget, one should focus on the best processor for
anything except

10
Google’s privacy policy states: “We may collect and store informa-
tion (including personal information) locally on your device.” The rest
of this privacy policy deserves a careful reading.
11
Arm processors are known for mobile and automotive use, but not as
PC central processors.
 22

browsing and word processing, where almost any

processor suffices. Computationally difficult applications
like graphics, video editing, and long documents require
fast processors, but the tacit reason to aim for the best
processor is to incorporate a degree of redundancy
into the purchase. The next generation of software and
operating systems always demand greater computing
power; moreover, the state-of-art is a moving window: the
better today’s processor is, the more likely it will retain
relevance in future products. Apart from sever (Xeon) or
gaming (Extreme) chips, Intel’s best family of desktop
processors has the designation “4th Generation” and
comes in various flavors.12 In contrast, the least expensive
processor is likely to court obsolescence sooner than the
today’s high end models, so that savings today merely
results in earlier expenditures in 1-3 years than the high
end buyer has to incur. All computer machinery becomes
obsolete at some point, and the question is only when.
3. Memory
After determining the processor, the next decision
should center on the amount of memory, the most important
determinant of speed after the processor. Local hardware,
however, has no bearing on a slow Internet connection,
usually a function of the last mile bottleneck or of congestion
either on the Internet itself or at the destination which you
are trying to visit. Whatever amount of memory comes on
an advertised special, a safe bet, funds permitting, is to
double the memory, for the payback will be in speed and
increased likelihood of accommodating future software.
4. Screen resolution
After memory is determined, resolution of the screen
is crucial—the density of pixels—for the screen is what
you will be seeing for the entire life of the device. High
12 See http://www.intel.com/p/en_US/support/graphics.
 23

definition, according to the Consumer Electronics

Association, begins at 720p, but 1,080p is much better
than 720p. Those are standards for video, where the
“p” signifies progressive scan lines, which give a better
picture than interlaced scan lines, the former standard. A
related PC standard— WUXGA, or 1,920 X 1,200 pixels
per inch—has been downgraded to1,920 X 1,080 “in the
most heavily marketed” TV displays.13 Notable
exceptions are the 2,880 X 1,800 pixel Retina MacBook
Pro and the 2,560 X 1,440 pixel HP Spectre. No sooner
has 1080p become a minimum requirement for
discriminating TV buyers than the industry has
introduced 4K a n d 8 K U l t a H i g h D e f i n i t i o n
( U H D ) m o n i t o r s , w i t h r e s o l u t i o n u p t o 7,680
by 4,320 pixels in the case of 8K UHD. In sum, picture
quality is increasing, and you either should try to cleave
to the evolving standard or economize, knowing that
you only will have to replace today’s purchase in the near
future. Any TV with an HDMI or DVI connection is
also a PC monitor, though the reverse is not the same:
not all PC monitors have a built-in TV tuner. While
cable TV could appear on a PC monitor via a set-top
box and HDMI cable, a tuner would allow the monitor to
receive over-the-air broadcasts at 1,080p. Comcast,
the largest cable TV operator in the U.S., currently
upconverts conventional interlaced programming to
720p for high definition customers, but claims to transmit
programming at whatever resolution Hollywood
studios offer. A TV cabled to an Internet-connected
PC eliminates the clutter and expense of a Roku, Boxee
(Samsung), or

13
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_display_resolution. For
a short article about resolution see: http://hometheater.about.com/
od/hometheatervideobasics/qt/The-Difference-Between-720p-And-
1080i.htm.
 24

Apple TV adapter. Samsung, Westinghouse, and other

TVs can switch to computer data by your clicking a TV
remote control and changing the source. This method
solves the problem of how to get PC data onto a TV—
you simply turn the TV into PC monitor. GoogleTV,
adopted by LG and other companies, also provides
for Internet data on a TV, but only in a picture-in-
picture mode.Sony and other vendors have long had the
ability to fetch Internet data via smart widgets, but do not
attempt to replace the entire TV signal with PC output.
However, a combination TV and PC monitor is
impractical beyond a certain screen size—probably 42
inches. A PC monitor typically sits on a desk in front of the
keyboard, and looking up at, say, a 55 inch screen on the
wall would be abnormal. Moreover, the usual place of the
TV screen is in the living room, and a PC would tend to
be elsewhere in the home. Used alone as a monitor, a
combination monitor and TV should be able to rotate 90
degrees like the Samsung Simple or Viewsonic TD2340,
which can switch from portrait to landscape modes.
Portrait is good for Web pages and desktop publishing;
whereas, landscape is natural for spreadsheets and
movies. A do-it-yourself alternative is to acquire a rotating
wall mount and then toggle the display between portrait
and landscape after first right-clicking the Windows
desktop and choosing “screen resolution.” The best
TV/PC monitors have a 120-240 Hertz refresh rate,
meaning that the screen can change quickly. On the
other hand, the units that are easiest to find and cheapest
to buy are still 60 Herz, deemed adequate by vendors for
screens where there are fewer pixels to illuminate than
on, say, 55-100 inch screens. All vendors advertise their
screens as the best, but the key criterion is how well the
unit displays black. Forget the vendor’s exaggerated
contrast ratio, and try to see how black objects contrast
with the other colors—with poor contrast, the colors
 25

will not be vivid. Unfortunately, resellers run optimized

video clips, which never challenge the weaknesses of
the TV. If possible, bring your own video clip on a USB
drive and ask the reseller to show it. Expect reluctance.14
5. Sourcing: make or buy
Assembling your own desktop system is worth a
try, but not from the standpoint of saving cost. You can
buy a large case and motherboard, plug in hard drives,
memory, DVD/CD-ROM drive, cards (video, USB,
Ethernet, Bluetooth], and install the operating system.
Lack of the usual bloatware from PC manufacturers will
be refreshing. However, assembly is one of the least
expensive items in PC manufacturing, and whatever you
save in labor will be offset by the increased cost which
you have to pay for shipping and components, compared
to the economies of scale of the market leaders. The
justification for a build-it-yourself project, though not for
everyone, is to deepen your understanding of PCs, while
developing skills for repairing or upgrading components.

Video Glasses
Assumed leader: Meta Quest 2.
Alternative: Vuzix M2000AR HMD.

There long have been goggles and glasses for gaming,

3-D television, and wearable computers. None have
become dominant, and 3-D vendors cannot even decide on
whether active (connected) or passive (wireless) shutters
should predominate. In the home 3-D is conceded to have
been a failure except for gaming, and movie houses are the
only stronghold of 3-D. Now wearable glasses intended for
general computing and tricked out with picture-taking
features are about to roll in on a new wave of mobile
computing. Developed with Nokia, Vuzix eyewear fits into
standard eyeglass frames and can display an HDMI
signal.
14
This task is more difficult than you would expect. See http://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=jOhvbdVkPaM.
 26

Weight
Computer glasses combine the ultimate in portability
with a full-size screen, for so it will appear so close to
your eye. Here finally ends the worry of whether you
should buy a 17 inch notebook for its “spacious” screen
(still smaller than the typical desktop monitor) or settle
for an 11-13 inch notebook because it feels lightweight.
Style
Does the desire to look geeky outweigh the risk of
tripping because of obstructed or distracted vision?
Expense
Are you so dissatisfied with your other screens—e.g.,
smartphone, tablet, notebook, monitor, smart TV, etc.—
that you need to lay out funds for a new screen?

Keyboard
Leaders: Microsoft, Logitech.

The mouse and keyboard bundled with a new

desktop system can be assumed to be functional,
but cheap. Since so much of your time will involve,
literally, hands-on experience with both, you should
consider ergonomic alternatives. If you dislike cords
on your desk, there are wireless mice and keyboards.
For presentations, where you do not want to be
confined to a chair, the Gyration AIRMOUSE has geek-
appeal—you can operate the screen from a distance. But
when you sit down you will go back to traditional hardware,
and conference speakers are not ashamed to navigate
screens with the cursor controls of an ordinary notebook.
Size, comfort, productivity.
Microsoft’s Curve is a strong candidate in corded
 27
keyboards, unless you want to type in the dark on
Logitech’s Illuminated Keyboard or any number of
backlit keyboards. The proof is in the pudding. You
should test the Microsoft and Logitech models at a
large reseller or at a trade show since hand size is
variable. Then you can intuit the value of this extra cost.
Microsoft’s Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 includes
a convenient “Zoom Slider” in the center of the keyboard
for zooming in or out of the screen without pulling down
menus. (Unlike Adobe software, few products implement
keyboard shortcuts for zooming.) Microsoft’s Sculpt, Arc,
and Comfort Curve 3000 keyboards are also worthy
of note, as is Logitech’s Wireless Keyboard K350.
Desktop clutter
Is the trackpad of a notebook adequate for you, or in
increased comfort and productivity can you justify the cost
and lost real estate of a dock?
Annoyance
Is the occasional charging of a wireless mouse and
keyboard, plus turning them on and off, more bothersome
to you than extra cords on your desktop? Forgetting to
charge them will result in computer downtime.
Security
If you are hyper-concerned about security, you may
want to rethink the advantages of a wireless keyboard, for
you never know who might be monitoring your keystrokes
and clicks from a short distance away.
Environmental factors
Does an illuminated keyboard cut down or typos, or if
the light is so weak that you have to light up your keyboard,
will you get eyestrain before you revert to a lamp?
 28

OTHER HARDWARE

Router
Leader: D-Link’s DSR-632.

Security and efficiency are benefits of all routers. You

need a router not only to offload processing of network
traffic from your host computer, but to wall off, to an extent,
an inimical world from your PC and LAN. The router is the
public face of private network, and if you are the object of
a malicious attack, it is better for the router to be attacked
than your PC. The router stores settings, not your private
files like email and word processing.
Speed, number of ports
D’Link’s 8-Port Router is good because a common
four port router does not give you enough connections.
In addition to at least one PC, you may want to plug in
a VOIP modem, security camera, Macintosh, tablet, or
notebook, along with any of the same used by other family
members. Although you can expand a four port router by
adding an Ethernet hub, clutter on your desktop should
be resisted. A wireless router affords an alternative way
to connect multiple devices, and products that support
the latest Wi-Fi (802.11ac) standard are expected later
in 2014. The 802.11ac specification offers a practical (not
theoretical) throughput of 1.3 to 1.7 Gbits/s.15 However,
until you connect new devices which implement the “ac”
specification, there is no point in having it only on a router:
if you want a gigabit LAN, you will have to rely on ethernet,
which is easier to set up and more secure than Wi-Fi.
While this discussion concerns leading products,
and planning for the future should incorporate extra

See http://www.extremetech.com/computing/160837-what-is-802-
15

11ac-and-how-much-faster-than-802-11n-is-it.
 29

“horsepower,” it should be conceded that current Wi-

Fi standards like 802.11n likely will provide adequate
bandwith for you. Moreover, if you would like a
combined DSL modem and wireless router, like D-Link’s
ADSL2 Plus Modem with Wireless N300 Router
(Model DSL-2740B), you are limited to the DSL speed
for Internet connectivity. Verizon’s most expensive DSL
service for example, claims to provide 7.1 to 15 Mbps
downloads and 768 Kbps uploads, and you never could
browse the Web at the maximum 802.11n speed of 54
Mbit/s to 600 Mbit/s.
Another concession is that Linksys, which Belkin
acquired from Cisco, is a worthy competitor who will be
included when we launch a separate study of networking
products. That day has not come.

Scanner
Leader: Fujitsu (see below).
Alternatives: Epson WorkForce B11B194011 Pro GT-S50
Document Scanner,
Xerox XDM31255M-WU DocuMate 3125 Color Sheetfed
Scanner,
HPScanjet Enterprise Flow 7500 Flatbed Scanner,
Visioneer Patriot 430, multifunction printers.16

Despite the advantages of a virtual lifestyle, we come

from and will never escape a world of paper documents
and solid objects. Capturing this information in digital form
is the province of scanning, including 3-D scanning.

Throughput
Are you trying to digitize “vast” quantities of 8.5 X 11
16
Kodak has been a top vendor in this industry, but the bankruptcy of
the parent company and spinout of the imaging division to Kodak’s
U.K. retirees leaves a cloud of uncertainty about Kodak’s future.
 30

inch sheets, both single or double sided, black-and-white

or colored? The scanning function of multifunction printer
with an automatic document feeder is adequate for small
jobs, but if you are trying to process cartons of documents,
a standalone scanner capable of generating at least
300 dpi at 25 black and white, simplex pages/minute is
advisable.
Probably adequate for digitizing one person’s collected
business and personal papers is a small workgroup
scanner like Fujitsu fi-7160. At a lower speed and cost
than the 6130Z is Fujitsu’s ScanSnap line of scanners like
the IX500.
Multifeed detection and image enhancement
An upright scanner not only should meet your criteria
for speed and durability, but be able to detect misfeeds
that would jam the scanner, causing it to stop. Multifeed
detection through ultrasound or infrared sensors alerts
you if two or more pages come through at once. Similarly,
page straightening, removal of stray marks (despeckling),
and sharpening are among the built-in features that you
would want. So are rollers that can be replaced by the
user, as opposed to authorized service center, since worn
rollers also can result in paper jams.
Form factor
A low-end flatbed scanner, in contrast, would tend to
lack the above features, but be good for delicate items
and for ganging more than one item in the same image.
(Software, too, can combine images from separate pages.)

Film scanners
Mid-Range Leader: Epson Perfection V750-M Pro
Scanner.
Alternatives: Braun MULTIMAG SlideScan 6000, Pacific
Image
Prime Film 120 Pro Multi-Format Film Scanner, Pacific
 31

Image
PowerSlide 5000 CCD Slides Scanner.

Film scanning requires a more expensive system

than a scanner intended only for OCR (Optical Character
Recognition) or archival preservation of documents. As
digital cameras have come to dominate photography, film
scanning has a rapidly receding market, but is the only
way to get a previous film collection into electronic form
so that photographs can be merged with new media,
colors captured before they fade over time, and the
collection backed up or shared. Nikon, whose CoolScan
5000 scanner was popular, has exited this business.
At the high-end of film scanning are drum scanners
which extract microscopic details from an image by
making multiple passes over i. Drum scans can cost
hundreds of dollars per photo at respected service
bureaus like Baboo Digital or Duggal in New York.
Because drum scanners are expensive and used for
professional work, they are beyond our scope. At the
opposite end of the market, which we also will ignore, are
machines costing around $50 to $500. We will comment
only on the next tier, mid-range film scanners that exceed
what we consider a minimum level of quality and speed.
Price/performance
The Epson Perfection V750-M Pro Scanner is a flatbed
scanner, retailing for around $800. Except for automated
batch processing, the Epson scanner seems close in
quality to the Plustek Plustek OpticFilm 120 Film Scanner
(around $2,000) and the Braun MULTIMAG SlideScan
6000 (around $1,800). The next more capable tier jumps to
about $16,000-25,000 for Hasselblad scanners. If ultimate
quality is your objective, you might as well go all the way
up to drum scanners.
 32
Outsourcing
Service bureaus that offer to scan film that you mail in
may be attractive from the standpoint of convenience and
be able to handle large formats that require professional
equipment. But the resolution invariably is less than you
would obtain with your own scanner, unless you are willing
to pay a premium, and then jobs of any quantity would
soon cost as much as a new scanner.
There also are questions of security and shipping. If
shipping is necessary, what is the cost, and are you willing
to subject irreplaceable photos to the risk of being lost?

3-D scanning
Leaders: Geomagic Capture, Makerbot Digitizer,
NextEngine 3D Scanner
Alternatives: Sense (3D Systems), Hovercam Solo 5X
(Pathway Innovations and Technologies).17

Ability to digitize real-world objects which cannot go

through a scanner
You can always get out a digital camera to photograph
three dimensional objects, but for measurement and
importing data into a CAD system, specialized hardware
and software are needed. Leading products are priced for
a professional or prosumer market, but the portable Sense
scanner ($399) suggests the kind of “front-end” that can
be expected as 3-D printers become popular.
If image capture, rather than CAD is the intention, an
option is the Hovercam Solo 5X. This product offers a
high depth of field, automatic focusing, and near real-time
previewing and repositioning of the object or document.

Disclosure: Four years before launching this site, our editor-in-chief

17

had an e-book and marketing proposal for Hovercam which never

materialized.
 33

The camera can face upwards for videoconferencing or

fold into a portable device. Bundled software is intended
to make the product a self-contained imaging solution.

Tracking of Receipts
Leader: NeatDesk

Need for expense reporting and tracking

How good are you at collecting receipts and hunting
them up when needed? Are you willing to snap a photo
every time you buy something (recommended) or else
take the trouble to scan receipts in batches?
The company which originated the market for scanning
and totaling up receipts is The Neat Company, whose
first product was a portable scanner called NeatReceipts.
NeatReceipts since has grown into desktop (NeatDesk),
cloud (NeatCloud, NeatConnect), and service bureau
(NeatScan) modesl. Although any OCR software could
parse receipts and give you numbers to paste into a
spreadsheet, Neat recognizes certain types of receipts
and knows how to populate relevant fields of its software.

Business Card Scanning

Leader: Abbyy Business Card Reader.
Alternatives: IrisCard 5, BizCard Reader 901, Dymo
CardScan Executive.

Somewhat like Neat Receipts in the ability to detect fields

(such as name, address, phone number), business card
software can populate a contact database automatically.
Accuracy; amount of trouble which you are willing to take
to maintain a contact database; scanner availability
Abbyy has the finest OCR software in the industry, and
Abbyy’s Fine Reader software can be used both with almost
any scanner. In contrast, Dymo CardScan Executive and
 34

CardScan Personal are dedicated business card scanners

small enough to travel with you, should you so desire. A
dedicated business card scanner is more likely to be used
than a general purpose scanner, but also could become
extra desktop clutter.

Mobile Scanners
Leaders: iPhone 5S, iPad Air, and Samsung Galaxy S4
Alternatives: ScanStikSK600V and DocuPen Xtreme X05

Today the best smartphones and tablets, listed above,

have high-quality, though single-focus cameras that have
wrested market share from both point-and-shoot cameras
and mobile scanners. The fact that smartphones are
personal items “always” with you and ready to scan QR
and UPC codes has fostered the growth of lookups and
comparison shopping. When equipped with a cellphone
SIM, tablets can perform the same function or, if immediacy
can be sacrificed, when they are connected to a PC.
Camera quality, form factor
The iPhone, iPad, and Samsung Galaxy phones are
more than adequate for QR and UPC codes, but usually
require patience and repetition to digitize 8.5 X 11 inch
documents. When held far enough away to see the entire
page, the print tends to be too small to red, and when
close enough to see the print, the frame may cut off part of
the page. Therefore, there is still a market for dedicated,
battery-powered scanners like the HP Scanjet Professional
1000 Mobile Scanner. In comparison, the pen-shaped
Planon ScanStik and DocuPen Xtreme X105 roll over a
document line by line; whereas, the WizcomTech InfoScan
TS Elite is held like a pen and can capture strings of text.
 35

Keyboard Scanner
Leader: KeyScan KSP10
Convenience
KeyScan builds the scanner into the keyboard so as
to be always ready and near at hand. But absent a sheet
feeder, pages have to be fed in one at a time—a tiresome
process unless the scanning is only occasional. The
choice of a KeyScan keyboard scanner versus a standard
scanner thus depends on the convenience and availability
of other scanners. Is manual feeding of one sheet at a time
more troublesome than walking over to a scanner with an
automatic feeder?

Printers
Leader: No clear winner.
Candidates: any HP printer, Lexmark laser printer, Epson
multifunction printers.

Resolution, speed, form factor, compatibility, TCO

In contemplating a new printer, an astute follower
of the IT industry would think of HP because of its past
leadership. Undoubtedly, HP makes a good product and
deserves consideration. However, there are too many
printers for different purposes at different price points to
suggest a foolproof means of choosing a printer. Personal
preference and random factors such as a previous usage,
a reseller’s temporary promotion, or the cogency of a sales
person are no more fallible than an arbitrary standard
would be.
Otherwise, the decision criteria for a printer would
start with color versus monochrome, laser versus inkjet;
wireless and networking capabilities; and multifunctional
options (combined printing, scanning, copying, and
preferably faxing). If you expect to keep the printer until
 36

it falls over dead, the vendor’s track record in releasing

drivers for previous operating systems should be the next
consideration since Microsoft could release a new version
of Windows which lacks backwards compatibility with your
model. If you install this version of Windows, your printer
would become useless unless you can obtain a suitable
driver from the printer’s vendor. You thus should observe
how far back the vendor still supports out of date operating
systems: there is a good chance that there will be no driver
for your printer after the same length of time.
TCO for inkjet printers
Inkjet printers theoretically will approximate the
appearance of commercial printing better than laser output
since the ink flows together after coming out of nozzles
in tiny droplets. However, manufacturers, having adopted
a razor blade model, tend to price small ink cartridges
much higher than the actual cost—the profit comes
from consumable items instead of the initial purchase.
Accordingly, TCO should govern your purchase decision
as much as resolution, speed, and duty cycle, other key
factors in printing. For laser printers TCO includes not just
the yearly cost of laser cartridges, but also the variously-
named drum, photoconductor unit, or OPC cartridge. At
some point the printhead of laser printers will wear out or,
in inkjets, become clogged from non-use. If the printhead
is not replaceable, the printer is toast at that point, but if
the printhead is replaceable, its cost has to be considered
in the TCO. Similarly, rollers for an automatic feeder will
need replacement: their cost and possibly that of a service
technician also must be included.
Mobile, 3-D, and label printers suppose further
considerations which we cannot explore fully, for example:
 37

• Weight in mobile printers

• Need for a dedicated label printers like the Seiko
Smart Label Printer (SLP 620 and SLP 650) or
Brother QL-1050, which take rolls of labels, as op-
posed to removable (e.g., Avery) labels on 8.5 X 11
inch sheets.
• Need for vinyl lettering, as from the Brother PT-
1230PC.
• CAD expertise, needed for 3-D printers.

Storage

Magnetic Hard Drives

Leader: Seagate.
Alternatives: Western Digital, Memorex, Buffalo.18

In a spinning hard drive only Seagate, Toshiba, and

Western Digital make the “platters” which actually store
the data.19 Since the platters are a commodity item sold to
other vendors, what distinguishes a hard drive lies chiefly
in the subsystem that controls how data is written to the
platters. Secondarily, hard drive vendors are differentiated
by pricing and support.
Price, support, reputation
Seagate takes honors in traditional drives for its pre-
and post-sales support, wide variety of models, and
historical prominence. On the other hand, you might prefer

Hard drive divisions of Hitachi, LaCie, Fujitsu, Sony, and others

18

have been acquired.

19
See http://www.storagenewsletter.com/rubriques/hard-disk-
drives/217-companies-hdd-since-1956/; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
List_of_defunct_hard_disk_manufacturers.
 38

Buffalo’s aggressive pricing or the price/performance of

anyone else. Our sampling of top vendors suggests that
the average cost of 1 TB magnetic hard drives is under 5¢/
TB, so above this price you are paying for marketing more
than for engineering.20
After making sure that the drive has the interface that
you require—namely, Thunderbolt or USB 3.0, the leading
standards today—you should decide questions of:
Redundancy
Do you want multiple drives in a disk array? RAID is
good, but it cuts down on the amount of storage, since
volumes need to mirror each other (with the same data
written on each drive, sometimes in “stripes” that can
be processed rapidly). Another problem with RAID is
that you cannot switch a volume in or out of the RAID
array without reformatting the volume, thereby losing all
the data that RAID was supposed to protect. If you are
disciplined about creating backups, you also can achieve
redundancy simply by having multiple drives, called JBOD
(Just a Bunch of Drives). Absent a wide area network
with mirrored sites, JBOD has the further advantage of
letting you store backups in different physical locations:
then if your principal location succumbs to theft, fire, flood,
tornado, or terrorist attack, you (or your successors) may
have a chance to recover essential files.
Networking
Do you have the skill and patience to set up a NAS
(network attached storage) device like the LenovoEMC’s
six bay PX6-300d network storage unit? NAS devices let
you share and broadcast data throughout a home network,

20Also see http://www.statisticbrain.com/average-cost-of-hard-drive-

storage/; http://www.extremetech.com/computing/153879-storage-
pricewatch-hdds-back-to-pre-flood-prices-ssds-grow-as-gb-holds-
steady.
 39

but they have the same problem that RAID presents: the
network or array must be working before you can use it,
and if you want to recreate a volume from a backup, it
cannot include the disk with the boot sector.
Form factor
If you like the size of an external portable drive, which
takes its power from a notebook computer, are you prepared
to shorten the battery life of the notebook? Secondly, do
you even need a portable drive since lightweight thumb
drives are reaching ever-higher capacities?

Solid State Drives (SSD)

Leaders: SanDisk, Kingston.
Alternatives: Seagate, Crucial Technology, Intel, etc.21

Since there are no moving parts, SSDs are faster than

magnetic drives and draw less power. They are a win-win
except for the increased cost. Our sampling of 256 GB
SSDs suggest average cost of 6.3¢/GB, and 10.3¢ as the
average costs of 512 GB SSDs. SSD prices are declining,
though parity with magnetic drive pricing is not expected
for another three years.
Capacity, speed, cost trade-off
Because of cost, an SSD has less capacity than a
magnetic hard drive of the same value. Are speed and
reliability more important than the premium that you pay
for SSD, or are you willing to sacrifice SSD capacity to
lower the price?
Customer support
SSD nonetheless is or is becoming a commodity item,
and if price is not the deciding factor, you should consider
how supportive the vendor is. Both SanDisk and Kingston

See others: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_solid-state_drive_

21

manufacturers.
 40

have excellent customer service departments. Seagate

has focused its SSD sales on enterprises, but in time
should be active in the consumer market at well.
Encryption
Today, a thumb drive—one embodiment of SSD—can
store 512 GB to 1 TB, provided that you are willing to
pay the price. But are you willing to risk leaving this drive
behind, still plugged into a host? If so, you can reduce the
risk by using an encrypted 16 to 64 GB USB drive, such as
the Kingston Data Traveler (available in various models),
SanDisk Ultra USB 3.0 Flash Drive, or Kanguru Dual Trust.
Even if you favor the Internet for access to large files, local
storage on a secure drive can be invaluable when you are
in a dead signal area for a mobile connection or chary of
security at a public hotspots.
Cloud storage
Cloud servers can backup both spinning drives and
SSD, but are especially important in mobile applications,
where SSD predominates.It can be assumed that you
would have a limited amount of data on a phone compared
to that of your home or office system. Cloud storage offers
you the possibility of instant access to any data that you
choose not to carry with you.
On the other hand, is cloud storage secure enough for
you considering that banks, RSA, and such personalities
as President Obama, the First Lady, FBI Director, and
CIA Director have not been able to keep hackers at bay?
Perhaps you feel that hackers are after big game instead
of you, and that the gravest risk is to your bank rather than
to you. As long as you are confident in cloud storage, you
can take advantage of the free storage offered by Dropbox,
Microsoft’s SkyDrive, Google Drive, Amazon Cloud Drive,
Apple’s iCloud, Ubantu One, Yahoo’s Flickr, and others.22
See: http://www.zdnet.com/the-top-10-personal-cloud-storage-
22

services-7000011729/.
 41

Large companies and even the CIA use Amazon’s Web

services, so cloud storage has a vote of confidence from
IT professionals. The redundancy, state-of-art fire and
theft control, and scalability of these services are not
insignificant, but you should realize that NSA is believed
to be monitoring or capable of monitoring all traffic to and
from large Web sites. Foreign countries also are known
to engage in espionage of industrial secrets. If privacy is
a concern, the threat of snooping by friendly or unfriendly
governments is one of the criteria that must be considered.

Headsets
Leaders: Multiple

Among vendors of headphones there is no universally

acknowledged leader, and the choice of products is huge.
We will focus on music headphones—also suitable for
cellphones—as opposed to office worker headsets (as
from Plantronics), Bluetooth earpieces for cellphones
(as from Jawbone); “walkie-talkies,” hearing impaired, or
augmented reality devices, as for hunting or hearing aids.
All the well-known electronics firms from Japan—e.g.,
Sony, Panasonic, JVC, etc.—make a range of headphones,
and in the same company are Bose, Sennheiser, Acoustic
Research (Audiovox), Monster, Bowers and Wilkins,
Shure, and Beats Studio. In a mainly mid-range market
are also Skullcandy and Koss.
Environmental factors
Headphones and earbuds lose much of their value
when used in a poor acoustic environment like a subway,
moving automobile, or city street. Noise cancellation helps
only to a point inasmuch as it applies to “heavy” sounds like
the roar of an airplane motor—if all possible interferences
were filtered out, you would not be able to hear the music
either. In public expensive gear may give you a sense of
 42

self-worth, but hardly a concert experience. If you resort to

bulky over-the-hear headphones that attempt to isolate the
music with large ear cups, you run the risk of not hearing
ambient sound that could endanger you, such as the
approach of unexpected vehicles or a mugger’s footsteps;
cheap headgear that “lets in” some of the external world
is advantageous outside the home; whereas, in your living
room you want the highest quality for which you are willing
to pay.
Sensitivity, frequency response
As with keyboards or audio speakers, headsets that
match your physical requirements are as important as their
sound quality. A shortcoming in the headphone’s sensitivity
or frequency response may compensate for a defect in
your hearing, so that otherwise average headphones or
earbuds sound excellent to you. By the same randomness,
expensive headphones can exaggerate an imperfection
in your hearing and therefore appear undistinguished.
You thus need to try a great many models, but from the
standpoint of hygiene, you may have difficulty with this
research. Your best bet for testing is to go to trade shows
like CES where these vendors congregate.
Bluetooth
Despite the untethered freedom of wireless headphones,
you need to decide your interest in a Bluetooth headset,
there is a tradeoff between the inconvenience of tangles
and wires touching your face and the inconvenience of
charging yet another device. Moreover Bluetooth listening
wears down battery life of a connected mobile device
more than a corded model does, and when the battery is
gone, so is your notebook, phone, or tablet.
Earbuds (earphones)
Earbud leaders include most of the same headphone
manufacturers with all of the same caveats as above.
To these vendors should be added Etymolic Research.
 43

Earbuds, of course, are attractive from the standpoint of

portability.

Drawing tablet
Leader: Wacom

Fidelity to your writing and drawing habits

You can draw on an iPad or notebook touchscreen, but
it helps to have pressure sensitive pens and the vendor’s
commitment to this market. Here Wacom excels.

Other imput devices

Leader: LiveScribe 3 Pro Edition

Ability to digitize handwriting

Using special paper filled with “micro-dots,” LiveScribe
can digitize and OCR handwriting, while recording the
spoken words. Words that you miss can be recorded to
the pen and later transferred to a PC. The pen then acts as
a navigation device inasmuch as touching it to any place in
the ink starts the audio recording at that point. Minus this
navigation feature, a close competitor is IrisNotes 2.
Weight
Alternative products also bridge paper and digital
worlds (e.g., Moleskin Evernote Smart Notebook), but
are heavier to carry than LiveScribe’s pen and paper.
LiveScribe’s achievement is the combination of a natural
interface (handwriting) with OCR and recording in a device
much lighter than, say, an Olympus audio recorder.
OCR
Are you content with handwriting saved as graffiti, or
is OCR your objective? OCR at best has a 20-30 % error
rate when the imput as printed text. With poor penmanship
the error rate can be so high as to make OCR unworkable.
 44

Scanning
Scanning of handwritten notes also would get you an
electronic copy, but lack the clever navigation of LiveScribe.
On the other hand, the need for specialized paper, which
can run out or be left behind, introduces a different type of
limitation.

VOIP
Leader: Ooma
Inexpensive alternative: MagicJack Plus

Voice-Over-IP (VOIP) phoning is closely related to PCs

in that it is set up from a PC, the VOIP phone normally is
connected to the router used by your PC, and it is from
the PC that you view call logs and manage features like
call forwarding. Although cellphones have diminished and,
for some users, eliminated the need for a landline, not all
cellphone plans have “unlimited” minutes, as you get with
VOIP. (On a fixed monthly plan VOIP services limit you to
a region like North America, but within the region calls can
be unlimited.)
Pricing, miniaturization, portability, and smartphone
integration
MagicJack has figured out how to bring the above
elements together in a cost-effective way. MagicJack
nonetheless is missing some important features that
other VOIP providers offer, like simultaneous ringing of
multiple phones, masking of caller ID on outgoing calls,
“picturephone” service, and speed dialing.
Your tolerance for occasional glitches
VOIP uses an inherently fluctuating infrastructure, the
Internet. As in any VOIP service, line quality is less reliable
than traditional (PSTN) telephone service, though rarely
will you notice a problem. How important to you is this
difference when it occurs?
 45
Optional features
Do you require VOIP features like free teleconferencing,
digital logging of incoming and outgoing calls, optional
access to calls as email attachments, user control of
voicemail settings, etc.? Cellphone apps have these
capabilities, but not MagicJack so far.
Price
Can you find any other plan that offers five years of
unlimited local and long distance calling in North America
for $99, as MagicJack offers after initial purchase of
$29.95?

IP camera
Leaders: Microsoft LifeCam Cinema, Logitech HD Pro
Webcam C920.

Name recognition, video quality, availability of other

cameras, convenience
Many companies make a simple IP camera for video
chat. However, good optics on a fixed lens camera that
operates in poor lighting and transmits a compressed signal
will not rescue the inevitably degraded video, and almost
any camera that supports a USB connection will suffice
for video calling on Facebook, Skype, and other services.
Phoning never used to require video at all. Autofocusing and
the 720p-1080p resolution of the Microsoft and Logitech
cameras listed above make them a step above “generic”
cameras. Nonetheless, they are not in the same league
as camcorders in terms of image quality and user control.
In fact, you might be able to connect a camcorder to a PC
for same purpose as an IP camera or otherwise employ
a security camera, built-in camera on tablet or notebook,
or Hovercam scanner. The extent to which you intend to
engage in videoconferencing will dictate how much trouble
you wish to take on in setting up one of these cameras
 46

instead of relying on an inexpensive model always ready

for service.

Security camera
Leaders: D-Link DCS-2230, Dropcam Pro
Popular alternative: Ring cameras from
Amazon

The embedded IP address of a home security camera

similarly provides for remote viewing of the home over the
Internet. These systems can consist of nothing more than
a baby cam, or else, with add-ons, become an alternative
to a professional alarm system, as from ADT. Instead in
the room. However, sensors that detect the breaking of
glass, opening of doors and windows, smoke, and low
temperature would be missing. These fefatures tend to
be available only in kits that include a conventional wall
panel. of an alert from a call center, you would get a text
message saying that motion has been detected in a room
which was supposed to be unoccupied, and it would be
your responsibility to summon police. Depending on the
system, you also could get a snapshot of the intruder by
email, a cloud service which stores a video recording of
the event, and via the Internet two-way communication
with anyone
Ease of installation and use
D-Link’s DSC-2230 camera is easy to set up from the
company’s Web site, mydlink.com. This site also provides
free, unlimited access to images captured by the camera
and can dispatch email alerts to you if motion is detected.
In similar vein, Dropcam advertises the ability to begin live
streaming with nothing more than plugging the camera
into your Wi-Fi network, naming the camera, and creating
a free account on the company’s Web site.
Access fees
After the first year, is there a yearly cost for remote
access to the camera, and how much help is available from
 47

the vendor? Linksys, for example, only gives one year of

free viewing for its WVC80N security camera through a
hosted solution; the customer then starts paying a third
party, TZO, $19.95/year for the ability to receive streaming
video. Neither Linksys nor TZO provide a turnkey solution
for recording the video. Dropcam will store a week of
video recording for $9.95/month or $99/year or 30 days
of recording for $29.99/month or $299/year. D-Link offers
no cloud recording, but its camera can talk to the D-Link’s
DNR-332L video recorder, a NAS (network attached
storage) device which you can place anywhere, whether
in a different building or different city.

Fax
Leaders: eFax, multifunction printers noted above.

Ability to manipulate and repurpose the fax

Fax has a greatly diminished role today now that .jpg,
.PDF, and .docx attachments are commonplace in email,
although fear of opening an unknown attachment can
motivate an email recipient to say: “send me a fax instead.”
Digital fax never caught on, but a version of it remains in
fax-to-email attachments such as J2 Global provides in its
eFax service.
Today images captured by a scanner, iPad, high quality
camera, or smartphone can be sent via broadband instead
of the copper wires for which fax was intended. Recipients
then have a machine-readable file that can be archived,
forwarded, or otherwise manipulated. Fax, by comparison,
can only fax. If, however, fax is desired on occasion, a
multi-function printer is probably a better investment than
a dedicated fax machine.

Privacy filters
Leader: 3M Privacy & Screen Protectors
 48

Sensitivity of your work, amount of work viewed in public

spaces (coffee houses, plane, train, etc.)
A privacy filter keeps snooping eyes off private files as
long as the line of sight is at an angle. Directly, in front
of the filter, visibility is not constrained. This market was
created by 3M, which remains the leader. Your work
habits, of course, govern the question of whether sensitive
personal or company data is at risk—browsing a news site,
for example, would not expose confidential information.
 49

SOFTWARE

Word Processing and Office Suites

Leader: Microsoft Office Professional 2013, Office 365
Alternatives: Word Perfect Office X6, Apache OpenOffice,
LibreOffice 4.1, Google Drive

Microsoft Office Professional 2013 and Office 365

Business requirement
Needing no introduction, Microsoft Office has become a
lingua franca of document interchange—you can assume
with high confidence that an experienced user will be able
to open Microsoft Office documents, not least of all because
competing suites support Microsoft formats.23 Can you
escape the conclusion that the widespread adoption of
Microsoft Office has made it more or less mandatory in a
business environment where documents are expected to
be sent and received in the reigning formats? PDF helps,
but is not the final format when documents need to be
revised and repurposed.
Bloat
Do you really need the all of Microsoft’s bloated
features?
Political considerations
Do you want to support Office as a mainstay of the
Wintel duopoly, which continues to hold sway despite the
rise of tablets and Microsoft’s unimpressive performance
in mobile computing?
Cost
Is the cost justifiable in view of free alternatives? On the
other hand, Microsoft, to its credit, has experimented with
varying pricing models, and Office 365 has given Microsoft
23
See http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/best-microsoft-office-
alternatives/.
 50

customers new flexibility in cloud computing.

Word Perfect
Under the original owner, Word Perfect was slow
to adopt a graphic user interface and lost its primacy to
Microsoft Word. Corel, which acquired Word Perfect in
1996 has made the program competitive with Word and
added features that some users prefer like Make It Fit,
Reveal Codes, or redaction (masking) of confidential
information.
Personal preference
The choice of interface and working environment is
largely one of personal taste. In suite versions of Word
Perfect, are you content with the spreadsheet and
presentation products, or is Corel’s bundling of Word Perfect
eBook Publisher and the slightly out-of-date PaperPort 12
SE24 (re: document management) persuasive? Likewise,
do you wish to rebel against Microsoft’s juggernaut?
Legal affiliation
Word Perfect has a high market share in the legal
profession, and depending on your circumstances, the
business requirement for Word could well be reversed.

LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice

Cost
Deriving from the discontinued OpenOffice, LibreOffice
and Apache OpenOffice are respected, free suites, and,
as it is said, it is hard to compete with “free.”25 In addition
24
The current version of PaperPort is described at http://www.
nuance.com/for-business/by-product/paperport/professional/index.
htm.

Also free on Apple’s latest hardware and with a large degree of

25

Microsoft Office compatibility are Apple’s iWork and the open source
NeoOffice.
 51

to word processing, presentation, and spreadsheet

programs, Apache Office includes drawing and math
modules missing in Microsoft’s program. Microsoft charges
a premium for suites that include its Access database;
whereas, Apache Office includes a database. In a
different sense, however, Microsoft and Corel also provide
“free” modules by bundling separate programs into a suite
for one price: if you only want, say, Microsoft Word or
Excel, the rest of Office is nearly the same price as Word
and Excel alone.
Compatibility
Since Apache Office does not support every feature
of Microsoft Office, how important is total compatibility for
you? However, most Microsoft Office users rely on only a
small subset of features, especially where the substance
of the document is more important than how the document
is presented. For example, if you receive a check for the
lottery jackpot, would you really care what fonts are used?
Compatibility, of course, concerns not just two programs
on a PC, but even more so, cross-platform compatibility.
LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice run on Windows,
Macintosh, and Linux. Microsoft Office, in contrast, has
had historical dissimilarities between Mac and Windows,
and at one time Microsoft threatened to drop its Microsoft
version.
Support
Do you feel the need for a technical help department that
you can contact by phone? Open software organizations
have no such department for end users. Instead, open
software has a community of avid users and developers
who believe in sharing information, as opposed to asking
for a credit card number before you ever present a question.
Yet, receiving imput through an online forum may not be
as swift or as certain as you want.
 52

GoogleDrive (formerly Google Docs).

Privacy
Here, too, is a free, very capable suite of word
processing, spreadsheet, presentation, and drawing
programs, and they combine free 15 GB cloud storage,
sharing, synching with local files, and a module for creating
a fillable form.
However, Google’s privacy policy provides for the
collection of personal data across all Google platforms,
such as Android (phone and tablet), Gmail, Google Wallet,
Google Maps, Google Voice, and Google Search. The
more data that you give Google, the more your privacy
is compromised. Google, in effect, then pays for “free” by
aggregating user profiles and selling your private profile in
demographic/psychographic groups to the highest bidder.
As pollen to the bee, GoogleDrive is attractive, especially
in the ability easily to create, store, distribute documents
too large to travel as email attachments, but do you wish
to encourage this assault on privacy? Google claims to
delete individual names from profiles that are auctioned,
but anonymously you still are plucked, categorized, and
shipped out for resale as the virtual equivalent of poultry.

Re: all suites

Completeness
As broad as these office “suites” are, they hardly include
all the controls and refinements that you might desire.
Adobe’s InDesign, for example, is head and shoulders
above Microsoft Publisher, included with Microsoft
Office. For writers and scholars EndNote is the standard,
probably indispensable, program for organizing footnotes
and bibliographical references—list fields like author, title,
publisher in a template, and EndNote will arrange this
information according to the style of whichever professional
 53

organization you prefer. Moreover, there are programs

which specialize in a given area like presentations or
databases, allowing you to avoid the expense and “heft” of
a full suite. Photodex ProShowProducer and Honestech’s
PhotoDVD 4.0 are examples of programs that are
alternatives PowerPoint. Another program, 3-D-Album
Creative Center 4, allows photos to be placed against 3-D
backgrounds. Android and iOS apps similarly erode the
market for office suites. Ultimately, you need to answer:
how important is cost savings for you as opposed to the
“omnipresence” of Microsoft Office, its reliability, and
technical help?

Structured Database Software

Leaders: Act!, Microsoft Access, 9FileMaker Pro 19

In a structured database, commonly called a relational

database, information is entered into fields, as for name,
address, phone number, and zip code. In contrast, an
unstructured or full-text database, comprising the entire
document, not just known fields, is potentially more
comprehensive than a structured database, but slower to
search. Fixed length fields and inflexible rules about the
type of data that can be entered can impose unwelcome
rigors in a structured database, yet also empower it. On
the other hand, the distinction between structured and
unstructured data is not absolute: Oracle can organize
data of any type, whether structured or not. At the other
end of the scale is Act!—an easy-to-learn, easy-to-use
contact manager. So are “single purpose” databases like
Avanquest’s MyMailList & AddressBook and the very
useful 6Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 6 (re: management
and storing of photographs).
Your interest and skill in customizing the database
Obviously, Act! Offers an inexpensive means of
 54

customer relationship management (CRM), as in keeping

track of calendar appointments, meetings, call lists, email
campaigns, etc. You can get to this same point, a premade,
ready-go-do, database, via free templates for Microsoft
Access or separately purchased plug-ins for FileMaker
Pro. Access, of course, deserves consideration if you
acquired Microsoft Office for its other modules.
Cost
If you have the technical know-how and extra cash to
spend, you could go all the way up to IBM’s DB2 Express
Edition or Microsoft’s SQL Server Standard Edition: these
client versions bring high-end computing to the desktop,
but are made for heavy workloads that you probably
would not tackle with Access and FileMaker. Both IBM
(DB2 Express-C) and Microsoft (SQL Express) offer free
trial versions. Since cost is usually important, you might
want to consider the Contact Manager of SalesForce.com,
a well-known cloud service which has expanded beyond
its eponymous name. A license to the full program costs
$5/month. Otherwise, this study is focused on desktop
products—versions of Oracle, SAP, and IBM databases
which need consultants to install and a full-time technical
staff to administer are beyond our scope.
Training
Even for Access and FileMaker, how much time you are
willing to devote to learning, developing, and maintaining
the database should govern your decision. These areas
impose non-trivial commitments of time and, willy-nilly,
may wind up requiring the help of outside consultants. Not
everyone is willing to take on these commitments, and,
foregoing more than a modicum of customization, you
may have to settle for built-in templates or plug-ins.
Data interchange
Other structured databases, known to you simply as
a Web service, may address a portion of your need for
 55
Big Data already. At any heavily-visited site or service you
literally log onto a high-end database—Yahoo’s Flicker
and Google’s Picassa (photo sharing),26 Garmin Connect
or Magellan’s active.magellangps.com (personal training
and fitness data), and, of course, social media, are just a
few examples.27 To the extent that your data resides on the
Web, you typically consent to outsourcing, hosting, and
most of database management by a third party. There can
be little dispute that we all are adopting a virtual presence,
but the era is only beginning when the online world permits
the kind of table joins between disparate databases that
you might be able to achieve with your own database.
Medical records, universal inboxes, and legal databases
(Lexis and Westlaw) represent infrequent instances where
data interchange has worked. Americans who struggled
to sign up for health care under the Affordable Care Act
would disagree.
Suitability of do-it-yourself alternatives
Especially in combination with apps and Web services,
a casual user may be able to handle a no small number of
database needs—certainly not all—with an unstructured
database (discussed below). For example, you may
be able to avoid the rigors of a structured database by
devising a modularized with a spreadsheet and lists in the
form of word processing files,.

Unstructured Database Software

Leaders: Web: Microsoft OneNote, X1 Search Client

26
A list of photo sharing sites is found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
List_of_photo_sharing_websites.
27
Often these sites include a portion of unstructured data in user-
generated content (UCG), help screens, and audio-visual material.
 56
An unstructured database indexes entire documents
or collections of documents, not just fields. Sometimes an
unstructured database can import and process multiple file
types, employing the Outside In technology which Oracle
acquired from Stellent.
Cost
A popular program that not only aggregates different
media types, but indexes them (where it can) is Evernote.
Microsoft’s OneNote, bundled with Microsoft Office,
accomplishes the same result and adds a somewhat
error-prone ability to convert handwriting to text. Because
OneNote, being bundled with Microsoft Office, is free for
Office users and is integrated with the free storage of
Microsoft’s SkyDrive, OneNote has a cost advantage over
Evernote.
Cloud presence
Evernote and OneNote function either in the cloud or
on local hard drives; whereas, the competing X1 is strictly
local.
Conceptual searching
WizSoft’s WizDoc for Office does not attempt to go
beyond the nonetheless abundance of Microsoft Office,
Microsoft SQL Server, WordPerfect, Web pages, and .txt
files. Yet, WizDoc allows for “conceptual” searching (by
meaning and synonym) and well as brute force searching
(by strings).
Speed
The ability of Windows to index an entire hard drive
qualifies the result as an unstructured database, although
a slow, difficult one. In fact, Windows does not even index
a folder until you tell it to “add folder” to the search; even
then in Folder Options you have to check “Search files
names and contents” to be able to find words not in the file
name. If finding file names is the only task, Avanquest’s
PowerDesk Pro 9 is a useful alternative to searching in
 57

Windows and includes other utilities.

X1 wins laurels for its ability to search a hard disk with
reasonable speed and agility.

Anti-Virus and Security Software

Leaders: Multiple

Large vendors like Symantec (Internet Security),

Check Point Software (ZoneAlarm Extreme Security),
Intel (McAfee All Access 2014), and Kapersky (Internet
Security 2014) have vastly overlapping capabilities in
security software.28 Depending on your point of view, these
vendors, more or less, are equally good or equally bad—
bad because no anti-malware software offers complete
security. However, you would be unwise to have no anti-
malware software or only shareware.
Typically, desktop security software combines anti-virus
file definitions with a firewall, claims to watch suspicious
activity on your computer, and offers an enhanced version
that purports to offer defense against both Web and local
threats. The problem is that if you are an early victim of the
malware, the security software, despite the vendor’s claim
to the contrary, may not be sensitive enough to detect
and isolate the threat. Anti-virus software furthermore can
interfere with the installation of a new program. Important
though it is, anti-viral defense is only one part of computer
security. Security must include an integrated approach to
28
Total Defense, the divested and renamed Anti-Virus product from
Computer Associates, has similar capabilities, as do Trend Micro’s
Titanium Maximum Security, and other products, but the reference
here is to the largest vendors. Microsoft obviously qualifies as a
large vendor, except tht Microsoft’s Windows Defender, while clearly
providing help, is an unlikely candidate to fill holes in an operating
system from the same company that created the holes in the first
place.
 58

the total environment, with access control to the premises,

properly configured hardware, personnel training, robust
passwords, clear IT policies, oversight, and regular
review of the foregoing. Any point inside the company
can be vulnerable and so can outside vendors, suppliers,
networks. No one product thus can be comprehensive;
although security suites attempt to be.
Other partial solutions add layers of protection. A
password manager like RoboForm thus encourages
the use of hard-to-guess passwords. Absolute LoJack
(formerly CompuTrace LoJack for Laptops) can help to
recover lost or stolen notebooks and may be able to delete
sensitive information remotely when the notebook cannot
be recovered. Symantec Drive Encryption (formerly Pretty
Good Privacy) can encrypt an entire hard drive. Enterprises
go further yet with RSA’s SecurID tokens, which use “two-
factor authentication.” This system requires not only a PIN
to log on to private network, but also physical possession
of a key fob synchronized with a central server. Every sixty
seconds the fob generates a new password. Yet even RSA
(owned by EMC) was hacked in 2011 and had to replace
40 million tokens.29
At the end of the day human stupidity is probably the
greatest threat to computing, as when a unthinking user
clicks on an attachment which conceals malware in a
clever-sounding name, “intriguing” photo, or counterfeit
warning of an issue pertaining to the user’s account,
financial transaction, or supposed attention by the
government. Phishing attacks, by which you are asked
to reveal sensitive data, are a perennial problem. So is
inserting removable media that appears to have been
dropped by a colleague, using passwords easy to guess,
29
See, for example, http://arstechnica.com/security/2011/06/rsa-final-
ly-comes-clean-securid-is-compromised/.
 59

and failing to change the password periodically.

Multiple criteria thus apply to systems for computer
security, including:
Overhead
To what extent does the security software take over
your system, make it slugglish, or keep you waiting while
it updates itself? Computer protection is a no-win situation
for you because you want the protection to be embedded
in the most intimate parts of the system, yet out of the way
for normal usage. In our judgment none of the vendors
have figured out the correct balance nor offered adequate
controls for variations in personal taste.
Conflict with other programs
How much does the security software interfere with
other programs, especially during installation of these
programs?
Comfort level
Does the security software itself represent a threat
since the software gives someone direct access to the
most sensitive parts of your computer?
Level of annoyance
How annoying are the alerts from the software,
and can they be turned off? Another type of possible
annoyance is the vendor’s belief that updates should load
immediately, whether or not you would prefer to complete
another operation without the disruption. The option which
Windows offers—“download updates but let me decide
when to install them”—should be implemented on all
security software.

Networking Software
Leader: Linksys NetworkMagic

You may be satisfied with streaming music and video

from a Networked Attached Storage (NAS) drive or Dish
 60

Hopper, but setting up a LAN requires know-how which is

not for the average user.
Ease of use
For the non-technical user NetworkMagic attempts to
automate the setting up of a LAN. It is worth noting that
a basic version of NetworkMagic has been bundled with
the Linksys IP camera WVC80N. Belkin, which acquired
Linksys from Cisco, would do well to continue this practice.
Other software that can be used to set up a limited—in
a sense, a poor’s man network—is SingleClick CONNECT.
Although intended for remote access, as when a
technical help representative wants to see your computer,
SingleClick effectively allows you to share files among
Ethernet-connected computers, if that is your intention.
The resulting network would lack the central control of a
multi-user network, but let an authorized user control any
other client on which this software is installed.

Graphics Software
Leaders: See below

Leaders. There are multiple leaders because graphics

is a diverse area.

Photo Editing
Leader: Adobe Photoshop CC

Complexity
Photoshop, of course, is the clear leader in photo
editing, and the only decision here is whether to learn it or
not. The latest version of Photoshop is called Photoshop
CC (also Photoshop Creative Cloud). If you are impatient
with photo editing, there are many programs easier to
use than Photoshop, such as Corel’s PaintShop Pro X6
Ultimate. These programs not only meet an immediate
 61

need, but can help educate you about capabilities for which
you ultimately may turn to Photoshop. Moreover, as long
as you preserve a copy of the unedited photo, you can
always go back to it someday when you feel comfortable
with Photoshop.30
Adequacy of plug-ins
Plug-ins that automate certain processes in Photoshop
tend to be helpful, among them Tiffen dfx, Topaz Labs
Complete Collection, and Nik Collection by Google (for
iOS the earlier name was Snapseed). Depending on your
needs and interests, these plug-ins can spare you the labor
of learning one of the most complicated programs ever
devised. Are you willing to take on this labor? Professional
photographers have done so, and you should, too. The
question then becomes: how to learn Photoshop. There
are endless books on Photoshop, and Lynda.com has
helpful online lessons, some of which are free on YouTube.

Vector drawings
Leader: Adobe Illustrator CC
Alternatives: CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X6

Also complexity
Do you acknowledge a need for illustrations that go
beyond simple geometric shapes (rectangles, circles,
ovals), the word art of Microsoft Word or MyLogoMaker
Professional, templates, and clip art? Do you want the
best, or would simplified programs like Microsoft Visio
Professional 2013 suffice?31
30
Adobe Photoshop Elements attempts to simply Photoshop and has
its followers. However, in our judgment it fails in two ways. First, it
does not simplify Photoshop enough to matter and secondly, it often
requires the full Photoshop for final editing.

31
See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_vector_graph-
 62

Illustrator has outlasted competitors and is rightly placed

in Adobe’s Creative Cloud suite of products. However, you
can expect a long learning curve for Illustrator. The Corel
suite, in comparison, has 350 professionally designed
templates, 10,000 clip art images, and 1,000 photos which,
together, allow the user to produce advanced images with
less training that Illustrator requires.

Paint
Leader: Corel Painter X3
.
Jaggies
Are you working with lines and curves that look jagged?
Vector drawing, as opposed to paint programs, avoids this
problem.
Occasional v. professional use
Do you wish to spray only basic colors, or in Corel
Painter do you want a “real” program that a digital artist
would use? Alternatively, if simply filling a defined area
with color, a blend, or varying opacity, Adobe Illustrator
may address your painting needs.

Outlining
Leaders: MindJet’s MindManager for Windows,
MatchWare’s MindView 5

Flexibility, ease of use

PowerPoint and other programs include templates
for creating an organization (org) chart. These templates
excel as long as the intended diagram is simple. Programs
specialized for org charts include MindJet’s Mind Manage,
MatchWare’s OpenMind 5, and SmartDraw from Smartdraw

ics_editors; http://mac.appstorm.net/roundups/graphics-roundups/
the-best-alternative-apps-to-everything-in-adobe-creative-cloud/.
 63

Software. These programs render a tree diagram

adequately, but the point comes where modification of
the diagram or coupling it with other artwork cannot be
achieved with simple diagramming. Illustrator and Corel
Draw, of course, let you draw every element from scratch:
templates obviate most of this effort. The decision thus
turns on your interest in flexibility versus ease of use.

Advertising Design
Leader: Multi-Ad Creator Professional

Throughput, need for stock images

Images over which letters are written can come
from any graphics program or video editor. Similarly,
any page layout program can create ads, and certain
refinements of text, as in kerning and vertical spacing,
may be available nowhere else. However, MultiAds
Creator, which specializes in display advertising, can
accelerate production where turnaround is unforgiving.
The further advantage is the program’s integration with a
sister service, Kwikee, which provides stock images for
consumer advertising, especially grocery and consumer
packaged goods. Product images require proper lighting
and sizing to look good, and simply photographing an off-
the-shelf item is not a slam dunk. Kwikee images come
with approval of the large companies paying MultiAd to
draw these images.
Does the volume of ads justify the cost of this program?
Do you need the Kwikee images and logos often
enough to justify a subscription?

Stock Charts
Thomson-Reuters’ MetaStock Pro 16

Graphical representation of data is undeniably more

 64

engaging and intuitive than raw numbers. Stock charts

have come a long way from the era in which you needed
a Bloomberg or other specialized terminal for ambitious
trading. Today powerful stock charts are available for
free at Web sites like StockCharts.com, Nasdaq.com
(powered by EdgarOnline), Yahoo Finance, and brokers
like Ameritrade, Fidelity, and Merrill-Lynch. Although these
free charts are helpful, they will not let you massage the
data as you might want on your own system. For that you
need your own software like MetaStock Pro.32 MetaStock
Pro ($2,400/year with data subscription) is priced for
a professional market, but in usability could be for the
average investor.
Objective
How far do you want to go in investing?
Degree of professionalism sought
Are the specialized charts of MetaStock needed, as
opposed to simple line charts created from a spreadsheet?
Cost of data
Do you have or are you willing to pay for historical
financial data that makes MetaStock worthwhile?

Animation
High-end leader: Maya
Alternatives: Poser, Adobe Flash Professional CC,
Honestech Stopmotion Studio; CrazyTalk7,
CrazyTalk Animator 2, iClone5

If you want to “wow” a group during a business

presentation, word charts can look passé. Video and
animation get attention, except that the standard by which
moving images are judged is set by Hollywood studios
32
Other programs are listed at http://stock-software-review.toptenre-
views.com/.
 65

whose full-length movies can cost $100-200 million. You

have no chance to compete at this level, but short clips can
punctuate a dull talk and dramatize a main point that wish
to make. TV cartoons, for example, often have sequences
that are extremely simple, as where only a mouth is
moving. You can achieve a similar effect with Crazy Talk.
Similarly, MicroSmith’s Poser and Honestech Clamation
Studio are intended for basic animation, not just for
entertainment. They also foster prototyping, simulations,
education, planning, etc., in which animation can play a
role. However, animation usually must be combined with
other disciplines like audio-visual editing and compositing.
Cost
If you buy Maya, you must have either a high expense
account or high net worth.
Learning curve
You may be going to a lot of trouble for amusement that
will be transitory. Is there a payback for you that justifies
the cost and long learning curve?
Artistic skill
Is the skill set required to create an animated sequence
effectively beyond your abilities or patience?

CAD
Leader: AutoCAD

Like animation, CAD is coming down from a

professional market with the new influx of affordable 3-D
printers. Consumer/prosumer products like TurboCad
Pro 20 and TurboCad Platinum, CadPro 7.5, GeoMagic
Design, and 3D Cad are beginning to bring CAD to the
general public. Meanwhile, you can get a free trial of high-
end products—namely, AutoCad, SolidWorks, and Bentley
Systems’ MicroStation Review. Freeware that might let
you test the water includes Blender. CAD nonetheless
 66

requires a level of expense and commitment that is not

for the faint of heart. Despite what vendors claim, ease
of use remains an obstacle to CAD’s adoption outside of
professional use. On the other hand, CAD was associated
with mainframes and workstations when AutoCAD was
created, and AutoCAD brought professional tools to the
desktop. AutoCAD remains the most established program
in this market, but its strength is in 2-D design more than
in 3-D, where interest is growing.
Business requirement
Do you work in an engineering field that makes CAD
mandatory?
Work product
Is it important for you to “professionalize” hand-drawn
diagrams by generating them on a computer?
Outsourcing
Is the TOC for your CAD system acquisition and
learning less than what you might pay a design house on
a work-for-hire basis?
Data interchange
How easy is it to export CAD files to other systems
that you intend to use?

Publishing
Leaders: InDesign CC, Quark XPress, Dreamweaver CC,
Adobe Muse CC
Alternatives: Serif PagePlus X7, Print Artist 24,
Printshop 3.5

Far and away, the leaders in layout software for

traditional publishing are Adobe InDesign for Creative
Cloud (InDesign CC) and Quark Xpress. InDesign CC is
still close to its predecessor, the shrink-wrapped InDesign
CS6, but Adobe has announced that from now on all
updates to its creative tools will be through Creative Cloud.
 67

In fact, the entire Creative Cloud suite should interest Web

publishers.
Personal preference
You would have difficulty convincing either InDesign
or Quark XPress users that they are using an inferior
program. The choice of programs is really one of personal
preference, probably based on which you used first. In
our thinking Xpress has a slight advantage in ease of use
and a slight disadvantage in terms of industry support
for Quark’s native format. InDesign may have a degree
of momentum in that Adobe is a larger, more versatile
company than Quark, and unlike Quark, still independent.
Though not intended to compete with InDesign and Quark,
Microsoft Publisher may suffice for simple jobs and, as
part of the Office Professional suite, can be cost-effective.
Plug-ins
Plug-ins allow customization of both InDesign and
XPress, and it is here, depending on your idiosyncratic
needs, that you may find the greatest contrast between
the two programs. Plug-ins, in fact, will help you get from
one program to the other. If you ever have to import an
InDesign document into XPress, a plug-in from Markzware
that will assist with little or no editing needed is Q2ID
(Quark to InDesign). Markzware accomplishes the reverse
process by IN2Q (InDesign to Quark). Markzware’s
PDF2DTP (PDF to Desktop Publishing) brings PDF into
either InDesign or XPress.
Templates and design alternatives
Designing a publication with harmonious headlines,
columns, runarounds, fonts, etc. requires a graphic artist,
and templates, albeit at the cost of uniqueness, can
speed up the process, while saving cost. Serif PagePlus,
Avanquest’s Print Artist, and Broderbund’s Printshop 3.0
are among programs that offer ready-made templates for
publishing. They variously include simple photo editing
 68

tools, clip art, and fonts as well. On the other hand, many
of these applications (e.g., greeting cards and calendars)
would apply more to hobbies and school projects than
business.
Web publishing
Both InDesign and XPress arose from ink-on-paper
publishing, still the strong suit of both products, but provide
for HTML and ePub output. Publishing on the Web is the
focus of Adobe’s Dreamweaver, which is also a great
learning tool since it can show Word and HTML documents
side by side. After you place a document in InDesign, you
can import it into Dreamweaver, add interactivity through
menu options, and then export the document as HTML.
Adobe Muse CC, though less powerful than Dreamweaver,
simplifies Web publishing approach inasmuch as you can
add scrolling effects, slide shows, contact forms, videos,
etc. to a Web design without ever seeing computer code.
If Dreamweaver is too Geek-oriented for your taste,
building a Web site is aided by Avanquest’s WebEasy and
its competitors, some of which are available for a surcharge
at Web hosting sites like GoDaddy and Network Solutions.
These programs provide tools for customers ready to build
a Web site from scratch except that the tools are primitive
compared to those of Adobe and Quark.

UTILITIES

In a sense, utilities define basic operations that

Microsoft omitted from Windows. Accordingly, the following
list of utilities could be extended indefinitely. Different
users have different needs, and there are relatively few
needs like security, backup, and PDF creation/viewing that
would seem to apply to most, if not all, users. Obviously,
as in backup and defragmentation, Windows may suffice
for the casual user; others will want additional capabilities
 69

and specialization. As elsewhere, cloud computing and

apps are impinging on the traditional desktop market even
though, for most users, the latter is still the main port of
call for financial transactions and “serious” work. In no
order of importance, categories worthy of note include the
following.

CD-ROM and DVD burning

Leaders: Roxio Creator NXT Pro 2 and Roxio Easy CD &
DVD Burning,
Cyberlink’s Power2Go 9 Platinum
Alternative: Nero 2014 Platinum Suite

Now that Ultrabooks come without an internal optical

drive, optical media would appear to be on the way out
except for the fact is it useful for software installation.
For example, how else would you reinstall the operating
system on a PC which cannot boot on its own? In time
you can expect other solutions, but meanwhile the role of
optical media is, first, to allow vendors to upsell you on
an external optical drive; secondly, to allow you to install
software available only in a shrink-wrapped box; and
thirdly, to satisfy security-conscious users that they are not
downloading corrupt software. That is to say, there is still
reason for optical drives, and unlike Ultrabooks, desktop
PCs can accommodate the extra weight.
Windows 7-8 can burn a CD-ROM or DVD.33 However, if
you wish to maintain a list, especially a changing list, of files
that are archived, specialized software is advantageous.
Need for bundled multimedia tools

See, for example, http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows7/

33

burn-a-cd-or-dvd-in-windows-explorer.
 70

In addition to the burning and archival tools, do

you also want a suite of music and video editing tools,
since the leading vendors have sought new revenue
in multimedia software? If you prefer other software for
editing multimedia, the answer is “no.”
Need for Blu-ray support
Do you ever intend to burn Blu-ray disks? Windows 8
can burn Blu-rays disks, but not Windows 7 by itself.
Archiving practices
As suggested above, do you need to save and later
modify a list of items on the optical disk?
Social media integration
Cyberlink’s Power2Go 9 Platinum lets you back up
photos and videos from YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, and
Vimeo.

Defragmentation
Leader: Diskeeper

Fragmentation of a hard disk—i.e., dispersing parts

of a file in multiple locations of a hard—occurs even
before the disk becomes full. This fragmentation slows
down your computer as fragments proliferate and have
to be reassembled. Defragmentation thus should be a
regular part of system administration. Windows, freeware,
and utilities like System Mechanic include a module
for manual defragmentation (i.e., on command). The
opposite, automatic defragmentation when the PC is idle,
is convenient and said to be more thorough than manual
defragmentation.
Trust
Whom do you most trust to rearrange data on your
hard drive—Microsoft, a third party whose main interest
is elsewhere, a freeware vendor hoping for the best, or a
specialist?
 71

As in choosing a physician, do you want a specialist

or a general practitioner? Diskeeper’s parent company,
Conduciv Technologies (formerly Executive Software),
has marketed defragmentation software since the
days of Digital Equipment Corp. Diskeeper’s Automatic
Defragmentation, which runs when your machine is idle,
confers leadership on this program.

PDF Viewing and Creation

Leader: Acrobat Professional

Since 1993 Adobe has documented its Portable

Document Format (PDF), and PDF has become an
ISO standard supported by other vendors. Adobe’s free
Acrobat reader is widely distributed and all that you need
to open and read PDF documents. Adobe’s paid version
of Acrobat, Acrobat Standard, adds features, but not as
many as Acrobat Professional, the top-of-line product.
Among other selling points, ability to redact, import a
range of content types, create forms, and insert multimedia
justify the cost of Acrobat Pro. Vying for a middle ground
between free and premium versions of Acrobat are Abbyy
PDF Transformer, Nuance’s PDF Creator Pro, and Corel’s
PDF Fusion. Increasingly, these programs are eroding
Acrobat’s market share, while helping to grow the overall
market.
PDF is much less adaptable than HTML inasmuch as
users not only want to read a PDF document, but, within
the boundaries of fair use, copy and reuse relevant parts
of the document. PDF came from Adobe’s background in
printing and is still created from the print command. The
original idea was to render the document as the author
intended, where printing was the final goal. Reuse of
the document was never the intention, and Adobe has
struggled to allow modest editing of the document not to
 72

exceed a single line. Enfocus’ Pitstop Pro 12 does a much

job than Adobe in terms of native PDF editing. Although
Adobe, to its credit, has figured out how to convert PDF
documents to Microsoft Office formats, reusability is the
Achilles Heel of PDF. Welcome change will come when
a successor to PDF is found that solves the reusability
issue.
Extent of use
Do you simply want to read PDF documents?
Reliability
Are the built-in conversion tools of Microsoft Office
sufficient and also reassuring enough for you in terms of
creating documents in PDF?
Need for forms, interactive objects, and publishing
Do you need tools of Acrobat Professional for designing
PDF forms, interactive objects, and publishing the resulting
pages?

Backup
Leader: Retrospect34
Alternative: Paragon Hard Disk Manager 14 Suite

Disaster happens, and you need to be prepared for

one. The disaster can be a catastrophic hardware failure,
irreparable software corruption, fire, theft, explosion, or
natural disaster (flooding, tornado, hurricane, earthquake).
The backup utility in Windows 7 offers a degree of
protection, but its failing is that the backup must be
restored to the same computer, which may no longer be
available. Microsoft was concerned that effective backup
would result in piracy since software restored to a different
computer from the one that created the backup could create
34
See the competitive analysis at http://download.retrospect.com/
partners/sales_tools/competitive/q4_2013_competitive/retrospect_
competitive_q413_enusd.pdf.
 73

an illegal copy of Windows. If a computer failure merely

owes to the hard disk or power supply, replacement parts
can be found. However, the user has no choice except to
acquire a different computer when the first computer is lost
or stolen, rendered useless by failure of the motherboard,
and so on. A mandatory requirement for backup software
therefore should be the ability to restore the data to a
different computer. Windows 8 finally implemented this
capability, which long has been available in third party
software like Paragon Hard Disk Manager 14 Suite.
Expense
Retrospect strikes us as the most complete backup
program in the desktop market. Retrospect’s drawback is
its expense ever since it was acquired by EMC. On the
other hand, it can be assumed that losing the contents of
your entire hard disk would be very expensive as well. The
extent to which you are comfortable with a backup program
and use it effectively will affect your diligence and prudence
in making backups. On standalone machines Paragon’s
Backup and Recovery 12 Home and Hard Disk Manager
14 Suite are nearly as good as Retrospect and much more
affordable than Retrospect. Paragon’s awkward viewer for
files in the backup detracts from what is otherwise a good
program, one which includes other disk utilities besides
backup.
Vendor commitment
Symantec’s Backup Exec also has merit, but gives
us pause. Backup Exec has been owned by a variety
of companies, and it is hard to develop a product if its
parentage keeps changing. Backup Exec copies data files,
but not the programs which creates them. Accordingly, it
is either an incomplete solution if you need to restore an
entire hard disk or an excellent utility if you want a succinct
compendium of your most valuable files. Clickfree Backup
Software for Windows PC is a suitable alternative with
 74

the same limitations. Both programs can be purchased

separately or sometimes bundled with a new hard disk.

System Utilities
Leader: System Mechanic Pro

Windows is famous for developing corruption over

time from incomplete removal of programs, conflicts,
annoyances, and subtle bugs. Since Microsoft, despite
unending system fixes, is unable to set its own house in
order, the job of cleaning up some of the broken Windows
links and discarded junk falls to third parties.
In this area System Mechanic has the most versatile
set of tools, focused on preventing registry and hard disk
errors, while speeding up normal computer operations.
Competing products like Systweak’s Advanced System
Optimizer 3 and Avanquest’s System Suite Professional
14 cover much of the same ground: the purchase decision
may come does to which interface you prefer.
Confidence
Are you sure that it is OK to mess with Windows, which
already has a degree of instability? Backups are advised
before beginning any system operation.
If you acknowledge an obligation to correct problems in
the Windows Registry, which vendor do you most trust—
Microsoft or a third party?

Screen Capture
Leader: SnagIt

Within the boundaries of fair use, one often needs to

retain or share a computer image or part of a document.
Freeware or Microsoft Snipping Tool can capture a small
image, but not every type of image. SnagIt, however, can
capture a scrolling image, irregular shapes, and menus.
 75

MatchWare’s ScreenCorder 5 is another option, though

aimed at capturing screen activity for training.
Editing
Do you expect to edit the image after it is captured?
SnagIt has an editing suite which is handy, although you
could go far beyond it by pasting the image into Photoshop.
Size and regularity of target
Does the image that you wish to capture fill more than
one screen, and is the image visible after you click on a
relevant menu?
 76
Editorial Note
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 77

Author

Lawrence Kingsley is a journalist and the General Editor

of Telepublishing Ebooks.