| Product: |
Computeractive |
| Date: |
22/09/01 (9 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: price
Disadvantages: no CD
Computeractive has to be one of the best Magazines around. It uses plain simple English easy to understand. There are many sections within and now has been updated and expanded. These sections include many reviews of the latest products also with news, hints, competitions and many more.
I have chosen this magazine over many of others simply because it is easy to understand and covers a wide range of items ranging from the Internet to computers.
Each fortnight the content is changed or updated, and the news is always uptodate. Each issue comes with around 98 pages of jam packed information.
One of the best sections has to be the workshops, each issue comes with a set of workshops. Recently they showed how to format your hard drive, re-install windows and set up passwords within windows. This teaches you how to do the basics if you are a novice, and for the more advanced person it will even have something for you. All though Computeractive comes with a host of game reviews these are usually not even worthy of a skim read for me. This is because many of the games are for very young children or are those cheap games that only a few people consider buying. Another weak point is the advertisements inside. There are loads of these and many won?t be of any use to someone thinking of buying any sort of electrical equipment. As many of these Ads don?t show many products or their prices. I don?t mind Ads as long as they are informative and not just a waste of space.
What would make this magazine much more desirable is a cover mount CD, but I suppose this would increase the price substantially. Although a few issues ago we were given a complimentary birthday CD-ROM. This had on it a large number of useful software applications. One of which is Zone Alarm, (firewall) this you would have to normally download off zonelabs.com for quite a long time.
With ZoneAlarm Installed, your computer is effec-tively hidden from the rest, of the onlin
e world. In other words, potential hackers simply don't know that you exist. There's no better security than Invisibility.
ZoneAlarm also pops up a warning message every time one of your programs tries to access the Inter-net. You can see exactly what your computer is up to and decide for yourself which applications - say, your web browser -are allowed unre-stricted access, and which should always ask per-mission.
You might be surprised just how many programs try to use your Internet connec-tion on the fly -and you may very well wonder why! Some, dubbed "spyware", send Information about your surfing habits back to base.
The longer your computer is online, the more vul-nerable you are to hack attacks. So, it you have an ADSL or a cable connec-tion, better get protected.
Another essential piece of application was download accelerator. This works in much the same way as Go!Zilla, but claims to be much faster. (Even though I have found it doesn?t work much of the time.) Hopefully they will occasionally supply a free CD.
At around £1.20 it?s a bargain this price is reduced to 85p if you subscribe. I definitely have. It probably has to be one of the cheapest computer Mags in the Newsagent. Go on try it out. It comes out fortnightly, but please pray it comes out weekly.
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