Multimedia upgrades

Home Office Computing, Sept, 1998 by Darren Gladstone

You can teach your old PC new tricks. It's all in the cards ... and speakers and drives

Multimedia isn't just for kids anymore. It's finally grown up, put on a suit and tie, and is ready for work. Sure, a multimedia PC lets you play a great game of Quake II, but today's new breed of graphics and sound cards can also boost your home office productivity. Have you considered creating your own promotional video? How about using speech-recognition software to dictate correspondence directly into your PC? With the right multimedia upgrade, yesterday's clunker can become today's workstation.

Why find yourself in a constant game of catch-up, buying yet another computer to stay ahead of the technology curve? While some new apps such as speech recognition do have certain horsepower minimums, there may be no reason to pay $2,000 for a new PC when you can add a high-end graphics or audio card or CD-RW (rewritable) drive to turn your two- or three-year-old desktop into an up-to-date powerhouse. Upgrade kits and multimedia tools are economical ways to solve your computing woes. The only downside is that you'll have to open up your PC and add the new hardware yourself, but today's plug-and-play kits make even that once traumatic procedure considerably more doable.

Compiling the upgrade kits and multimedia tools for this review was tricky. Since the sheer volume of products available in each category is overwhelming, we decided to split our search into three categories: audio, video, and drives (DVD and CDAW). Unlike previous buyer's guides, we sampled a variety of tools in each category. For example, in the sound group, we reviewed a sound card, a pair of speakers, and a sound card/speaker combo. Furthermore, we also narrowed down each category by selecting products that you're likely to find on the shelves at your local computer store. We took care to avoid expensive tools that would only be appropriate for sound or video professionals.

Second, a majority of multimedia upgrade tools are for family consumers. Most manufacturers assume that you'll buy these devices to improve the performance of your latest favorite game, not that of your home office. For this reason, most of the bundles ship with entertainment software. But with some ingenuity--and the right equipment--you'll be able to use multimedia to your business advantage. So, when evaluating each product, we paid close attention to the bundled software and how useful the upgrade could be in a home office.

The third and last hurdle is the very nature of upgrade cards. Most plug-and-play devices are fairly easy to install, but others should ship with a bottle of aspirin for the migraines they induce. No card, regardless of its use, has been tested on every available system with every piece of software. It's almost inevitable that you'll run into a driver conflict that will cause problems in your PC (usually solved by downloading a patch from the upgrade manufacturer's Web site). Therefore, our first piece of advice is to check for any potential conflicts before making your purchase. Go to an upgrade kit maker's Web site and call its tech support department to get the full picture about the product and any possible shortcomings.

But don't let us frighten you away from upgrading your PC. Once everything is installed, you'll feel as if you have a whole new computer on your hands. Your only problem will be keeping the kids, and yourself, from playing Flight Simulator 98 on company time.

TESTING...One, Two, Three Because no two PCs are alike, we attempted to put each of these devices through the wringer in a variety of situations. We set up two desktop PCs--a Packard Bell C 115A 120MHz Pentium with 32MB of RAM running Windows 95 and an iDot 333LX Pentium II with 64MB of RAM running Windows 98--to see how well each product worked. We also installed a pair of office suites (Microsoft Office 97 Small Business Edition and Lotus Smart Suite 97), Internet Explorer 4.01, Netscape Communicator 4.03, and Norton Utilities 3.0 on each system to simulate what you'd use on your home office PC.

SOUND: Did You Hear That?

Is your audio coming in loud and clear? Sound is often taken for granted in the workplace, but there are some interesting and useful applications that incorporate sound to get work done. With the rise of Internet telephony, for instance, you can use your sound card to place a phone call by speaking into a microphone and listening through the speakers or a headset specifically designed for Net telephony. Another sound card-reliant application is speech recognition. With programs such as IBM ViaVoice 98 (IBM, 800-455-5056, www.ibm.com; $89) and Dragon Systems NaturallySpeaking Personal Edition (Dragon Systems, 800-825-5897, www.naturallyspeaking.com; $109), your PC can transcribe your spoken words into digital word processing documents. But all of this software is only as good as the quality of your PC's sound system.

For these tasks, you need two important tools--a set of speakers and a sound card. So for the audio portion of our review, we tested a sound card, two sets of speakers, and one bundled kit that combines the two.