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Hardware And Software For All Your Business Needs – July 2013 (Part 3) : HP Pavilion 27xi, Kanex meDrive, Snagit 2.1.5

7/17/2013 11:36:40 AM

HP Pavilion 27xi

Price: $300

Ratings: 4/5

Web: www.hp.com

It’s uncommon to see a 27-inch display, such as the HP Pavilion 27xi, with a resolution of 1920 by 1080 pixels; usually the resolution is higher at this size. Because those pixels are spread across a larger screen area, the 27xi displays larger text and icons at its native resolution. This could be advantageous for someone who has trouble seeing small type, but it also means that icons and images look grainier, and text looks less smooth.

The Pavilion 27xi has a sleek design, with a brushed aluminum and black color scheme

The Pavilion 27xi has a sleek design, with a brushed aluminum and black color scheme

Despite the low pixel density, however, the Pavilion 27xi is a very good display. Its colors are accurate: At the default settings, it produces a very neutral gray. The LCD panel uses an IPS (In-Plane Switching), a technology that offers an extremely wide viewing angle. And the glossy screen gave photos greater color depth in a series of test photo files. Of course, glossy screens are prone to glare, so be sure to take your work environment into account.

The Pavilion 27xi has a sleek design, with a brushed aluminum and black color scheme. It owes its slim profile in part to the use of energy-efficient LED backlights, which take up less space than other technologies. The external power brick also helps the monitor avoid bulk.

The display offers HDMI, DVI, and VGA connections, and is compatible with VESA mounts. It ergonomic adjustments are few, however: It tilts forward and back a few degrees but doesn’t swivel, rotate, or pivot, or move up or down.

With its wide viewing angle and its neutral grays right out of the box, the Pavilion 27xi is an easy monitor to recommend.

Kanex meDrive

Price: $99

Ratings: 3/5

Web: www.kanex.com

Kanex’s meDrive is supposed to make it easy to set up a file server on your home network

Kanex’s meDrive is supposed to make it easy to set up a file server on your home network

Kanex’s meDrive is supposed to make it easy to set up a file server on your home network. The small device plugs into your network router after you attach your own USB storage device (I tested it with a hard drive and a 1GB thumb drive). But it encountered a few snags during the setup, including a device-naming issue that Kanex may well have fixed by now.

You might have to provide your own power adapter for the meDrive, which requires 300 milliamps of power. If your router has a USB port, Kanex says you can use it to power the meDrive using the included mini USB cable. But if the router lacks a USB port, or you want to connect the meDrive to an Airport Express (which doesn’t provide enough power), you’ll need to get a power adapter.

Once everything is plugged in, your storage device is immediately available on a local network. To access the meDrive from a Mac, you connect to it as you would a server. iOS devices can access the meDrive via a free app.

Doo

Price: free

Ratings: 3.5/5

Web: www.doo.net

Doo can index documents from local directories, cloud providers, and even email accounts

Doo can index documents from local directories, cloud providers, and even email accounts

Doo is a free app that organizes all your files regardless of where they come from and where they’re stored; it then analyzes them to create a database of interesting features that you can search and sync among multiple devices.

Installing Doo on my Macs was the most frustrating part of using the app. This was because almost all my machines contain multiple hard drives, and also because my home directory is in a nonstandard location – two things that Doo doesn’t handle very well out of the box. Luckily, the company addressed this shortcoming in version 1.0.5, which was released during the development of this reviews. (Doo currently does not support external storage devices.) Once I got past this problem, the app ran fine.)

Doo can index documents from local directories, cloud providers, and even email accounts. Adding a new source is seamless; Doo immediately discovered the appropriate settings required to add my email account, which uses an obscure mail server.

As soon as you add a new source, Doo starts to index its contents. It organizes documents according to tags such as file type and creation date; and it automatically detects the names of people, companies, and places mentioned in them; it will even make an intelligent guess as to the files’ contents. You can then construct a query allowing you to, say, find all résumés that mention a particular person.

A feature called Doo Cloud backs up files to cloud storage so you can access them from devices with Doo installed. But currently, cloud support is limited to OS X Mountain Lion and Windows 8.

Snagit 2.1.5

Price: $50

Ratings: 4/5

Web: www.techsmith.com

Snagit 2.1.5 is a full-featured image and video screen-capture program that should top your short list

Snagit 2.1.5 is a full-featured image and video screen-capture program that should top your short list

If you take a lot of screen-shots, you likely need more capabilities than the Mac’s built-in options. Snagit 2.1.5 is a full-featured image and video screen-capture program that should top your short list.

Besides the usual selection options (and many more), you can capture scrolling windows, such as webpages and even the contents of a big folder, as well as video clips with audio. Once you’ve made a still-image (but not a video) capture, it’s sent to the Snagit Editor, where you can edit, annotate, and add effects to the images.

I’d like to see two improvements: the ability to name images with a prefix and a sequence number, plus the ability to skip the Editor and save to disk right after capture. But at $50, Snagit is an excellent value.

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