Compact and stylish, this all-in-one printer is easy to use 
There was a time when a desktop multifunction primer was so big it took up most of the desk, but those days are far behind us, as proved by Brothers latest colour inkjet all-in-one MFC-990CW.
It's compact enough to put in a small office and you could even find space for it in a bedroom or study. Measuring 468x375x180mm (wxdxh), the MFC-990CW looks quite stylish, finished in a mix of gloss piano black, satin black and grey.
A 4.2in wice LCD touchscreen dominates the front panel of the winter with large touch-buttons that arc easy to use. Some of the menu functions are spread over several screens, but this doesn't present many problems. The rest of the buttons each side of the touchscreen are also easy to use and well labelled.
The front panel holds the print cartridge compartment, so the four cartrdges are easy to reach and replace A Flash card reader (supporting Memory Stick and Memory Stick Pro. SD. SDHC and XD). a separate Compact Flash reader and a Pictbridge port are built into the front of the winter.
The MFC-990W has a print resolution of up to 6,000x1,200 dots per inch (dpi), a copier will a 1,200x1,200dpi resolution and a 1,200x2,400dpi optical (19.200dpi interpolated) scanner; it can even be used for colour faxes.
The connections include L1582, Ethernet, 802.11b/g Wifi and Bluetooth, together with a Dect handset and dock. Bluetooth allows you to send photos directly from a mobile phone to the printer 
The MFC-990CW prints around 15 pages per minute (ppm) in fast draft mode, but this drops to just over 3pprn for normal quality mono and just under 2ppm for colour It takes around 27 seconds to copy an A4 page of text and 41 seconds for an A4 colour page. Scanning d magazine cover takes around 20 seconds at 300dpi, which is good for this type of device. Simon Crisp
Personal Computer World April 2009
Brother MFC-990CW
Shuttle D10
A compact chassis with built-in touchscreen display
Touchscreen technology is all the rage at the moment. Apple's iPhone prompted a slew of touch-sensitive competitors and Microsoft has unveiled its 'Surface' technology that can be used to create large touchscreen systems. And new you can build a PC with its own integrated touchscreen display, thanks to Shuttle's D10 barebones chassis.
The D10 looks much like Shuttle's other small form factor boxes, measuring about 19cm high, 20cm wide, and 30crn deep. However, the front panel of the unit is almost entirely taken up by a Tin touch-sensitive screen (800x480 resolution) that allows you to control the PC without a keyboard or mouse.
The rest of the unit is pretty conventional. Its Intel G31 chipset and LGA775 socket will allow you to install Core 2 Duo processors right up to the E8600 running at 3.3GHz. It won't accept the new i7 processors though, and you're limited to 4GB of DDR2 memory Graphics arc handled by an irtegrated Intel GMA 3100 processor, and there's a single - rather cramped - PCI Express x1 slot for upgrades.
Shuttle says the PCI Express slot could be used for a TV tuner or video capture card, and the D10 would be good to use as a compact media centre PC. Shuttle says one of its main target markets is for video surveillance systems, which we find a little baffling. The ability to control the D10 by touch would be perfect for playing music - just fire up iTures and tap on the screen to select your music.
Using it to play video is trickier. The D10 has a VGA interface for connecting it to a large external monitor, but there's no DVI or HDMI interface to connect it to a high-definition TV or monitor. You could upgrade the graphics card for this. but some sort of digital video output would make the D10 more useful as a media centre or home entertainment system. Cliff Joseph.
Personal Computer World April 2009
Three Ways to Install Windows 7 on a Netbook
Netbooks do not have optical drives for installation DVDs, but there are ways around this problem.
May 18, 2009 — PC World — By now you know that you can download the Windows 7 Release Candidate free of charge from Microsoft and use it for nearly a year.
Of course, the traditional method of installing the OS starts with burning the downloaded ISO file to a DVD, which you then pop into your desktop or laptop. That's fine if you have a desktop or laptop, but what about all the netbooks out there? They're notoriously devoid of optical drives.
Fortunately, there are ways around this problem:
1) Buy a USB DVD drive. This is by far the easiest solution, and it'll simplify installing any other software you may have on CDs or DVDs. I've seen external drives selling in the $40-50 range on eBay. Shop around and you may be able to snag one for as little as $20.
2) If you have a USB flash drive with at least 4GB of storage, you can make it bootable using the open-source Live USB Helper utility, then use the free Daemon Tools Lite to "mount" the ISO file to the drive. With that done, you'd boot the netbook with the drive plugged in and select it as your boot device. However, installing Windows from a flash drive can be very time-consuming — and the two aforementioned setup steps aren't exactly novice-friendly.
3) If you have an external hard drive, you can copy the ISO to it and boot from it, just like the with flash drive. Okay, it's a little more involved than that, but this is definitely the easiest method that doesn't involve buying a DVD drive. (It's much faster, too.) Check back tomorrow for a detailed step-by-step.
In the meantime, if you've already installed Windows 7 on your netbook, let me know what method you used — and, of course, how you like the OS!
© 2007 PC World Communications
source: CIO