Review: AOL Computer Checkup

AOL has launched a Computer Checkup tool intended to help less-confident users keep on top of Windows maintenance. It does a decent job, although practically all its features can be replicated for free if you look around. But that's missing the point - this is aimed at those who can't (or don't want to) build up their own toolkit.  Read my review on Computeractive.

News: TP-Link TL-R470T+ load-balancing router

Using multiple WAN connections is one way of ensuring your internet connection is reliable, but multi-WAN routers can be pricey. Enter the £30 (ex.VAT) TP-Link TL-R470T+, which is a five-port router with four of its five 10/100Mbps Ethernet ports freely configurable as either LAN or WAN ports. I've written a short product news piece about it for ZDNet UK's First Take blog.

You get an awful lot for your money in this small box

The user interface has plenty of useful help, but it's a bit crowded in there

Find it on Amazon:

Review: Avast! Business Protection

Small businesses are often neglected when it comes to managed anti-malware protection, an omission Avast's Business Protection seeks to rectify (AVG has a similar product, which I reviewed last year). It can manage from 5-1000 clients (either PCs or file servers) via a simple management console, at a very reasonable price. Read my full review over on V3.co.uk.

Happy birthday LEO: the first office computer

It's 60 years since J. Lyons & Co, owners of the Lyons tea shop chain, invented the first office computer, LEO (short for the Lyons Electronic Office). It was a tour de force of engineering, and this video is a great overview of the manufacturing and operation of it. It also highlights many of the uses LEO was put to when its services were offered on a bureau basis (later, LEO Computers was formed to manufacture and sell the hardware itself - this was eventually merged into English Electric LEO Marconi, and thence subsumed into ICL).

If you're interested in a book about it, I can recommend Georgina Ferry's excellent paperback, A Computer Called LEO: Lyons Tea Shops and the world's first office computer.

For a more technical treatment, L.E.O.: Incredible Story of the World's First Business Computer, which features first-hand descriptions from the creators of LEO, is a superb book, although a little hard to find now.

(via The Telegraph)

Review: Belkin Surf N150 router

Belkin seems to change its model design pretty radically every year, and 2011 is no exception. The Surf N150 is the base model in the new range, costing about £30 for the cable model I looked at. It's an 802.11n single-stream model (150Mbps) with four 100Mbits/sec LAN ports plus a WAN port, and features Belkin's new Multibeam antenna technology to improve range.

This seems to work very well, although I'm still unsure of the exact technical details - Belkin just says, rather unhelpfully, that the coverage pattern is 'apple-shaped' rather than 'doughnut shaped', and that its antennas use a 'slot design for higher gain', which sounds like another way of saying it has a high-gain antenna design. The N150 only has two internal antennas, so it can't use beam-forming (that is found in the more expensive models, though). It did give excellent range in my tests, as you can see in my full review for Computeractive.

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Review: SageOne Accounts

Accounting software for small businesses and sole traders can be nightmarishly complicated and full of jargon. Sage's new web-only accounts service has been designed to remove much of the complexity, yet be powerful enough to cope with most situations. You can read my review of the £12-a-month Accounts version (there's a cheaper £6-a-month service for cash-based businesses called Cashbook) over on Computeractive.

Note that in the review I mention the missing invoice batch payment facility for use when a payment covers multiple invoices; after the review was published Sage pointed out that this feature does exist, but it is poorly exposed (a hidden checkbox appears when you hover over an unpaid invoice entry, and selecting this lets you add it to a batch receipt job). This is rather poor usability for a common task, and Sage says it plans to look at how to improve this feature.