_{Cover of the May 2005 issue of PC World}

PC World was probably the most widely available PC Magazine throughout the 1990s and 2000s. At some point, they started covering more and more other consumer electronics stuff and it sort of lost appeal (at least to me) as a computer magazine. The May 2005 issue includes:

Cover Story

Supercharge Your Software - A look at various add-on utilities that add functionality to Windows, Office, browsers, e-mail clients and more.

Features

Inbox Tamers - A look at various web based e-mail services and desktop clients with an eye towards evaluating their ability to filter spam.

Battle of the Boards - A look at some of the latest motherboards. PCI Express was one of the most recent major features. This article reviews 5 Athlon 64 boards and 5 Pentium 4 boards. The top Athlon 64 motherboard was the Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe and the top Pentium 4 Motherboard was the Asus P5AD2-E Premium. The general consensus was that Athlon 64 boards were a little better on both price and features.

_{Table of Contents from the May 2005 issue of PC World}

Top 100

Spotlight: Wide-Screen Notebooks - For a brief time, you could get laptops with either a "standard" aspect ratio or a widescreen laptop. Widescreen quickly took over though. At the top of the list in this round-up is the Compaq Presario V2000 featuring a 1.8 GHz Pentium M 745 for $1348. I actually have one of the laptops in this list that I have recently been playing around with, the Fujitsu LifeBook N6010. It features a Pentium 4 538 @ 3.2 GHz (hyperthreaded) and 17-inch 1440x900 screen. It's most interesting feature (of limited use now) is the built-in TV tuner.

Top 15 Desktop PCs - A look at the top 15 "power systems" and top 15 "value systems". At the top of the power list is the Alienware Aurora 64 5500 featuring a 2.6 GHz Athlon 64 FX-55 and 256MB ATI Radeon X800 Pro for $3702. At the top of the value list is the Sys Technology MediMax featuring a 3.2 GHz Pentium 4 540 and 128MB PNY Verto GeForce FX 5200 for $1345.

Top 10 DVD Drives - Optical drives were exciting and new both in the console world and the computer world in the very late 1980s and early 1990s with CD-ROM drives. The tech passed through DVD, dual layer DVD and Blu-Ray in read only and writeable forms. Now, while the drives themselves are by no means rare yet, their inclusion on new systems is the exception rather than the rule. The top internal DVD drive at this point according to PC World was the Plextor PX-716A double-layer DVDRW for $125. The top external drive was the Memorex External 16x16 Dual-Format, Double-Layer Recorder for $170.

Top 10 Audio Players - At the top of the "large-capacity" player list was the Apple iPod Photo which had a 30GB capacity for $349. At the Top of the "mid-capacity" list was the Rio Carbon which had a 5 GB capacity for $199.

Departments

Up Front - An editorial on building your own PC.

Letters - Letters from readers on reinstalling windows, turning off html in e-mail, and more.

Consumer Watch - Things the PC industry could learn from Apple; protecting your files; and more.

News & Trends

64-Bit Pentiums Arrive - Comparing the new 3.73 GHZ P4 EE and 3.6 GHz P4 660 with existing Athlon 64 and 32-bit Pentium 4 CPUs. The new 64-bit Pentium 4s were a little faster than 32-bit P4s but still slower than Athlon 64s.

Hitachi Drive Hits 500GB - New perpendicular recording methods lead to hard drive capacities reaching 500GB. The Hitachi Deskstar 7K500 was one of the first.

HDTV Gets Higher Resolution - New 1080P TVs hit the market.

Podcasting Comes of Age - Legacy media giants start web audio broadcasting.

_{Table of Contents from the May 2005 issue of PC World (continued)}

New Products

Design Software - A review of Adobe's Creative Suite 2.

Digital Camera - A review of the Fujifilm FinePix S3 Pro, a 12.3 megapixel DSLR for $2499.

Operating System - A look at Linspire Five-O and Xandros Desktop OS. Linspire, aka Lindows, is a Linux distribution meant to look like Windows. However, it cost $50-$60 along with a $50/year subscription for updates. Xandros is another easy to use Linux distro. It was $90 for the "Deluxe" edition but didn't require a subscription.

Entertainment Device - A review of the Olympus M:robe 500i, a combo music player/camera/photo viewer that was only average at best.

Next Gear

Better Photo Sharing - A comparison of only photo services.

Gadget Freak - A look at ways to take your TV service with you including cell phone services and the Slingbox.

Here's How

Internet Tips - Updating your internet security software.

Windows Tips - Using Windows' hidden image viewer (we are talking Windows XP here).

Hardware Tips - Recovering lost files from your hard drive.

_{Back cover of the May 2005 issue of PC World}

Check out my other Social Media haunts (though most content is links to stuff I posted on Hive or reposts of stuff originally posted on Hive):

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Books I am reading or have recently read:

The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777 by Rick Atkinson
Total Power by Vince Flynn
Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr by Nancy Isenberg

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PC World (May 2005)