26 MAXIMUMPC JUNE 2007
No, Apple
didn’t design
the My
Book World
Edition II.NAS DEVICE
WHO NEEDS USB WHEN YOU CAN
ACCESS YOUR STORED FILES USING THE
POWER OF THE NETWORK?ONLINE BACKUP
WITH MOZY, RECOVERING YOUR LOST
INFORMATION IS AS SIMPLE AS A
DOWNLOAD
Apopular misconception about digital
audio is that it’s an all-or-nothing
proposition, and so the quality of the
equipment you use to extract it doesn’t
matter. You obviously can’t get better
quality than what was put on the CD in
the fi rst place, but that doesn’t mean just
any optical drive and digital-to-analog
converter is going to deliver that quality.
The fi rst step toward getting better
audio is eliminating the optical drive
from the playback process: Rip your
CD tracks to your hard drive using a
lossless codec (we recommend FLAC).
Next, plug an external DAC (digital-to-
analog converter) into your PC’s USB
port so that music remains in the digi-
tal domain until it’s safely outside the
electrically noisy environment inside
your PC. Many products will do that—
some of which are priced as high as
your entire PC—but Stereo-Link’s
A1300 ($215 including high-quality
cables, http://www.stereo-link.com) offers a
terrifi c price/performance ratio.
We’re not advocating dumping
your X-Fi card, unless you don’t use
your PC to play games or watch mov-
ies. The Stereo-Link performs only
two functions: It converts two-channel
digital audio to analog (outputting it via
a pair of RCA jacks), and it provides
a high-quality built-in stereo head-
phone amp. But when we compared
its musicality with that of Creative’s
best soundcard—the X-Fi Elite Pro,
which has a higher-quality DAC than
any other X-Fi—the Stereo-Link was
clearly superior.This external DAC plays digital music
better than any soundcard, including
Creative’s X-Fi Elite Pro.EXTERNAL DAC
GET BETTER-THAN-CD SOUNDG
one are the days of external stor-
age devices that have to be phys-
ically connected to your computer to
function. And for that, we say “woo-
hoo!” because network-based stor-
age devices are all the rage.
Don’t believe the difference?
We’ll spell it out. Hook a NAS (net-
work-attached storage) box up to a
router, and you can use a laptop and
a wireless card to access your fi les
from anywhere in your house. Sure,
you can do that with an external
device attached to your main com-
puter, but only when your machine is
powered up.
We have to give props to
Western Digital’s My Book World
Edition II ($500, http://www.wdc.com). Not
so much because of its now-com-
mon terabyte of storage split into
two 500GB hard drives, but because
of its superior, trouble-free software,
WD Anywhere Access.
What’s more, a yearly $65 con-
tribution to WD’s coffers gives you
ultra-deluxe-fancy access to the pre-
mium services of Anywhere Access.
You can access your My Book
device from any computer—from
wherever you want—share specifi c
fi les on your computers with friends,
and even take over your desktop all
UltraVNC style. There are a num-
ber of open-source solutions that
offer similar features, but Anywhere
Access simplifi es the equation with a
single, easy-to-use application.F
inding an awesome online
backup site is a lot like getting
tickets to a sold-out concert. Sure,
they’re out there, but only if you’re
willing to give up an arm, a leg, and
a firstborn.
It’s unfortunate because online
backup is great. It’s great for those
frequently on the go, those too
cheap to buy another hard drive, or
those tin-foil-hat folk who plan data
backup to the extreme. But trying to
find a site that’s inexpensive as well
as unobtrusive is damn near impos-
sible. Until now.
The extraordinarily cheap Mozy
($5/month, http://www.mozy.com) is the
best site we’ve come across, and
we doubt better exists. For starters,
you can give the backup site a whirl
absolutely free. Just download the
little application, and it will politely
sit in the corner of your taskbar and
back up whatever you want—you
get up to two gigabytes of free
online space. And those are incre-
mental backups too; you can restore
a file from yesterday, or the same file
from a week ago.
Toss a mere $5 to Mozy on a
monthly basis and that 2GB of space
expands to infinity. It’s the cheapest
deal we’ve seen on the net, and for
all the features—web access to files,
scheduled backups, and encryp-
tion—it’s worth every penny.No frills, no fuss, no hassle; it’s
everything we love in a website, let
alone a backup utility.19 Upgrades