MaximumPC 2003 12

You can forget your 20-character passwords if you

have the Puppy and a finger!

CORGI

PIT BULL

It doesn’t look, smell, or taste like a dog. Why the

hell is it called the Puppy?

$140, http://www.sony.com/puppy

MAXIMUMPC VERDICT 8

Reviews

106 MAXIMUMPC DECEMBER 2003

Sony Puppy

Like a wee watchdog, it’ll guard your PC’s contents

T

he Puppy is Sony’s entry into the burgeoning field of biometric security.

Biometrics works by assessing our unique biological characteristics. The

idea is that the patterns in our retinas and fingerprints are much more

distinct—and unhackable—than any password we might think up. The unfortu-

nately named Puppy is a biometric scanner that allows you to replace common

Windows passwords with a fingerprint.

The Puppy works much like other fingerprint scanners we’ve tested. You

plug it into a powered USB port, install some drivers that hook into the basic

Windows login process, and then replace your Windows password—as well

as any other passwords—with your fingerprint. Once we registered our fin-

gers, we experienced a very high success rate with recognition. We attribute

the Puppy’s accuracy to its silicon sensor chip. It measures ridges and valleys

in fingerprints by using electrical capacitance instead of an optical sensor.

The Puppy will also encrypt your files, using either a 512- or 1024-bit

RSA encryption key. Unfortunately, the Puppy software lacks a “Decrypt to

Memory” feature, so anytime you decrypt a file, the Puppy saves the unen-

crypted file on your hard disk. This could be a problem for the truly paranoid:

If you’re not frequently wiping your drive of data, anyone who gains access to

the drive could conceivably recreate the unencrypted files from the remnants

left on the platters. Offering an option that decrypts to volatile memory could

preclude this possibility.

We tried to foil our Puppy by replacing our finger with common objects. It

wasn’t fooled by photocopies of the finger in question, and we couldn’t confuse

it by wiggling our fingers during the scan.

But there are a couple annoyances. Having to specify which finger you’re

using anytime you use a digit other than the default digit sucks. After all, if

you take the time to register all your fingers, the Puppy should be able to

automatically recognize any finger you lay on it. Also, the Puppy doesn’t

work with Fast User Switching

enabled. You have to use the

old-fashioned login screen.

The Puppy is competitively

priced at $140, and has all the

basic functionality we require

in a biometric device. Still, it

doesn’t add any compelling

new features to the thumb-

scanner security category.

—WILL SMITH

Creative Inspire T7700

Even with a sub-par subwoofer, this seven-satellite

speaker set doesn’t suck

S

even frickin’ satellites. That’s how many speakers come with the

newest Inspire budget speaker rig from Creative. That’s a whole lotta

speakers. We’ve traditionally pooh-poohed Inspire speakers—for the

Maximum PC staff, the phrase “budget sound” means a nice set of head-

phones. But the latest Inspires took us by surprise.

With a 7.1 rig, you configure your speakers to envelope you in sound.

Three satellites go in front of you, one on either side, and two at your rear.

The Inspire satellites share the same 3-inch midrange driver, but the front-

right, front-left, and front-center channels also sport a tweeter, to push high

frequencies. The powered subwoofer has a 6.5-inch long throw driver and

a flared port.

These speakers can’t compete with the raw power that a high-end

speaker rig can blast out, but they do sound acceptable when set up prop-

erly. As we expected, the Inspires failed our 20Hz to 22kHz audio sweep

miserably. The subwoofer couldn’t keep up at the low end, there was a

noticeable crossover from the subwoofer to the drivers, and from the drivers

to the tweeters. These flaws are immediately apparent in our artificial stress

tests, but aren’t as noticeable in a real-world listening environment at vol-

umes your neighbors would appreciate. At higher volumes sound begins to

degrade, but that’s not unexpected from a speaker set in this price range.

Like all other new Creative speakers, the Inspires sport an M-PORT. The

M-PORT lets you plug the MuVo MP3 player directly into the speakers to

play digital music, without a PC.

Priced at $150, the Inspires are cheap for a 7.1 speaker set but they’re

more expensive than better-sounding 2.1 rigs. For example, the Klipsch

Promedia GMX A-2.1 rig is available for slightly more than the Inspires, and

has much better audio fidelity, albeit with just two channels.

There’s also the question of compatibility with soundcards. In order to

get support for seven discrete speaker channels, you must use a soundcard

that supports 7.1. The Inspires

include several modes that

upmix from 5.1 or 6.1 to 7.1, but

that’s not enough.

Overall, the Inspire T7700s

are a decent set of low-budget

7.1 speakers. Unfortunately,

we’d rather spend the same

amount of money on a signifi-

cantly better 2.1 rig.

—WILL SMITH

Decent sound, standard speaker cables, and

whole lot of speakers for nifty positional sound.

ABC

XYZ

We’d rather blow our speaker budget on a great

set of 2.1 speakers than a middling 7.1 rig.

$150, http://www.creative.com

MAXIMUMPC VERDICT 6

it by wiggling our fingers during the scan.

The Puppy is

quite proficient

at fingerprint

identification.

But is this enough?

Seven satellites

are overkill.

We’d rather

have a better-

quality 2.1 rig

than a swarm

of satellites.