Windows 2000 Driver / Operation

We'd love to cover more platforms but having just upgrade all our machines to Windows 2000 and not being a Mac house (anyone want to lend us their G4 to test the Wallet?) I can only cover the Windows 2000 drivers... Sufficient to say that with drivers installed the Wallet operates just like an external hard disk which means that its use on different platforms is almost identical.

Hook up the Digital Wallet for the first time and you'll have to install the drivers, supplied with in the box is a CD-ROM with drivers for Windows 98, Windows 2000 and MAC (OS 8.6+). Simply select the appropriate driver from the CD-ROM and after a few seconds you'll have a new device and hard disk installed, here's what the Windows 2000 Device Manager sees:

On my machine it mapped the Digital Wallet to the next free drive letter which was "G:", with a blank Digital Wallet here's what Explorer reports as the drives properties, it's possible to format the Wallet under Explorer (though I'm not sure if it actually performs a true format nor not, I just kept it to Quick Format to clean up the FAT table)	Opening the Wallet in Explorer we can see the structure of directories. Here we've performed three downloads (thus the three top-level directories) first two are from an Epson C3000Z, the last is Nikon Coolpix 990.

That's basically it, the Digital Wallet then acts as another drive, you can drag and drop between it (feels quite fast, exact timings in the Timing section of this review). When you've finished with the drive you must remember to tell Windows 2000 to stop the device before you unplug it:

If you don't you'll get a nice message like this:

One other note, it's not advisable to use the Digital Wallet on battery power when connected by USB, although it does work as soon as the device power saves (30 seconds of inactivity) you'll get the same unsafe removal error above. If you're quick then it shouldn't be a problem...

Supplied Software

Supplied with the Digital Wallet are the following applications:

ArcSoft MediaBrowser 2000 - an album builder and image browser	ArcSoft PhotoPrinter 2000 Pro - easy photo printing & thumbnails

ArcSoft PhotoFantasy 2000 - ever wanted your head on someone else's body?	ArcSoft PhotoMontage 2000 Pro - make a photo montage out of lots of tiny photos

Also:

• Rutilus SmartBack Jr. which enables you to safely share files between different machines using the Digital Wallet as a 'briefcase' (sorry, no Microsoft pun intended) for the files.
   
• AmazingMail.Com: for sending photos and postcards which are uploaded, printed and sent by mail.