Charles McLellan

Senior Editor

I'm a Senior Editor at ZDNET, based in the UK. My experience with computers started at London's Imperial College, where I studied Zoology and then Environmental Technology. This was sufficiently long ago (mid-1970s) that Fortran, IBM punche…d-card machines and mainframes were involved, followed by green-screen terminals and eventually the personal computers we know and (mostly) love. After doing post-grad research at Imperial for a while, I got involved in helping to produce a weekly news magazine based in Amsterdam. This was in the mid-1980s, and one of my duties was to set up data communications links with technologically-challenged national newspaper journalists in a number of European cities via a 300-baud modem and an acoustic coupler. Tech support people have my sympathy! I've been in computer publishing since the late 1980s, starting with Reed Business Publishing's Practical Computing, then joining Ziff Davis in 1991 to help launch PC Magazine UK as Production Editor. After a couple of years I switched to commissioning, editing and writing, becoming a Technical Editor and then First Looks Editor. When ZDNet came looking for a Reviews Editor in 2000, I was ready to make the move from print to online — just in time for the dot-com crash! It's been a long road from punched cards to the cloud and AI, but it'll still be fun seeing where we go from here.

Charles McLellan has nothing to disclose. He does not hold investments in the technology companies he covers.

Latest from Charles McLellan

Show search filters
Samsung X20 HVM 740

Samsung X20 HVM 740

Samsung's new X-series range of 'thin-and-light' business notebooks is built around Intel's latest <a href="http://reviews.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/processorsmemory/0,39024015,39184696,00.htm">Sonoma</a> platform, and provides a good spread of specifications and price points. The low end is represented by the £765 (ex. VAT, £899 inc. VAT) X20 LVC 730, which has a 1.6GHz Pentium M 730 processor, integrated graphics, a 15.1in. SXGA screen and a 60GB hard disk. At the top of the range is the £1,361 (ex. VAT, £1,599 inc. VAT) X50 HWM 760, with a 2GHz Pentium M 760, 128MB ATI Mobility Radeon X600 graphics, a 15.4in. WSXGA screen, an 80GB hard disk and a built-in fingerprint reader. We reviewed one of the intermediate models, the £1,020 (ex. VAT, £1,199 inc. VAT) X20 HVM 740, which features a 1.73GHz Pentium M 740, 64MB ATI Mobility Radeon X600 graphics, an 15.1in. XGA screen and a 60GB hard disk. It's a handsomely designed notebook that delivers solid performance and reasonable battery life at a competitive price.

June 16, 2005 by in Laptops