Two PC's from One! Sound good? Then read on.

A small accounts department, an under-utilised PC, and two accounts staff needing to update the ledgers at the same time. Well the Sharedware Savage may be just what you've been looking to stop those nasty squabbles in the office.

With the addition of a keyboard, mouse, speakers and a VDU you can have two users accessing the same PC together, both will have their own Windows session running, both will have access to all the PC resources such as the applications installed, the network card, CD-ROM Drive, data on the hard disk, the floppy drive, printers and modem. Clever Eh!

Of course there is the home use for this product as well. Stop those arguments when big sister is on the Internet emailing her boyfriends when little brother needs to use the word processor to finish his homework. Well now they can do it together.

The PCI Sharedware Savage combines graphics (Voodoo II equivalent), Sound, Keyboard, mouse, TV out and microphone ports. Install the card plug the extra peripherals into card and you have a second PC!

Graphics resolutions of upto 1,600 X 1,200 in 32 Bit colour is impressive. Sound is a 64-channel wave table controller, which is more than adequate in sound output for most people.

Each user can create a 'Profile' with its own specific windows session including a password. The card acts as a pseudo network card allowing dual game playing on the same PC. This does require the user to setup a Server and Workstation environment using the TCP/IP network protocol. This is where the manual came good as it explains the process clearly and concisely. Well done that manual author!

Installation is straightforward. Find an empty PCI slot, insert the card, restart the PC and the card is recognised. Installation of the drivers from the CD supplied presented no suprises. Then it's just down to setting each user profile.

On start up of the PC the main system is booted first and an icon on the toolbar will, when selected, boot the second users system. This can be automated so that on start up of the main system the second user profile is initiated. The Sharedware software controls the shutdown of the PC rather than the normal windows shutdown procedure.

Beware that some 16-bit software will not multitask well or not at all, so you may need to upgrade some software to its 32-bit version.

Don't try this card on an exhausted PC. Make sure that you've got plenty of spare capacity in terms of hard disk space, RAM and processor power. Our PIII-450Mhz processor with 128MB RAM and a 10GB Hard Disk showed little to no degradation whilst running lots of the most popular software. Although some games and graphics intensive software running on both sessions was a little sluggish.