A Photo-Friendly Desktop

It's pretty tough these days for a manufacturer to stand out in a market of cookie-cutter desktop computers. But that's not discouraging Sony Electronics. Although it's a latecomer to the industry, Sony SNE is managing to make a mark with high-end desktops aimed at the small but growing number of people interested in multimedia production.

Sony's latest effort, the VAIO Slimtop, is a particularly intriguing design. The Slimtop, a small desktop with a flat-panel screen, is a mixture of laptop and desktop components. For example, the use of desktop hard drives rather than the thinner and more rugged units designed for laptops saves money but keeps the machine small. Such designs are popular in Japan but have not done well outside of Asia.

The Slimtop is just 3 1/2 inches wide, 11 in. high, and 13 in. deep. The crisp, bright 14.1-in. LCD display is flanked by decent built-in speakers and mounted on a double-hinged arm that allows easy positioning for comfortable viewing. The keyboard is equipped with a clever wrist rest that unfolds to cover the keyboard. Starting at $2,299 for the 400-MHz version, this is an attractive machine for anyone who wants maximum desktop power in a compact unit.

The Slimtop's real attraction, though, is found behind a flimsy door on the front of the computer. There you will find a laptop-style PC Card slot and another, more mysterious, narrow slot. Between them, these slots make the Slimtop an ideal computer for people who want to get into serious digital photography.

TEDIOUS CHORE. One reason digital cameras are not as convenient as they should be is that getting pictures out of a camera and into a computer for processing and printing is a tedious chore. The usual method using a serial cable can take forever, especially with the big files generated by the new ''megapixel'' cameras. And the image-transfer software that is supplied with many cameras is finicky at best and, at worst, just doesn't work.

Sony has been struggling with this problem for a while. Its Mavica digital cameras rank among the industry's best-sellers, largely because all you have to do to transfer an image is pop a floppy disk out of the camera and stick it in your computer. But digital cameras are getting better all the time. You can now get a 2 million-pixel camera for around $650 and a 1 million-pixel unit for under $300. With more pixels, you get better images but also bigger files. The 1.44-megabyte floppy is a severe limitation when the pictures run half a megabyte.

The storage solution adopted by most camera makers is removable cards with 4 MB or more of flash memory, a special sort of chip that retains its contents indefinitely without power. But you still are left with the problem of getting data from these memory cards into your PC.

The Slimtop's mysterious slot lets you take the memory card out of a camera, such as Sony's new $900 Cyber-shot DSC-F55, and pop it directly into the computer, where it appears on your desktop as though it were another disk drive. The software could be better, by generating, for example, thumbnail images of the pictures so that you'd have more than cryptic file names to use in choosing among them. But the process is as easy as the popular floppy-disk Mavicas.

It's too bad that Sony, in the latest evidence of the consumer electronics industry's inability to agree on common formats, went with its proprietary Memory Stick design instead of one of the two existing flash memory packages known as CompactFlash and SmartMedia. (All three are functionally equivalent but use physically incompatible packages, and all cost about $50 for 4 MB.) But the PC Card slot comes to the rescue by letting you insert SmartMedia or CompactFlash cards using a $50 adapter. It's almost as easy as the Memory Stick, and you can load the images much faster than with the card-reader adapters sold for conventional desktops.

MAINSTREAM. One curious omission from the Slimtop is a high-speed connector, called FireWire by its inventor, Apple Computer AAPL, and I.LINK by Sony. The I.LINK is ideal for getting video from digital camcorders, such as Sony's new Digital8 Handycams, into computers for editing. Sony puts the ports on most of its desktop and laptop computers and plans to add them to future Slimtop models, which are otherwise well-suited for editing.

Image editing still is not a mainstream computing activity, but it could well become one as the use of digital cameras explodes. Sony has helped to pioneer the production of digital cameras for the mass market, and, as this machine shows, the company certainly understands consumer electronics. I think it's on to something.

BY STEPHEN H. WILDSTROM

Win98's Second Wind

The name is too grandiose by half, but Windows 98 Second Edition is a useful tune-up for Microsoft's popular, year-old operating system.

The most important new feature is software that makes it simple for computers on home or small-office networks, including those running Win98 or Win95 and Macintoshes, to share a single Internet connection. Similar software has been supplied with the home-networking products that have been shipping since the start of the year, but the Microsoft version is more tightly integrated with Windows.

Other features include enhanced support for new types of hardware that have come on the scene in the past year and an assortment of fixes, including those required for full Year 2000 compliance. The Second Edition CD-ROM will also contain copies of two previously released updates, the NetMeeting 3.0 conferencing software and the Internet Explorer 5.0 browser.

A minor upgrade of this sort really ought to be free, like the service packs that Microsoft makes available for Windows NT, but no such luck. Because Microsoft designed Second Edition as a reworking of the entire Win98 package, it's far too big to be downloaded, and the CD, available in June, will retail for $19.95 for current Win98 users. Microsoft MSFT says the charge should help it recover its costs, including the extra cost of supporting home networking. For those wanting to upgrade from Win95 or 3.1, Second Edition will replace the original Win98 at the same price of around $90, retail.

Help Desk

Q: Sandip Bhatia of Bombay, India, asks: ''Netscape lets you leave the messages on the server when viewing mail. May I know if Outlook Express 5 has this facility?''

A: Yes. But first a word of explanation. Most Internet service providers use a mail standard called POP3. In its normal operation, whenever you log on, new messages are sucked off the server and stored on your local hard drive.

This can become extremely confusing if you read mail on more than one computer, say a desktop and a laptop. To deal with the problem, mail programs include an option, though one that is not easy to find, that lets you both download messages and leave a copy on the server. On Netscape Communicator 4.5, it's found under Mail Server Properties on the Edit/Preferences menu. In Outlook Express 5.0, it's under Advanced Properties on the Tools/Accounts menu.

Many corporate mail systems are moving to the newer IMAP standard, which expects mail to be stored on the server and allows you to sort your messages into folders that can be read by any computer that can log into your account. It makes life much, much easier for anyone who reads mail from more than one machine.

Web Destinations

www.knowx.com
Many people are nervous about the personal information they leave behind when they visit Web sites. But few realize how much personal data about them can be found on the Web, even if they have never been there. KnowX.com is a portal into the vast store of information obtainable from online databases, from birth and death records to bankruptcy filings to liens against property to getting an address if you know a phone number. The information isn't free: KnowX typically charges $1 or $1.50 for a simple search. Detailed reports cost from $3.95 for a death record to $79 for a full Dun & Bradstreet business information report. The cost of gathering information from around the country can add up pretty quickly. But it's a lot cheaper than the old-fashioned way: Sending someone to check out dusty records at the courthouse.

www.homegain.com
There are a lot of Web sites that help buyers find homes, but HomeGain is a new service designed specifically to assist sellers. If you want to sell a home, you establish a free account, then post a description of the property and outline what services you expect from an agent. The information is then forwarded to agents who have registered with HomeGain (free for the remainder of this year). Interested agents then submit proposals covering the services they'll provide and the commission they'll charge for the real estate listing. The site also offers tools for sellers, including a rough estimate of property value, and calculators for computing the potential capital-gains tax on a sale and the net proceeds from the transaction.

www.flowerbud.com
Online florists such as PC Flowers may be the original E-commerce businesses, specializing in the impersonal bouquets that have always been the province of flower-by-wire merchants. Flowerbud.com lets you pick the flowers--even the colors--of your choices, from fragrant freesias to exotic lilies to cheery sunflowers. Typical prices (including overnight shipping) range from $39 for a bouquet of 20 tulips to $99 for four 24-inch stems covered with orchids. A vase adds $12. For the truly extravagant, $2,460 will get a bouquet delivered to the destination of your choice every week for a year.