GadgetMadness: We find the coolest gadgets first

After finding out about the BeTwin product that lets you split your PC into up to 5 stations, I not only funded a test installation at work, but I bought the product for home. Read on for the details.

I have tested this product in two places: Home and Work. The same video card was added to both, a GeForce 4 MX 440 SE PCI. In chronological order:

• The home PC is an AMD-based PC with 256MB of RAM. I think it's a 1800+ CPU. Installation was: Card, boot, install software, reboot, configure software, reboot, up and running. Browsers were able to connect to the Internet no problems, multiple users were setup and ran fine. The ultimate test was the game Diablo II, which was able to run two networked games with some performance hit. One instance was the server, one connected to it and a second PC connected as the third connection. After dialing-down the graphics detail I was able to make both instances fairly playable, though I have just ordered a CPU and RAM upgrade for that PC.
• The company PC was a Dell that was bought just over two years ago. I'm not sure of the CPU speed, but it has 768MB of RAM. Installation was identical to my home PC. The first thing that was run was a large database package. Different users on each station, each doing their thing. No noticable performance decrease. That's right, in a corporate environment, today's modern PC can run two users as easily as one.

Cost is slightly different than I thought. The software costs US$99 per extra station, so to get all five you need to pay US$386. Software registration is a little draconian, though instant. I may post an update to this saying that since installing my new CPU I've had to re-register, otherwise it's a very shiney program.

Update: Yup, a new CPU will cause the program to de-license. I checked and it's not Ghost friendly either, making it tricky to use in a computer lab environment. On the plus side, an Athlon 2200+ and 768MB of RAM is enough to run two instances of Diablo II until you get to about 40 skeletons total ;)