To adjust the microphone sensitivity, you mess with nearly invisible black-on-black buttons on the side of the monitor which, to be gentle, do not make the word intuitive come to mind. The speaker and microphone settings are less impressive.

We muttered, “ You’re the hardware, turn yourself on!” Without the hard reset, a webcam preview displays a “Turn on the webcam” error message, which is particularly annoying. What’s worse, this seems to apply anytime you connect and disconnect the laptop computer from the Viewsonic monitor, making life difficult in offices where the laptop spends frequent time in a conference room or trotting about elsewhere. The software doesn’t say that you need to reboot, but you must do a full power-down before the webcam works. She also would have liked it if the instructions and the plastic bags in which the cables were packaged identified each cable. Go forth and start videoconferencing!” she went through the installation process three times. Since she expected to read, “Congratulations! You’ve successfully installed your hardware and the software that runs it.

When Meridith used the wizard for product installation, nothing happened at the end. Then when you go to register the product, the “print the registration” dialog box (instead of online registration) has a drop-down date box with 2004 as the latest date. The first clue that something isn’t quite right: The startup CD installs Adobe Reader 4.0 by default instead of the current version, 8.0. Bigger problem: The instructions are minimal, contradictory and already out of date, which is quite a trick for a new product.

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