Now British television is so dominated by design programmes, Europress have produced a series of integrated design software linked with stars' names-Charlie Dimmock's Water Garden Designer; Tommy Walsh's D. I. Y Guide and 3-D Designer 3-and Alan Titchmarsh's Garden Designer. This 3-D garden designing software takes considerable getting used to, and is more something for the gardener to devote those frustratingly inactive winter months to, than to sit down to for a quick play. It will run on a Pentium 200MHz, 16 Mb RAM, 30Mb disk space and a 16 bit 888x600 graphics card, although so slowly that you sometimes think it is not working (Pentium II MMX266MHz, 64 Mb RAM, a sizeable 310Mb free disk space, 16 bit 1024x768 graphics card and Direct 3D graphics accelerator card (8Mb) recommended). You start off designing in 2-D, adding landscape features to your plot and selecting garden features and plants from a catalogue which also gives you details of the plants. This plan can then be viewed in 3-D, and you can wander round, looking at the effect from different angles, using special features to see what it looks like at different times of the year and after a number of years' growth. There is an extensive help menu, although it is not always written in the most user-friendly language (sometimes this is clarified by the instruction booklet). A number of peculiarities to the program-for example flower beds with convex curves are very difficult to produce and the plant catalogue allows you to plant 27 different varieties of crab apple but not a single ordinary apple-can be overcome by designing and importing your own features, although this demands considerable design skills. With patience, this software can produce some remarkable effects, but if you are a beginner, looking for something to help you get down some rough ideas, then you would probably be happier with Geoff Hamilton's Garden Designer. [+]

If you feel as if you have spent the last month chained to your desk, a makeover may be what you need. But why go to all the hassle of leaving your home, when it can now be done without anyone touching a hair on your head? This supposedly rhetorical question is the premise of this slick new CD-ROM, which promises you a complete new image-the only catch being that it's a virtual one. The idea is, you scan a picture of yourself into your PC and then the fun begins. There are over 350 hairstyles to choose from, and unlimited hair colours, plus a complete make-up set and the added possibility of a change of eye colour. Style yourself with hats, earrings and necklaces. Then, just to show that there is more to this "new you" than meets the eye, you can blend your image onto the cover of a magazine, print it up and e-mail or show it to all your friends. This CD-ROM is fast and funky, with great graphics and decent quality visuals. Of course, if you are going to spend all this time sorting yourself out with a virtual makeover and choosing a new look, there's no reason to not give yourself the real thing too. -Toby Green.

Fed up with the latest club anthems? Do you want to become the next Fat Boy Slim? Then you could do a lot worse than install Dance eJay 2 on your computer. The dance music starts as soon as you begin the installation process. It's relatively quick and within minutes you can begin to realise your own creative music dreams. There's a tutorial and a handbook to help you if you get stuck. More than a thousand original dance and house 140 BPM samples were recorded and edited by professional musicians to help create this recording studio. If you have your own samples that are not 140 BPM, don't worry because the built-in technology will automatically detect the BPM and change it to the required 140 BPM. The drum "groove generator" comes with more than 500 additional drum sounds to give your tunes an individual dance floor feeling. You can add your own raps and vocals, and jazz them up with a whole range of distortion effects including robot ones. But before you can record with this eJay software you need a microphone attached to your soundcard. This software is also very flexible. [+]