Phoenix Short Circuits the PC Start-Up Process

Instead of humming your own personal "hold" music while you wait two to three minutes to access that important conference-call info, you can use the Phoenix FirstWare Assistant 2004 to grab your data within 2.5 seconds, effectively turning your PC into a PDA. As you might imagine, when you see the BIOS information during the boot process, you hit a hot key (the F key) to access the FirstWare Assistant. You can then access every field and data element within Outlook's task list, address book and calendar. You can even pen a quick e-mail message for later delivery.

This may sound too good to be true, and in a way it is. FirstWare Assistant users will have to spend some time exporting data from Outlook to the Phoenix product. But it's worth losing a few moments doing the export to gain those moments when time matters most.