Microsoft Office has always had a lot of features--too many features, some would say. With menus inside of menus, palettes aplenty, and toolbars crammed with tiny buttons, the biggest problem with Office was finding the features you needed without being bogged down by the ones you never touched. Plus, with the Mac version of Office lagging at least a year behind the Windows suite, feature parity could be an issue, so Mac users often felt like second-class citizens over, for example, the lack of VBA macros.

I live in what’s called a “fringe coverage area” for AT&T. I get one or two bars on my iPhone 4 when I’m home. Calls sometimes drop, and callers often complain about the connection quality. Outside of moving or hoping AT&T builds a cell tower nearby, the best option to improve call quality is AT&T’s 3G MicroCell. Made by Cisco, the 3G MicroCell is a “femtocell”--a cellular base station that covers up to 5,000 square feet, according to AT&T. The device connects to your home broadband network, and it can tremendously improve cell phone reception in your house.

It’s been less than a year since I acquired my trusty MacBook Pro, but it’s already filled to capacity with important documents and precious photos. Since I can’t physically expand the disk space within the computer, the search was on for a Mac-friendly hard drive that offers the holy trisect of features: speed, capacity, and reliability. I put three of the most promising new external drives to the test to see which one could live up to my demanding storage requirements.