We get a lot of press releases talking about research in PC Pro, and studies have shown that 83% of them are entirely made up (boom boom).

But recently the NPD group, a market research company based in the States, published a study that showed only 58% of consumers who “bought a netbook instead of a notebook” (my italics) were happy with their purchase. That compares to 70% of buyers being happy if they intended to buy netbooks from the start.

The study then went on to say that 60% of buyers “never even took their netbooks out of their house”, which kind of suggests they shouldn’t have bought netbooks in the first place. (more…)

If you’ve ever wondered why it’s the likes of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Steve Ballmer, Scott McNealy and Eric Schmidt who are the successful ones who end up creating and running a hugely successful technology company and not you then I have excellent news – it’s not your fault. In fact, it’s an accident of birth.

I was reminded of this while browsing through Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell (author of The Tipping Point, Blink and generally considered to be a very clever bloke) as part of my research, such that it was, for next month’s Prolog – that is, the editor’s column in PC Pro. (more…)

While Barry Collins was researching his free upgrades to Windows 7 news story, he stumbled across possibly the most ridiculous offer I’ve ever seen: you, my lucky, lucky friends, can download Windows Vista Home Basic from the Microsoft UK store for £137.01. Excluding VAT.

Now before everyone rushes off to bag this bargain, I should point out that you can also buy Home Premium for £166.37! Obviously excluding VAT again, Microsoft has to make a living you know.

A quick trawl online reveals the going rate for the full version of Vista Home Premium is around £130 inc VAT - and you can buy it for less than £90 inc VAT if you’re willing to opt for the more restricted OEM version, which is tied to the motherboard you first install it on (so if you build a new PC, you’ll have to buy a new copy of Windows).

So, taking away VAT, Microsoft is charging a premium of over £50 if you buy direct from its store. It would be amazing to discover just how many sales it’s made for these two excellent picks, but sadly I don’t think I’m going to get much joy out of Microsoft on that one. My guess? A princely zero.

Once upon a time, when Google could declare “We’re not evil” without hundreds of thousands of shareholders to worry about, search engines were just search engines. Now, it appears, they’re not. Microsoft is calling Bing a decision engine, Wolfram Alpha is a computational knowledge engine, and Yahoo is… well, let’s not go there.

You could argue Microsoft’s position is born out of desperation. On whatever metric you chose to use, MSN Search (or Windows Live, I lost track of its names in the end) fell behind Google. Number of users, amount of money it made, brand awareness, effectiveness of the raw search - Google kept on winning. (more…)

I caught a glimpse of the Dell Adamo concept design at a pre-Christmas briefing last year, where Dell was so nervous about security they banned our phones (little realising that my faithful HTC Touch’s camera is barely worthy of the name).

So it was with some pleasure that I could finally get my hands on a production model at Dell’s Versailles-based event today. And I have to say, it’s a very impressive piece of kit. (more…)

I’m sure I can’t be alone in having a passionate love/hate relationship with Twitter. I steered clear of it for a long time, believing it to be a timesink and unwelcome distraction to my already communication-filled life. And now that I have joined the throng - as has PC Pro via @pc_pro - I haven’t really moved away from that point of view.

The problem is that the stream of information moves so fast. Even using the quite impressive TweetDeck, I find it impossible to keep track of the endless streams of communications happening. And the thing is, it’s not that I don’t want to hear what the likes of Jack Schofield at The Guardian have to say, but, well, he says so much! As do the numerous other friends, colleagues, influencers and publications that I follow. (more…)

I’m a big fan of mobile broadband. In theory. The idea of a connection wherever you go, the promise of lower costs than fixed broadband, the possibility of even higher speeds than fixed! The reality, which I’m living through right now, remains frustrating.

For the last few days, I’ve had to “rely” on mobile broadband as I wait for my broadband connection to go live in my new house. The trouble is, it doesn’t work at all well. The first problem is reception: I don’t live in central London but in deepest Bucks, and that means I can only get a GPRS connection. (more…)

Anyone who listens to the PC Pro podcast may have noticed my absence over the last couple of weeks, as instead of sitting in the office annoying my colleagues I’ve been busy filling boxes with books, CDs and what can politely be called odds and ends - those innumerable items that “might come in useful” at some future and uncertain date. In other words, I had the delight of moving house.

But there was one surprisingly pleasant part to the whole process, and it’s surprising because it’s the aspect of moving I dreaded the most: changing my address details with all the service providers that take my money each month. (more…)

According to our sister site Channel Pro the number of virtual machines is set to outnumber their physical counterparts during 2009. There’s a caveat to that: we’re talking servers rather than desktop systems, but it’s still an amazing statistic. (more…)

Anyone who’s read PC Pro over the last few years will know that we’re interested in green issues - occasionally indulging in a spirited argument with our friends over at Custom PC who are doing lots of good work by supporting the Folding@home scheme… but at the expense of energy consumption - and one of the ways we do this is by sponsoring the Sustain IT awards.

It’s through this that I happen to know about an excellent site called walkit.com, which describes itself as an urban route planner. The key difference, as it ever-so-subtly hints with its name, is that all its routes are for people who want to walk rather than drive or take public transport. (more…)