SD cards: the cheap way to boost laptop storage

Wednesday, August 24th, 2011

An increasing number of laptops these days boast SSDs, but capacities are rising quite slowly. For some people, 128GB as your main drive might be enough, but if you want more, is it worth shelling out the huge fees charged by manufacturers to upgrade to a higher capacity SSD, or can you make do with alternative storage?

To find out, we ran our standard file transfer tests – first between a RAM disk and the SSD of a brand new laptop, then between a RAM disk and a variety of external storage devices. (more…)

Smartphone crapware: worse than laptops?

Monday, August 22nd, 2011

A couple of years ago I holed myself up in the PC Pro Labs with some new laptops to see what impact their pre-installed software — known as crapware, bloatware and shovelware — had on performance.

The results proved shocking but, when it comes down to it, that software is pretty easy to deal with – it’s just a matter of uninstalling everything and, if you’re really particular, running an app like CCleaner to get your Registry back to its fighting weight.

Not so with smartphones. On Friday, I eased the Sony Ericsson Xperia Mini Pro from its box, turned it on, and was greeted with a message urging me to set up McAfee WaveSecure before I’d even set up the phone with my Google account. (more…)

Superzoom cameras: take me to the bridge

Tuesday, June 21st, 2011

There’s an excellent Labs round-up of Superzoom cameras (also commonly called “bridge cameras”) in the latest issue of PC Pro. My only criticism is that it doesn’t makes a strong enough case for its subject.

Most people tend to think that there are only two types of digital camera to choose from: point-and-click compact cameras majoring in convenience, and high-end DSLRs majoring in picture quality. Anything in between is – almost by definition – seen as an uncomfortable compromise. However I think that the vast majority of users would actually be far better off with this intermediate format.

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Apple MacBook Pro 13in: where’s the Turbo Boost?

Thursday, March 10th, 2011

The Apple MacBook Pro 13in is a glorious laptop. It’s thin and light, gorgeous both to look at and to use, and it packs no small amount of power in its tiny chassis. Yet our tests have uncovered a performance issue that will affect every user.

We ran our new Real World Benchmarks on the top-end model, with a dual-core 2.7GHz Intel Core i7-2620M processor, 4GB of DDR3 and a 500GB hard disk. It’s a very fast laptop for its size, as a final score of 0.70 shows – that’s only around 20% slower than the top-end quad-core 17in model. Yet it’s not quite as fast as it should be. (more…)

The all-new PC Pro Real World Benchmarks

Wednesday, March 2nd, 2011

It’s our mission to bring you the most accurate and informative reviews on the market. That’s why we’ve updated our benchmarks to reflect the way real people use computers today.

Our new tests don’t rely on synthetic measures: we use real, current applications such as Microsoft Office 2010 and Photoshop CS5, as well as a completely new set of responsiveness tests, to get an all-round picture of a PC’s performance.

That means the benchmark scores you’ll see from this day on are not directly comparable with older scores, but they give the best ever insight into exactly what each system can do for you.

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DisplayMate boss attacks the TFT marketing myths

Wednesday, May 19th, 2010

If you’re a regular reader of our monitor reviews, you’ll know we use an excellent suite of tests called DisplayMate. It covers colours, backlight levels, response times and any number of other tests for both digital and older analogue display types.

You’ll also know we have a real issue with many claims made by manufacturers. We generally find dynamic contrast (and its ludicrous headline-grabbing figures) detrimental to the movie-watching experience, and we’ve long stopped seeing any real motion blur on today’s panels. Quoted brightness figures don’t often appear to have any relation to the panels we test, and the pre-defined modes for movies, games and text usually make things worse.

It seems we’re not the only ones fed up of wading through hype and misdirection to gauge the actual quality of a monitor, though. (more…)

Taking the hype out of Hyper-Threading

Sunday, May 9th, 2010

In my recent review of AMD’s six-core Phenom II X6 1090T processor, I noted that, although this CPU has the same number of physical cores as Intel’s Core i7-980X, Intel’s Hyper-Threading technology lets the Core i7 service twice as many concurrent threads.

This prompted one commenter (giving his name as Wilbert3) to raise an insightful point. Hyper-Threading is great for everyday multi-tasking: for example, it lets a dual-core Core i5 CPU service four concurrent processes. But it works by presenting each core’s spare execution capacity to the OS as a virtual second core. Under heavy load, where there is no spare capacity, it would seem unable to offer any benefit. In such cases we shouldn’t expect to see a Core i5 achieve performance anywhere near what a true quad-core architecture would provide.

That analysis sounds persuasive, but is it borne out by the evidence? (more…)

USB 3 first benchmark – it’s here, and it’s fast

Wednesday, November 4th, 2009

The first USB 3 external hard disk has arrived in the PC Pro Labs – a pre-production sample courtesy of our friends at Asus – and initial impressions are simply excellent.

The chart above may need a little explaining. The first two groups of results show how long it took, in seconds, to copy a folder of 3,000 small files, totalling 300MB in size, back and forth between a RAM disk and an external hard drive using various connections. The 650MB results are based on the same process using a single 650MB file.

The USB 2 and USB 3 figures were obtained by simply connecting the external drive first to a USB 2 port and then to a USB 3 one. The eSATA figures are from the A-Listed Iomega Professional External Hard Drive. (more…)

Eyefinity: nice demo, but I won’t play games on it

Friday, September 11th, 2009

The new ATI Eyefinity system has created quite an online buzz. Otherwise sane-sounding people have been openly drooling over the idea of combining six monitors into a vast 7,680 x 3,200 display; and, in fairness, if you just focus on that really big number it is quite seductive.

But, while I hate to be a Negative Nancy, I think that excitement needs to be cooled down with a few caveats. (more…)

My one-line, no-frills backup solution

Friday, August 28th, 2009

I’ve heard it said that there are only two kinds of people in the world: those who appreciate the value of backups, and those who will.

It’s a maxim that’s been particularly on my mind lately, after I spent last month testing 21 external hard disks – almost all of which came with some sort of backup software – and then, this week, looked at two standalone backup applications as well. Right now, if there’s anyone who’s apprised of his backup options, it’s me.

But do you know which backup package I’ve chosen for my own use? None. (more…)