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…)

Can Lexmark change the way we buy printers?

Wednesday, August 26th, 2009

Lexmark’s inkjet printers have had a pretty rough ride from PC Pro in recent reviews and Greg Caster, senior development manager for inkjet R&D, admitted to me yesterday that its 2008 range was simply a step behind its competitors. To change that, Lexmark is finally moving to individual inks for its next all-wireless range of inkjet all-in-ones, and introducing a fantastic touchscreen interface that I’ll come to later.

But the real news for me – and for anyone who ever has trouble choosing a printer – is the way Lexmark’s eight-product line has been assembled.

Currently, buying a printer is a confusing experience, with too many competing manufacturers, each with too many printer ranges that contain too many similar models and accept too many different cartridge types. Even within a single manufacturer’s product range, the variation in quality and speed can be staggering.

(more…)

How to make stubborn 32-bit apps work on 64-bit Windows

Thursday, August 6th, 2009

By now you’ve hopefully seen my feature on 64-bit Windows in the latest issue of PC Pro. And perhaps you derived some comfort from my breezy assurances that “you don’t need to worry too much about application compatibility. Almost all modern 32-bit software should install and run flawlessly on a 64-bit edition of Windows.”

Well, of course, whenever you write something like that you’re asking for trouble. (more…)

Windows 7: surprising benchmark results

Wednesday, May 6th, 2009

Six months ago I benchmarked an alpha version of Windows 7. And I was surprised to find that, despite the new OS feeling much more snappy than Vista, application performance was actually identical.

Now Windows 7 has progressed all the way to Release Candidate status I thought it might be interesting to repeat the experiment with the almost-final code. So again I’ve been running our real-world benchmarks, this time on a Core i7-based system with 3GB of RAM, to compare performance in Vista to both clean and upgrade installations of Windows 7 RC.

This time the results surprised me even more:

As you can see, in most of our tests a clean installation of Windows 7 RC remains on a par with Vista, or at worst a few seconds behind. It’s faintly odd that, in the Photoshop and 3D tests, the upgrade installation was slower than a clean installation of either Vista or Windows 7, but the gap isn’t big enough to fret over.

But what sticks out like a sore thumb is Windows 7 RC’s dreadful performance in our Office test. This test involves extensive number-crunching and graphing in Excel, page formatting and printing in Word, database sorting in Access and slide creation in PowerPoint. Our Windows 7 alpha completed it in an identical time to Vista, but the RC took 70% longer in a clean installation. In an upgraded environment execution time was almost doubled.

(In case you’re wondering, the Multi-app test entails running the Office, audio and Photoshop benchmarks all at the same time, so 7’s relatively poor scores here are probably just another symptom of poor Office performance.)

I don’t yet know what’s causing the slowdown. It’s not unique to this particular setup: I repeated the test on an Athlon X2 system, which is architecturally pretty damn different to a Core i7, and saw a comparable slow-down on this benchmark.

But I’m continuing to investigate, and I’ll let you know what I find.

Laptops of the future

Tuesday, May 5th, 2009

While most of the world seems to be raving about netbooks and budget computing, I’ve spent the last couple of weeks hunkered down in the Labs, ploughing through the forthcoming Ultimate Laptop Labs test.

It’s been an illuminating test for many reasons – not least the chance to test a dozen of the world’s most extravagant notebooks – but one of the most interesting themes to come out of this particular Labs is that the march of progress is, indeed, inevitable.

This is plain to see by comparing the line-ups from issue 169’s Luxury Laptops Labs and the dozen machines that we’ve got lined up for our Ultimate Laptop face-off.

(more…)

The recession, as measured in Canon cams

Friday, May 1st, 2009

We’ve got awfully used to technology getting cheaper by the year over the past decade. But the party’s over. I got my hands on Canon’s newest EOS DSLR camera this week, in the form of the EOS 500D (we’ll have a full review next week).

It’s a nice enough addition to the legendary DSLR range that began with the 300D in 2004, but the price is flabbergasting. (more…)

Can we please kill the Captcha

Monday, February 2nd, 2009

Right I’ve had enough. Captcha codes are now officially the most irritating thing I’ve ever encountered, and this is from a man who grew up with a little sister.

Captcha codes, for anybody not au fait with this peculiar torment, are the codes you have to enter to add comments to blogs or download things, or pretty much do any of the hundred little tasks that make the internet worthwhile. If you’re particularly keen to see one, it’s the thing that will bug you before you post a comment on this here blog. They’re intended to stop bots from signing up for millions of email addresses and swamping the planet in a Viagra blizzard. Essentially, they’re the gatekeepers to the online world, and they’re bloody irritating.

At what point did Captcha’s lords and masters decide that making them completely indecipherable was the way forward? If anything, Captchas have made me side with the bots. We have a common enemy, and if a bot can read the squiggles and inkblots that make up a modern Captcha code, then good for them. It deserves the email account. I’ll throw it a parade. Personally, I can’t even begin to comprehend the damn things. Captcha codes are long past telling humans from bots, they’re now only useful for judging the psychological state of the person entering the comment.

(more…)

Where next for the TFT market?

Tuesday, January 20th, 2009

For a while now I’ve been blathering on to anyone who’ll listen (and plenty who’d rather not – Ed) about falling TFT prices, while marvelling at the bargains that can currently be had. Large-format TFTs have gone from expensive luxuries to affordable commodities in a remarkably short period of time, so I wasn’t surprised to read today that the head of LG Display, Kwon Young-soo Kwon, believes the industry has “hit the bottom.”

I’ve just finished writing a TFTs Labs for next month’s issue so I know first-hand just how crazy the market has become. We had one 22in TFT for £80 plus VAT, a 24in model for £140 plus VAT and even a monstrous 28in for a little over £200 plus VAT. If I remember correctly, some of these prices are cheaper than 17in and 19in TFTs reviewed just months previously.

It can’t be healthy for a whole industry to plummet so quickly in order to chase declining sales, and the remarks from Kwon at LG back this up. (more…)