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. The results are in the table at the bottom of this post.

The SSD

The tidiest upgrade is to a larger internal SSD, and there’s no doubt this is also best for performance. With a single 1.5GB file, the SSD in our test MacBook Air delivered read and write speeds of 187MB/sec and 156MB/sec. More importantly (you’ll see why later), with 1.5GB of tiny files its read and write speeds were a healthy 87MB/sec and 75MB/sec.

The big problem is the hefty price of a bigger SSD, with Apple charging £250 to step up from 128GB to 256GB in its 13in MacBook Air, and Sony charging £410 for the same upgrade in the VAIO Z. That’s a lot of money.

The external hard disk

The first alternative is an external hard disk, and it’s a cost-efficient way of adding storage, particularly for files you won’t always need to hand. The winner of this month’s USB 3 hard disk Labs (issue 204, in shops now!) costs only £51 inc VAT for a 500GB drive.

In our tests with a single 1.5GB file, it achieved identical read and write speeds of 82MB/sec. With 1.5GB of tiny files this figure fell, but only to 60MB/sec read and 51MB/sec write; not as fast as an SSD, but significantly cheaper.

Of course, not all laptops have USB 3 ports – the MacBook Air being one such example. In our last USB 2 hard disk Labs, the winner achieved 32MB/sec read and 28MB/sec write speeds with a single 1.5GB file, and 26MB/sec and 12MB/sec with 1.5GB of tiny files.

The SD card

Adding external storage is cheap and fast, but if you prefer the convenience of having something you don’t have to carry around, you could make use of the SD card slot. Now, SD cards aren’t built for the kind of constant writing that you do on your main hard disk. They have a limited number of guaranteed write cycles before the card risks failing, so they’re best considered for storing files you don’t update often – a media collection, for example.

There are also several speed categories of SD cards. Look for a class rating on the packaging: this refers to its minimum non-fragmented sequential write speed. So, Class 2 will do at least 2MB/sec, and Class 10 at least 10MB/sec. To confuse matters, some manufacturers use “x” ratings that have minimum rates even higher than Class 10.

Sure enough, in the large file test a Class 10 card saw read and write speeds of 30MB/sec and 23MB/sec. For Class 6 this was 18MB/sec and 15MB/sec, while Class 4 saw 16MB/sec and 6MB/sec. You wouldn’t want to write 64GB of data regularly, but for a one-off the speeds are fine.

With small files those cards had healthy read speeds too, from 44MB/sec on Class 10 down to 20MB/sec with Class 4. But the big problem with using an SD card in this way is writing multiple small files: transferring 1.5GB of files to a Class 10 card pummelled the speed down to below 1MB/sec, and that fell even further with lower classes. If you’re going to regularly write a lot of small files, these cards are a terrible choice.

The value question

For data that will be written once and largely stay unchanged, however, does an SD card offer a value alternative to an SSD upgrade? At the kind of large capacities where it’s feasible, we found several 32GB Class 10 cards on sale for less than £40 inc VAT, and 64GB Class 10 cards at around £100. That’s for basic cards; those rated faster and with a higher number of guaranteed write cycles can cost up to several hundred pounds, so you can pick and choose to suit your needs.

You’ll need an SDXC slot for 64GB cards, and some slots don’t accept the card fully inside – on the MacBook Air it protrudes by 8mm, ripe for the snapping. But if your laptop meets the requirements, and if you’re after only a quick boost in capacity for non-critical files, the sheer convenience of being able to leave an SD card in there at all times makes it a great way to save money. And at lower capacities we really are talking pocket money.

(Click to enlarge)

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.

Delving into the app drawer revealed more unwanted software, with a host of apps neatly summarising Android’s perennial fragmentation issues: alongside the official Market, the Xperia Mini Pro comes loaded with four different app stores. There’s also other McAfee apps installed as well as a Popcap Games trial and a selection of media management tools.

It’s not restricted to Sony Ericsson handsets, either. HTC’s often held up as the paragon of Android quality — alongside Samsung — but my own Desire HD is riddled with stuff that I simply don’t want: 3Mobile-TV, 3Musik and Planet3 were all installed alongside third-party apps such as Amazon MP3, Bebo, Bejeweled Deluxe and a demo of EA’s Sims 3.

Who’s responsible? Networks, largely, which receive clean handsets and then load them up with rubbish after signing deals with numerous partners. And it’s not like you can just get rid of this software, either — most of it’s there to stay, with hard-coded blocks in place to ensure you don’t uninstall any of the tat you don’t want.

There are ways around it, with rooting a possibility if you’d like an untarnished Android experience. Personally, I use a superb app called LauncherPro to kill two birds with one stone: it replaces HTC Sense with its own customisable home screen, and it also allows you to hide apps in your app drawer — the next-best option if I can’t uninstall.

Vodafone’s actions prove that smartphone bloatware can go very wrong, but other companies don’t seem to be learning lessons. Instead, this greed continues, and comes at the expense of Android’s reputation and, more importantly, the tarnished experience that users will have with their new phones — after all, this sort of thing doesn’t happen on iOS.

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.

From my own experience I think that the bridge cameras offer two overwhelming advantages.

The first is the zoom. I just don’t understand why this is generally seen as an optional extra – and an incredibly expensive and awkward one for DSLRs where you have to buy and carry separate lenses. Taking a good photo is as much about content and composition as it is about light gathering, and a good optical zoom opens up so many more creative options. Go to the zoo or park with a superzoom – anything from around 20x to the Nikon Coolpix P500’s amazing 36x – and you really can bring back genuinely interesting and exciting photos; go without and your photos will almost certainly be as dull as everyone else’s.

The second is video. I have to admit that this was very low down on my list of priorities when I bought my Panasonic Lumix a few years back (a long way below full manual control and RAW support). However I was amazed by the quality of the 720p HD video, which was actually far better than that from my admittedly ancient, dedicated device. Now the latest Lumix DMC-FZ100 is offering 1080i.

Having impressive video handling conveniently to hand dramatically increases your creative options. There are just so many occasions where a static image doesn’t do the subject justice and other scenarios where video is the only way to be sure of getting the still. Now I would find it as unthinkable to buy a camera that doesn’t also shoot HD video (complete with a dedicated video record button) as I would to buy one with an ordinary zoom.

Ultimately bridge cameras don’t just offer a bridge between two camps, they offer a bridge between three. Moreover, the result isn’t an awkward compromise that is neither-one-thing-nor-another, but a creative mix that is greater than the sum of its parts (including zooming video).

Of course dedicated DSLRs and video cameras will still be required for professionals and the keenest enthusiasts, but compact cameras and Flip-style video devices are disappearing into the smartphone where they belong. That leaves the bridge camera holding the high centre ground – precisely the ground that most users are looking to occupy.

Is it time for a new A-List category?

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.

We first noticed a problem when the benchmarks finished five full runs and the results popped up on screen: the times taken to complete several of the most intensive tests were rising with each run. This would suggest an overheating problem, so we ran a temperature monitor to find out how hot this Sandy Bridge CPU was getting. Here are the readings both when idle and under full load:

We should point out that 93°C is not necessarily too high for a modern CPU, but it is the root cause of the bigger performance problem. To explain, here’s that full-load temperature again, along with Intel’s own Turbo Boost monitor:

The temperature of 93°C was reached with the processor peaking at 2.7GHz. The Core i7-2620M should be able to Turbo Boost up to a maximum of 3.4GHz, but in this laptop it doesn’t top 2.7GHz at any temperature.

For comparison, here is the same reading from the Core i7-2720QM in the top-end 17in model:

Here it’s being Turbo Boosted from its stock 2.2GHz. Notice how the blisteringly fast 17in model only peaks a few degrees hotter than the 13in, and that’s with the maximum boost. As soon as the fans kicked in that settled comfortably in the high eighties.

What does this all mean? Well, if the CPU in the MacBook Pro 13in hits 93°C at stock speeds, we can only imagine how hot it would get if Turbo Boost was allowed to kick in. So we suspect Apple has disabled it completely to prevent overheating in such a tiny chassis.

It’s an issue we haven’t seen highlighted, perhaps because to the end user it doesn’t really affect the day-to-day experience – and it shouldn’t put you off buying what is in every other way a fantastic piece of kit. But Apple is promoting this on its website as a Turbo Boost-enabled laptop. We’ve asked Apple for comment and await its response.

We also now have the £999 model with its 2.3GHz Core i5 processor in the Labs. We ran the same tests on that one and can confirm that its processor is Turbo Boosting in Boot Camp as it should. The issue is unique to the i7 model.

However, secondly, we must doff our caps to Anandtech and show you our reading from a utility they used called MSR Tools:

We stand corrected on one count: it is indeed Turbo Boosting in OS X. We ran a temperature monitor for several minutes as well, and those boosted speeds occurred with a peak temperature of 93°C, the exact same as the peak in Windows without the boost.

The Turbo Boost issue therefore looks to be one of processor cooling in Windows. That affects a far smaller group of users that an OS X flaw, but it remains a mystery: does the Core i7 model of the MacBook Pro 13in run so hot under Windows drivers that Apple has chosen to disable Turbo Boost? Our tests make that a plausible scenario.

Heat is an issue that’s difficult to ignore. Even on the Core i5 model, just unpacking a large zip file had the Turbo Boosted Core i5 quickly rising to 90°C; during a stress test that hit 99°C. And that has a knock-on effect: with an IR temperature gun we measured the aluminium underside of the laptop at a thigh-scalding 60°C!

We’re more sure than ever that Apple had a real task on its hands getting such fast processors into this chassis, and from everything we’ve seen we’re leaning away from the top-end 13in model as a purchase. If the sight of our benchmarks gradually getting slower with each consecutive run wasn’t enough to highlight the cooling problem, a heat gun pointed at the metal underside certainly was.

There is one plus to the Turbo Boost mystery, however: if you intended to buy a MacBook Pro 13in and install Windows on it, you’ll probably find the cheaper model actually runs faster than the top-end one. Save yourself £300.

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.

The new tests

The new PC Pro Real World Benchmarks are split into three sections, each reflecting a different area of usage.

Responsiveness

With so many netbooks and ultraportables using lightweight processors, it’s vital to know how responsive a system is. We measure this with two new tests. We time how long it takes to open documents and switch between a series of common desktop applications, including the latest versions of Word and Excel, Acrobat Reader 10 and Internet Explorer. We also measure Windows performance, by timing how long the system takes to open, close and move dozens of Explorer windows.

Media

Our media tests expose how capable a system is at using modern software to process music, photos and video files. We start by using iTunes 10 to encode an album into both AAC and MP3 formats. Next, we set Photoshop CS5 to work on a folder of 12-megapixel RAW-format photographs. We adjust the colours and curves, apply some artistic sharpening and blurring and save the results in JPEG format. Finally, we use Sony Vegas 10 to render a short home video shot at 1080p resolution, with a picture-in-picture effect and a crossfade transition. Again, the whole process is timed.

Multitasking

For our multitasking test, we run the iTunes and Photoshop tests simultaneously and then launch our responsiveness tests over the top, giving the CPU, hard disk and memory a real workout. Finally, we time how long it takes the multi-threaded Cinebench 11.5 renderer to produce a complex 3D scene. The multitasking score thus reflects both responsiveness and performance under heavy load – just the information you need if you’re looking for a real workhorse computer.

The Overall score

Once we have our timings, we compare them with the times achieved by our new reference platform: a 3.4GHz Core i7-2600K processor, with 4GB of DDR3 RAM and a 7,200 RPM hard disk, at a display resolution of 1,920 x 1,080 (all desktops are tested at this resolution; we test laptops at native resolution).

Each score is given as a number relative to that platform, with higher scores being faster. Thus, a score of 0.50 in a particular test indicates that a system performs those tasks half as quickly as our reference system. A score of 2.00 would indicate a super-powerful PC that was twice as quick as the reference platform.

We combine the three scores into an average for easy comparison – this is the Overall score. But at the bottom of each review you’ll find a breakdown of the scores in the three tests. This shows each system’s strengths and weaknesses at a glance, so you can easily find the system that’s perfect for you.

Examples

Current desktop PCs are powerful enough to motor through the Responsiveness and Media sections with ease, and should prove the most adept at Multitasking too:

Laptops, with their slower processors but still-plentiful RAM, should show the real variation in what is being tested. Most will remain strong in the Windows Responsiveness test, demonstrating their proficiency at everyday tasks, but will be less successful when pushed by the more intensive Media and Multitasking tests:

Finally, low-power systems such as netbooks and nettops will see that Responsiveness score falling by the wayside as well, but the real drop will be in the more intensive tests as their lack of power limits them to simple linear tasks:

New battery benchmarks

We’ve changed our battery benchmarks too, to be more consistent and to better reflect the sort of stamina you can expect from your laptop while it’s actually in use.

Light use

In the light-use test, we optimise the system settings for the greatest power efficiency. Windows’ power profile is set to Power Saver mode, and we use an X-Rite i1Display 2 colorimeter to set the screen brightness as close to 75cd/m² as possible. We then disconnect the mains and run a script browsing a selection of web pages until the system shuts down, giving you a realistic idea of how much surfing time each notebook offers.

Heavy use

For the heavy-use test, we engage Windows’ High Performance power profile, set the display brightness to maximum, and allow the taxing Cinebench 3D renderer to push the processor load to the limit. This gives a worst-case figure, revealing how long you can expect the battery to last under the most demanding conditions.

The switchover

As of today, every PC and laptop that arrives in the PC Pro Labs will have these new Real World Benchmarks run on them. You’ll still see the old benchmarks on reviews already on the website and (due to press timelines) in issue 199 of PC Pro, on sale 10 March. We’re in the process of updating the benchmarks tab on website reviews, and as of issue 200 the switchover will be complete.

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. The President of DisplayMate himself, Dr. Raymond Soneira, has written an excellent article on US tech site Maximum PC called “Display Myths Shattered: How Monitor and HDTV Companies Cook Their Specs“ in which he dissects these claims with insightful despair.

It’s well worth reading in full if you have even a passing interest in the specs of your PC monitor or HDTV, but the highlights will be reassuring to anyone who feels increasingly lost in a sea of jargon and marketing claptrap. Among the many points, he explains:

• why dynamic contrast modes don’t work, why the “sordid business” of quoting them in place of standard ratios needs to stop, and why a high contrast generally doesn’t matter a whole lot in the majority of onscreen tasks anyway.

• why quoted response time figures usually bear little relation to the actual response time of the panel, and are only really relevant to gamers.

To quote the results of a test in which Dr. Soneira lined up 11 HDTVs side-by-side and got experts and consumers to evaluate them:

“We found that there was no visually detectable difference in motion blur for the mid- to top-of-the-line LCD HDTVs. This regardless of their claimed pixel response times, 60Hz or 120Hz refresh rates, strobed LED backlighting, or motion-enhancement processing. If you find this surprising then just re-read the classic tale of The Emperor’s New Clothes.”

• why, when it comes to colour gamut, wider is not always better:

“A larger gamut will simply make all of the screen colors for standard production content appear more saturated than they ought to appear. Indeed, displays claiming more than 100 percent of the standard color gamut simply can’t show colors that aren’t in the original source image. Expanded gamuts are just gimmicks that make consumers think they’re getting something better.”

There are many more angry dissections and dismissals of features dreamed up in a PR meeting rather than a Lab, and they all refer to the DisplayMate tests we use in every monitor review. As Dr. Soneira wisely says, “the only specs that are useful and meaningful are those in reviews that evaluate every display with the same consistent methodology.” Remember that next time you’re shopping for a new TFT, it might save you a few quid.

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?

To find out, I’ve done some tests on our standard Core i7-920 test rig, using our highly parallel 3D rendering benchmark and selectively disabling physical and virtual cores. Here are the results, in seconds, showing how long it took to render the same scene in different CPU configurations:

For the record, this was tested on a 32-bit Vista Home Premium installation, running at 2.66GHz with 4GB of DDR3-1066 RAM and a 1TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 hard disk.

Clearly, Hyper-Threading does help, cutting the dual-core render time for our test scene from 185 seconds to 165 seconds. It seems even highly parallel tasks waste some execution capacity that Hyper-Threading can exploit. But when we switched off Hyper-Threading and stepped up to four physical cores, render time was slashed to just 118 seconds — a performance boost more than three times greater than that offered by Hyper-Threading.

(Update: At the request of some readers, I subsequently repeated the four-core test with Hyper-Threading enabled. This brought render time down to 107 seconds, representing a speed improvement of 10% — almost exactly the same proportional change, to within 1%, as observed in the two-core tests.)

The conclusion is clear: Hyper-Threading can eke some extra performance out of even the most demanding tasks, and to that extent it’s certainly a plus point for Intel’s architecture. It’s also clearly worth having if you need to service many parallel lightweight demands — in a server, for example. But when it comes to proper grunt-work, it’s no substitute for real silicon.

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.

The results

As you can see, USB 3 left USB 2 comprehensively in the dust in every test. That’s no surprise: USB 2 has always been a bottleneck for external hard disks, with even “Hi-Speed” mode limiting transfer speeds to a theoretical maximum of 480Mb/sec. USB 3 adds a new “SuperSpeed” mode that increases the bandwidth by a whopping ten times, yielding greater throughput than a typical SATA connection and enabling external drives to communicate at full speed. In our real-world 650MB test, the external drive connected via USB 3 averaged sustained read and write rates of around 120MB/sec, beating even our eSATA unit.

Our 300MB test was a little less clear-cut: USB 3 raced past USB 2 as expected, but eSATA performed erratically. In the write test, eSATA was three times as fast as USB 3, but in the read test it was barely faster than USB 2. It seems the SATA interface makes better use of buffering than USB when it comes to writing files, but it doesn’t read files back so efficiently. Overall, if pressed as to whether USB 3 was better than eSATA, we’d have to say “mostly”.

The connector

One interesting aspect of USB 3 is that it brings a new connector — the first one since USB 1 was specified in 1996 that actually involves an electrical change, rather than simply being a different shape. Previous versions of USB have used four-pin connectors, but to enable “SuperSpeed” transfers, USB 3 devices use new eight-pin connectors.

The upgrade has been very thoughtfully implemented, though. You can still use a four-pin cable to hook up a USB 3 device to your PC — you’ll just be stuck at USB 2 speeds.

And if you have a USB 3 cable you can still plug it into a USB 2 socket on your PC: again, your device will simply fall back to USB 2 speeds.

The only thing you can’t do is plug a USB 3 cable into a USB 2 device. That’s because the new USB-B plug is physically larger than the old USB-B socket, to connect with the four extra pins which have been piggy-backed onto the top of the existing design (pictured).

The future

Will USB 3 catch on? Technically speaking, it’s hard to see why it wouldn’t. The performance benefits are simply unanswerable. Of course, not all USB devices will benefit, since things like printers and flash memory devices don’t saturate an existing USB 2 connection. But USB 3 ports and devices retain full compatibility with USB 2, so there’s really no reason not to switch.

(Indeed, despite what you may hear on this week’s PC Pro podcast, it appears that USB 3 even maintains support for USB 1.1 devices and ports.)

The transition may be slow, though. Neither Intel nor AMD yet supports USB 3 at the chipset level, so for now you’ll find it only on premium motherboards with dedicated third-party USB 3 controllers (such as the Asus P7P55D-E or the Gigabyte GA-P55A-UD3). If you want to add it to an existing system, you’ll need to invest in a PCI-E controller card. It’s safe to say that, with these as its only distribution channels, USB 3 isn’t going to flood the mainstream in the immediate future.

All the same, if USB 3 achieves even niche penetration, it will probably be the end of eSATA — always an awkward bus, technically superior but fatally narrow in function, unsupported by most laptops and often only half-implemented on the desktop. Come, USB 3, come, and put this unhappy also-ran out of its misery.

The bottom line

USB 3 marries everything that’s good about USB to performance that’s better than eSATA in most scenarios. To that extent, I am hopelessly in love with it.

But an interface is only as useful as the things it connects, and right now a quick Google search reveals precisely zero USB 3 devices on general sale.

So we’ll have to wait a little longer to see what sort of USB 3 devices appear, and how much they cost, and how quickly consumers take the nascent technology to their bosom. My suspicion, though, is that this upgrade could catch on very quickly indeed.

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

The most obvious one is that multi-display systems are nothing new. Back at the Spider launch in 2007, ATI demonstrated an eight-monitor gaming setup which made everyone go “ooh” — and which was then never heard of again. Admittedly, that system required four graphics cards, but the enthusiast gaming market isn’t known for penny-pinching. If people genuinely wanted to play games on six monitors, they’d be doing so already.

And ATI clearly realises this, as the six-monitor capability is to be reserved for specialist models (of which, we may safely assume, not many will be made). Mainstream cards will be limited to three displays.

The rule of three

But then three is an awkward number. You can’t make three screens into a grid, obviously. If you line them up in a row you get a screen that’s five times as wide as it is high, which is frankly weird. Stack them vertically (with a special stand) and it’s like using a widescreen monitor on its side. Your best bet is probably to rotate three monitors into portrait mode and push them together, for a viewport that’s similar in shape to a normal desktop monitor but with three times the pixels.

Even then, though, your huge multi-monitor display will have two big, dark bezels cutting right across the picture.

That’s not just a superficial complaint. Yes, the overall graphical effect is cheapened by the intrusion of thick plastic bars across the playfield. But bezels also introduce very particular problems when game elements stray across them. A perfect illustration was provided by the flight simulator that ATI used to demonstrate its six-monitor setup, in which the speedometer and altimeter, in the middle of the display, ended up split across two screens, leaving them basically illegible:

(Let’s not get into the problems you’d hit if you tried to use an Eyefinity monitor group to run a productivity application like Word or Excel.)

Lethal bezel

Bezels can cause more general gameplay problems too, as objects moving at regular speeds suddenly leap forward by an inch or more as they pass from screen to screen. That certainly doesn’t help the player to track opponents with the precision required to target / overtake / frag them.

A workaround in some cases could be for the software to insert virtual gaps between screens corresponding to the bezel width, to produce an effect like looking through a window frame. This would bring its own problems, though: it would make it fully impossible to read the flight simulator instruments, for example, and would open up the possibility of bullets and enemies hiding in the “dark” area between screens.

Basically, there’s no proper solution with current hardware —— and I suspect that means that multi-monitor gaming isn’t going to catch on with real people any time soon. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed watching the Eyefinity demos as much as anyone, and the idea of a huge display certainly does appeal. But, sad to say, I think it’s going to take a slightly more creative development than this to make it a reality.

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.

Keeping work files safe

Now, before you all bombard me with contemptuous comments, let me be clear. I’m not saying I don’t keep copies of important files. PC Pro is produced to a tight and immovable schedule, so none of us can afford to be blasé about the prospect of losing work. (Ask David Bayon, who once accidentally deleted the text of a twelve-page Labs section and had to pull some very late nights indeed to reproduce it in time for print.)

But I don’t need special backup software to make copies of my work files — because I save them into my Windows Live Mesh folder, from where they’re immediately beamed up to a remote server and synchronised with my laptop and home PC. In terms of data redundancy you really can’t do much better.

Ah, but, you may say: Live Mesh has comparatively limited storage, allowing you to synchronise a mere 5GB. What use is that in these days of terabyte drives?

What really needs backing up?

And that brings me to my main point. Yes, I would need a hundred Live Mesh accounts to back up my entire PC. But what exactly would I be backing up? The overwhelming majority of my hard disk space is taken up by videos, music, programs and system files — files I didn’t create myself and could easily replace.

(Yes, it’d be a pain rebuilding a music collection from scratch, but unless my MP3 player dies at the same time I can always just copy the files back from there.)

When you come down to it, if my computer were to wink out of existence tomorrow, the files I’d actually miss would add up to no more than a few gigabytes. And because the ones I’m actively working on are protected by Live Mesh (and are often wholly disposable once I’ve finished with them), the stuff that I need to back up myself changes by just a few megabytes a month.

Darien’s brute-force backup

So I have a batch file on my desktop which contains just one line:

This snappy command mirrors my user folder to a backup destination on another PC, recursing subdirectories but skipping NTFS junctions, system and hidden files, plus movies, music and VirtualBox disc images, files beginning with “_” (generally superfluous support files) and folders with names that start with “temp”.

The first time I ran it it took a good few minutes to do its work; but now I double-click on it whenever the mood takes me and, since it only copies changed files, it takes just a few seconds to update my backup. And if I ever need to rebuild my main machine, I can simply reinstall Windows, copy the “darien” folder back into its place and all my files (along with lots of useful application settings) are restored.

Of course, my system isn’t as versatile as a “real” backup package. It doesn’t run automatically, and it doesn’t encrypt or compress my personal data — not that it would be hard to add those capabilities if I could be bothered. And it doesn’t help me if I discover a month down the line that I’ve accidentally overwritten a vital file with gibberish.

But for all its limitations this single command has, so far, answered my backup needs admirably. I’m aware that it copies a lot of application support files that aren’t strictly necessary, but when you consider the wastage involved in a complete system backup I think it’s still a comparatively efficient approach.

Feel free to suggest refinements – or to tell me I’m an idiot, and point out what I should be doing instead. I’m interested to hear what you think.