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.

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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.

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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.

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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…)

2009 will be the year of DisplayLink

Wednesday, January 7th, 2009

We’ve talked about DisplayLink quite a bit recently at PC Pro, whether as a boxout in a recent TFTs Labs or in product reviews like the Village Tronic ViBook. Late 2008 saw a few tentative moves by major manufacturers like Samsung, LG and InFocus to incorporate DisplayLink natively into monitors and projectors, but 2009 looks set to be the year when the technology really explodes into life.

Early reports from CES in Las Vegas have most of the major monitor brands launching DisplayLink versions of products, and mainly on previously successful, high-quality monitor lines. Several companies are also launching adapters that will convert any exisiting monitor to DisplayLink, which takes care of backwards compatibility.

DisplayLink – sending the video signal via USB rather than standard graphics outputs, for those who haven’t been keeping up – won’t revolutionise your use of your main monitor, let’s be honest. But I’m pretty certain it’ll grow in popularity among those with multi-monitor setups, those who regularly hook up TFTs to a laptop with limited outputs, and those who simply don’t want or need graphics cards cluttering up their compact PCs.

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Samsung’s 360-degree turnaround

Tuesday, December 23rd, 2008

I spent the end of last week poking around the Samsung X360, and found that it fell short in several areas. One of these was the optical drive: whereas rivals from Sony and Lenovo manage to cram optical drives into the svelte dimensions, the Samsung doesn’t bother.

I found myself thinking that, well, maybe this isn’t actually a bad thing – in our day-to-day lives, who uses their optical drive on a regular basis any more?

My laptop is used on the train or on the sofa, for example, and I’m normally playing a game or working. The game doesn’t use a disc, and neither does Microsoft Word. Listening to music doesn’t need a CD anymore, as I have my mp3 player, and the vast majority of applications that I have on my laptop don’t require the CD in the drive to boot.

Of course, Samsung has included a USB DVD drive if you need to use a CD, but the excellent battery life means that this, surely, can be left at home more often than not – it’ll usually be wheeled out for an occasional product install, for instance.

I suppose that the optical drive could now be considered virtually redundant for the majority of users most of the time. It also appears that the Macbook Air may have actually done something right. What do you think?

Can Nvidia halt its current decline?

Wednesday, December 17th, 2008

This month in the Labs we’ve mostly been testing graphics cards, and you’ll be able to read the results when the next issue of Pro is published in January. But I don’t think I’m giving too much away by revealing it’s not particularly happy reading for Nvidia.

Put simply, Nvidia’s desktop department is having a torrid time of it right now: when its own chipsets aren’t faulty they’re generally slower than ATI’s; and when they’re not faulty or slower than ATI’s, they are dearer, which negates any advantage they might have had.

It’s a cyclical thing. ATI had its troubled times before the HD 3000 cards arrived, and when new technology arrives the situation may well reverse again. But for evidence of where the strength lies you should alway look to the board partners – and it’s a one-way surge right now.

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