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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The Beatles on iTunes: we can’t work it out

Tuesday, November 16th, 2010

So The Beatles have finally released their back catalogue on iTunes. Whoopi-do. Can we get on with the rest of our lives now?

To a man (and woman) in the PC Pro office, none of us can work out why anyone would want to buy the albums off iTunes, let alone the £125 Beatles Box that wraps up all 16 of the albums plus a selection of questionable extras.

For starters, you’re far better off buying the albums on CD – presuming you haven’t already. Take for example the The Beatles 1967-1970 (The Blue Album) is £17.99 to download in iTunes’ 256Kbits/sec AAC format, while the double-CD version of the very same album is half the price on Play.com. And that’s in a completely lossless format, that arrives with its very own backup media (ie. the CD) and sleeve notes.

The only possible reason for buying the album off iTunes instead of Play is the convenience and unbeatable speed of delivery: but is anyone really in that much of a hurry to download albums that have been out for 40 years or more?

And what about the nutcases who want to own the first ever digital release made by The Beatles for the sake of it? Well, I’m sorry. You’re too late. The Beatles released a delightful little apple-shaped USB stick that contained the remastered audio from all 14 of the band’s stereo albums – in both 24-bit FLAC 44.1Khz and MP3 320Kbits/sec formats – last year.  Sure it cost £200, but that has more keepsake value than a bunch of AAC files downloaded from iTunes.

So, please tell us, why does Apple think this is a day none of us will ever forget?

Low prices can break the illegal download habit

Tuesday, January 5th, 2010

Last month I came across one of the most interesting books I’ve had the pleasure of reading in a long time: Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age by Steve Knopper.

As well as a riveting account of changes in the music industry over the past several decades, it tells the story of the birth of Napster, the rise of peer-to-peer downloading, and the terrible choices the industry has made that have directly led to the situation we find ourselves in today.

The sheer scale of the head-into-sand plunging that evidently went on in industry boardrooms until very recently – and still does in some – is astounding, and it’s hard to feel sympathy for the fat cats who are now seeing their bottom lines being squeezed by punters with more technological nous than they. The plight of the artists themselves, and the music they make and we enjoy, is a different matter entirely – one which the book seeks to address.

But Knopper’s not looking at ways of preventing illegal downloads. He’s more interested in how the industry can make legally downloading a song a better experience than taking the free alternative route. It’s an obvious point, but in my opinion Apple’s recent stranglehold over the digital music market and its rigid pricing (not to mention the appalling design of iTunes) were standing firmly in the way of that ever happening. To this end, even though I use my iPhone as my primary music player, I’ve never purchased a track from Apple.

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Palm should leave Apple alone

Monday, October 5th, 2009

I challenge you to name something – anything – more ludicrous than the war of attrition being waged by Palm against Apple.

I realise that looks the wrong way round. Palm is the smaller company. The weedy David to Apple’s giant Goliath. But each time the chance to go to war with a company several times its size has been presented, Palm has reached for it with both hands like a 19-stone man lunging for cake.

I’m talking, in case you’re not following the smartphone market as closely as you should, about Palm’s moronic battle to keep the Pre compatible with iTunes.

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Songbird: the open source media player

Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008

If, like me, you despise iTunes with a passion, this could be the player for you. It’s called Songbird, and it’s an open source alternative to the big, bloated media players that dominate the market. Powered by Mozilla, it’s could soon be the Firefox of media software.

It works with iPods and your existing iTunes library, and integrates with YouTube, ShoutCast, Last.fm and other media-related apps. It links to concert tickets for artists in your library, supports FairPlay tracks, works on Windows or Macs and even has an integrated web browser.

All sorts of extra features are in beta, as the Songbird website details, and you can also download add-ons in the same way as you currently do with Firefox – so the possibilities for expansion are immense.

Version 1.0.0 was officially launched yesterday, and I’ve downloaded it to see how it puts up with my terrible music taste, so look out for a full review soon.

UPDATE: Read the full review of songbird 1.0 here.

What price an MP3?

Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008

Now for the rest of this blog I’m going to come across like a curmudgeonly old grump who only likes listening to Radio 4 and restricts his TV viewing to Newsnight. But I’m not, honest. I listen to Radio 6 Music each morning on my way into work, and have on very special occasions been known to throw a few shapes on the dancefloor. People soon ask me to stop, but we’ll gloss over that.

The fact is, I haven’t bought a CD or downloaded a track on iTunes for over a year. My MP3 player is, right now, gathering dust in a draw, and it’s full of tracks I transcoded from my rapidly ageing CD collection. And while I used to get a thrill out of firing up the various components of my hi-fi and losing myself in the expensive Sennheiser headphones I bought a decade ago, I’m now far more likely to be inserting the latest In The Night Garden CD at the behest of my young children. (more…)

Playlists killed the classic album

Thursday, November 27th, 2008

As someone whose musical tastes are so reluctant to be dragged into today that I spent last Saturday night at a gig featuring Carter USM and EMF, this week has been both beautiful and troubling.

On the one hand, Chinese Democracy, Axl Rose’s 15-year tortuous journey towards the Guns N’ Roses album he always felt he had in his brilliantly destructive brain, was released. On the other hand, a music software company came to our offices and showed us some software that analyses all the music on your hard drive, clusters it into a big cloud of tempos, styles, and other gubbins, then lets you choose your playlists visually by picking the clusters that interest you.

The two couldn’t have been further apart in what they represent. (more…)

Windows 7: networking

Tuesday, October 28th, 2008

Networking has been beefed up in a number of subtle ways in Windows 7. The first is a new feature called HomeGroup. This essentially turns all the Windows 7 PCs on the home network into a combined pool of data and files, much like a Windows Home Server or a NAS appliance.

Using a new feature called Libraries in Windows Explorer, you select and open files on the HomeGroup network as if they were stored locally on your PC. It’s also possible to search for files (using tags and filenames, or more advanced searches, such as the month a photo was taken) across the entire HomeGroup.

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Cheeky Sun throws in OpenOffice with Java

Thursday, August 28th, 2008

Sun, which has spent the past decade constantly moaning about the worst excesses of Microsoft’s behaviour, is clearly not averse to employing underhand tactics of its own.

Having spent the past couple of days wilfully ignoring the Java update nagging away in my System Tray, I finally relented and installed the latest version, only to be confronted with the following screen:

Admittedly, Sun was only trying to force the OpenOffice installer on me, rather than automatically downloading the hundreds of megabytes that comprise the full suite. But after the furore caused when Apple automatically ticked the Safari installation with iTunes updates earlier this year, it’s amazing that companies are still resorting to such cheap tricks.