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.

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?

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.

This Christmas I received the best present I’ve ever had: the knowledge that my Apple boycott (if you can call it that from someone who handed over an arm and a leg for an iPhone…) may long continue. It was thanks largely to the Rage Against The Machine vs X Factor internet campaign that somehow managed to spark a million people into action. I didn’t buy either track, for the record, but I was surprised by the number of alternative MP3 stores offering both. Amazon, Play, 7Digital, the legal Napster… the list is growing and the competition means we’re seeing plenty of prices below those offered by iTunes. In fact, a visit to the Amazon MP3 store revealed the RATM single was being sold for a loss-leading 29p, but that wasn’t what caught my eye.

Armed with a “Best Albums of 2009″ list, I found recent, hugely successful albums selling for £5, and £4. Some for £3 or less. Twelve tracks for less than the cost of a London pint is firmly inside the realms of the impulse buy, and before the hour was out I found I’d bought 14 new albums – more than I’d bought in the whole of 2009, 2008 and 2007 combined. The whole lot cost me less than £45, and they immediately downloaded and automatically added themselves to Windows Media Player at my request.

I know I may be late to the party here, but the prices on offer changed my view on downloading music so completely that I’ve since found myself asking friends for recommendations, looking through specialist websites and exploring the back catalogues of bands I’ve recently enjoyed. A quick look on iTunes tells its own story, as those very same 14 albums would have cost me more than £85 – the kind of unappealing amount I had previously associated with buying music.

Most people use torrent sites not out of a desire to get their entertainment for free, but to acquire it at a price that doesn’t feel like they’re being taken for a mug. Whether a supermarket-style price war on digital music is good for the industry is a question for another blog, but making music legally available at attractive prices is by far the best way to drag the vast majority of torrent addicts back to legality.

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.

Now the Pre has been patched to work with iTunes again, a development so tedious it may as well have been written by Dan Brown. Does Palm really think people will buy the Pre because you can use it with iTunes?

The story so far goes like this. Palm releases the Pre in June. One of the claims the marketers made at the time was that it was compatible with iTunes. It was a sort of hook to get iTunes or iPhone users to think about transferring because they wouldn’t have to change their music software.

But iTunes is only for Apple hardware. It’s a bit silly, I grant you, but it’s Apple’s software and I suppose Apple can do whatever it wants with it. It could make iTunes only compatible with people whose names began with ‘H’, if it wanted.

So a few weeks later Apple releases iTunes 8.2.1. If you had a Pre and you upgraded iTunes, iTunes would no longer work with your handset.

Then Palm released a new version of the Pre’s firmware, and iTunes started working again.

Then Apple released iTunes 9, and the Pre was once again incompatible.

It’s at this point everyone watching began gnawing the side of their hands and wishing that Palm, or Apple, or ideally both, would vanish off the face of the planet.

Now the Pre has been patched to work with iTunes 9 again, a development so monumentally tedious and predictable it might as well have been written by Dan Brown. Does Palm really think people will buy the Pre because you can use it with iTunes?

Then there’s the very questionable wisdom of getting into a scrap with one of the world’s most successful smartphone manufacturers at a time when your own survival is anything but guaranteed. Palm is a company which had to clarify a few days ago that it wasn’t laying people off. No, it’s “better aligning our staff with our business objectives,” which could mean anything. And even if it’s not firing people, it lost $164.5 million dollars in the first quarter of 2009, and that’s bad news however you look at it.

The constant tit-for-tat is being started by Palm every time. It’s bad for the Pre’s image, not least because those likely to buy it – consumers – are unlikely to tolerate repeatedly being shut out of iTunes while Palm scrambles to release another update for long. Palm should let iTunes go and leave Apple alone. It has enough problems already.

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.

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.

So I’m not ashamed to say that part of the reason for my lack of music buying is that I’m getting older, but it’s not just that. It’s also that music has been devalued. Despite the “best efforts” of DRM, it takes just a nanosecond from the time a CD has been released to someone creating an MP3 and sharing that online.

And people – particularly anyone under 30 – see nothing wrong with sharing an MP3 with a friend, just as I see nothing wrong with lending a book to someone. The end result is that I could lay my hands on pretty much any track I wanted, whether through file-sharing sites or a colleague.

Which all, in a terribly long-winded way, leads me to my point. If I can get an MP3 for free, why should I be paying Amazon – which launched its music download service today - 69p? How much is music really worth when it’s just a file, when it’s not surrounded by the glorious paraphenalia that comes with a CD or (more convincingly) a vinyl LP?

In the end, what Amazon is asking me to pay for is convenience, for instant satisfaction. After all, in most cases I could just buy the CD version of the album on Amazon for exactly the same amount of money it’s asking for the download.

And we’ve already seen the power of convenience. It’s why iTunes lovers love iTunes: they see a track, they pay their money, and it’s not only on their computer but on their iPod. Despite the fact they’re generally paying 79p for the privilege of a DRM-locked file, when they could go out and buy the album and then actually do with it what they will, it’s arguably worth it.

Amazon shaves 10p off that price and removes all DRM too, but because it’s not part of an all-encompassing system like Apple’s – one click and you’re done – I don’t think it will have a huge impact.

Anyone who wants that convenience will already be an iTunes addict, while the rest of the population is probably evenly split between those that would rather take the music for free and those who would prefer to physically own the CD.

Oh, and there will be one other sector of the population too. Those, like me, who’ve stopped buying music altogether.

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. Think back to the albums that have defined a point in time, or a generation. Appetite For Destruction, Nevermind and Definitely Maybe jump to mind from my generation; yours will undoubtedly feature others, those bigger-than-music albums that everyone in school bought and listened to on loop till they knew every note and nuance.

Chinese Democracy is part of a dying breed. An album that is absolutely intended to be listened to as a whole, a selection of 14 songs painstakingly constructed and assembled into a single album, with track order, transitions, lyrical theme and album design all chosen for a reason. And – despite what reviewers pining for a 20-year-old sound may tell you – it’s fascinating. A huge array of styles and tempos, with heavy rock giving way to piano ballads, and with most tracks throwing in more styles in five minutes than Coldplay will manage in a career.

As Axl has surely already discovered, though, MP3 players and their personal playlists have no respect for any of this. A quick look at the Chinese Democracy iTunes page shows that you can download the tracks individually, and that the ratio of those downloading the title track (and first single) to those downloading the other album tracks is depressingly huge.

Do you think Katy Perry spent 15 years recording an opera of musical masterpieces to best complement I Kissed A Girl before she aired it in public?

No, she didn’t because she didn’t have to. Thousands of people can happily download her one popular song without having to acknowledge the existence of the other twelve tracks, and still make money for her record label. She could almost not have bothered with the album at all, but as it probably only took a week to write and record, the label can’t lose by putting it out.

The emphasis on individual tracks rather than albums is bad enough for the industry, but playlists are making it worse. If Katy Perry on repeat hasn’t driven you to lop your own ears off with a rusty kitchen knife, your MP3 player will recommend similar tracks, also randomly plucked from their own album line-ups. It can watch which tracks you listen to and which tracks you skip, further driving you towards the big singles, particularly as many obscure album tracks aren’t instantly recognisable – or indeed catchy – when heard in isolation.

Then there’s the playlist based on genre or tempo. The logic is terrible – I like Frank Sinatra so I must also like some Butlins crooner off X Factor strangling a cover version; I like the plodding pace of a Radiohead wrist-slitter so I must also like Leonard Cohen.

You may think that by finding more songs like your favourites you’re broadening your musical tastes, but you’re doing the opposite. You’re becoming someone who likes to listen to what iTunes thinks is “Alternative Rock” but not “Alternative Pop/Rock”; someone who likes Apple’s “Punk Revival” but not “Punk Rock”. Here’s another band that’s probably not as good as the one whose album you haven’t finished listening to yet, enjoy!

Don’t get me wrong, genuinely useful features like Apple’s Genius Playlists can throw up some great bands to try from outside your own collection; but it’s the opting for personal playlists over the intended form, the focus on the track rather than the album, which means we’ll likely never see another record with the social impact of old.

I realise this is merely my Luddite opinion – I know several PC Pro colleagues listen to their music in precisely this modern way and disagree with me entirely – but if they just chose an album and listened to it from start to finish once in a while I’m sure they’d be surprised by how many bands do more than just hit singles.

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.

The obvious disadvantage compared to a Windows Home Server is that the other PCs in the house will need to be left on for you to access their files. What’s more, HomeGroup only works with other Windows 7 PCs, and it’s likely to be many years before the average household has migrated all of its PCs to the new OS.

A more useful feature of HomeGroup is its ability to automatically detect when your work laptop, for instance, is being used in the home. Subsequently, printer settings are automatically configured to your home printer, preventing those baffling moments when you hit Ctrl + P and wonder why nothing’s being spat out of the inkjet in the corner, because it’s still set to your work printer.

Music and video streaming

As well as accessing photos and documents from other PCs on the Home Group, you can play their music and video back from the PC in front of you, too. Windows Media Player now includes support for AAC files, meaning it’s even possible to dip into other people’s iTunes libraries and play those back on your Windows 7 PC. You’ll be shocked to hear that files wrapped up in Apple’s DRM aren’t supported. However, H.264, DivX and AVCHD are, which certainly broadens the range of videos that can be streamed from PC to PC across your home network.

One exceedingly nice touch is the option to right click on music files on your Windows 7 PC and select the option to play them on a networked media receiver, such as a Sonos Digital Music System. This means you can sit with a laptop on the sofa and have the media receiver fill your living room with a handpicked playlist of songs, which will appeal to audiophiles at the end of a long day.

Wireless networking

Selecting a Wi-Fi hoptspot or wireless router has been made marginally easier in Windows 7. Instead of clicking on the wireless networking icon in the System Tray, and then entering a separate dialogue box to select an available connection, you now simply left click on the icon in the System Tray and you’re presented with a list of available networks in a pop-up jumplist. Timesaving, if not exactly breathtaking.

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.