StartUp Britain is an initiative to help startup businesses in the UK. Clearly this is a good thing in principle though some have suggested – not least my Real World Computing comrade Kevin Partner -  that some of the sponsors and backers of this Government-applauded but privately backed venture are rather in it for themselves, judging by the help and offers that have been made public.

However, things hit a new low with Microsoft’s offer: it is offering “free technology resources worth up to £400 per company”, which sounds pretty good to me at first glance.

But when you go to read the Microsoft offer you find that the offer consists of:

1. “Webinars and seminars – we will build a programme to train 5,000 businesses”  - which sounds just like the free webinars and seminars Microsoft already provides.

2. “A free 90-day trial of Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online to help you manage your customer relationships and sales pipeline. Worth £370.” Excuse me? £370 of value in a 90-day trial of some Microsoft software? I can go to the Microsoft website and get a 30 day trial for free. Do it three times if you really need to. But claiming this is “worth £370″ is an insult to small businesses.

3. “A head-start on online advertising with Bing and Microsoft. Worth £30 + sign up for a free webinar.” So you get £30’s worth of free advertising on the Microsoft advertising engine. Gosh.

4. “A free 60-day trial of Microsoft Office, the essential software suite for managing a small business,” for which, curiously, Microsoft attaches no value. Probably because it is a “free trial”.

So the reality is that Microsoft has not provided “free technology resources worth up to £400 per company”. That, dear Microsoft, would be two full licences of Office 2010 for small business for free. Trialware and a free play with your advertising engine adds up to a great big zero.

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.

One of my very first gigs when I started at PC Pro in 2007 was to interview Tristan Nitot, the president of Mozilla Europe. He was an affable chap, full of engaging answers to questions he’d no doubt heard a hundred times before. The interview practically wrote itself – though for the sake of appearances I held the pen.

Safari for Windows had just been released and I asked Tristan what he thought of it. “I want Safari to have a significant market share. We want choice, we want innovation, as a company that’s what we stand for,” he told me.

I’ll be honest, at that moment Tristan was the software world’s Tom Jones and my knickers were mid-flight. Three years later and things are a little different. These days, standing for choice and innovation in the browser market is a bit like saying you stand for air and the colour blue. We have the browser ballot – Opera’s work, but Mozilla celebrated loudest – bookmark syncing across multiple machines, private browsing, hardware acceleration. The list goes on.

Standing for choice and innovation in the browser market is a bit like saying you stand for air and the colour blue

Internet Explorer is learning how to play nice with others, Safari gets prettier every iteration, Opera’s on feature steroids and Chrome goes whoosh. Do we still need Mozilla keeping everybody else honest? If not, then what is it that Firefox still offers? What is the outstanding feature? Add-ons are nice – I don’t use any because Chrome comes with all the ones I need preinstalled – but selling your browser on them, as Mozilla seems to be, is riskier than inviting Wayne Rooney to your nan’s birthday party.

Like the catalyst in a science experiment, I’m beginning to wonder if Firefox’s greatest contribution to browsers is not its continued existence, but that it existed at all. Put another way: Mozilla has won all its battles, is it time the company picked a new war?

My lord, if looks could kill I’d be stabbed, shot and dropped off a bridge by now. But bear with me, ferocious internet creature filled with malice and wrath. I’m not suggesting Mozilla give up on Firefox, or that the company’s rubbish at creating browsers. It’s not. However, given the resources available to rivals, and their renewed impetus, Mozilla’s beginning to look like a pantomime horse with a 100,000 people inside being asked to race in the Grand National.

Roaming troublemaker

I think Mozilla has a lot more to offer as a kind of roaming software troublemaker. The company has already proven itself brilliant at pulling a community together, offering it direction and spurring innovation in a lifeless market. Now that browsers are healthy, wouldn’t it be brilliant if Mozilla started a ruck elsewhere?

Now that browsers are healthy, wouldn’t it be brilliant if Mozilla started a ruck elsewhere?

And in the finest traditions of “did you hear what that bloke just said about your mum” I’d like to suggest that it crash Microsoft’s cushy Office party. As it stands, Office 2010 and Office 2007 are brilliant, and all the rest are rubbish. I’m sure the community behind OpenOffice.org work very hard, but pretending the last seven years never happened is no way to make an office suite. Similarly, and I’m looking at you Google, pretending hard disks don’t exist isn’t exactly healthy, either.

In fact I’d rather carve words into my own flesh than ever use either again – a point rammed home every time to use Ubuntu for an extended period. (Just imagine how much more attractive Ubuntu 10.10 would be with a decent office suite pre-installed.)

This is a market that desperately needs somebody to be brave. Look at Scrivener on the Mac, an utterly brilliant piece of software chock full of ideas that deserve a bigger audience. I’ve written before about the implementation of tabbed documents in a word processor, and that’s only the beginning. There’s so many things that could be better.

I can feel the rope being slipped around my neck, but before you kick away the stool, give yourself over to wistfulness for just a moment. Imagine if Mozilla decided tomorrow to build an office suite. Imagine all those ideas. Imagine how brilliant that could be. Just imagine. Now imagine Firefox 4. Honestly, which one of those are you most excited by?

“A PC without Office 2007 is like a wagon without wheels.” Well, for starters, if Microsoft believes that’s so then why on earth isn’t it bundling Office 2007 with Windows?

And secondly, it really isn’t. Office 2007 is fantastic, but there are lots of different ways to create documents and crunch numbers without spending the extra money on Microsoft Office.

Perhaps the advert should read “A PC without Office 2007 is like a slightly awkward wagon that you won’t enjoy using quite so much as a PC with Office 2007.” Equally catchy, I’m sure you agree.

But what takes the biscuit is their reply to his email asking when he can have his licences: oh sorry… would you like some CDs with the keys stuck on the back? Should be with you in…

(any guesses?)

…four weeks!

Adopting strictly limited software licencing systems tied tightly to the physical machine and the software install process looks good, for exactly as long as you can be bothered to stay responsive when people ask for new licences. A major cause of unease amongst my clients is the idea that one day, their right to get into their own files will be removed: having it taken away because you haven’t paid is pretty bad (if you thought you’d stopped paying). Having it taken away because someone is asleep at the wheel, or penny-pinching, or deliberately turning their back on the stream of customer-service requests… that’s far more worrying.