Acer Aspire P3 review: first look

Friday, May 3rd, 2013

The Acer Aspire P3, launched at a glitzy New York press event in New York, wants desperately to be a rival to the Microsoft Surface. At first glance it looks like it could be: it has a keyboard cover, just like the Surface, and that cover can be folded over so you can use it  as a tablet or prop it up at an angle for use in laptop mode.

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Acer Aspire R7 review: first look

Friday, May 3rd, 2013

We’ve seen some wacky hybrids in recent months, but the recently launched Acer Aspire R7 has gone further out on a limb than most. Its hinge, dubbed the “Ezel”, resembles the central support strut of an all-in-one PC more than a laptop hinge, and it delivers a surprising amount of flexibility.

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Silly Microsoft, that’s not a Start button

Tuesday, April 23rd, 2013

Rumours that Microsoft is bringing the Start button back to Windows 8 have been gathering pace over the past week or so. Don’t get your hopes up, however.

The Verge’s Tom Warren, as reliable a Microsoft-watcher as they come, has been told by his Redmond sources that Windows 8.1 will indeed include a Start button on the desktop – but this will merely send people back to the Metro Start screen. It isn’t a return of the cascading Start menu and search bar that appears when you click on the Start button in Windows 7.

If true, it’s yet another indication that Microsoft just doesn’t get it. The people clamouring for the return of the Start button don’t want just another shortcut to the Start screen – they can get there easily enough by pressing the Windows button or using the Start button charm. What they want is the convenience of being able to open and search for applications, files or settings without being thrust into the touch-optimised Metroverse.

It looks like those PC makers who are preinstalling third-party Start buttons on their machines are going to get no respite.

Windows 8 sparking little more search interest than Vista

Monday, April 15th, 2013

There’s a lot of debate over the popularity of Windows 8. Microsoft claims Windows 8 is outselling Windows 7; British desktop PC makers have told us that up to 93% of new PC buyers still want Windows 7.

Google provides us with another means of divining the popularity of different products. The Google Trends website allows you to compare the search volumes of different terms, and it doesn’t make particularly pleasant reading for Microsoft when you start comparing recent versions of Windows.

We compared the search volumes for the past four editions of Windows, from 2004 until the present day, and this is the result (click graph to enlarge):

As you can see, Windows 8 is following a very similar trend line to Windows Vista, briefly bursting past the incumbent version of Windows at the time of launch, before settling down at a level that’s well below its predecessor. While the post-launch drop-off isn’t quite as severe for Windows 8 as it was for Vista, it’s still pretty grim viewing for Microsoft.

If there are crumbs of comfort for Microsoft, searches for OS X appear to be in long-term decline — although we suspect more people search for the particular version number than “OS X”:

Indeed, when you throw the search term “Mac” into the comparison, it paints an entirely different picture:

Major retailers mis-selling Windows RT as Windows 8

Thursday, April 4th, 2013

There are only five Windows RT tablets or hybrids on store shelves and they’re not selling well, as one analyst has pointed out this week.

There’s many reasons devices such as the Asus VivoTab RT TF600T and Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga 11 haven’t challenged the iPad’s dominance — high prices, poor availability, failure to invest in marketing, dislike of Windows RT, incredibly silly names — but I can add one further excuse to the list: confusion among retailers.

The Samsung Ativ Tab RT, for example, is listed over on Argos’ website. It won’t be tough for PC Pro readers to name what’s wrong with this picture:

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Dell XPS 18 review: first look

Wednesday, March 13th, 2013

The Dell XPS 18 joins the Asus Transformer AiO and the Sony VAIO Tap 20 in the growing portable all-in-one market, and Dell reckons it has the march on its rivals – the XPS is both slimmer and lighter than its competitors.

The XPS 18 is around 20mm thick, and it weighs 2.1kg – making it 300g lighter than the Asus, and less than half as hefty as Sony’s 5.1kg VAIO. That’s especially impressive considering a battery has been crammed in too  - if the XPS 18 can live up to Dell’s claims of five-hour battery life, it will double the Sony’s longevity. (more…)

Windows 8: a touch of madness

Monday, February 18th, 2013

For the last week or so I’ve been using Windows 8 and, for the most part it hasn’t been the least bit horrid.

Yes, it forced me to restart this morning just as I sat down to get some work done and, yes, the procedure to actually turn off the computer is like a putative storyline scribbled on a napkin by Franz Kafka but later rejected for being too complicated. And yes, the way PDFs, JPEGs and a few other file types insist on opening full-screen (how many PDFs are that important?) is jarring, but still, most of my work is done in a browser these days, making the operating system in the background irrelevant most of the time.

It is, as operating systems go, perfectly fine.

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How to add Media Center – and DVD playback – to Windows 8 Pro for free

Friday, January 25th, 2013

If you own Windows 8 Pro, you have precisely six days to claim your free Media Center upgrade – the main advantage of this is that it allows you to watch DVDs on your PC, because a DVD codec is part of the package.

Plus, if you have a TV tuner already installed or fancy buying one in the future, you can also watch and record live TV.

But – and it’s a big but – this free upgrade offer expires as of 31 January 2013.

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Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga 11S review: first look

Friday, January 11th, 2013

There are a lot of them at CES 2013, but is this the Windows 8 convertible Ultrabook you’ve been waiting for? Built using the same innovative design as the Yoga 13, the IdeaPad Yoga 11S’s screen flips around a 180-degree axis, allowing you to use it as a full-powered laptop when you want it and then move to tablet mode in a single, slick movement.

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Samsung Series 7 Chronos review: first look

Thursday, January 10th, 2013

Don’t be fooled by their similar names: the Samsung Series 7 Chronos couldn’t be more different to its much smaller sibling, the Series 7 Ultra. This is a 15.6in behemoth designed for the heaviest of duties – Samsung uses the phrase “ultimate performance for professional creation” – and that’s obvious from the moment you pick it up.

That said, compared to other 15.6in laptops, the Chronos is quite light: Samsung claims it weighs 2.35kg. Mind you, it also claims that it’s just 20.9mm thick – we’ll have to measure it with the office callipers when the final sample arrives in the office, but we suspect it’s closer to 30mm at its fattest point.

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