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Windows 7: Good and Bad Since Windows 7 has been out for a while now, it's time for some real-world benchmarks to start rolling in. I haven't seen too many yet, but a first look appears to place Win 7 slightly above XP in some tests...but slightly below it in others. And in a totally unsurprising non-revelation, Vista didn't win a single test. This said, the tests that PC Magazine ran weren't exactly exhaustive. They tested things like comparative start-up and shutdown times, video encoding, and also ran a few basic benchmarking tools. And while Win 7 won 3 tests, it only won the "shutdown time" and SunSpider comparisons by a large margin. Otherwise, the results aren't all that different from XP. I'm sorry, but shutdown time is probably so irrelevant as to be useless as a test. I doubt most users care how long this process takes, since they're likely to tell the machine to shut itself down and walk away for the night. This doesn't mean you shouldn't upgrade to Windows 7 from XP. Upgrading might be the only way to make use of some newer hardware or applications (though the latter is probably debatable). This will become more evident over time, as Microsoft loses interest in XP and starts putting it lower on the patch/upgrade food chain. Eventually it'll be put out to pasture, and you'll be stuck upgrading to some newer Windows release. If you have Vista... Microsoft Blings Bing In its ongoing challenge to industry leader Google, Microsoft is throwing even more resources into its highly touted Bing search engine. The boys in Redmond have long tried to achieve some sort of traction in the search market, and Bing has done just that. It's now 3rd in the market, behind Google and Yahoo. Of course, most other competitors are in the low single digits in terms of popularity. And Microsoft has thrown huge resources behind its effort to unseat Google. Bing is being portrayed as a "decision" engine rather than a "search" tool. The basic idea is that people shouldn't get a bunch of irrelevant data back from a search term. Instead, they should get truly relevant information. Search for airline flights, and most search sites will give you everything from links to travel sites to someone's blog about how bad Airline X was on their flight to LA. As a result, Microsoft "introduced several changes Wednesday aimed at answering people's questions without sending them to an outside page." From a user's perspective, this is a two-edged sword. On one hand, keeping them localized to Bing's data might give them even better results when searching for specific data. Search engines are all about the concept of "relevance" when returning data. On the other hand, keeping the user trapped on Bing... Another Reason to Protect Your PC Companies that sell antivirus or anti-spyware packages often sound like they're using scare tactics to sell their wares. Selling based on fear is a common tactic, i.e. "buy a Foo Corp home alarm system or your family will be massacred!" This tactic is used to boost sales in many product lines. Thing is, it's not always unwarranted fear. People do break into houses, residents are occasionally murdered in their beds (though not nearly as often as alarm companies want you to believe), and, yes, antivirus software does help keep the bad guys out. Maybe no example of the need for such software is as clear as a recent one involving a family accused of peddling child porn via their PC. The one I'm referring to "involved Michael Fiola, a former investigator with the Massachusetts agency that oversees workers' compensation. In 2007, Fiola's bosses became suspicious after the Internet bill for his state-issued laptop showed that he used 4 1/2 times more data than his colleagues. A technician found child porn in the PC folder that stores images viewed online." Needless to say, Fiola was fired and prosecuted for these perceived offenses. He and his wife spent their life savings -- about $250,000 -- defending themselves against the charges. Eventually they had the system inspected by a computer forensics specialist. The ... |
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