No, Microsoft's testing isn't perfect. But you can be reasonably confident that the basic functionality in the product will work, and work as intended.

My T61 has a Quadro NVS 140m (effectively the same as GeForce 8400M).

One thing is for sure: I'm getting the extended warranty.

I just hope that my ThinkPad T61 (Quadro NVS 140m) doesn't die.

Essentially, whenever you modify a file, the OS keeps the old version around. Only the files that change need to be kept in the snapshot (more precisely, only the parts of the files that change need to be kept around).

There is a LOT of cool stuff in Vista, but you never hear about most of it because it's "core" functionality rather than something that's directly visible.

There's only one British pop/rock band.

When people point out that you're paying $129 for a new version of OS X, you trash them for calling it a "point release" and say it's a "major release".

When Apple reveals that there aren't any major new features in 10.6, suddenly it's a "point release" again.

Make up your mind. Either Apple's $129 upgrades are "major releases", in which case they should deliver major new features, or they are "point releases" and should be much cheaper.

FYI, Vista SP2 had some major new features, including the security center, pop-up blocking in IE, major wireless network improvements, and quite a bit more.

I'm tired of hearing how much "better" Japanese cell phones are.

They have more features. They're more "advanced". But are they better? All of these features mean NOTHING unless they work well.

I'm reminded of the Sprint "Crime Deterrent" commercial. You can buy phones that have TV in the US. Companies have tried cellphone based payment systems. Airlines have tried to let you use your phone as a boarding pass.

But, you know what? Watching TV on a 3" screen sucks. My credit cards are small enough to fit in my wallet, and they work great. And paper boarding passes are cheap and reliable.

The thing is, Apple didn't try to deliver all of these features. Instead, they delivered features that are actually useful. A large, bright screen. A web browser that really works. A fast CPU. A truly excellent web browser. Music sync that works and is fast. Music downloads that are reasonably priced.

So, maybe the iPhone isn't "advanced" enough for Japan. But I think the iPhone is the most advanced phone ever released. Because I don't think that being "advanced" is about having the most features. It's about building the best device.

This is blatantly wrong. All modern notebooks have lithium button cell batteries, but all they do is keep the clock (and firmware/BIOS data) stored. They do not have remotely enough power to keep the DRAM alive for any length of time, nor are they designed to do so.

Now, if you use Mac OS or Vista (or properly-configured Linux), you have what's called "hybrid sleep". This is a combination of sleep (suspend to RAM) and hibernation (suspend to disk) where memory contents are saved to the disk and THEN the system goes to sleep. If power is lost, the system simply resumes from disk. This works great in Vista and I've seen it work well on Macs too.

Of course, that's not what Giz was asking for. What Giz wanted was the ability to keep the system ON while swapping the battery. That means that, for example, file downloads aren't interrupted.

Funny that Giz pictured a ThinkPad, because nearly all ThinkPads (including the X300 and my T61) support an UltraBay battery. This battery not only gives you 1.5-2.5 extra hours of juice (depending on model), it also can be used so that you can hot-swap the main battery.

The new Indy is so over-the-top absurd that it's funny. Maybe that's the point. Whether it's the nuclear blast, the sword duel on the cars, or the giant UFO, it's just so blatantly stupid that it's laughable.

I guess I'm a bit disappointed. I expected a better performance from Harrison Ford, who was competent but not stellar. I expected a plot that was more fleshed out and more mysterious - you could predict the end of this Indy about 1/2 way through. And I expected more character development.

There were a few moments when the new Indy was great. The atomic blast was surprisingly funny, even though it wasn't believable. The "triple agent" joke hit the spot. And you can't help but love the diner fight scene, even if it was stolen from Back to the Future.

Overall, it was a solid summer blockbuster. But it wasn't as good as, say, Transformers or Iron Man.

Pliers are surprisingly useful, as are the integrated wire cutters/strippers, 2 knives (serrated and smooth), saw, file, screwdrivers, and scissors.

Some things to know:
- If you get multiple boxes, they are probably from different warehouses
- Really large items (monitors, printers, etc) usually come in the original shipping box, not one provided by Newegg
- Multiple small items get combined into a larger box

Note that Newegg HAS switched to using padded envelopes for really small (e.g. flash drive) items, but only if you select the USPS option.

You CANNOT ship padded envelopes via UPS or FedEx ground - they only allow those sizes for express shipments. Trust me, I've tried.

Also, I re-use ALL of my Newegg boxes. I order a LOT of stuff from them (over $10,000 so far), so I have a wide variety of boxes, complete with packing peanuts. I never need to buy boxes.

My old Compal EFL30 did this, too - it even did it on battery when the laptop was sleeping.

If you're talking about the "recent applications" screen, you can disable that.

IE mobile is still absolutely terrible. I use Opera Mini, which is quite good.

I actually switched from an iPhone back to my Dash for several reasons:

- Despite getting much better over 2 months, I still can't exceed 10WPM on my iPhone, which is about 1/2 as fast as I can type on my Dash and about 1/3 as fast as I could type on the Sidekick.
- There's no good IM app for the iPhone. Both apps disconnect randomly.
- No internet sharing. I actually had the best hacked solution with the iPhone (VPN tunneled through the iPhone), but it drains the battery FAST and is a pain to use.
- The iPhone is durable but it shows every scratch and nick. My Dash looks good 2 years later.
- The Dash has a standard miniUSB connector for sync/charge
- I can sync over Bluetooth with the Dash
- DirectPush works today on the Dash; it's not coming until 2.0 for the iPhone
- The Dash has better RF (signal quality) than the iPhone, which frequently loses signal in my dorm

Now, 90% of what's wrong with WinMo fits into two categories:
- UI needs some work
- Craptastic devices

The S620/Dash has good RF, good battery life, a good form factor, and is overall a decent device. But it, like many GSM WinMo phones, has a terrible 180MHz TI OMAP850 CPU and only 64MB of memory. The Dash gets dramatically faster when you overclock the CPU to 264MHz - imagine how much better it would run at the 624MHz that the iPhone runs at.

Has the TSA ever considered that terrorists looking to get information on TSA procedures might actually fly around the country?

Southwest tickets are $69. You can fly back and forth a bunch of times for $1000, which lets you examine all of the procedures and look at plenty of X-Ray images.

Security my ass.

- Their DVR sucks (locks up, is slow, has ads in the guide)
- Very few HD channels (locals and a couple of nationals like Discovery and ESPN)
- Annoying as hell advertisements that play OVER AND OVER

And who the hell likes On Demand? Does anyone actually watch any of the 1000 crappy free movies they have? Or maybe we should watch an exciting remix of C-SPAN on "Elections 2008 On Demand". The whole thing is marginal at best.

Blu-ray, copies CDs to the drive, and a lot more.

Seriously, Mossberg manages to sneak Apple praise and Vista-bashing into pretty much every review he does. Even Pogue isn't that bad, and Pogue wrote "Macs for Dummies", among other books.

You know what the EEE is great for? A friend of mine has a much-younger cousin (she's 13) who is REALLY hard on technology. She (the cousin) needs a computer to play Flash games and write papers.

So, guess which computer makes a lot of sense? The EEE. It's got an SSD, so it's pretty durable, and it's only $300, so it's not such a huge deal if it's broken.

The MacBook Air has a regular old LV (not ULV) Merom. It's (the CPU's packaging) smaller because it's soldered to the board rather than socketed. The die is exacly the same size because it's the same CPU.

The Dell has inferior battery life because it has NVIDIA graphics. The ThinkPad T61 with Quadro NVS 140m (which I have) gets two hours less battery than an identically-configured T61 with Intel graphics. Note that the Quadro NVS 140m is basically the same GPU as the Dell XPS M1330.

Modern Intel mobile CPUs use almost no power at idle (more specifically, when they are in their lowest P-state and sleeping), generally less than a watt. This, fortunately, is the state that the CPU is in most of the time.

The MacBook Air has a 37Wh battery, and with 5 hours of battery life, that means that it needs to draw 7.5W. This is not an unusual number for a modern notebook - my regular-old HP Compaq 6910p business notebook draws around 10W, and it doesn't have an LED-backlit display, low-power hard drive (e.g. 4200rpm) or anything else special. It's not hard to shave 2.5W off of that.

No, seriously. The ModBook is a really slick mod. It might even be a decent tablet. But it is not a new thing.

Oh well. I'm sure 2009's MacWorld will roll around, Steve will demo a tablet, and we'll all be talking about how innovative it is.

Funny how he trashed the Viper during the period where Chrystler was owned by Daimler. Funny how he calls Japanese cars "soulless".

Germany isn't the only country that makes good cars, Clarkson.

You can't use SAS drives with a SATA port, so I'm guessing you used one of the SAS ports.

HP qualifies the xw8600 with both XP and Vista (I live in Fort Collins where HP Workstations are designed/tested), so I'll ask if any performance differences showed up during HP testing.

120MB/s is still high, even for 15k SAS drives. You can PEAK at 120MB/s, but that's not sustainable accross the entire surface of the drive.

So, I guess there are some more questions:
- Are you running the HP-provided SAS drivers (download the SoftPaq)?
- Why are you testing with 100-baseT? The xw8600 has gigabit ethernet.

You SHOULD NOT be seeing significantly different disk performance in Vista. AnandTech tested the fastest SSD (the MTron 7000) using Vista, and many other websites use Vista regularly for disk benchmarking. If you're seeing that much difference, there's something wrong - probably the SAS drivers aren't installed, or DMA isn't working.

There's something fishy here, people. Vista is a memory hog and it eats disk space. It is not, however, 10x slower at network transfers than XP. If anything, it's significantly faster due to the new TCP implementation which is much more tolerant of packet loss and latency.

What's probably happening is that your test is testing the drive's cache.

My disk results using HDTune on Vista are identical to the results on the same system with XP (Lenovo T61, Hitachi 7k200 100GB 7200rpm drive).

As for the network tests, I'm interested in what you were copying. I just copied 4.2GiB of music (452 files) in 6:22, which works out to 90Mbps - darn close to the theoretical maximum of the NIC and similar to what I have seen in XP.

Front collisions against a concrete barrier aren't a very good test, even at 70mph.

What we need to see are:

- An OFFSET crash test, like the ones conducted by EuroNCAP and the IIHS
- A SIDE crash test, like the ones conducted by the IIHS

If you look up the EuroNCAP, you'll see that the Smart performs well for a vehicle of its size, but that it performs considerably worse than larger vehicles like the Toyota Prius.

Moreover, SIZE IS A FACTOR. All things equal, a larger vehicle performs better in a two-vehicle collision than a smaller vehicle. This is just physics, but it's also supported by actual fatality statistics.

I'm not advocating that we all drive monster SUVs. In fact, much of the problem is that people are driving monster SUVs. But we drive on the roads we have, not on the roads we would like to have.

If you're hit by a 6000lb SUV, there's a HUGE difference between being in a 3800lb Prius and an 1800lb Smart.

People who complain about Windows Mobile "Professional" being too hard to use need to get a Windows Mobile "Standard" (smartphone) device. The smartphone UI is simplified, there's no touchscreen to screw with, and in general the devices are smaller and have better battery life.

Here are the things that I dislike about WinMo, some of which you have already covered:

- Pocket IE. It gets the job done, but other than that it's a steaming pile of crap. Install Opera Mini (or Opera Mobile) and move on with your life. Not that Safari is exactly great - sometimes you WANT to reformat the page so you don't have to keep scrolling around.
- Mail client. Great if you have Exchange, but I don't. It's a mediocre IMAP client that's just as bad as the one on the iPhone. Give me Chatter any day.
- Memory usage. My WM6 device has 64MB of memory, but only 22MB is usable by apps. Either devices need to ship with 128M (like the Shadow) or WM needs to get less memory hungry.

Things I don't mind:
- Close button. This was never an issue when I used a WM5 standard device, and it's definitely not an issue on the Smartphone which doesn't have a close button. A smartphone shouldn't have a close button.

Things I like:
- Internet sharing. Works over Bluetooth or USB. T-Mobile EDGE is slow, but its also cheap, and it has saved my butt on occasion.
- IM. I paid $20 for Shape IM+ and haven't looked back. I don't have to pay for a text-messaging plan to IM, and IM+ supports Google and Jabber too.
- Home screen. You have to be an XML hacker to do this (or download a home screen from someone who is), but I completely customized my home screen. It has a BIG clock (like 3/4 of an inch tall) plus my appointments and number of emails/SMS/voicemails. It also has a recently used application list. I can see this by pushing pretty much any button on the device while it's locked.
- Smart dialing. I can search my recently dialed calls and contacts from the home screen, which is a big time saver.

Now, of course, if you draw too much current (say, by plugging in 4 toasters), you might have a problem. But if your breaker is working, you're perfectly safe - you're just going to pop the breaker.

UL requires extension cords to be able to take more current than they actually need to. This prevents a fire, because you can't overload the cord without blowing the breaker first.

Most power strips also have a breaker, which is a good thing from a safety standpoint.

So, remember:
Make sure your extension cords, power strips, and other electrical devices are UL listed.

If you buy an off-brand device, check the UL file number (it begins with an E) on UL's website to make sure the device is actually UL listed. Some manufacturers have used the trademark illegally; these devices have not been tested by UL and have been known to cause fires and other electrical hazards (which may not be covered by your insurance!).

Don't plug extension cords into other extension cords.

Use an extension cord rated for the device you are connecting.

If you don't think that an electrical fire can happen, watch the Christmas MythBusters episode - they demonstrate what happens when an undersized extension cord is overloaded.

The really cool thing about the wrap-around feature is that the earbuds are asymmetric - the left one won't fit in the right ear and vice versa. That means that you don't have to look at the "L/R" text (which they have anyway) to put them in.

They do a great job of isolating noise and deliver some awesome sound.

However, in-ear earbuds are not for everyone. I had to try 5 different options (Shure includes 9 different pads - from foam to silicone to PVC) before settling on the large PVC option.

I HATED my e2g buds at first. And despite the fact that I managed to fit them correctly, they ARE NOT as comfortable as over-ear headphones or even loose earbuds. But the much better bass response (as good as over-ear headphones) and sound isolation (better than active noise cancellation) make up for this.

I can listen to music on the bus or on an airplane with my e2g buds without having to crank up the volume. They are great when I mow the lawn, too.

So, yeah, I'd recommend these. But buy them locally, in case you need to return them. In-ear buds aren't for everyone.

How do I know? Because I'm part of a university team taking part in the cluster challenge that's also going on at the same show.

Spaces = In X (UNIX) for over 20 years
Time Machine = Previous Versions, Windows Backup (Vista)
Parental Controls (Vista)
Address Space Randomization (Vista, BSD)
Signed Executables (Windows 98)
Front Row = Media Center (Windows XP MCE, Vista)
Core Animation = WPF (Vista, now in XP)
Native 64-bit (Vista, XP-64, Linux, BSD, others)
Downloaded App Tagging (Vista, XP SP2)
App Sandboxing (Vista)
Advanced Spotlight Searches (Vista)
Icon Mode in Open/Save (Windows 98)
Tabbed Terminals (Various Linux / BSD / UNIX terminals)
Live Partition Resizing (Vista)
Guest Log-On (Vista, XP)
Trash Empty Button (Windows 98)
Application-Based Firewall (XP SP2, Vista)
Mail Stationary (Outlook Express in Windows 98)

The list is really quite stunning. Go down the features list on Apple's website. A large fraction are "inspired" by other operating systems.

I find Apple's tactics and marketing to be insulting. Apple, you played up the Mac vs. PC thing back in the early 90s, too. Look where it got you.

The company I work for has policies that specifically FORBID trashing the competition. It's fine to point out your competitive advantages. It's not OK to engage in mudslinging - it makes your company look juvenile and insecure.

And, FYI, the blue screen they are showing doesn't exist in Windows NT/XP/Vista.

The only times that Vista has bluescreened on me is when I overclocked my system too much (duh!). I have never seen a bluescreen in Vista that wasn't caused by hardware problems.

Of course the $7500 cables "sound" better. They sound better for the same reason that people feel better when they are given a pill that does nothing. It's called the placebo effect, and it's well documented.

The correct way to test whether these cables are better is to use an A/B/X test. You listen to the $100 cable (A), then to the $7500 cable (B), then to an unknown cable (X), which is the same cable as A or B. Your job is to decide whether cable X is cable A or cable B.

The process is repeated, with cable X randomly chosen to be A or B. If your guesses are significantly better than chance (statistics come in here), we can say that A and B are perceptually different.

This is what Randi wants.

Now, I'm sure that you're going to say, "but the cables measure differently". They probably do. With a good scope, I can measure the difference between a 30-foot wire and a 30.1-foot wire. Whether or not that extra 1.2 inches makes any difference at all is the question.

Even if you have super-mega-uber hearing, you simply cannot hear anything past about 25kHz. This is well established by years of medical research. And, guess what? Just about anything is fine at 25kHz.

Randi doesn't care if there's a measurable difference between these cables. I work for Agilent (one of the big companies in electronic test and measurement), and I can assure you that our equipment is more than up to the challenge. We make multimeters that can measure the resistance change in a 1-inch copper wire because of a 0.1C temperature change.

But I can assure you that 10^(-8) ohm change in resistance isn't going to be perceptable. You claim that these tiny differences are heard by a select few. We think that you're full of crap.

You claim that you can hear the difference. We claim that it's in your head. Perhaps you should prove that your ears truly are "superior" rather than expecting us to blindly accept your claim.

But Apple is one of the few companies that doesn't allow third-party development for their devices. Even the cheapest RAZR has Java.

My Windows Mobile phone runs apps written in C++, C#, VB.NET, and Java. It can run thousands of great J2ME apps (like Opera Mini), plus great native apps like CorePlayer (XVID!), IM+ (multi-network IM client), FlexMail (IMAP client), and more.

I can use my WM phone as a modem, too.

So, why should I want an iPhone?