Good-Bye Desktop PC, Hello iPhone

The Apple iPhone SDK marks the beginning of the end for the venerable deskbound PC.

My generation's concept of what it means to compute is so quaint and firmly rooted in the 20th century. Young people and teens computing 10 or 20 years from now will look back and laugh at people like me (and, most likely, their own parents and grandparents) who sat down at desks and worked on 20-pound boxes.

The decline of the deskbound PC has been under way for years, but recent events convince me that the transition to desktopless computing is accelerating at a breakneck pace. What's next? I have a feeling that mainstream laptops could someday meet the same fate.

What precipitated these changes? The arrival of the Apple iPhone , of course. It's an okay phone and an excellent multimedia device, but now, with the promise the Apple SDK holds and the introduction of the Exchange ActiveSync software, it's about to become much, much more.

I know I railed against the iPhone's lack of physical keys and what I saw as a nearly impossible-to-use virtual keyboard. My shortsighted evaluation, however, failed to take into account that Apple couldn't care less if I could use the keyboard. Its target market (young, hip 20-somethings) adopted the iPhone immediately and figured out how best to use the virtual keyboard to message, text, and search in the Safari browser, and so on. So what if I couldn't figure it out.

The addition of business-class tools, such as synchronized e-mail and contacts, and the promise of a whole new world of other apps will transform this product from a really smart phone to a pocket-size PC.

Yes, there are countless smartphones and ultraportable laptops (and even mid-size UMPCs) out there, but the iPhone is special.

One of the reasons Apple's iPhone stands to be a game changer is because people lust after it. Young people buy it because it's something of a passport to coolness, acceptance, and good times among their demographic. Businesspeople who like to appear hip want it, too, but many have held off. Without synchronized e-mail, they'd still have to carry their BlackBerrys. Sure, the BlackBerry Pearl is sexy, but it doesn't have the iPhone's cachet.—Next: The Most Important Product of the 21st Century >

Internet Explorer 8 Goes a Different Way

Microsoft displays new and welcome restraint in its latest browser beta.

I'm not bowled over by Microsoft's new beta of Internet Explorer 8. First of all, it looks almost exactly the same as Internet Explorer 7.0 (IE7), which was arguably one of the most significant updates in the browser's roughly 12-year history. The tabs, address bar, Favorites and Home buttons, and RSS and other links are all in the same places as they were in IE7 and appear little changed. Microsoft says that many of the forward-facing consumer features aren't active in this beta. Maybe they'll make a bigger impression. For now, however, I contend that it would be more accurate to call this release IE 7.5.

That said, all in all, I'm pleased.

Last year, Microsoft overhauled the interfaces in its tent pole products—Office, IE, and Vista. This time around, the company seems content with taking a measured approach, one that's clearly more focused on what's inside the browser than on what's on the outside.

It took me a while to get used to the IE7 interface. I loved the tabs and knew how to work with them, thanks to Firefox. I hated that Home, Refresh, and Stop had been separated, and I had hoped that Microsoft would consider reuniting them. By now, though, I've grown accustomed to IE7's quirks. I've even embraced some, particularly the Favorites panel, which drops down over the left-hand side of your page and allows you to navigate easily through and find all of your stored links, even if they're nested deep inside multiple folders. The RSS button on the main toolbar is a handy feature, but I often wonder if consumers miss it because there's no label.

I decided to hop on the beta bandwagon early, because I was actually having some trouble with IE7. It's been my experience that software updates often automatically fix major problems without much user intervention.

For weeks I'd been running IE7 without add-ons. It's easy to do: You simply right-click on the IE desktop icon and select Start Without Add-ons. This loads IE as fresh and new as the day you first installed it. This action was necessary because IE had been crashing a lot—often when I was scrolling up or down on a Web page, but not always. Sometimes, I just clicked in the wrong place and the browser would freeze. I noted that, at one point, a reader had a similar problem, and our software expert, Neil J. Rubenking, suggested that an add-on-free load might get around the problem.

An add-on-free IE7 worked like a charm for me, except when I wanted to do things like view Flash video. As a result, I began using Firefox as my primary browser. I like Firefox, but it has its own interface quirks, and with enough tabs running, it's as much of a resource hog as IE.—next: A Soft Spot in my Heart >

The Best USB Keys

USB flash drives aren't just for storing files anymore. Plugged into a laptop or desktop, thumb drives can run a range of portable apps without touching your hard drive.

If you don't own a USB flash drive (also known as a USB key or thumb drive) by now, you've probably never been to a trade show. Never has a more useful item been given away by so many. Small and pocketable, these devices are about the size of a thumb (hence the name "thumb drive") and can hold plenty of data; some can even run applications.

If you've been relying on some piddling 16MB USB flash drive with a USB 1.1 connection for transporting data from work to home, you should realize that mere portability doesn't cut it. You want speed and space to grow. Today's USB keys are all USB 2.0–ready and boast capacities as high as 32GB—with high prices to match. The sweet spot is 4GB. There you'll find reasonably priced USB keys with worthwhile extras and all the space you need (for now).

A key use of thumb drives today is for portable applications—software you can run from the drive without installing it to Windows. With portable apps, you can slip the equivalent of your entire PC into your pocket using any USB key, as long as you can find an actual PC to plug into. They're a great way to maintain privacy and circumvent the rules (not that we're advocating that). For example, your IT might deny use of certain browsers or e-mail clients on a computer, but you can run them from the thumb drive (which stores the cookies and history for your portable browser) and have all the messages downloaded to your portable e-mail. It's also a safer way to use your portable apps at any public-access PC, where, for instance, you may forget to log out of a Web-based app like Gmail . In either case, you won't leave a trace of your activities on the system you were using, since all the portable apps should read/write only to the thumb drive. Just don't forget to take the drive home with you.

USB keys can support platforms specifically designed for running portable apps. The best known is U3, which is exclusive to a few select "smart drives," mostly from SanDisk. Another is Ceedo (www.ceedo.com), which powers the PowerToGo software on Lexar USB flash drives. Almost any USB key can run the Ceedo Personal Installer ($29.95), however. Both work under Windows XP and Vista.

Plenty of apps, including AbiWord, Firefox , GIMP, and Thunderbird, can be run in a portable mode without U3 or Ceedo. (See www.portableapps.com for a list.) The problem is that you have to install them yourself. Combining them with a portable-app launcher is much simpler. In fact, the download sites for U3 and Ceedo can install some of the PortableApps.com programs on a USB key in only two clicks.

USB keys aren't just for apps, of course. They provide general storage for anything and everything, from simple documents to entire digital movies. They're handy for transporting photos to a photo printer with an integrated USB port, or dragging around that giant PowerPoint slide show instead of lugging your laptop and a projector.

We reviewed four USB keys with 4GB capacities (and one with 8GB), all fast enough to support ReadyBoost under Windows Vista. ReadyBoost helps your system run faster by borrowing some of the USB flash drive's capacity for Vista to use as virtual memory. Whenever you plug a USB flash drive into a Vista system, the OS checks the drive's random read/write speed. If it's fast enough (and not all USB keys are), Vista's AutoPlay dialog will offer the option Speed up my system using Windows ReadyBoost. Click on it and you're given the option of reserving space on the USB flash drive as virtual memory. Having a ReadyBoost cache gives applications a bit of a boost when loading, no doubt thanks to Vista's SuperFetch, which preloads frequently used programs into memory. The real impact of ReadyBoost is seen on systems with a low amount of system memory, such as 512MB RAM, the Vista minimum.

A USB flash drive isn't just for Windows storage, however. All the USB flash drives reviewed here offer storage for Mac OS, and most work fine with Linux flavors as well. It's that kind of versatility, along with portability and large capacity, that really makes these drives worth pocketing.—Next: Imation Swivel Flash Drive

Imation Swivel Flash Drive

At first glance, Imation's Swivel Flash Drive looks pretty standard, but the swivel gets its name from one of its nicest features. The attached cap swivels around 180 degrees when you want to plug it in. It's also extremely inexpensive and has a fast read speed. The downside is that it has the worst write speed among the USB flash drives tested.

The Swivel comes with a full neck lanyard, so you can wear the drive under a shirt. It can be detached from the lanyard via a plastic clip when needed. Be thankful for the lanyard, as the drive is so light and small as to be insubstantial. Even with the swiveling cap out of the way, the drive is short, measuring 56mm by 17mm by 12mm. The casing has a small yellow activity light on one side, and opposite it is a feature no one else offered amid the crop of USB flash drives we tested: a lock switch to prevent overwriting anything on the drive.

On the drive itself you'll find the Imation Drive Manager. This utility, a single .exe extension file for Windows, runs from the drive without installing to your system's hard drive. It can create partitions on the Swivel, one public and one secure. The utility is also used to create the password for the secure partition. If you want to nuke the data, the Drive Manager also can format the drive or a single partition for FAT16 or FAT32 (which leaves it usable on Mac OS and Linux). With the correct driver installed, you can even use the Swivel in Windows 98 SE.

The 4GB Swivel costs only $49.99 (direct) from Imation. At that price, there's no reason not to go for the 8GB version, which costs $89.99 direct—not much more than 4GB models from other vendors. There are also lower-capacity models: 2GB for $29.99 direct and 1GB for $19.99 direct. As of this writing, Imation's Web site needs a serious e-commerce update. It lists even smaller models, down to 256MB, that are now kaput. The prices on Imation's site are higher than the direct prices that the company's PR people quoted to us (the 4GB model is listed at $69.99 on the company's site).

All the drives we looked at are enhanced for ReadyBoost, but the Swivel is the only one not to proclaim this on its package. It says only "Works with Windows Vista," in an easy-to-miss icon on the back. Regardless, the Swivel had no problem offering a ReadyBoost cache under Vista to help speed up that operating system while the drive is attached to your PC.

The drive itself has a fantastic read speed of 26.7 megabytes per second, in line with the best of the bunch here. But the write speed is not so good: On our copy tests, the Swivel managed only 6.2 MBps on average. The fastest, the SanDisk Cruzer Contour, had a write time almost three times as fast.

Despite that flaw, the Imation Swivel Flash Drive is a decent product, and with its low price, it should be on your radar.

Compare the Imation Swivel Flash Drive's features and performance with other flash drives.

More Flash Drive Reviews:
• Lexar JumpDrive Lightning
• PNY Attaché (P-FD5GBATT2-FS)
• Kingston DataTraveler HyperX
• Imation Swivel Flash Drive
• SanDisk Cruzer Contour

• more

PDF to Mac Word 2008 Conversion Tool Ships

Recosoft's PDF2Office now supports Office 2008 and retains all formatting when converting documents.

Recosoft Corporation has introduced software that lets users easily transport content from PDFs into Word 2008 for Mac OS X documents, with all formatting preserved.

The software, PDF2Office Personal 4.0 for Mac OS X, introduces support for Office 2008 along with 120 newly-added features.

PDF2Office Personal re-creates the intended construction and layout of the document - forming paragraphs; applying styles; regrouping independent graphic elements; extracting images; creating tables; and processing headers/footers, endnotes/footnotes and columns/sections, all automatically without any manual intervention.

The Retain Layout conversion has been significantly enhanced to offer even more exact layout retention. Text box/text frame generation has been dramatically reduced, and tables are formed.

The developers have improved font substitution and built a more powerful PDF Reconstruction engine to drive the conversion, offering snappier performance than previously found.

Customers who purchased PDF2Office Personal 3.0 licenses on/after 1 January, 2008 are entitled to a free upgrade.

PDF2Office Personal 4.0 costs US$59. Upgrade from a previous version costs $29. Customers who purchased PDF2Office Personal 3.0 licenses on/after 1 January, 2008 are entitled to a free upgrade.

Combo FireWire/USB Drives Reach 1 Terabyte

Other World Computing offers high-capacity stackable combo storage.

Other World Computing has introduced new Mercury Elite-AL Pro FireWire+USB 2.0 Combo storage drives.

The drives start at US$107.99 for an 80GB configuration and range up to 1.0 terabytes (TB) for $369.99.

The Mercury Elite-AL Pro drives use Oxford 934 chipsets and Serial ATA (SATA) hard disk drive mechanisms inside. They feature two FireWire 400 six-pin interfaces and one USB 2.0 port. The drives can be stacked or stood vertically, and measure 9.3 x 1.4 x 5.6 inches.

OWC also offers 160, 250, 320, 400, 500 and 750GB models of the Mercury Elite-AL Pro FireWire+USB 2.0 drive.

Combat Laptop Cable Clutter With Bluelounge SpaceStation

Bluelounge calls the SpaceStation an "extended desk organizer;" it's basically a laptop stand with a cable organization system and a USB hub

In the morning when I arrive at my desk at work, I pull my MacBook Pro out of my backpack and then I proceed to do my best impression of a 1920s switchboard operator, plugging all sorts of cables into my laptop. There's a power adapter, an external keyboard, my headphones, a DVI cable for a second display, and an Ethernet cable.

Then there's my USB hub, which has connected to it an iPod sync cable, a USB cable for the two-port USB hub on my external display, and an external hard drive. The resulting Frankenstein-ish look is the least of my worries--what bugs me the most is the unruliness of all those cables, a mess that hogs up precious desk space.

When Bluelounge's SpaceStation ($80) arrived, I could see that cable orderliness was attainable. Bluelounge calls the SpaceStation an "extended desk organizer;" it's basically a laptop stand with a cable organization system and a USB hub.

SpaceStation Specs

Available in white/black and black, the SpaceStation has a rubber-padded top.

Measuring 24.5 inches wide, 4.25 inches deep, and 1.75 inches at its tallest point (the top of the SpaceStation is angled; it's 1 inch at its lowest point), the SpaceStation is made of a sturdy plastic and has a rubber pad on top of it, so your laptop and other items don't slip off. There's also a narrow slot above the pad that runs the length of the SpaceStation; Bluelounge includes a clip that fits in the slot so you can use it as a page holder, but you can also slip business cards, a bus pass, a library card, a few dollar bills, or even a picture into the slot.

Underneath the SpaceStation is the hidden treasure: eight pairs of cable clips and a 4-port USB 2.0 hub. Rubber risers lift the SpaceStation up to leave enough room for your cables to come out from underneath. To use the SpaceStation's cable management system, you wrap each cable around the clips, leaving enough slack so you can connect to your laptop.

The USB hub is powered. Bluelounge includes a power adapter.

The Best Laptops Under $1000

These budget laptops--from the big-brands you know--will let you get the job done, without breaking the bank.

These days, $1000 lands you a pretty well rounded budget laptop. You can easily get 2GB of memory, 120GB or more of hard disk space, 802.11b/g wireless networking, and dedicated multimedia shortcut keys that let you watch DVDs or view documents without booting into Windows. The Acer and Dell laptops in our list even sported HDMI connections, extras we didn't expect at this price point. See the next slide for our Best Buy.

Note: This slide show is part of our package on low-cost PCs. Visit the following links for the rest:

The Best Bargain PCs (an overview on our roundup of both desktops and laptops).

Best Desktop PCs Under $750 (slide show).

Top 5 Desktops Under $750 (chart).

Top 5 Laptops Under $1000 (chart).

Sweet Sound: Toshiba Satellite Pro A210-EZ2201

The basic $699 Toshiba Satellite Pro A210-EZ2201 is the lowest-priced laptop of our sub-$1000 group, and it's also rather slow, with short battery life too. If pinching pennies is paramount, however, this 15.4-inch, Windows Vista Basic notebook can get mainstream work done without too much fuss. The only model here using an AMD processor, and only one of two to include just 1GB of RAM, the Satellite Pro A210-EZ2201 achieved a WorldBench 6 score of just 54. The sub-$1000 laptop average was 19 percent faster. Performance aside, this black-and-silver unit has some nice features for a $699 notebook, including a DVD writer, a FireWire port, and an ExpressCard/54 slot. It even has two surprises. One is an empty bay inside for adding a second hard drive. (A single 80GB hard drive comes standard.) The other is great sound--this plain little laptop belts out music like Ugly Betty channeling Celine Dion.

Full Review and Specs | Check Prices

Lightweight Contender: Fujitsu LifeBook S7211

This svelte $899 Windows Vista Business laptop has only two significant drawbacks: so-so speed, and an inability to burn DVDs. The S7211 notched a WorldBench 6 score of 56, putting it 14 percent behind the average of 65 earned by the five sub-$1000 laptops we tested. Aside from a minor glare problem, the 14.1-inch, 1280-by-800-resolution screen is crisp and readable. We quickly acclimated to the petite keyboard, which features Fujitsu's dual-purpose Security Application Panel (numbered buttons for shortcut keys or a password). The S7211 weighs 5.2 pounds with a CD writer/DVD reader installed in its modular bay. Swap this optical drive out for a battery instead ($120 extra), and Fujitsu says you can get about 6.5 hours of operation. Our review unit lasted an average 3.8 hours with a single battery.

Full Review and Specs | Manufacturer's Pricing

Built to Order: Dell Inspiron 1525

Like the excellent HP Pavilion dv2600se, this $999, 15.4-inch Dell has lots of entertainment features: an instant-on button, a Webcam, and even dual headphone jacks. The 1525's Media­Direct button also lets you view your calendar, contacts, and PowerPoint presentations--without booting into Windows. Our test model paired 2GB of memory and a 2-GHz Core 2 Duo T7250 CPU to produce a WorldBench 6 score of 78; that's 17 percent faster than the average score of 65 posted by the five models in this slide show. With the battery upgraded from the standard four-cell to a six-cell ($15 extra), our unit lasted just over 4 hours on a charge. Though you get only basic integrated graphics, the Inspiron 1525 does include an HDMI connection for HDTVs. And an important difference between this and most other inexpensive laptops: You can customize it down to the smallest detail--even the lid color--before finally clicking the 'Buy Now' button.

Full Review and Specs | Manufacturer's Page

Got Game: Acer Aspire 5920-6954

Except for business applications, which it lacks, the $999, 7.2-pound Aspire 5920-6954 has just about everything that price-conscious home-office buyers could ask for. It includes a 250GB hard drive and both an HDMI port and an HD DVD reader. It also has a subwoofer for better-than-average sound and a handy volume wheel. The terrific keyboard boasts loads of useful shortcut buttons, including one to play music or movies without first launching Windows. This is also the only sub-$1000 laptop here with a dedicated graphics chip: an nVidia GeForce 8600M GS with 256MB of memory. The Aspire posted a solid WorldBench 6 score of 70 (the second best in this group), and its battery life was average at 3.8 hours.

Full Review and Specs | Check Prices

Designer Looks: HP Pavilion dv2660se

The $900 HP Pavilion dv2660se offers strictly middling performance, but its exceptional battery life and a great design make it our winning laptop under $1000. The notebook's WorldBench 6 score of 67 is significantly lower than the high-eighties marks of some portables with the latest mobile chips, but it's not bad for a budget machine. Though the 14.1-inch, 1280-by-800-pixel screen could be a tad brighter, it's easy enough to read. Nice extras include a bundled copy of Microsoft Works 8.5, and the ability to play a CD or DVD without first launching Windows. The dv2660se also has upgrade potential thanks to a side connection (one that all Pavilion laptops have) for HP's xb3000 Notebook Expansion Base.

WD and Toshiba Join the 320 GB 2.5" HDD Club

More High Capacity HDDs For Notebooks

No, we're not turning into a review site for notebook hard drives, but a couple of products have launched that deserve a look after we visited the topic a few weeks ago. We then introduced Samsung's Spinpoint M6, which was the world's first 320 GB notebook hard drive Compare Prices on Spinpoint M6. The hard drive still is one of the bottleneck components in every system, as it still takes a noticeable amount of time to launch complex applications, to store huge files or to start or shutdown Windows. The faster your hard drive, the quicker the entire system will run.

Samsung, Toshiba and Western Digital were among the first OEMs to offer laptops with 320 GB hard drives, but it was the Samsung Spinpoint M6 that made it to our test lab first. But since the publication of our review on the Spinpoint M6, we received two other contenders: the Toshiba MK3252GSX and Western Digital's Scorpio WD3200BEVT. All three hard drives offer a whopping 320 GB capacity at 5,400 RPM and they can be installed in every laptop or notebook with a standard 2.5" drive bay based on the Serial ATA interface. While Samsung utilizes a maximum bandwidth of 150 MB/s, both Toshiba and WD decided to go with 300 MB/s. While this is faster on paper, it actually doesn't provide better performance for everyday applications. The only scenario where the quicker interface delivers small benefits is with read or write operations that involve the drives' 8 MB cache memory. The downside of SATA/300 is increased power requirements, as you will see in our benchmark section.

It's interesting to see that both Hitachi and Seagate, which had regularly offered hard drives with bleeding edge capacities and levels of performance, do not yet offer drives with capacities over 250 GB. And both aren't able to compete with the three 320 GB drives in terms of performance, as their 250 GB offerings appear to be one product generation behind the drives that Samsung, Toshiba and Western Digital offer at this point. Fujitsu is out of the competition, as its 300 GB 2.5" drive is based on three platters and hence won't fit into a standard 2.5" notebook drive bay.

At the same time, Samsung and Toshiba are doing well in our benchmark parcours. After being out of the running for a while, Toshiba has now entered the fray again with its MK3252GSX. For Samsung, it took the Korean company several years before it began to offer drives that posed a serious threat to the established drive makers. Only some months ago, its Spinpoint F1 1 TB 3.5" desktop hard drive took the performance crown away from Hitachi, Seagate and WD. Can it maintain its leadership position against the new models from Toshiba and Western Digital?

WD and Toshiba Join the 320 GB 2.5" HDD Club

Toshiba MK3252GSX (320 GB)

As I mentioned in the introduction, Toshiba's latest addition to the 2.5" hard drive family is very capable of competing against Samsung and Western Digital. This hasn't always been the case in recent years, as Toshiba typically was close behind the other players, but failed to make it to the very top. Although Toshiba doesn't win the crown in this shootout, its MK3252GSX provides very solid performance at up to 65 MB/s. The application benchmark results prove that the new drive is a good choice as a system drive, with results being in the upper areas of our charts. Access time and I/O benchmark results are only average, though.

Toshiba has two models that sound almost similar: the MK3252GSX, as reviewed in this article, and the MK3253GSX. The latter shows exactly the same technical specifications, but these drives are equipped with a free-fall sensor. This sensor automatically moves the read/write heads into a secure parking position if it detects a certain level of acceleration, which indicates that the drive could be falling or experiencing some other sort of physical impact. While many business notebooks come with a free-fall sensor (Lenovo's T60 series is an example), integrating it right into the drive is the second possible approach, which certainly doesn't hurt.

The minimum power requirement of 1.0 W in idle indicates that the drive must be using the fast SATA/300 interface. Many other 5,400 RPM hard drives, which are based on SATA/150 specifications, stay well below this power requirement, reaching as little as 0.7 W. The maximum power requirement under load (measured with IOmeter) of 3.5 W isn't revolutionary, either. Only few 5,400 RPM drives require more maximum power (e.g. Seagate's Momentus 5400.4), but many stay within 2.5 and 3.0 W. There even is a 7,200 RPM hard drive: Hitachi's Travelstar 7K200, which only requires 1.1-3.2 W power. A SATA/150 interface would hardly have any impact on the solid benchmark results, but it can help to reduce unnecessary power consumption, which is especially important in notebooks with purported long battery lives.

Toshiba doesn't only offer the 320 GB top model, but there are smaller capacity versions that offer similar performance levels, including capacities of 80, 120, 160 and 250 GB. All of them are covered by a three-year factory warranty.

WD and Toshiba Join the 320 GB 2.5" HDD Club

Western Digital Scorpio WD3200BEVT (320 GB)

WD's new 320 GB Scorpio drive is more extreme than the Samsung and the Toshiba drives. It has the highest power requirements of all the 2.5" notebook hard drives you can find in our charts, but it also offers very good performance, beating many of the 7,200 RPM hard drives as well as Toshiba's offering. The drive is also quicker than the Samsung SpinPoint M6 when it comes to access time, I/O performance and the PCMark05 application benchmark, which gauges Windows XP startup performance and performance while writing files that are being copied. While the difference is tiny, WD's new Scorpio is not fast enough to beat the Samsung drive's data transfer rates that are as fast as 70 MB/s. This shouldn't be an issue, though, as the drive's overall performance is very much on par against the others.

We only found the new 320 GB drive on Western Digital's U.S. Website. While Samsung and Toshiba offer other capacity points, WD has only been listing the 320 GB top model on its Website. All other models seem to be based on the previous-drive generation (WD2500BEVS), as they are shown as utilizing SATA/150 instead of SATA/300. However, we are sure that WD will follow up with smaller capacities based on the latest technology soon, as well.

Yet, road warriors with high-capacity demands will probably want to stick with the Samsung drive, as it offers comparable performance, the same warranty and the same capacity at much lower power requirements compared to what the Western Digital and Toshiba drives offer. The power consumption specifications of Western Digital's WD3200BEVT and Samsung's Spinpoint M6 are 1.0-3.2 W and 1.1-4.2 W, respectively. But WD has a small advantage when it comes to its performance under extreme conditions; Samsung and Toshiba specify a temperature operating range of 5-55°C (41-131°F), while Western Digital allows up to a 60°C maximum operating temperature. All drives have a three-year warranty.

CPU Cooler Charts 2008, Part 3 - Are Box Coolers any Good?

Among the enthusiast crowd, it is more or less a matter of course to equip a computer with a powerful CPU cooler. After all, thanks to their better design and construction, most aftermarket air cooling solutions offer superior cooling performance, while running at lower noise levels than their boxed brethren. Depending on the performance class, the CPUs come with more or less massive coolers. We were interested in finding out how the box cooler compared to aftermarket solutions, and especially, in what respects the coolers differ. After all, the higher-end coolers found in stores can cost upwards of €50. That's a fair bit of money, especially considering that some people try to save as much money as they can when shopping for a CPU.

In the first part of this series, CPU Cooler Charts 2008, Part I - Losing your Cool?, we found that nearly half of the aftermarket coolers we reviewed suffered from some serious flaws. The second part, CPU Cooler Charts 2008, Part II - Junk or Jewel?, ended with a better overall result.

In this installment, we will take a look at coolers that ship with CPUs in retail boxes - so-called box coolers. In the process, we will meet a few familiar faces, namely Intel's selection of bundled coolers, which represent something of a reference point for each CPU class. The question we will attempt to answer is this: are box coolers sufficient, or are you better off opting for an aftermarket cooler upgrade?

To make this comparison more interesting, we compiled a test field consisting of various coolers for the Socket 775 platform. This includes such exotic models as the first engineering samples that accompanied the Prescott launch, and the legendary Performance FMB that Intel released upon launching the first dual-core Extreme models. They will square off against three conventional box coolers included with Intel's current Conroe-based Core 2 line of processors.

CPU Cooler Charts 2008, Part 2

The Whole Range - From Bargain Bin Part To Water Cooler

In the first part of our extensive roundup of CPU coolers, we came to the conclusion that 45% of the products we tested either failed the test, or weren't worth the asking price . Additionally, we were surprised by how much junk is sold in hardware stores these days, and how badly customers are sometimes deceived. Today, we move on to the second part of the cooler charts, testing six more coolers that join the eleven models we reviewed in the previous installment. The field covers the full range of products, from the inconspicuous and cheap entry level model to the high-end water cooler costing €350. For us, cooling performance alone isn't everything, though - we also take the products' noise and ease of installation into consideration. In the first part of this series, five of the review samples didn't make the grade Compare Prices on CPU Coolers.

Although we only describe the new additions to the roundup in this part, the charts include all of the coolers tested so far. We will continue this series of articles, creating for your reference an overview of a large selection of the coolers available in stores.

CPU Cooler Charts 2008, Part 1

It's been over seven years since Tom's Hardware first published a comparative test of CPU coolers. At that time, there was a distinct lack of awareness regarding the importance of this component, and a pronounced dearth of critical tests containing knowledgeable analysis. In December 2000, we published the first CPU cooler comparison worldwide, comparing 17 different models. Compared to today's technology, the coolers of that time seem like amateurish and provisional designs - many of the companies that are well-established brand names in cooling today only became aware of this very profitable field through the tests. And while some companies have since exited stage left, others have evolved into real heavyweights.

Things became critical for AMD in September 2001, when we published an article detailing how CPU cooler failure could lead to instant destruction of Athlon processors. The situation was remedied by integrating a thermal sensor and a protective circuit on the motherboards. Since then, Tom's Hardware has regularly published CPU cooler roundups and comparisons, with the field of candidates growing each time.

Zalman, a company that has since become a well-known and respected brand, was only just getting started at around that time. The first review of the young company's products wasn't very favorable, either. However, things have really turned around for Zalman over the past two years, and the company created a real winner with its CNPS9700, which it introduced in the middle of 2006.

But enough history for now; it's time to draw the curtains open for the largest comparative test of 2007/2008. In no other class of components are the differences between individual products as pronounced as they are with CPU coolers. After all, the prospective buyer can't tell what kind of cooling performance to expect just from looking at a cooler, let alone its retail box. Of course, it's just as impossible to tell how difficult installation will be, and if the buyers relied on the veracity of the colorful marketing promises on the box, they'd be lost anyway. At any rate, more than 30 companies sent us their current creations for review, this time, so we have lots of ground to cover!