I know I've done benchmarks on my various machines in the past but I had no idea how far the rabbit hole goes... Let's start with back in 2003: Benchmarking Dell XPS and Lenovo Thinkpads (littletinyfrogs.com) Device Description Score Frog 2003 Decent Dell Dimension for its time. 132 Turtle 2006 My ThinkPad T60 for business trips in 2006. 150 Turtle 2007 ThinkPad T61 replacing T60, good 2007 laptop. 286 Frog 2007 Dell XPS 710 work desktop, quad core, RA...

How's that for a dramatic headline? Groupy is a new program from Stardock that does something so simple that, in hindsight, seems like it should have always been part of the OS.  It allows users to drag windows together and create a single tabbed window. Like so: A few years ago at CES, I showed a prototype of it to Mary Jo Foley , Paul Thurrott , Brad Sams and others.  The motivation to create Groupy came from the frustrating of having lots of windows ope...

  My desktop running WindowBlinds, DeskScapes, WindowFX, Fences, Start10 at 5K resolution IconPackager, Tiles and more at 5K resolution   Object Desktop is a suite of desktop enhancement utilities designed to allow users to customize their Windows desktop to work however they want it to work. The core components of it are: WindowBlinds – customize the Windows GUI Fences – organize your desktop IconPackager – customize your icons ...

I was on this week’s episode of Windows Weekly with Mary Jo Foley, Leo Laporte and Ed Bott. You can listen to our antics here: http://twit.tv/show/windows-weekly/323

I occasionally upload “stuff” to YouTube before I share it on the forums (and sometimes I don’t). So if you want to get a sneak peek of things going on, check out my YouTube channel. -> Brad Wardell on YouTube

As we get more connected online, the haters of the world become more empowered. I am often astonished at some of the brazen behavior I see in comments and on forums by people who, one assumes, are functioning people in real life.  I think a key ingredient is narcisism. i cant think of any other explanation for someone who puts effort into trying to upset other people while their own identities are just a bit of Google-Fu away. If you’ve ever read an article on someone before, there...

I sometimes wonder how many misunderstandings occur online due to people who don’t speak English as their native language interpreting dry humor as literal statements.  I recently saw on a forum a discussion that quoted banter back and forth between myself and our PR rep. It goes something like this: PR Rep: Got a 4.5 out of 5 on Game X! Me: Oh no! That’ll wreck the Metacritic score – we want it to end up at 79. High enough for sales but low enough so we don’t have to ...

If you have Windows 8 and want the Start menu back, the single best way is to use Start8 .   www.stardock.com/products/start8

So far is to run it via Parallels on the Mac.  In that setup, on a MacBook Pro with the way MacOS X Mountain Lion handles full screen it actually almost works.  Now if there was only  a way to make the charms bar less obnoxious.

Multiplicity 2 was released today. You can get it here: https://www.stardock.com/products/multiplicity/ Here’s a video of it in action: What makes Multiplicity special isn’t that it’s the first program ever that can enable users to use multiple computers at once. You can get a digital switch to do that and heck, there’s freeware out there that will let you use a keyboard and mouse to move back and forth between computers. Instead, what makes Multipl...

Anyone who has an SSD already know this. But there are still people out there who aren’t sure on this.  The performance difference of putting in an SSD is greater than any single upgrade I’ve ever seen since the days back in the early 90s of going from 4M to 8M in memory on Windows NT or OS/2.

October is going to be insanely good. I have a ThinkPad X1 Carbon on order for my wife. A new Kindle white on order for me. And of course the iPhone 5 will be generally available. It does appear technological progress and innovation is accelerating.              

  http://www.systemcomic.com/2011/08/03/so-youre-mad-about-something-on-the-internet/ A great way to diffuse a raging Internet troll.

For the last few weeks, the poor IT team have been battling spam bots. Let’s give a shout out to all our hard working moderators who have been able to clean it up quickly and the IT team that’s been making it harder for them to do it.

It's no secret I'm not a fan of the way Microsoft is handling Windows 8.  So how could they have done it? First, simplify/unify the underlying platform in a way that developers can feel confident that they're not going to get screwed over again (That Silverlight knowledge in my brain is going to be stored right with my OS/2 SOM storage). That means .NET .NET .NET.  You make sure that if you write for .NET 4.5 that it'll work on any Windows 8 target.  I don...