CloneCD is a sweet tool to make backup copies of your music and data CDs. It’s easy to use and is mostly effective at removing and emulating today’s game copy protections. If you are looking to create high quality backups of your favourite games, data CDs and DVDs quickly and easily, CloneCD is one – if not the – best tool on the market. Downsides are that it can’t create a Virtual Drive, there’s no built-in copy protection scanner, and it can’t (currently) bypass SecuROM copy protection. In this case, BlindWrite or even Alcohol 120% are a better choice.
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PhotoPlus X3 is a very powerful program that’s up there with Adobe’s Photoshop Elements and Corel’s Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 in its ability to cater for digital photographers of all levels. While most of the editing can be done via the various tools in the toolbar, to the beginner the toolbar is overwhelming. That’s where PhotoPlus X3’s Quick Fix Studio comes in handy. You’ll love the way you can view your changes in real time with the Before and After pane enabled, and the Export Optimizer is great for getting the right balance between size and quality for both Web and print output. Sadly, organising your photos is clumsy as it relies on a second program, AlbumPlus SE Pro, and there isn’t a way to automatically publish your photos to image sharing sites like Flickr, Picasa, etc, or back them up to an off-site server. If you are an existing PhotoPlus user, PhotoPlus X3 is a major improvement and worth the upgrade. While Serif has done its best to cater for beginner and advanced users alike, PhotoPlus X3 isn’t as intuitive as some. If you’re not afraid to spend a little time following the 25 or so PDF tutorials, PhotoPlus X3 is one of the most powerful and flexible – if sluggish – image editors in its class. For a better all-round package, Adobe’s Photoshop Elements 7 or even Corel’s Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 are better choices.
Norton 360 v3.0 stands up well against most of its rivals, especially in terms of features. The software is also easy to use and there’s very little management duties required. It’s not the prettiest software, but it’s not the ugliest either. Most importantly, because it uses same engine as Norton Internet Security 2009 it does a reasonable job of stopping malware and keeping your computer safe. It’s also relatively light on CPU and memory. My biggest gripes are that Symantec only provides 2GB of online storage space, which is pathetic given today’s monster hard drives, but there is a Premier edition with 25GB storage available for £10 extra. The built-in backup component doesn’t support passwords, file compression, or drive cloning either, and the tune-up software is superfluous because it’s nowhere near as good as individual programs dedicated to serving a specific purpose.
The vast majority of notebooks and netbooks on the market make do with Intel integrated graphics. Intel holds the vast majority of the GPU market with its integrated graphics chipsets, including the GMA 954GM and GSE940 among others.
ESET’s NOD32 is probably the best anti-virus software on the market. Once again the company has delivered an excellent product that is highly effective and easy to use – the interface can even be tweaked by the advanced user. The strength and beauty of it is its light footprint (hard drive space and system resources), relatively fast scanning and superior ThreatSense Technology that detects malicious software before it has been reported. It’s also very good value for money. If you already have a valid license, then there is no charge for the upgrade. Even if you are running an all-in-one security suite you should consider running ESET NOD32 Antivirus v4.0 as well – at the very least you should download the 30-day trial.
The most important component of KIS 2009 is undoubtedly the anti-virus scanner, which is the backbone of protection for any computer. Some of the most comprehensive AV testing is done by a company called AV-Comparatives, which test a variety of scanners against a huge database of viral infections. This is one of the most effective ways of measuring the performance of AV scanners, and provides a much more representative result than personal testing. In the latest test of on-demand AV scanners (Feb 09), Kaspersky is tested alongside 16 other products in their default modes. A 97.1 overall detection rate was achieved, which is roughly a mid-table result – however the number of false positives was significantly lower than many other scanners.
Last week Intel had pushed out a second alpha release of Moblin V2 and now it boots even faster, which means they are down to the point of being able to boot in just a few seconds. Beyond a very quick boot process, they have already incorporated kernel mode-setting and other newer Linux/X.Org technologies while also working to build a desktop environment around the Clutter OpenGL tool-kit. Moblin is certainly turning into an interesting Intel creation, but how does its performance compare to other mobile-focused Linux distributions? We have benchmarked Moblin V2 Alpha 2 and compared it against what is likely their biggest competitor in the mobile space, Ubuntu Netbook Remix, and the LPIA-based Ubuntu MID edition. Which of these mobile operating systems is the fastest? We hope to find out today.
When it comes to putting Ubuntu Linux on mobile devices, Canonical has two flavors of their popular Linux distribution to suit the needs of vendors and end-users: Ubuntu Netbook Remix and Ubuntu MID. The former targets netbook computers (hence its name), particularly those with Intel Atom processors, and brings a unique interface atop GNOME. The Ubuntu MID edition is targeted for very small netbooks and mobile Internet devices. Particularly, Ubuntu MID aims to be on handheld devices and those with 4-7″ touch-screens. Beyond having a different user interface, Ubuntu MID is spun with LPIA packages instead of the i386 package-set. LPIA is quite similar to i386, but targets the Low-Power Intel Architecture with different compile-time optimizations. With the low-power focus, will this distribution extend your battery life? Yes, our results today show that the power consumption can be cut down by greater than 10%.
While the Catalyst driver for Windows was released a number of days ago, the Catalyst Linux driver was missing. It has, however, been released today. AMD’s Linux engineers ended up delaying the Catalyst 9.3 release so they could spend additional time tuning this driver, since it will be the last release that supports the R300 through R500 series as the support is being dropped. The significant feature that was pushed back into the Catalyst 9.3 Linux driver is improved Composite support.
Back in January Intel had pushed out its first alpha release for Moblin V2. This Intel-optimized Linux distribution targeting systems with Intel Atom hardware was quite unique and offered a number of advantages for being a netbook-oriented operating system. Particularly special about Intel Moblin V2 was its boot-time, which was extremely fast when using a Solid-State Drive. Intel has now put out a second alpha release for Moblin V2, which we are briefly exploring today.
