General Gaming Article |
- Best Email Service: Gmail vs.Outlook.com
- Adobe Servers Hacked, 2.9 Million Customers Affected
- Ask the Doctor: Overheating CPUs, Caseless Computing, and More!
- Google Chromebook Pixel Review
- Check Out This Awesome Time Lapse Video of Grand Theft Auto V
- Nvidia Closes $5 Million Deal with Ubisoft
- Gigabyte, Asus Wrestle for Motherboard Shipment Crown
- Nvidia Dubs GeForce 331.40 Beta Driver an "Essential Update" for Battlefield 4 Players
- Newegg Daily Deals: Gigabyte GeForce GTX 760 Graphics Card, ViewSonic 24-inch LCD, and More!
- ASRock, BMW Put the SFF Pedal to the Metal and Crash the Living Room
| Best Email Service: Gmail vs.Outlook.com Posted: 03 Oct 2013 02:54 PM PDT Gmail vs.Outlook.com: the battle of the best email servicesYour webmail inbox is the center of your online ecosystem, and not just for your primary email account, but for every other account you have that's connected to it. Which one's better? It's time for the battle of the webmail giants, and it'll be a doozy. In one corner, we have the Whale of Webmail, the defending champion inboxer: Gmail! In the other corner, the scrappy kid with a big name, the King of Clean, the Preview of Pain, Outlook.com!
Gmail vs Outlook.com: Battle of the best webmail clients Round 1: AestheticsOutlook.com looks great. It's clean and simple in the Modern UI style: white background, black text, one bright color, low information density. It looks better than the desktop Outlook, and Outlook webmail, and it looks much better than Gmail. It's easy to configure the preview pane—you have to dig in the Labs section to find that in Gmail. On the other hand, customization is limited to changing the one color, and you only get 18 options there.
Outlook.com's inbox is clean and modern and has a preview pane by default, but offers much less usable information at a glance than Gmail's. Gmail is more themeable—you can choose background images, color schemes, and even information density, but even at its most minimal it's more cluttered than Outlook.com. It's the same sort of cluttered as the Outlook desktop client—the price you pay for having a lot more information available at a glance. Gmail can look great or horrendous; Outlook.com just looks good all the time. It's close, but Outlook wins this round.
Gmail's inbox is information-dense and extremely configurable, but too much information onscreen means info can get lost in the noise. Winner: Outlook.com Round 2: Email ExperienceThe Outlook.com composition window is large and clean and easy to use, but Gmail lets you compose a message in-line with the thread you're replying to, or in a pop-up window in the corner, so you can keep tabs on other messages or your entire inbox while you're writing. Both Gmail and Outlook.com offer robust tagging and sorting for messages, and both have enough keyboard shortcuts to be usable without a mouse. Gmail offers 10GB of storage; Outlook.com doesn't advertise a limit. Outlook.com also allows you to easily unsubscribe from bulk mail. Outlook.com's Quick Views are fantastic, letting you easily find messages with photo or document attachments, tracking numbers, specific labels, or flags. Gmail's Label views can do the same, but take more manual setup. Winner: Tie Round 3: CustomizationThere's just no contest here. If you can find the right settings to enable, Gmail is incredibly powerful. Priority Inbox does a frighteningly good job at sorting your email by importance, Send and Archive keeps your inbox tidy, and the Labs fix problems you didn't even know you had. There are Labs settings to enable an Outlook-like preview pane, tweak the Chat interface, add calendar and documents widgets, even "undo" sending an email—which has saved our bacon once or twice. You can view multiple Label inboxes at once, play Google Voice messages in Gmail, and so much more. Outlook.com's customization is modest, and that's an understatement. Winner: Gmail
Round 4: EcosystemGmail ties into the enormous Google ecosystem, from Calendar to Drive to Google Accounts to Google Plus (meh). Outlook.com ties into your Microsoft Account—which you use for everything from Xbox Live to Office 365 to Skype to logging into Windows 8. You can open Microsoft Office files on the web directly from your Outlook.com inbox, but you can do the same for Google Docs files in Gmail, and you can view Office documents (and convert them for editing) in Drive, as well. Outlook.com ties into SkyDrive and lets you send large attachments easily, while Gmail does the same with Google Drive. Gmail has Google Hangouts and Google Plus integrated, while in Outlook.com you can chat with your Facebook or Live Messenger friends. Each, of course, works best if you're heavily invested in its corresponding ecosystem, so we're calling this a tie. Winner: Tie Round 5: Accounts and SecurityBoth Outlook.com and Gmail connect via HTTPS by default, with 128-bit encryption, and both let you send and receive messages from POP3 accounts. Google also supports IMAP. UPDATE: At the time of publication, Outlook.com did not support IMAP, but has since updated to support it. Gmail has had two-factor authentication for a long time now; Outlook.com doesn't—yet. Microsoft is reportedly working on it, and it may even be available by the time this issue is out. Two-factor authentication is essential for any online account you don't want hacked. Given that your Gmail and Outlook.com accounts tie into your entire Google and Microsoft ecosystems, anyone who gets your password can access your entire digital life—unless you have two-factor authentication enabled. Finally, Google supports multiple sign-on, so if your work or personal website uses Google Apps, you can be signed into that as well as your Gmail account. Outlook.com doesn't. Yes, Google gets this round. Winner: Gmail And the Winner Is…
With ties in two rounds, Gmail only beats Outlook.com by one round. Google's offering has better security options and more power under the hood—if you can figure out how to make it work. Outlook.com is clean-looking, ties into more social networks, and has useful features right out in the open with less tweaking. It can't match Google's eight-year head start, but it's catching up quickly. |
| Adobe Servers Hacked, 2.9 Million Customers Affected Posted: 03 Oct 2013 02:49 PM PDT |
| Ask the Doctor: Overheating CPUs, Caseless Computing, and More! Posted: 03 Oct 2013 01:53 PM PDT The doctor tackles Overheating CPUs, Caseless Computing, SSD Free Space, and moreThe Cooler Does Nothing!I have a PC I built in 2011 with an Asus P8P67 motherboard, EVGA GTX 570 GPU, 3.4GHz Intel Core i7-2600K CPU, and Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo cooler. When playing BF3, I consistently get temps around 90 degrees Celsius. I'm pretty sure this is dangerous territory, though I've never had any problems—no crashes or anything. Still, this morning I took my cooler off and reapplied the thermal paste. I added a pea-size drop of Arctic Silver 5 after thoroughly cleaning both the chip and the cooler. I plugged everything back up and got the same result. I have an older Lian Li case that has decent cooling. If I take the door off the machine it's very loud, but it does drop the temp by about 10 degrees. Still, 80 degrees seems too high. Friends who play with me who have the same basic setup see temps more like 50 C and 60 C at load. My idle temp is around 40 C. What am I doing wrong? What should I try? Should I worry about it or is 90 C OK? - Aaron Newton The Doctor Responds: Yikes, that is high. The Doc used to have the same problem: a high-powered cooler that just wasn't doing the job. The culprit? The PC's case. It had zero intake fans. It sounds like you're not getting enough airflow through your PC—or your CPU fan is fighting with your exhaust fan. Without a fresh supply of cool air and a quick way to exhaust the warm air, the ambient temp in your case is going to stay high, and even a great cooler isn't going to keep your rig cool. Check that your intakes are clean and free of dust, your fans are spinning, and you have clear airflow from your front intakes to your rear exhaust fans. If you have fan mounts that aren't occupied, consider getting some high-airflow fans to put in them. If that doesn't help, it may be time to invest in a new case—one that has ample cooling for today's components. Finally, make sure the utility you're using is modern and reports the chip temps correctly. CPUID.com's HW Monitor works very well and will let you log the temps. The Doc also recommends using Intel's own Turbo Boost Monitor to see what your chip is spooling up to, as well. A chip that's stable but excessively hot may not actually boost as high as it would if it were cooler. Airplane Mode ShortcutI loved the airplane mode tip for Windows 8 in the April 2013 issue of the magazine. It reminds me of the keyboard key on my mother's laptop, which will enable/disable network access with the press of a button. Can you set me up with a shortcut that I can place in my Windows 8, Windows 7, Windows XP system tray or desktop what will accomplish the same thing? - Robert Cichon The Doctor Responds: You're not the only one asking for this, Robert—our research shows plenty of people around the web asking the same thing. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a simple way to do it other than the way we've already talked about. Microsoft declines to make that API call available to outside developers, and if someone has figured out how to do it, we don't know of it. As for the alternative methods, those work by powering the radios on and off via hardware; Microsoft says the software airplane mode is the way to go, because it prevents other programs from turning those radios back on without your permission. The Emperor Has No CaseWhat is your opinion on putting together a rig without a case? I think it's rather cool to have a "visible" computer. However, I am concerned about heat dissipation. The system only has a CPU fan and nothing else. Is the natural convection adequate to cool the system? - Bill Ryder The Doctor Responds: We run open-air test benches all the time in the Lab, Bill (ours are from HighSpeedPC.com). We still recommend having some sort of framework to affix your components to, just so everything stays connected. There are plenty of PC "test bench" cases that provide the sort of look you seem to be going for. A closed case does provide focused airflow, as well as protection for your parts. But as long as the room your PC is in has decent climate control, natural convection ought to be enough, though you may want to add an additional fan to keep air flowing over the motherboard components. Just make sure you keep liquids, pets, small children, and airborne debris away. And don't come crying to the Doc if something happens.
HighSpeed PC's Tech Station gives you stylish open-air computing. CPU Out of Gas?I have an older laptop with a Pentium III 750 running Windows XP. I had been using it just for Internet browsing until it started to slow down. It was taking forever to boot and opening any application became excruciating. I thought it may have been a virus or just crapware that I might have installed inadvertently, so I wiped the drive and did a fresh install of Windows XP. It didn't make much difference in speed so it made me wonder about the hardware, specifically the CPU. Do CPUs slow down over time and eventually stop working? I was always under the assumption that they either work or they don't. - Greg Whitlock The Doctor Responds: If you're getting poor performance even after a clean install, it is more likely to be caused by a hardware problem than an OS issue. However, make sure that you're not infecting the machine immediately after your clean install. The Doctor has seen a person perform a clean install on a box to eliminate a malware issue and then immediately get it infected upon connecting to the Internet. Despite its age, Windows XP continues to be a top target of malware and putting an unpatched XP box on the Internet without a firewall can result in nearly instantaneous infection. If your outbreak was severe enough, it may have infected any portable drives you use, so you could be getting re-infected that way. But assuming that your issue is purely hardware, CPUs don't get slower over time. They will execute the code as fast in 2013 as they did in 2001—it's just that the code of 2013, written for more powerful hardware, may be far more taxing than the code of a decade ago. There are two problems the Doc thinks might be responsible. The first is possible CPU throttling due to heat. The PIII doesn't have the advanced onboard thermal throttling of today's Core i7 chips. Instead the chip counts on the chipset and motherboard to throttle back the clocks. If the laptop's fan is filled with dust or failed, the CPU may be throttling back in speed. The other possible issue is a failing hard drive, which may be generating enough random errors to affect performance. Don't Delete Your SSD?In the April issue of the magazine the Doctor told us how to move items off an SSD to regain space. Doc, I know I read somewhere that deleting files from an SSD doesn't work the same as a delete from, well, the other type of hard drives, that the more files are deleted, the worse the SSD performs. Is that so? I have avoided performing a lot of deletes on that drive, but no doubt things happen just from running the system. If the drive has been filled up that extensively, will a simple delete be much of an improvement? - Leslie P. The Doctor Responds: It's true that deleting files from an SSD doesn't work in quite the same way as deleting them from a hard drive, but it's not true (anymore) that your SSD will perform worse the more files you delete. The flash memory in an SSD consists of 4KB "pages" inside larger "blocks" (usually 512KB). Because of the way flash memory works, you can read individual pages, and write to them if they're empty, but you can only empty a page by deleting the whole block, then rewriting the pages of the block you aren't deleting. Deleting files in your OS only marks the pages they're on as able to be erased, but the data isn't actually gone until the next time the drive needs to write to that block. Then it's erased and overwritten with new data. On older SSDs, that meant that, once the drive ran out of blocks that had never had data on them, it had to start putting files on blocks that contained data previously marked for deletion. Instead of just writing the data to the block, the SSD first had to copy the whole block to its cache, erase the information marked for deletion, replace it with the new information it needed to write, clear the entire block, then rewrite it with the old good data and the new data. This is a lot more work than just writing the information to a fresh block, so the SSD would slow down by a huge margin while doing all this extra work. Fortunately for us, that's not something you really need to worry about anymore. All modern SSDs have garbage collection algorithms in their firmware, as well support for the Trim command (see our Holiday 2009 white paper at http://bit.ly/7GhVfo). These nifty tools work while your PC is idle to clear away data marked for deletion and optimize data on those blocks. Windows 8 will even detect if you have an SSD and let you manually invoke the Trim command. So while nearly full drives can still get clogged up in the manner described above, even after deleting a bunch of data, simply leaving your computer on and not doing anything for an hour or so is enough to get your SSD back up to speed. |
| Google Chromebook Pixel Review Posted: 03 Oct 2013 01:31 PM PDT It's the Tesla Model S of laptopsAfter almost three years, it's still difficult to explain to techno-newbs just what the hell Google's Chrome OS and Chromebooks are exactly.
Content will look superb on the Pixel's 2460x1700 high-pixel-density screen. Browser-only OS? No, when we tell people that, we just get a slack-jawed look that tells us they don't understand what that even means. Instead, we've taken to using a car analogy to help explain the concepts. A laptop with a full-service OS (whether Windows, Linux, or even OSX) is a truck with a sports car engine; it gives you mind-bending performance and cargo capability not available on any other consumer hardware. An ARM-based device is more akin to early hybrid vehicles. They give you amazing run time and portability, and the applications—for what they are—work pretty damned well when scaled down for the platform. If that analogy holds up, the Chromebook is an electric car. It's fine when you have Internet access, but once you're offline, its capabilities plummet. It's like trying to drive your electric car across the United States—it's just not feasible at this point unless you want to stop every 250 miles and park the car overnight near a power outlet. Well, kids, behold the Tesla Model S of personal computers: the Chromebook Pixel. Built on a stunning aluminum shell, the Chromebook Pixel is the sexiest Chromebook we've ever seen and easily one of the sexiest notebooks, too. It's no clone/me-too notebook, either. Google eschews the popular 16:9 aspect ratio screen for a 3:2 aspect-ratio IPS multitouch panel. This makes the screen slightly taller than 99 percent of the notebooks out today. We appreciate the 3:2, but then again, we actually still pine for the days of the long-ago 4:3 aspect-ratio screens, so maybe we're just crazy. The screen itself is an incredible 2560x1700 pixels crammed onto 12.8 inches diagonal. That gives it a PPI of 239, which is the highest in the industry on a clamshell computing device. The etched glass and laser-honed track pad is simply stunning to use, too. The LTE version reviewed here features 64GB of storage and gives you 100MB of data per month for two years. Pixel buyers will also get 1TB of Google Drive storage for three years. The Wi-Fi-only model cuts the storage in half and brings the price down to $1,300. And proving that even for thin clients, performance still matters, the Pixel uses a 1.8GHz Core i5 processor, which makes a monkey out of all previous Chromebooks we've tested. On the graphics side, some may beg to differ with the performance of the Intel HD 4000 graphics (*cough* Nvidia) but the combination outstrips any other Chrome OS notebook out today. You're probably wondering why you even need CPU performance for a browser OS that actually runs decently on even limp ARM chips. Frankly, our gut says Google has plans to use all the CPU horsepower in the Pixel on something. Don't believe us? Just look up Google's 10,000 Stars experiment on your old Atom- or ARM-based Chromebook and you'll see what we mean. Still, we understand what has led the majority of reviewers to label the Pixel the sexiest notebook no one should ever buy—its utility still falls far short of a full-service laptop. At the same time, there are a lot of a people who think the Tesla S is an impractical, overpriced electric car, too. That assessment is probably accurate, but there's no denying that the Tesla S is a damned-sexy car few of us would turn down. Same goes for the Google Pixel. $1,450, www.google.com |
| Check Out This Awesome Time Lapse Video of Grand Theft Auto V Posted: 03 Oct 2013 10:10 AM PDT |
| Nvidia Closes $5 Million Deal with Ubisoft Posted: 03 Oct 2013 10:02 AM PDT |
| Gigabyte, Asus Wrestle for Motherboard Shipment Crown Posted: 03 Oct 2013 09:03 AM PDT
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| Nvidia Dubs GeForce 331.40 Beta Driver an "Essential Update" for Battlefield 4 Players Posted: 03 Oct 2013 08:37 AM PDT
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| Newegg Daily Deals: Gigabyte GeForce GTX 760 Graphics Card, ViewSonic 24-inch LCD, and More! Posted: 03 Oct 2013 06:38 AM PDT
Top Deal: Now that the back-to-school frenzy is in the rear view mirror and things have settled down, you can exhale and get back to doing the really important things, like playing games! Don't have a capable GPU? That's a shame, though easily fixable with today's top deal for a Gigabyte GeForce GTX 760 Graphics Card for $260 with free shipping (Free Batman Arkham Origins with purchase, limited offer). Unlike regular GTX 760 cards, Gigabyte's version keeps its cool with its Windforce 3X triple-fan cooling solution. This card is fast, cool, and quiet, and it comes with a free game to boot! Other Deals: ViewSonic VA2446M-LED Black 24-inch 5ms Monitor w/ Built-in Speakers for $130 with free shipping (normally $150 - use coupon code: [AFNJ2623]) Rosewill LCD Screen Cleaner Kit for $8 with free shipping (normally $10 - use coupon code: [RW20MA1013]) In Win Commander III 800W ATX 80 Plus Gold Certified Modular Power Supply for $102 with free shipping (normally $120 - use coupon code: [IW15OFF]) Corsair Enthusiast Series TX750M 750W Semi Modular Power Supply for $108 with free shipping (normally $120 - use coupon code: [CRPUZ10]; additional $15 Mail-in rebate) |
| ASRock, BMW Put the SFF Pedal to the Metal and Crash the Living Room Posted: 03 Oct 2013 06:21 AM PDT
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Combined mobo shipments from Asus and Gigabyte likely to top 43 million units in 2013
All GeForce GTX owners playing BF4 should install these drivers, Nvidia says
When subsidiaries get together, SFF happens
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