I got a new job as a Senior Editor at PC World. Just started last week, and I’m still getting my feet wet. Jumping in right before the Christmas holiday break and then CES is a hell of a time to start. Lots of meetings, lots of learning the product database system and publishing system and gearing up new coverage for next year and so on and so forth.

Right now, I’m getting up to speed by taking the reins of the laptop/notebook beat. But I’ll be heading up a “system group” that covers notebooks, desktops, some parts and peripherals, how-tos and stuff, things like that. It’s a goal to re-boot the graphics card coverage over there early in 2010.

So that’s all for now.

For some reason, Press Pause, the weekly video game web show I co-host with Carlos Rodela, is not listed in the Zune Marketplace. You can get it on iTunes here. You can subscribe to it in the Zune software by adding the RSS feed. But we want to be listed in the excellent Zune Marketplace, and for some reason it’s not there.

So, I need your help to submit it. If they get enough submissions, they’ll add it. Just follow these three steps.

1. Go to the Zune podcast page on the web. Any browser should work fine.

2. Click the bright “Submit a Podcast” button on the left-hand side.

3. In the dialog box that pops up, enter the following URL and click “Submit”: http://mevio.com/feeds/presspause.xml

That’s it! Thanks for all your help! And to show you that this wasn’t just a complete waste of your time…hey, you’re already at this neat Zune podcast directory thing on the web. Did you check it out a bit? You might want to. You can stream any podcast in the Zune marketplace (which is really big) right on the web page. Free. That includes audio and video podcasts. And you don’t need to have a Zune account, or to sign up for anything, or enter in some arcane RSS feed, or any of that stuff. It’s just a big, totally free podcast playback machine on the web. Neat, huh?

Update: Looks like we’re listed now. Thanks to everyone who submitted.

Maybe you’re not doing an upgrade. Maybe you’re shopping around for a new PC. Either way, the biggest pain in the butt with getting a new PC or wiping your drive and starting fresh with a new OS is re-downloading and installing all those indispensable apps you use every day. (Well, the biggest pain is actually backing up all your photos and music and stuff – but you really should be doing that anyway.)

Enter one of the greatest websites in all creation, Ninite.com (no, that’s not hyberbole). It’s an idea so brilliant, so simple, and so useful that I wonder why it hasn’t been done years ago.

Visit ninite.com and you’ll see, right there on the front page, a list of checkboxes for commonly used Windows applications and utilities. It’s all categorized, and most of the big “must haves” are there. Check the ones you want to install, and hit the little “Get Installer” button at the bottom. This will download a tiny (less than 200k) executable which, when run, will download all the apps you picked and install them. There are no prompts, no sites to visit, nothing to sign up for. It installs all the apps to their default locations with default settings.

Take, for example, the notebook I just upgraded to Windows 7. I head to ninite.com, and check the boxes for Chrome, Firefox, Skype, Pidgin, iTunes, VLC, Hulu Desktop, Picasa, Microsoft Security Essentials, Adobe Reader, Flash (both IE and non-IE), Silverlight, uTorrent, Dropbox, Steam, and WinRAR. Hit the button, run the exe (which downloads in two seconds because it’s so small), and walk away. I come back later and all those apps are installed and ready to roll.

Genius.

It’s even smart enough to recognize that I’m running 64-bit Windows and grab the 64-bit versions of apps like iTunes, Security Essentials, and WinRAR. All they need to do now is add the Zune software and Ventrilo to their list and it’ll have literally everything I need on a new PC install (outside of boxed products and games). Try it. You’ll love it.

Dear ninite.com people – work your magic on a site for drivers!

As they point out in a pretty neat article about the issue at Icrontic, the problem is that the industry standard for measuring battery life is a program called MobileMark 2007. This program basically runs your computer through some productivity apps, which are pretty easily cached into RAM on modern notebooks so you don’t get much hard disk usage. These run until the battery dies, and that’s your battery life benchmark. Wi-Fi is almost always disabled, the laptop is almost always in its most power-saving and low performance profile, screen brightness is usually at 50% or less, etc.

There are plenty of advocates for changing this, to use different ways of measuring battery life in notebooks. Most call for a new set of procedures revolving around real-world application tests and new logos or stickers to describe battery life. Frankly, I think most of these ideas won’t go very far. Testing labs want a reliable, repeatable, “set it and forget it” test. We don’t need to rewrite the book on battery life testing, we just need a new version of MobileMark.

What should MobileMark 2010 look like? First, it should reflect what people actually use their notebooks for. This means mostly browsing the web (the modern, dynamic web, not static HTML), some document creation and editing, a little video, and a little 3D gaming.

First, the standard should be for notebooks to be set the way normal people set them. Power profile set to “balanced” or whatever the middle-of-the-road general setting is. Screen brightness at 80% or 90% (which is how most users have it set). Wi-Fi enabled. In fact, Wi-Fi should be used for some of the test.

The test itself should be a 10-minute loop that runs through several typical laptop scenarios. Why 10 minutes? Any shorter and you spend all your time loading tests, not running them. Make the test too long and some notebooks won’t go through enough loops of the test to average out the tests over time. A 15 or 20-minute test might work, but anything longer than that is probably too long.

The first 4 minutes should be a web test. Today’s dynamic web sites are the #1 use of notebooks. BAPCo should host several mock websites (accessible only to registered MobileMark users) that the notebook will load. They mimic the javacript and Flash heavy environments of modern popular sites like Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, Digg, etc. The test can use whatever browser is set as the computer’s default, but it should actually interact with the sites, virtually “clicking” on buttons and opening menus and such.

The next 3 minutes is standard document creation. Load up World, Excel, Powerpoint, and some light image-editing app and run through a scripted scenario of searching, typing, copy/pasting, etc. This is straightforward stuff, and is what MobileMark already does.

The next two minutes is all video. Full screen, hi-def video in a popular format like H.264. If the laptop has a graphics chip that can assist with GPU decoding, that’s fine, it can be used. If not, the video might be jerky and drop frames and such – which is fine. We’re measuring battery life, not quality or performance.

The same goes with the last minute of the 10-minute test. This should be an intense 3D game, or rather, a test made to mimic the load of one. Full-screen 3D graphics that actually puts a load on typical notebook graphics processors, together with some physics and AI routines running a canned animation. It doesn’t need to actually be interactive, it just needs to load up the CPU and graphics chip like a game would. It should be reasonably forward-looking, too; it doesn’t matter if Intel’s integrated graphics gets 4 frames per second while a mid-range discrete GPU from ATI or Nvidia gets 40. Again, we’re just measuring battery life here.

As with the current MobileMark 2007, this loop of tests would just repeat until the laptop dies. I’m guessing your typical “four hour” laptop of today would die in about two hours of this new MobileMark, which is in line with the reality where most users’ laptops die in half the promised time.

This hypothetical new MobileMark 2010 would be a vast improvement over what we currently have, without making the testing labs for notebook manufacturers and editorial press have to make major changes. They would just load on a different version of MobileMark, and the checklist of pre-test conditions (Wi-Fi state, energy saving mode state, screen brightness state) would slightly change. It’s not more work for anyone, it doesn’t mean changing stickers or labels or building a new logo program or any of that sort of stuff.

Of course, it won’t happen unless everyone agrees to jump at once. The need for a more realistic battery test has existed for a long time, but manufacturers don’t want to adopt a standard that makes their notebooks look like battery life is shorter. Certainly, they don’t want to do so unless everybody else does. Yet another reason why a new version of MobileMark with newly mandated test conditions is the best way to go – it’s the path of least resistance to broad industry adoption.

I won’t bother to summarize all the individual features that were revealed today. Tech Report has a excellent article on it, so does AnandTech. I’m just going to editorialize a bit with some of my thoughts based on what we know (and don’t know) so far.

First, boards based on Fermi are going to cost a considerable bit more than the Radeon HD 5870 and 5850, which are ATI’s competing DX11 cards that just launched. The RV870 GPU powering ATI’s cards is 334 mm². It has a 256-bit memory interface. Nvidia didn’t talk about GPU size, but it did say that Fermi is 3.0 billion transistors – 40% bigger than RV870’s 2.15 billion. So, figure a chip somewhere around the 460-480 mm² mark. That’s huge.

The chip being 40% bigger doesn’t mean 40% more expensive to produce, though. Imagine chips A and B. Both are 40nm chips made at TSMC. Chip A can fit 100 chips on a wafer, and Chip B can fit 60 chips on a wafer, because it’s 40% bigger. But as chip size grows, it’s harder for the whole chip to come out without flaws, so the yields are worse. Chip A has a yield of 75% – three-fourths of all the chips on the wafer function properly within the intended specs. Chip B has a yield of 60%, because it’s so much larger. That means you’ll get 75 good chips on a wafer for Chip A, but 36 good chips for Chip B. That’s less than half.

In other words, depending on how the yield situation works out, Fermi could be twice as expensive to produce as RV870. Hell, it could be worse. We really have no way of knowing, except to say that a 40% larger chip is usually well more than 40% more expensive to make.

It’s not just the chip, either. A 384-bit memory interface means Fermi-based cards will likely have either 768 MB (not likely) or 1.5 GB of RAM, so that’s higher RAM costs. It also means more PCB layers on the board itself. So aside from higher chip costs, the board costs of Fermi-based products will be higher than Radeon 5800 products.

So if Fermi-based products are going to be considerably more expensive than Radeon 5800 products, what about performance? Well, all Nvidia has talked about so far are the chip design elements that impact GPU compute, rather than traditional graphics. There’s quite a lot there. Nvidia has clearly spent a fair chunk of the transistor budget doing things like dramatically improving double-precision floating point performance, increasing cache sizes, ECC memory support, and so on. These things typically do nothing at all for typical graphics performance (games and stuff). So the chip is 40% more transistors, but that won’t necessarily translate into 40% higher frame rates.

Nvidia seems to be gearing the world up for this. The mantra they keep chanting is that “graphics performance isn’t enough anymore.” Compute really matters a whole heckuva lot, they tell us. This sounds like PR code for “the card is going to be 50% more expensive than the competition and not 50% faster in games, so please place as much importance on GPU compute apps as possible so we look like a better value.”

You know how drill sergeants tell recruits to begin and end everything they say with “sir?” Sir, yes sir! Sir, I didn’t mean to shoot the sergeants toe off, sir! That’s what it’s like listening to Nvidia these days, only with “CUDA” instead of “Sir.” For over a year, Nvidia has told everyone who will listen that GPU compute is super duper important, and has very aggressively flogged PhysX and CUDA. And you know what? Consumers just don’t care all that much. Maybe one day, when there are robust standards and quite a few GPU-accelerated applications that normal people use all the time, the average consumer will want a graphics card to make its non-gaming apps go faster just as much as it wants it to make its games go faster and look better. But we’re not there yet, and we’re not going to be there in the next six months, as much as Nvidia would like us to be.

So Nvidia’s facing a tough sell in Q1 2010 (or maybe late 2009) when the first Fermi-based cards go on sale. They’ll almost certainly cost $399 or more, judging by what we know so far. ATI has a chip and board design that will let them push Radeon HD 5850 cards below $200 and 5870 cards below $250 within the next six months, if they want to. Is a modest increase in frame rate and much higher performance in GPU compute apps going to be worth such a broad difference in price? Will it be a moot point, because the cards will be out of the cost and power budget for most consumers (and OEMs)?

This, of course, means jack-all if the software is crap. Fortunately, it is not crap. In fact, it’s quite good. The fine folks at Ars Technica have a first-look that is favorable, but I’ve been using the beta myself for a couple months on both Windows 7 and Windows Vista PCs so I thought I would offer my two cents.

First, it’s reasonably lean. On my 64-bit system, it generally uses less than 100MB of RAM (usually more like 70MB). That’s not the leanest background app around, but it’s not the worst offender, either. Windows Defender gets disabled (MSE is a superset of the Windows Defender stuff) so those system resources get freed up, which offsets the “cost” of MSE.

Second, it stays out of the way of my other programs. I haven’t noticed any change in system performance. It doesn’t screw up any of my games. I get the same firewall permission prompt with new games I always get in Windows, but that’s it. It doesn’t seem to run scans while I’m doing other system-intensive stuff. After a couple months of running this thing, I really can’t tell the difference between it being there and not being there, unless it catches something. Which is good.

Third, it appears to work. New virus and other malware definitions are updated practically every day. Windows Update will deliver them, and of course you can update by hand. I purposely downloaded a couple keygens and other programs from torrent sites that people said were infected, and MSE did indeed detect the bad stuff and prompt me to clean it. Cleaning the infected file (usually deleting it, sometimes quarantining it) is generally a one-click affair.

For now, I see no reason not to choose Microsoft Security Essentials as a free anti-spyware alternative. Many of the pay antivirus packages offer all kinds of extra features, like rootkit removals and more advanced firewalls and anti-email phishing stuff and all. If you want that stuff, go get AVG or something. But compared to products like AVG Free, MSE seems to stack up just fine. Frankly, if you don’t go around clicking on things you know you have no business clicking on, and if you keep up to date with your Windows Updates, you probably don’t need more protection than the free packages offer.

Of course, the real security firms will test the software against hundreds or thousands of known threats and get a really detailed take on how well it protects you. Maybe against that sort of testing, it’ll turn out to be crap. But hey, it’s free and so far, I like it. So if you’re not running any sort of anti-malware other than the basic Windows Defender that comes in Vista or Windows 7, go ahead and give this a whirl.

Now, if Microsoft really wanted to secure Windows, they’d work a deal with Adobe to offer updates to Flash through Windows Update. Not to distribute it in the first place, but if someone has it installed, they’d get updates that way. Flash is on like 95% of all desktop and notebook computers and it’s just chock full of potential attack vectors for malware. Adobe keeps closing the holes, but nobody ever updates their Flash software. I know Microsoft is all about positioning Silverlight against Flash and Adobe Air, and that’s all well and good. But I don’t see how providing updates to people who already have the software will really change that, and it’ll make Windows a gazillion times more secure.

Of course, if I were buying a notebook for myself, I’d probably wait until the middle of October and get one of those really awesome new HP Envy notebooks. They’re a lot more expensive, but oh-so-awesome. (Probably. Who knows what “gotchas” they haven’t told us about yet.)

So that’s the latest freelance thing to go up. I do other posts at the Geek Tech blog from time to time, and I’m not going to link all of them here. This one was much larger and more involved than most, so I thought I’d call it out.

My main complaint? No Windows 7 drivers. HP still has no Win7 drivers for any of their printers or all-in-ones. And they’re not alone. I don’t see Win7 drivers for Epson or Lexmark, or a host of other peripheral manufacturers, either.

Why is this a problem? Doesn’t my printer print using the drivers built into Windows 7? Yes, it does. Win7 did an amazingly good job of just finding my network printer in seconds and spitting out prints. But it’s basic. If you want full control over your printer, like checking ink levels and such, you need the HP software. You need the HP software for the scanner to work over the network with your PC (you can always scan and dump to an SD card or something). In most cases you don’t get support if you’re not using the manufacturer drivers, or installing them will be the first thing support will tell you to do.

What’s the hold up? I’m sure HP’s company line is that they’ll have drivers when Windows 7 is available. Not good enough. Certainly that philosophy isn’t good enough for their notebooks, which list Windows 7 32- and 64-bit drivers on a whole host of models.

First of all, Windows 7 is available. I have a legal, full, final copy right now. TechNet and MSDN subscribers have access for weeks, which is how I got it.

More importantly, the general public has had access to Windows 7 beta since early January. The whole point of this beta is for users to test out their hardware and software with Windows and find the problems. Sometime between beta and release, HP (and everyone else) is supposed to release their Windows 7 drivers so the public can try them out and report problems. This is how a company releases really solid drivers right at the release of a new OS. It is almost impossible to really get the kinks out with just your internal testing, and the resulting support calls can kill profits. AMD and Nvidia have figured this out, and have been shipping and updating Windows 7 drivers throughout the beta process.

So get with the program, HP. Win7 is “hot” right now. You should have a big badge on the front page that says “Ready for Windows 7. Get your Windows 7 drivers and support here!” It should take you to a whole page themed and dedicated to owners of HP products, all of them, getting Windows 7 drivers and support. That’s what we like to call an “obvious marketing opportunity.” And if Windows 7 rolls around and there’s no proper driver for my not-at-all-old-and-should-still-be-supported product, I guess you’ll lose my future business.

Yeah, some of those items are… lame. I was going to be diplomatic, but they’re lame. But hey, that’s a really good price on those Polk Audio bookshelf speakers. The CX300B might not be the best canal headphones Sennheiser makes, but for $18 freakin’ bucks with free shipping, you’d be nuts not to finally replace those crappy headphones that came with your iPod.