performance

Apple's Macworld announcement about professional and celebrity music instruction as part of GarageBand '09 may have been impressive, but what might be a little more eye catching (and ultimately useful) is iPerform3D. This browser-based music learning system shows users how to play guitar in 3D, and works on both Macs and PCs.

iPerform3D eschews A-list music celebrities like Sting and Sarah McLachlan in place of guitar-playing veterans who have undergone motion capture recording of their entire bodies (fingers especially) to teach you various lessons. To learn, you get control of a 3D video player that lets you change vantage … Read more

This easy-to-use and informative application cleans, configures, and optimizes your PC. Advanced WindowsCare Professional's interface dispenses with the bells and whistles to display commands and data without embellishment.

The install Wizard zips through the set up, querying the user on the PC's primary use and Internet connection type. Answer those two simple questions, choose from a short list of options, and you're ready to virus check and scan for spyware, registry errors, and start-up problems, or clean your PC of history and surfing traces. The app's strength is the detailed information the scan provides, which lists … Read more

As I write this, the temperature in the City of New York hovers around freezing, though it's expected to be warmer and wetter by the time this post gets published. Not the right conditions for high-performance driving, to be sure, but that won't stop enthusiasts from planning for better weather.

Eager drivers in the area have several new options since this time last year. The Monticello Motor Club, for example, is a 4.1-mile racetrack (a road course, of course, not a mere oval track) that opened last July in Monticello, NY. It's just 90 minutes by … Read more

On Tuesday, Mozilla released Firefox 3.1 beta 2 and Google released Chrome 0.4.154.33, so it's time for the latest installment of JavaScript performance testing.

Here's the highlight: Though Firefox remains the leader on the SunSpider test, with a score of 2,110, Chrome edged very close with 2,140. A lower score is better; because of some variation in results, the numbers I quoted are an average of several runs.

Firefox and Chrome aren't the only browsers out there, but they're interesting to compare for a few reasons. First, they're both … Read more

This handy pair of executables adds muscle to the monitor's power off function. WinFlog's small multitabbed interface offers four easily invoked functions. WinFlogTurnOff's executable needs no interface as the application simply and immediately turns off the monitor.

Operating WinFlog is very easy, especially for XP users. The program's primary tab lists two options to add a Turn Off Monitor option to the My Computer Icon right-click menu and to the desktop right-click menu. The functions are just as easily removed from the menus using single-click buttons on the same tab. The program's second tab uses … Read more

A Dell slide shown Tuesday was a reminder that a future 80-core processor is still in sight.

Flash back two years to the Intel Developer Forum when CEO Paul Otellini pledged to deliver an 80-core processor in five years.

Otellini said at the time that the chips will be capable of exchanging data at a terabyte a second and that the company hopes to have these chips ready for commercial production within a five-year window.

Michael Dell referred to a slide showing an 80-core chip Tuesday at SC08, a conference in Austin, Texas, focused on high-performance computing.

The trend of … Read more

Democratize IT. A banal catch phrase until you see off-the-shelf gaming boxes from PC maker Dell being used for visual supercomputing.

CEO Michael Dell showed the "Stallion" Visualization Cluster at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) running on standard Dell XPS gaming machines during his keynote Tuesday at SC08, a conference in Austin, Texas, focused on high-performance computing. (The keynote was streamed over the Web.)

The Stallion "visualization wall" uses XPS boxes to power 30-inch Dell displays. "The largest display of its kind in the world, at 307 million pixels," Michael Dell said.

"… Read more

Google began updating Chrome users with the new beta version, and my performance tests show the company has ratcheted the browser's speed up another notch.

Google Chrome's latest version, 0.3.154.9, shows a 37 percent JavaScript performance improvement over the initial beta released two months ago.

JavaScript is a programming language used to add some pizazz to innumerable Web pages, but more importantly from Google's perspective, to power sophisticated Web applications such as Google Docs, Google Calendar, and Gmail. JavaScript is also up against Adobe Systems' Flash and Flex, Microsoft's Silverlight, and HTML 5, … Read more

I get impatient waiting for my Vista PC to boot up. I could just leave the machine in sleep mode, but going long stretches without rebooting can cause problems of its own.

Instead of relying on sleep mode to get my workday started faster, I make it a habit to open Windows' list of start-up apps on a regular basis to determine whether any rogue programs have slipped in, slowing my start-ups unnecessarily. It seems that every time I check the list, some entry catches me by surprise.

To view your start-up apps in XP, click Start > Run, type … Read more