performance

Fine-tune Vista's indexing options

After finding my post from last March about tweaking Vista's index locations, a reader sent me five questions. I don't have the person's name or e-mail address, so I'm going to respond in this post and hope they're still reading.

"Please advise step-by-step how to delete all the locations in the Indexed Locations screen at one time."

Press the Windows key, type indexing options, and press Enter. In the Indexing Options dialog box, click Modify > "Show all locations" (you may need to click through the User Account Control warning). Uncheck … Read more

MySpace about to lose out to Facebook in U.S.?

The team at Pingdom, a firm that focuses primarily on uptime and performance, has posted a new blog entry estimating that Facebook will overtake MySpace as the top social network in the U.S. within a month or two. That's largely because, according to the same numbers, Facebook has doubled in size in the past year.

Several months ago, traffic firm ComScore noted that Facebook--a year ago far smaller than the News Corp.-owned MySpace--was starting to pass its rival in worldwide traffic. But in the U.S., which still has the big ad dollars, MySpace remained bigger.

There'… Read more

Red Hat sets new performance record at a 20 percent cost savings

Once upon a time CIOs bought into open source solely to achieve dramatic cost savings. Today, Red Hat gave them another reason: superior performance.

Today Red Hat announced that it has broken server performance records with its Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 on an IBM System x 3950 M2 running Intel X7460 Xeon processors. Apparently you can have your cake and eat it, too, at least in the open-source world:

In its latest 1M tpmC benchmark, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 outperformed all other operating systems on price performance in the 1M+ range. The Red Hat-based benchmark system … Read more

Step aside, Chrome, for Squirrelfish Extreme

Just about every browser out there now is trying to grab the crown for fastest performance for running JavaScript, the programming language that powers many increasingly sophisticated Web-based applications. The latest development is from the programmers behind Apple's Safari.

Mozilla bragged earlier this month about TraceMonkey, a new JavaScript engine due to ship in Firefox 3.1 near the end of 2008. Next came Google's Chrome, a leading feature of which is the performance of its V8 JavaScript engine. Now the WebKit programmers, whose open-source code is used in Apple's Safari browser and the Konqueror browser of … Read more

Will that Dell solid-state drive be regular or ultra?

Regular or ultra? Consumers will now have at least a couple of performance options when they order solid-state drives on the newest ultraportable notebooks from Dell.

Hard disk drives are getting scarcer by the week in the ultraportable notebook market. Dell has officially started selling its new 2.2-pound Latitude E4200 this week with solid-state drives as the only storage option, accelerating a trend in ultraportables away from hard disk drives.

The popular ThinkPad X301 also comes with solid-state drive options only.

The SSD options on the E4200 come in two flavors, standard or "Ultra".

Dell pre-announced the … Read more

iPhone software gets an update

After more than a month of suffering from agonizing 3G data performance and dropped calls, I was very eager to update my phone to the major 2.1 update, especially since it comes with a lot of promises of improvement.

The update process took a long time, mostly because I needed to back up my phone. (I have a 16GB version of the phone that's almost full). The update took exactly nine minutes. Unlike the 2.0.1 update that caused me to have to reinstall some apps, the 2.1 update was able to retain everything: music, contacts, … Read more

Improve Vista's performance a little or a lot

Vista won't win any popularity contests, but even with its faults, I'll take the most recent version of Windows over any of the predecessors. My biggest beef with Vista is that it's slow. At least the OS makes it easy to optimize your system for peak performance. Here's a quick recap of my three favorite Vista speedup tips.

Put indexing on permanent hold I've been using Vista for a good 18 months now, and you can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I've used Windows' built-in search feature. I … Read more

Firefox counters Google's browser speed test

Mozilla fought back on Wednesday with some performance results to show a forthcoming version of Firefox outpacing Google's new Web browser, Chrome.

During a launch event Tuesday, Google was eager to toot its horn about Chrome's performance running JavaScript, a programming language used to power many sophisticated Web applications such as Google Docs, Yahoo's Zimbra e-mail site, and Zoho's online application suite. Google showed performance results using its own collection of five JavaScript benchmarks and V8, Chrome's JavaScript engine, but Mozilla countered with a different test called SunSpider.

"We're very much in the … Read more

Inside CNET Labs 11: This podcast clearly goes to 11

First, we answer an e-mail sent by a very concerned listener of our language and subject matter. Then Dong tells a story of misunderstandings and mistaken identity...sort of.

Eric briefly talks about Nvidia CUDA and the headaches he had last week when trying to upgrade his video card. Dong gives advice on how to speed up your Windows PC. Finally, Eric has a run-in with a business owner involving quarters that goes to ridiculous levels.

To subscribe to this podcast, visit us at our main page and click the link on the right.

Listen now: Download today's podcast … Read more