WinRAR File Compression and EncryptionThe first test we ran was to compress and encrypt the MPEG-2 source file from our video encoding test with the highest quality compression ratio. Secondly, we compressed and encrypted the folder of 400 photographs used in our Photoshop Elements test with the same compression settings.
BioShock (Publisher: 2K Games) was one of the best games to be released last year and is a ‘genetically enhanced’ first person shooter set in an underwater city called Rapture. The city was created at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean by a man named Andrew Ryan as part of an ideological dream and is focused around a beautifully crafted 1930’s art-deco style.
Paint.NET 3.20 (Website: Paint.NET) This is the 32-bit version of the popular free image editing software, Paint.NET. It's not as advanced as something like Adobe Photoshop CS3 or Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2, but it does serve well for most image editing tasks.We used the PDNBench script to test the processing times for a range of images and filters. The multi-threaded software also takes advantage of multi-core processors quite effectively.
We regard World in Conflict (Publisher: Sierra)as one of the best real-time strategy games we've ever played. It's based on Microsoft's DirectX 10 API and, in collaboration with Nvidia's The Way It's Meant To Be Played developer support team, it incorporates some DirectX 10 specific graphics effects.The first of these is a soft particle effect that removes the banding often found in particle effects like smoke, explosions, fire and debris - the effects simply didn't exist in the 3D world; instead, they were merely an add-on. With DirectX 10, the edges of the particle effects are much softer and banding is almost non-existent as the effects now interact with their 3D surroundings, as they're actually a part of the 3D world.
PCMark Vantage (Publisher: Futuremark) is a Windows Vista-only productivity benchmark that tests a range of standard application types providing a general performance number in respect to other systems.It tests multi-core processors and requires a processor with at least SSE2 support and a graphics card that supports Shader Model 2.0 or higher.
Call of Duty 4:(Publisher: Activision) Modern Warfare is different to all previous Call of Duty games, as it moves the action out of the World War II era and into the modern day. We have used the full version of the game with the 1.5 patch applied.The game runs on a proprietary engine, which includes features like true world dynamic lighting, HDR lighting, dynamic shadowing and depth of field. Unlike most triple-A games that were launched late in 2007, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare only uses a DirectX 9.0 renderer and, given the realistic nature of the graphics, it proves that there's still life left in the old dog!
What can we say about this game that hasn’t been said already? Crysis is probably the most anticipated game on the PC last year and was released on November 16th 2007.Crysis is seen by many as the poster boy for DirectX 10 and it will make your system cry, quite literally – it’s a monster! It doesn’t come as much of a surprise then, that the graphics are something special – they’re above and beyond anything we’ve ever seen in a PC game.
Hard Drive to Hard Drive File CopyingWe copied two large files: a 3.6GB zip file and a 3.84GB ISO file from the second 80GB "I" partition on the Windows disk to the 150GB "D" drive on the second hard drive. Secondly, we copied 400 small jpeg files (600MB of data) in the same way.
Microsoft is working hard to nudge customers onto the Windows Vista bandwagon, offering free support to those migrating to Windows Vista SP1. But IT administrators continue to resist making the kind of aggressive deployments Microsoft would like to see across the board.Microsoft released Windows Vista SP1 last week, complete with security fixes and other patches Microsoft produced between Vista's launch in early 2007 and the end of last year. Many Windows administrators delayed installing Windows Vista until at least the first service pack. Administrators who tested Windows Vista SP1 in beta gave it poor reviews. Attitudes haven't changed much since the service pack's release last week.
Just a week ago, Microsoft released the long-awaited first Service Pack for Windows Vista and, as a result of its release, we felt it was right to move all of our test systems to Windows Vista Service Pack 1 as soon as possible. There will be a few reviews published during the transition period that don’t use Windows Vista SP1, but starting from this week you will start to see our first hardware reviews using the new Service Pack.
