Super Speed USB is knocking in our door

It seems as if we've been writing about USB 3.0 forever, but it has really been only about two years since Intel and other parties formed a promotional group for USB 3.0 in 2007. The spec was completed in November 2008, at which time the standard's backers said that a glut of devices would hit the market late this year. Well, that statement turned out to be almost right: Devices are coming very soon, but the glut won't be until next year.

A USB 3.0 test and development setup from Texas Instruments.

SuperSpeed USB (as USB 3.0 is called) supports a maximum data rate of 4.8 gigabits per second, compared with 480 megabits per second for Hi-Speed USB (USB 2.0). That amounts to a theoretical maximum of 600 megabytes per second--it's way faster than most hard drives, and it's coming just in time for a wave of newer and speedier solid-state drives. To give you an idea of how fast that is, it's the equivalent of moving almost one full CD's worth of data in 1 second.

USB 3.0 achieves those speeds with a new plug and cable format, but it's all backward-compatible with USB 2.0 and USB 1.1. Plug in your old device, and it will still work (at the older speed). Plug a USB 3.0 device into a USB 2.0 port, and it will run at the slower speed.

What's more, the USB 3.0 protocol is now full-duplex: Devices can send and retrieve data simultaneously, which wasn't true with USB 1.1 and 2.0. Lower operating voltages and the elimination of broadcasting and polling (methods that the previous USB standards used to communicate with all attached devices) should make USB hosts draw less power, but a higher maximum carried voltage should help you charge your portable devices more quickly.

An early USB 3.0 add-in card from Asus, using PCIe.

It sounds great--and recently it seemed poised to make its debut. Asus was scheduled to ship the high-end P6X58 Premium motherboard with USB 3.0 ports provided by NEC's host controller (for the uninitiated, the traffic cop for external devices), but the company announced a slight delay. NEC's host controller just obtained the first USB 3.0 certification of any host on September 21, however, so that Asus board should see the light of day before long.

A few more motherboards equipped with USB 3.0, all using NEC's host controller, should crop up later this year, and Fujitsu is close to releasing a laptop with USB 3.0 ports. USB 3.0 ports will become far more common on laptops and desktop PCs throughout 2010.

All the ports in the world are useless without compatible devices, of course. We saw a demo at IDF 2009 of an external solid-state drive with a USB 3.0 connection by LucidPath that achieved a transfer rate of over 240MB per second (and if you've ever used an external USB hard drive, you'll know just how much faster that transfer rate is). These sorts of mass storage devices should be the first to hit the market, starting early in 2010.

Point Grey's prototype USB 3.0 Webcam sends uncompressed HD video to the host PC.

Expect video cameras to start using USB 3.0, too. Point Grey has demonstrated a high-def Webcam that uses USB 3.0, though it isn't yet a shipping product. Unlike current USB Webcams, this USB 3.0 model does not have to compress the video feed before sending it to the PC. SuperSpeed USB is fast enough to transmit the raw, uncompressed HD video to the PC for capture or compression, which can greatly improve the video quality and make high-def Webcams cheaper, too. Devices like these will arrive a little later in 2010, but you should see all sorts of products carrying the SuperSpeed USB label on store shelves by the end of 2010.

None of this means that USB 2.0 is going anywhere, of course; it will continue to be the more affordable option until USB 3.0 controllers come built into the I/O host controllers of motherboards (the NEC USB 3.0 host controller mentioned above is a separate chip on the motherboard, and is not part of the motherboard's main host controller). And USB 2.0 is still suitable for input devices--mice and keyboards don't require all of the available bandwidth that SuperSpeed USB promises.

Still, it's good to know that the higher-speed, lower-power, faster-charging cabled future is almost upon us. Perhaps your future 128GB iPod, Zune, or smartphone won't take 2 hours to fill up with music.

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How we test windows 7 Performance

See how the new OS fared against Vista on boot time, battery life, and benchmark performance.

• Windows 7: How We Test »
• Windows 7: Can Your Netbook Handle It? »

Windows Vista never was particularly speedy in most people's eyes. Whether it deserved the reputation or not, the word on the street was that Vista was both slow and bloated.

Given that, it's no wonder that improving performance was one of Microsoft's design goals with Windows 7. Many reviewers have said that the new operating system feels faster than Vista. In our extensive PC World Test Center evaluations comparing the two, we found an increase in speed, though the overall improvement wasn't dramatic.

We installed Windows 7 on five computers (two desktop systems, two laptop PCs, and a netbook), and put the systems through our WorldBench 6 benchmark suite, which consists of a number of tests that assess a machine's performance in popular, real-world applications. We also ran timed tests to measure how the two OSs affected boot-up and shutdown times, laptop battery life, and launch times for several common apps. (For more information, see "Windows 7: How We Test.")

The verdict? Windows 7 makes some performance strides over Vista, though in some cases we saw no clear-cut winner, and in one area Windows 7 lagged considerably behind its predecessor.

WorldBench 6 Test Results

Overall, Windows 7's performance improvement over Windows Vista is slight--but the important thing is that there is an improvement at all. For a breakdown of some of the performance scores, see the chart below.

On our E&C Black Mamba desktop (with a 2.66GHz Intel Core i7 processor, overclocked to 3.8GHz), Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit earned a WorldBench 6 mark of 144, edging out Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit, which scored 139. Here Windows 7 was roughly 3.6 percent faster than Windows Vista.

When comparing the two versions of Windows on the HP Pavilion a6710t desktop (with a 2.6GHz Pentium Dual Core E5300 CPU), we tested both the 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows Vista Ultimate and Windows 7 Ultimate. Running the 32-bit versions of Vista and Windows 7, the a6710t saw its WorldBench 6 score increase only a little, from 104 on the former to 106 on the latter. But on our WorldBench 6 tests comparing the 64-bit versions, it enjoyed a somewhat larger boost with Windows 7, going from a score of 96 on Vista to a mark of 103.

We saw similar incremental performance improvements on our portable test PCs as well. With the 32-bit versions of Vista Home Premium and Windows 7 Home Premium, our Gateway T-6815 notebook went from a WorldBench 6 score of 58 on the older OS to a result of 64 on the newer one. Our Lenovo IdeaPad Y530 laptop's WorldBench 6 score improved by only one point with Windows 7 in our comparison of 32-bit Ultimate editions (going from 83 to 84); when we tested the 64-bit editions of the two OSs, we again saw a modest boost, with the Y530's score increasing from 79 to 83.

In our WorldBench 6 Nero tests, Windows 7 showed big improvements. Performance nearly doubled on average over Vista, which indicates that the new OS enhances hard-disk performance. *Average of results from six test PCs. Lower time equals better performance.

Windows 7 makes big gains in disk performance, however. For example, in our hard-disk-intensive WorldBench 6 Nero test--in which we create a series of images of an optical disc and then save them--every PC we tested showed an improvement. In our comparison of the 64-bit versions of Vista and Windows 7, the IdeaPad Y530 performed the test twice as quickly with the newer OS. Meanwhile, our Gateway T-6815 was almost two and a half times faster, going from a time of 1648 seconds to complete the test on Windows Vista to a time of 667 seconds on Windows 7. We had noticed a similar speedup on disk-intensive tests in our earlier evaluation of the Windows 7 release candidate; such gains may be due to updated hard-disk drivers under Windows 7.

One particular result worth noting: In our testing, the 64-bit versions of Vista produced poorer disk performance than the 32-bit Vista editions did. With Windows 7, however, Microsoft brought the 64-bit versions' disk performance more in line with that of the 32-bit versions. That explains the larger WorldBench 6 score advantages over Vista that we saw from 64-bit Windows 7 compared with 32-bit Windows 7.

Boot-Up and Shutdown Times

Microsoft says that in Windows 7 it changed the way the operating system handles starting up processes when you boot your computer. For some processes and services, Microsoft employs a scheme called trigger-start services. These are system services and processes that under Vista would have started up when you booted your PC, but now kick in only as needed. One example Microsoft gives is Windows 7's handling of Bluetooth: Instead of launching at system boot, Bluetooth now starts up when you use a Bluetooth device with your PC. Reducing the number of services that start at boot is supposed to reduce boot-up time.

Launching Photoshop took two to three times longer on the new OS, but that isn't a big deal--the difference was still just a few seconds. *Times are in seconds. Shorter times indicate better performance.

In our boot-up tests using one desktop and one laptop, though, we saw mixed results. On our Gateway T-6815 laptop, Windows Vista Home Premium (32-bit) had the advantage, booting up in 39.6 seconds on average. Windows 7 Home Premium (also the 32-bit edition) took slightly longer, averaging 43.6 seconds. On our HP Pavilion a6710t test desktop, the outcome was reversed. The 64-bit edition of Windows Vista Ultimate Edition booted in 55.2 seconds, whereas Windows 7 Ultimate Edition 64-bit came out slightly ahead, booting in 48.3 seconds.

At first, we couldn't explain why the 64-bit edition of Windows 7 improved the boot-up time over Vista (on the HP desktop) while the 32-bit edition of the new OS lagged behind its predecessor (on the Gateway laptop). In subsequent testing, however, we discovered that the 32-bit version of Windows 7 exhibited a similar speedup on our HP desktop, going from an average of 54.5 seconds on Vista 32-bit to 47.7 seconds on Windows 7 32-bit. The upshot: Whether Windows 7 will start faster than Vista for you will likely depend on your particular computer's setup.

As for shutdown times, in our tests we observed no significant difference between Windows 7 and Windows Vista. On our Gateway T-6815 laptop, the 32-bit version of Windows Vista Home Premium shut down in 11.72 seconds on average. The 32-bit Windows 7 Home Premium took 11.57 seconds to shut down--an improvement of a mere 0.15 second. The results were just as tight on our HP a6710t desktop. The 64-bit Vista Ultimate shut down in 9.1 seconds on average, while the 64-bit Windows 7 Ultimate took 9.0 seconds--a negligible difference of just 0.1 second.

To say that such results are too close to call would be an understatement: The difference between the two is so minor that you likely wouldn't notice it even if you had the OSs running side-by-side on identical hardware.

Granted, boot-up and shutdown times aren't as important today as they once were, now that many people use their computer's sleep or hibernate mode instead, but in either case you'll probably find only slight differences, if any.

Scandisk your hard drive to remove errors

Scandisk your hard drive to remove errors (Windows 95) is available here.

Step One: Click on "My Computer" located in the upper left hand corner of your screen.
Step Two: Right click (press the right button on the mouse) on the icon of your hard drive. It is usually drive C:.
Step Three: When you right clicked, a menu of options will appear. Click (with the left button) on "Properties".
Step Four: Click on the "Tools" tab when the properties menu appears.
Step Five: You will be presented with three choices: Error-checking status, backup statis and defragmentation status. Choose "Check Now..." button in the error-checking status window.
Step Six:The ScanDisk application will launch. Click on the "Start" button in the ScanDisk window. Don't get confused and click the Windows 95 Start button!
Step Seven: In a few moments, your computer will be scanned for errors. A progress bar will appear in the ScanDisk window. Please be patient.
Step Eight: If an error is found, the following dialog box will appear. If you are missing any files, or have problems with your PC choose "Convert the lost file fragment(s) into file(s)." If you have no PC problems, choose "Discard lost file fragment(s) and recover disk space." Then click the "OK" button.
Step Nine: When the program is done, a results window will appear. Click the "Close" button.
Source: http://www.ridgenet.org

Working with Files

Tricky file operations

To rename several files at once:
Select all of them in any folder view, or in the Windows Explorer, rename the FIRST one in the list, and the rest will follow.

To turn off filenames:
Hold down the Shift-key when you click to open a folder in Windows Explorer or when you switch into thumbnail view. This will turn of the file names, giving more space for the thumbnails. Doing it again turns them back on.

Try grouping your files:
Right click in the window then, select View>Arrange icons by>Type, and then View>Arrange icons by>Show in groups.