Background For years I have been attracted to PC gaming and never cared much about the Xbox. There were many reasons for this but primarily because I preferred the controls of a PC, the graphics resolution of a PC, and I was completely uncoordinated with the Xbox controller. In addition, it did not allow me [...]
Here is a quick view of my new Samsung Series 5 Ultrabook. The performance you see here is after the SSD and memory upgrades. Other than slightly lower battery life than I would like, this is an awesome device for this price range. Samsung Series 5 with Corsair SSD Upgrade The first thing [...]
If you are like me you love to stream your content to other devices both inside and outside your network. The issue is the typically convoluted and unstable packages such as Twonky, tVersity, or PlayOn. There are obviously solutions like Windows Media Center or XBMC but they do not stream or transcode to mobile devices. [...]
Recently I had the opportunity to visit the Microsoft store in San Diego California. I was wondering around looking at the different laptops and testing out the type cover for the Surface. In the process I ran across the new Microsoft Wedge Mobile Keyboard. I had seen pictures of this before however this was the [...]
As many of you have seen by now, the app selection for Windows 8/RT is growing in availability, but not necessarily in quality yet. There are still tons of third party developers that are releasing garbage apps which is making it hard to sort through and get something worthwhile. In my recent search, I came [...]
A topic I have struggled with for a long, long time has been the use of virtual machines in an actual home environment. In the past VM’s where limited to enthusiast but now that Hyper-V is bundled with Windows 8, I wanted to revisit the practicality of using a VM in a home environment to [...]
As we move toward the public release of Windows 8, we are beginning to see more and more hardware available for it. Here is a quick view of the new Wedge Mouse from Microsoft. It is a Bluetooth based device that requires that you computer have some sort of transmitter. Setup and Installation [...]
Intro and Test Setup Following in the tradition of testing each release, here is a summary of the testing I did on the RTM version of Server 2012 Storage Spaces. Since this has the final code, the hope was that it was tuned and tweaked to provide the maximum performance and stability. Issues Right [...]
I had a chance to test a Samsung 11.6 inch tablet running Windows 8 Pro RTM at the Microsoft store. Retail price was a bit steep at around $1299 but this unit had a 1366 x 768display, Core I5-XX, 4 Gigs of Ram and a 128 Gig SSD. The experience was very fast and smooth [...]
In following tradition, below are the updated benchmarks of the Release Candidate of Server Essentials. As you can see from the benchmarks below, things have not improved in terms of performance. In fact, some tests were a bit slower. I am using the same hardware in the same configuration as before for the testing. I [...]
Being an avid user of the Wake-On-Lan feature in Logmein and various utilities, I was not thrilled when I found that none were working in Windows 8 RTM version. I finally isolated the issue to a new feature in Windows 8 that allows for quicker boot times. Below is how I got it to work. [...]
I have been testing and using storage spaces on Sever Essentials since its release. I am using it to back up two systems as well as for some Movies, Music, and Photos. Mostly testing and very light use. On Tuesday I got a bit of a surprise I did not expect. Before I get into [...]
Near and dear to my heart has been all the discussion on Storage Spaces. I have tested the Server 2012 and the Window 8 versions for performance as compared to a hardware solution, and have consistently seen lower performance, especially from Windows 8. Now that they have released the beta version of Server 2012 Essentials, [...]
Back in March, I did a post on the performance results of storage spaces in Windows 8 as well as the server product. I think it was pretty obvious that I was really not impressed with either, however the version for Windows 8 was far worse in the area of performance. Given that it was [...]
Back in March of the this year I spent some time testing Storage Spaces on the Server 8 Beta, along with the Storage Spaces in Windows 8. As you can see from my prior articles, I was not too impressed with the performance in the earlier versions. Now that they have released new versions, I [...]
