Marco Chiappetta

How powerful is your phone? The question would have been nonsensical a decade ago, but as we increasingly depend on smartphones and tablets for some of our everyday computing needs, paying more attention to their performance makes sense. Until recently, choosing a smartphone was mainly a matter of aesthetic taste and mobile OS preference. Today, however, most of the devices available prioritize their display and use similar slate or candy-bar designs. As a result, performance has become a much more prominent differentiator.

Unfortunately, many mobile device owners are falling into the same trap that desktop PC consumers did years ago: They look at a list of specifications, see that a smartphone's processor is clocked higher or has more cores, and assume that the device is faster than one that has what appear to be lower specs. It's as though the MHz myth of the 1990s is back to confuse buyers in a totally new market segment.

Many technologies originally intended for the enterprise end up trickling down into the consumer market at some point. Some of these technologies (ethernet or virtualization, for instance) are more practical than others; but if businesses find a use for a specific piece of technology, then chances are good that consumers can benefit from it as well. Such is the case with iSCSI.

iSCSI stands for Internet Small Computer System Interface. SCSI (sans i) has long served to connect a variety of peripherals to computer systems, but most commonly it appears in storage devices, such as hard drives or tape-backup drives. iSCSI builds upon the base technology by allowing users to connect to a remote storage volume over a network, as if said storage volume were a locally attached disk. Simply put, iSCSI transmits SCSI commands over IP (Internet Protocol) networks. iSCSI is like a virtual SATA (or SCSI) cable, in that it uses a network connection to link a system and a storage volume.

Western Digital WD VelociRaptor internal hard drive.Solid-state drives are all the rage lately, thanks to their high transfer speeds and ultrafast access times, but most people still use cheap, spacious mechanical hard drives. Unfortunately, mechanical hard drives also constitute one of the most significant performance bottlenecks in modern computer systems. Even when paired with the fastest processors and lots of memory, a slow hard drive will drag down the a system's overall performance and responsiveness, which is why upgrading to an SSD usually yields such significant performance gains.

If upgrading to a solid-state drive isn't the cards for you right no, you can improve the performance of your hard drive through a technique colloquially known as "short stroking." In simple terms, short stroking a drive means partitioning it so as to use its highest-performing sectors. Hard drives perform differently depending on where data is stored on their platters. Knowing where the fastest sections of the drive are and partitioning the drive to take advantage of them are the keys to optimizing it.

The Windows Registry is a powerful but confusing component of the Windows operating system. In earlier editions of Windows, editing the Registry was fraught with peril; if the user edited it with the wrong tool or altered a critical key, the result could be an inoperable Windows installation. Windows 7, however, is far more forgiving than its predecessors when it comes to modifying the Registry, if you use the built-in Windows 7 Registry Editor (Regedit).

The Windows 7 Registry is a massive database of settings and configuration data for the operating system and for all of the applications and drivers installed on your PC. When you tweak the Registry, you edit (or create) database entries to customize how your OS works. Before making any changes to the Windows Registry, you should be sure to back up your important data, as missteps in the Registry could impair your PC or even render it inoperable. That said, if you stick to modifying the appropriate entries--or keys--there's little to worry about.

Longer battery life: Every laptop user wants it, but few know how to get it without buying a new machine. Though laptop manufacturers have made great strides over the past few years in increasing the efficiency (and thus the battery life) of their products, even the most efficient modern machines don't last long enough for many users. What you may not realize, however, is that your system is probably loaded with integrated peripherals and bloatware that you'll never use but that consume resources and reduce battery life.

In this guide, we'll look at ways to reclaim those resources and maximize your laptop's battery life. Some of the steps may require venturing into the BIOS or UEFI of your notebook, while others are simpler software tweaks.

Many PC gamers eagerly await the release of next-generation graphics cards, hoping that the new hardware will boost frame rates and enhance eye candy in the latest games. However, while a graphics card upgrade is almost always a good way to increase game performance or improve image quality, new cards tend to be expensive--and they aren’t always necessary.

Today, even midrange graphics cards are generally fast enough to pump out buttery-smooth frame rates in cutting-edge games at all but the highest resolutions. If your current graphics card is serving you well, and you’re just looking for a little something extra to increase performance, overclocking may be the better way to go. And it will certainly be more affordable.

As the popularity of smartphones and tablets increases, so will our dependence on the myriad apps available for them. Whether the end result is a hot game, a handy price checker, or a useful contact manager, the constraints of smartphone and tablet designs and interfaces have forced app developers to find creative ways to present and access data.

Unfortunately, most apps created for smartphones or tablets aren't available for use on a PC. Some apps let you sync favorites or other personal data with a companion program or a somewhat equivalent application on a PC, but mobile apps and their PC counterparts are rarely the same.

When Intel launched the Z68 Express chipset for second-generation Core family processors, one of the chipset's differentiating features was its support for Smart Response Technology (SRT), a solid-state caching technology designed to enhance overall system performance and responsiveness. SRT is not a feature specific to the Z68 Express chipset hardware, however. The technology is fully implemented in Intel's Rapid Storage Technology (RST) drivers and software (version 10.5 or newer), but it's enabled only on the Z68 Express and on newer 6- and 7-Series Intel chipsets.

Smart Response Technology is a transparent caching arrangement that intelligently monitors both data reads from and data writes to a standard hard drive, caching the most frequently accessed bits of data to a faster solid-state cache to yield SSD-like performance in a system that uses a standard hard drive for its main storage volume. Solid-state drives typically offer near-instantaneous access times as well as transfer speeds that far exceed even the fastest hard-disk drives' performance. A modern SATA III SSD, for example, can deliver reads and writes in the vicinity of 550 mbps, with sub-1-millisecond access times; by way of comparison, a 10,000-rpm hard drive may hover at around 160 mbps under ideal conditions, with multi-millisecond access times.

Illustration by The Heads of StateSetting up and maintaining your home PC network is easier than ever before in Windows 7--but that's not saying much. Many networking issues still aren't easily addressed from Windows 7's control panels. That's why we've compiled a list of common networking problems and quick fixes.

Reset Your IP Address

If your system's connection to a network is unreliable, or you're getting IP address conflict error messages, try renewing your IP address. First, click on the Start button, navigate to the Command Prompt (Start Menu, Applications, Accessories, Command Prompt), right-click it, and select Run as Administrator from the menu.

You don't need an electrical engineering degree to properly install a cooler on your CPU. As is the case when installing many PC components, however, the procedure involves some subtleties that can have a measurable impact on the computer's performance.

Simply latching on a CPU cooler without doing additional prep work may result in a seemingly perfect, working system. However, if you take some extra time to thoroughly clean the CPU’s integrated heat spreader and heat sink, prime their surfaces, and properly install a high-quality thermal interface material, your CPU's temperatures will be lower--sometimes much lower. And lower CPU temperatures often result in a quieter system that’s also more stable and overclockable, if that’s your thing. A cooler chip is likely to hold up longer under sustained use, too.

Microsoft’s Kinect has been an undeniable sales success. In fact, in the device’s first 60 days on the market, more than 8 million of them were sold, making it the fastest-selling consumer electronics device in history, earning it an entry into the Guinness Book of World Records in the process. The advanced voice and motion / gesture recognition technology used in the Kinect sensor made it an immediate hit with gamers, but the powerful device has since transcended its use as a “controller-less” game controller and inspired innovation in multiple industries, perhaps most notably in Healthcare.

It was back in June that Microsoft released a software development kit for non-commercial Kinect-related projects (next year the company plans to release a similar kit for commercial uses). Since that original SDK was released, however, the Kinect sensor has been adapted for use in a wide range of projects that run the gamut, from security applications to robotics controls. Kinect’s use in the Healthcare sector though, has been the most pervasive. “Honestly, what we know about here at Microsoft is but a tiny fraction of what is actually going on,” said Bill Crounse, a medical doctor and Microsoft’s senior director of worldwide health, referring to medical uses of Kinect. “Everywhere I go in the world – every hospital, college or public health organization, people are already doing something with Kinect or they plan to."

With the immense popularity of digital cameras, smartphones, and tablets for taking pictures and capturing video, and the wide availability of affordable digital music and movies, many people have amassed enormous collections of digital media. Much of that media typically finds its way onto a PC or mass-storage device of some sort--and, unfortunately, it can sometimes go unused for ages. Flipping through pictures or videos and relaxing with some good tunes is always appealing, but sitting in front of a PC isn’t the ideal way to enjoy such content.

You may be surprised to learn that sharing digital media across different devices and platforms is quite easy. Windows 7 with Windows Media Player has built-in tools and DLNA/UPnP support for easily sharing digital media libraries with compatible devices. And allowing access to the media across a network or the Web requires minimal configuration.