Intel Core i7-4790K Devil's Canyon CPU Review

Intel Core i7-4790K Devil's Canyon CPU Review. Intel's brisk production schedule should see the new 14nrn Broadwell architecture arrive by Christmas, but that doesn't mean Haswell is out of tricks. To tide us over until the next generation arrives, Intel has released a new spin on the Haswell design, codenamed Devil's Canyon, that squeezes more performance from the hardware.

This has been achieved not through complex re-engineering, but by simply switching to a new thermal interface material - that is, the stuff inside the chip that conducts heat away from the transistors and up to the heatsink. Thanks to the use of "next-generation" thermal material, the chips enjoy better heat dissipation than the original Haswell models, so they can run faster without overheating.

What this means in practice depends on whether you go for a Core LS or i7 processor. Intel has set the base clock of the Core i5-4690K at 3.5GHz, only 100MHz higher than that of its predecessor, the Core i5-4670K.

With the Core i7-4790K, however, the company has pulled out all the stops. Previously, the fastest Intel CPU on the market was the Core i7-4770K, which has a base speed of 3.5GHz; the i7-4790K takes the same design, but cranks it up to 4GHz. When it comes to single-core operations, Turbo Boost accelerates things further still, to an eyebrow-raising 4.4GHz.

It's no surprise that the new chip tears through benchmarks. Tested in Windows 8, with 8GB of RAM and a Samsung 840 Evo SSD, the Core i7-4790K achieved an Overall score of 1.27 - a huge 13% improvement on the i7-4770K, representing the highest score we've seen from any desktop chip. The single-threaded Media section of the test was particularly strong: here the Core i7-4790K scored 1.35.

Incredibly, the i7-4790K had yet more to give, since, like all K-class processors, Devil's Canyon chips come with unlocked Turbo multipliers. We configured our Core i7-4790K to clock itself up to 4.7GHz for single- and double-threaded tasks, and 4.6GHz for more demanding scenarios. At these speeds, it achieved an Overall score of 1.31 with a standard, low-profile Intel cooler.

However, there's a price to pay. Like the Core i7-4770K, the i7-4790K is expensive at £259, and unless you do a lot of heavy-duty, multithreaded computing, it's of questionable value. Also, it's worth noting that running at such speeds takes a lot of power. Flip over a Devil's Canyon chip and you'll see an extra crop of capacitors that regular Haswell processors lack. To keep these fed, the new chips have a thermal design power of 88W - slightly higher than their predecessors.

But so what? Devil's Canyon isn't aimed at the low-cost, low-power market; it's for enthusiasts and can't-get-enough workstation jockeys. For them, it delivers better performance than Intel's previous flagship. If you're looking for exceptional desktop performance, there's only one reason to consider holding off: with Intel wringing such speed from its 22nm architecture, who knows what may be possible with its forthcoming 14nm parts?

Features
New! 4.0 GHz base frequency
4 Cores, 8 Threads
Fully unlocked for performance tuning
Intel® Turbo Boost Technology 2.0
Intel® Hyper-Threading Technology
Intel® HD Graphics 4600 (1250 MHz)
Supports LGA 1150 socket
8 MB Intel® Smart Cache
2 channel DDR3-1600 memory support
16 PCI Express* 3.0 lanes

view details

Bluff It With Windows Server 2012 R2

I'm frequently amazed by the sheer number of people who don't bother to update their systems when a new server operating system version arrives. Amazingly, there are many systems administrators and part-time network people who seem to think that merely having a strong opinion about what Microsoft has done or looks like doing in future somehow qualifies them for a seat at the software-design table.

This being the case, here's my top-five list of tips to help those of you who aspire to stay on top of all things network to continue to pull it off.

1. Forget the GUI
Things such as creating a folder; sharing and other basics may be okay using the mouse, but all the heavy lifting is done inside PowerShell nowadays.

This is one of those Windows add-ons that had a distinctly rough initial reception, and it has retained a bad reputation among those who looked at v1, found a reason to hate it and never returned (think of these folk as early rejecters rather than early adopters).

Irrespective of the opinion of this marketplace of curmudgeons, Microsoft has now developed PowerShell into an extensible, if somewhat prolix, management tool. For almost everything you actually end up needing to do — and I make a distinction from the baby-step things the graphical user interface (GUI) is designed to facilitate — you'll want to use PowerShell.

2. Learn to love the ISE
This is the simple, straightforward graphical editor for PowerShell. It may look as though it's designed specifically for the editing of batch files and complicated things, but consider this: every Microsoft presenter on my last Redmond visit would show me their demo by grabbing a chunk of PowerShell code, dropping it into the integrated scripting environment (ISE) and then selecting each line or sub-unit of code by swiping with the mouse and running it with a swift stab of the FS key (yes, I know F.5 used to mean Refresh, but you have to adapt to survive).

The Integrated Scripting Environment (ISE) is undoubtedly more than merely an editor; it's similar to an interactive execution console such as interpreted BASIC or Lisp. There are plenty of useful guides to using the ISE start at "Using the Windows PowerShell ISE" (date: 2013), which is definitely much better than starting at "Using Windows PowerShell ISE" (date: 2009).

3. Keep Bing open
The ISE, and even the humble help file, will carry you a reasonably long way, but when it comes to Microsoft-specific search results, Bing gives you a shorter and better-targeted list than the other search engines.

Besides, it's an enormous advantage to be using a command-line environment linked to a 21st-century search engine when you need to narrow down the possible cause of a problem or find the fix for it. Indeed, it's significantly easier than trying to figure out what a particular graphical element within a specific mouse-friendly utility may have been called by its designer, the supporter, the presenter of a fault or the owner of its fix.

I'm aware there are a number of free Windows Store apps that purport to help with this task, but I'm not yet sufficiently avant-garde to start mixing Store apps with a number of open command windows on the same screen.

4. Don't get too macho
Note that in my previous recommendations I've discussed using PowerShell as a way to function on top of a fully graphics-driven operating system, with all its GUI-based tools functioning. Just because Microsoft has offered a command-line-only version of Windows Server doesn't mean you have to try to squeeze yourself into such a puritan, fragile and dangerous straitjacket simply because using the command line is good for your soul.

Of course, if typing in 64-character, hexadecimal, numerical, globally unique identifiers from memory turns you on, don't let me stand in your way — but I've witnessed far more problems arise from poorly chosen Server Core deployments than I have from the kind of poor decision-making that's supposedly encouraged by GUI-based server installations.

5. Keep your eye on System Center
Microsoft's primary motivation for developing this enormous chunk of system software was the observation that, at the far distant end of getting comfortable with script-based systems management, there are people who have written tens of thousands of lines of code and now find themselves stuck in a rat's nest of ad hoc solutions, entrenched methods, weird fixes and painful emergent behaviours. The scale - expressed both as the number of servers managed and the complexity of each server — at which this becomes a problem is absolutely huge, and it's very likely that most administrators will never hit these buffers in everyday business.

But when you sit down and think, "Why am I trying to pull all these bits together with 20 lines of code?", the answer is that the prebuilt, beautified version of the handy administrative overview you used to use is no longer a standalone application; instead, it appears as a tiny dialog or pop-up inside the enormity that is System Center.

It isn't that common to see smaller businesses go after a System Center licence, but it's a good idea to look around to see how System Center does things — not least because a lot of the dispatched instructions for far-flung servers, generated by a System Center wizard, either are PowerShell scripts or can be exported as PowerShell scripts. These can be employed as a handy source of information for your own processes.

arp -d *
Yes, that cryptic little string is both a snappy headline and something you can type into the command line. In fact, it's a bit of a fix-all, and it relates to a most unexpected collection of problems that I've run into myself or to which I've been alerted by readers. In particular, Rob Anderson has been in touch about a protracted and rather stop-start debugging of his internet connection that he was attempting to perform by making use of Netgear's helpline. In the same month, I encountered a couple of Swiss residents (one current client, one former) with the same issue, both doing battle with Swisscom.

In all three cases, the people involved woke up one day to find that their internet connections were suddenly misbehaving. For his part, Rob ran some tests and concluded that some of the settings on his Netgear weren't achieving the effects he was expecting from their description, so he got in touch with the company.

At the same time, I was sitting in the semi-darkness of a closed-for-the-summer ski chalet in Switzerland, watching the status display of an old, but ultimately reliable, Motorola Netopia DSL router. I'd intended to move a lot of data around that evening and make a stab at an inter-shop VPN configuration, but after my first try failed — the connection's external DNS server address seemed to change every few minutes — I called up the router's diagnostic page and watched, in a quasi-hypnotic state, as the link rotated through about five permutations of speed, DNS server, gateway and IP configuration.

During one of the short time windows when this rotating config would actually permit internet traffic, I received an email into my mailbox (not the client's) from a former client, now resident in Lausanne. He was at his wit's end, because his Swisscom connection was going up and down, fast and slow. He had no idea how to keep his document sync systems running, and he wasn't getting help from his router maker.

Switzerland is a strange mixture of similarities to the UK (there's a healthy market in third-party router hardware) and differences (Swisscom won't talk to you, and the tiny population means there's an even tinier technical skill pool to call upon). Nevertheless, the problems faced in the UK by Rob and overseas by me and Distraught of Lausanne were exactly the same — if you go to a helpline with a problem that you assume lies with the piece of equipment in front of you, you'll get into conversations with people who have very simple-minded remits and lack specific information to work from. When it comes to debugging internet connections, this unfortunate confluence of deficiencies will sink any chance you had of resolving the problem.

DSL lines aren't just a pair of wires that come out of the wall: these wires are merely the tail-end of a huge collection of varied equipment types and configuration choices. And ISPs and phone companies feel entitled to fiddle with the internal setup of the kit to which you connect.

This may take years to become noticeable to you. But when it does finally become noticeable, its effects can be drastic. This is often for reasons that are remarkably dull and untechnical, including the new kit at the far end of the line being incompatible with yours and the installation engineers not having the right configuration information to correctly match your wires to your internet service contract details. But the most obvious and unpleasant reason is that there's no communication between the people who do this work and the people who are using the connections they're fiddling with. In fact, if you think about the number of users connected to a typical telephone and internet exchange, there's never going to be a good time to perform an upgrade — someone, somewhere will always have a drop-dead reason why it should happen next week, or tomorrow or yesterday — any time but today.

For that reason, infrastructure maintenance teams all over the world adopt a working philosophy of "just pile in", thus leaving the debugging process to the hapless customers. In the UK, where your ISP may well have sold you the router as an extra-cost item, there's no liability upon that ISP to guarantee perpetual compatibility, either. You might buy their recommended device six weeks before some infrastructure-driven connection update to the exchange blows you off the net, never to return, at least not with the equipment you were using.

I expect that almost everyone who hasn't worked inside some part of the ISP or telco business will be boggling at this point. Surely broadband is a standard thing, right? It's practically just an algorithm, a method of packaging data and sending it down those long, thin wires very quickly, no?

If this were true, then whenever you encountered a problem it would have to be with your local equipment, and therefore your recourse would be with the manufacturer of said equipment. Unfortunately, this is far from being the only possible option.

Another less far-flung incident during the past few weeks involved a remarkably unhelpful UK ISP who had just been through an exchange-side equipment upgrade to a customer connection that was limited -- contractually - to a very low connection speed. In fact, the speed was so slow that it fell below the range of speeds permitted by the updated exchange equipment. I sat in throughout the support-call process on this one (with the ISP, not the router maker), which became stuck in an endless loop: the support guys didn't want to consider that the business hung onto the end of their line might be perfectly prepared to renegotiate their contract if only the support desk could arrive at some way of helping them prove the line was still usable. I seldom find it necessary to play the pompous, "Don't you know who I am?" card with people whom I consider to be my peers, fellow IT professionals, but this was one of those rare moments when I slapped it down.

So, for the benefit of Mr Anderson, my Swiss friend, and that client, here's the low-down. Yes, your exchange-side internet connection can be subjected to "improvements" without anyone contacting you, and there'll be no hand-holding, nor web resources, nor handy workarounds that you can type into little-visited pages of your router's firmware-management interface. All you can really do is pick a very modern replacement router, try not to waste too much time on the phone to support and put the incident as far behind you as possible.

Actually, there's one last tiny bit of escalation I've had to advise a couple of clients to follow in this situation: order up a new phone line and another connection and pretend that the old, bad one that gave you so much stress simply never existed. If you're called by the phone company, deny any history or any knowledge of it. Generally these businesses are set up to smoothly deliver new business, and then to utterly ignore the regular paying customers thereafter. That's why their support lines deliver such a low-satisfaction experience.

Celestial arp
And that arp -d * thing? Ah, yes. Many small businesses run their entire networks unchanged for years at a time, and I mean years. The reliability and consistency of operation lead them to consider their network as permanent as the roof over their heads. Or, at least, that's the way it feels when someone like me arrives who's intent on taking everything to bits and tidying it up. Tempers can become short, and patience with disconnection from the internet severely limited. This means you'll need a bit of a workaround to put in place on the day you turn up with their replacement, go-faster router device that will cure all their woes.

The problem I'm trying to fix here concerns the way devices in a LAN figure out how to find one another. Most people think about machines as having names, while a smaller group are able to think about their IP addresses, the numbers beneath those names. However, very few people think about MAC addresses, those hardware addresses that may have one, or many, IP addresses to share with the rest of the network.

That's mostly because it's quite unusual to need to think about these relationships at the very bottom of the seven-layer OSI networking model: software and settings conspire to keep this level well out of sight.

Until you want to swap out your internet router, that is, when all of a sudden those machines left running for months or years can no longer connect to the replacement device, no matter what you do to it. That's because the IP address you've used for your router - the IP address that's typed in all over your LAN on your printers, Wi-Fi access points, servers, PCs and tablets - is still held in their network stack as belonging to a different MAC hardware address. It's as though your old router has kidnapped its own IP address and dragged it with it into the dustbin

You could fix this problem by rebooting everything, or by setting up the new router with a new address and then changing the configurations of just about everything in your building to point to it. Alternatively, you could work a little bit of command-line magic by typing in "arp -d *".

The address resolution protocol utility (ARP) manages the cache of numeric IPs and MAC addresses held by your machine. If you've managed to fool it by substituting one router for another then you can flush it out by using the -d switch - this deletes all the cached records and makes the ARP reach back out to the LAN to re-enquire from scratch.

After this month's fun and games, I can say with some assurance that knowing this simple trick can confer on any humble network troubleshooter an almost god-like aura of omnipotence.

Internet Explorer Tester Online

It's not easy to create code that actually works across a lot of browsers. But now, testing for Internet Explorer is now easier. Below are great tips for creating modern sites while supporting old version of ie from modern.IE

01. Valid Doctype
Ensure that you're using a doctype that recognizes modern web standards like HTML5 & CSS3:

02. UA Sniffing
Instead of UA sniffing, future-proof your site by implementing feature detection to make it easier to support new browser versions.

03. Vendor Prefixes
Ensure that vendor prefixes for all major browsers are included in your CSS. This allows you to offer a consistent experience in all modern browsers At the very least, ensure that the non-prefixed version of a CSS property is specified.

04. Browser Specific CSS Hacks
If you're using CSS browser hacks, there is an assumption that the functionality will be available going forward. As new browser versions come out, many of those hacks aren't necessary and in many cases, will be deprecated.

05. Use the Latest Frameworks & Libraries
JavaScript libraries and CSS frameworks are constantly updated to ensure proper compatibility with browsers If you're using a version that's very dated, you may find that as browsers are updated, the old code may not work as expected. Stay current when possible.

06. Conditional Comments
Conditional comments can be useful but as of Eio, they're no longer supported. If your code is dependent on them (e.g.: serving up different stylesheets), you're going to have to rethink the approach and ensure you're focusing on standards.

07. Focus on Stable Standards
With IE9, Microsoft made a concerted effort to focus on standards-based features and as of IE10, several non-standard features like DX Filters were deprecated. Use the IE Compat Inspector to check your site for problems and solutions.

Best 25 Responsive Design Tools

Over the past few years we've seen an explosion of web-enabled devices with varying resolutions, capabilities, form factors, pixel densities, interaction methods and more. This onslaught of connected devices is just the beginning, and we're bound to see people accessing the web from a greater number of devices in the coming years.

It's futile to create a dedicated web experience for every single device class out there, and the need to create a smart, flexible, adaptable web experiences is becoming more apparent every day. Responsive/adaptive/multi-device web design (whatever you want to call it) is here to stay. Just because responsive design is becoming necessary doesn't mean it's easy. We're tasked with creating experiences that are simultaneously aware and agnostic of device context. We're challenged to make interfaces that scale from itty bitty screens all the way up to massive cinema displays. Oh, and everything needs to be lightning fast, too.

These are formidable problems we're up against, but thankfully the web design community is up to the challenge. We're seeing clever, thoughtful and downright innovative tools and resources emerging on a regular basis.

There's a lot to get excited about, but it can also be a huge task to keep track of the latest tips and tricks. This article takes a look at some of the most helpful responsive resources and tools that have emerged that will help you on your responsive journey.

01. Responsive Design Weekly
Web developer Justin Avery (@justinavery) spends a lot of time curating a weekly newsletter dedicated to the latest resources, tools and techniques around responsive web design. If you're like most people, you can't spend your day glued to a Twitter feed waiting to pounce on the latest responsive news. This newsletter hands you all the latest responsive resources on a silver platter. Do yourself a favour and subscribe at: http://responsivedesignweekly.com/.

02. Foundation by ZURB
Foundation (foundation.zurb.com) by ZURB is marketed as, "the most advanced responsive front-end framework in the world," and there's no denying that a Lot of effort has gone into the open source project. ZURI spent a lot of time rebuilding its Foundation framework from the ground up.

Foundation 4 is now built mobile-first, which more closely follows a progressive enhancement strategy. Instead of taking large desktop designs and simply squishing them onto small screens, Foundation lets users layer in complexity as screen size and device capabilities increase. The framework also sports a comprehensive library of Ul components that makes it easy to rapidly prototype any interface you can imagine.

If you want a framework that's got a lot of the latest responsive development best practices, Foundation 4 looks like a pretty great candidate.

03. Jetstrap
There's been a massive shift around getting designs into the browser much earlier in the design process. Static wireframes and comps fail to accurately show how a design will look and function in the multitude of web environments. And prototyping tools have typically required a fair amount of coding knowledge to get started.

This is where jetstrap (https://jetstrap.com/) comes in. It's a visual interface-building tool for the Bootstrap framework. It provides a way for designers to quickly assemble rapid prototypes in the browser by dragging and dropping Ul components onto a canvas. It doesn't require hardcore frontend development skills to get started, but still outputs a living, breathing web page. It also provides the right Level of abstraction to be accessible to non-developer types, but is still powerful enough to demonstrate how a design actually works in its final environment.

04. The Style Prototype
Mood boards can be too vague, whereas static mockups are too precise in this responsive age. That's why designer Samantha Warren created Style Tiles (http://styletil.es/) to provide clients with a gist of colours, typography and atmosphere without getting too literal.

The responsively-minded folks at Sparkbox developed took Warren's idea a step further with the Style Prototype.

The Style Prototype is Style Tiles in the browser, which allows you to show true colours, typography, animations and more in a website's final environment.

04. Element Collages
Creating full mockups in Photoshop and declaring, "this is what the website will look like!" makes less and less sense. Designer and founder of agency SuperFriendly (http://superfriend.ly/) Dan Mall took the Style Tiles concept a step further with Element Collages. Element Collages are comprised of visual explorations for interface components. These collages facilitate conversation around the visual direction without having to create entire comps.

05. Pears
Anna Debenham explains the many benefits of frontend style guides as: allowing for easier testing, establishing a better workflow, creating a shared vocabulary and serving as a useful reference to keep coming back to. Pears (http://pea.rs/) is an open source WordPress theme created by designer Dan Cederholm for creating your own frontend style guide. Pears makes it easy for design teams to contribute to a shared pattern library to establish a consistent design system.

06. lcomoon
These days seemingly everyone is freaking out about Retina screens. Retina and other high resolution displays are quickly becoming the norm, and bitmap icons look fuzzed out and illegible on them. One of the most effective solutions to create resolution-independent icons is to create a custom icon font and embedding them with CSS @font-face.

07. Icomoon
Icomoon is a web tool that makes the process of creating and deploying icon fonts easy. It lets you choose from a library of icons and also Lets you upload your own. You can then generate your custom icon font and download a package that includes the fonts and appropriate CSS. There's even a font CDN that can serve up your custom icon fonts. Icomoon is a tremendously helpful tool as we strive to create resolution-independent experiences.

08. Foresight.js
Bitmap images can look fuzzy on high resolution displays, but loading hi-res images can considerably bulk up page weight. Foresight.js detects device display and network connectivity in order to determine whether to load in hi-res assets or not. Keep in mind that detecting available bandwidth isn't a perfect art just yet, but this is certainly a smart way to think about conditionally serving hires assets only to users who can make use of them.

09. Detector
Feature detection and device profiling can be a tricky game. Device libraries are difficult to manage, but pure feature detection relies on client-side detection and solely relying on it can limit flexibility when delivering functionality to a broad-range of user-agents.

That's what led developer Dave Olsen to create Detector, a PHP and JavaScript-based browser and feature detection library. Using a combination of Modernizr and user agent detection to determine device classes, Detector can adapt to new devices and browsers on its own without the need to pull from a central database of browser information.

10. Enquire.js
We all know how great media queries are for CSS. But what happens when you want to also alter an experience's behaviour at certain breakpoints? Enquire.js is a script that uses matchMedia so you can conditionally load scripts, execute functions and much more when the right conditions are present.

11. SocialCount
ZURB reported that loading Facebook, Twitter and Google share widgets took 19 HTTP requests and added 246.7KB to a page's weight. Frontend engineer Zach Leatherman addressed this issue by creating a progressively-enhanced, lightweight solution called SocialCount. The script lazy loads social widgets on demand so users aren't penalised up front.

12. Fitvids
Videos and other media objects are different than images in that they don't maintain aspect ratios when resized. Besides juggling a myriad of codecs, the scaling issue creates a big challenge for serving up video to a slew of web-enabled devices. Thankfully, there are ways to create intrinsic ratios for videos. Designer Chris Coyier and the responsive mavens at Paravel created FitVids.js, a plug-in that does the heavy-lifting for you in order to serve up videos that maintain the correct aspect ratio when resized.

13. IE-friendly mobile-first CSS
We all know how amazing CSS media queries are, but unfortunately older a versions of Internet Explorer (less than 9) don't support them. Must we abandon authoring mobile-first CSS just to support old IE? No! Developers Jake Archibald and Nicolas Gallagher demonstrate how Sass (http://sass-lang.com/) can help us author mobile-first styles while simultaneously providing appropriate desktop-centric styles to old IE.

14. Ish
There's no shortage of viewport testing tools, but most of them rely on popular device widths like 320, 768, 1024 and so on. Many have long been preaching to let content — not device widths — determine breakpoints in responsive designs. So, rather than determining several fixed breakpoints, ish. Demo ish roughs out general ranges (small-ish, medium-ish, large-ish, etc) in order to ensure your design serves the entire resolution spectrum. You can also use 'Disco mode', which puts your responsive design through the ultimate stress test.

15. Proportional Media Queries
At the core of responsive design is abandoning fixed-width values and returning the web to its intrinsically fluid state. We're already making widths, font units and measurements relative, so why are we still using rigid pixel values to set our breakpoints? Developer Lyza Gardner explains how using relative units for breakpoints creates more accessible experiences.

16. MQTest.io
It can be difficult to keep track of what media queries a browser supports. Viljami Salmine created a handy little tool called MQTest.io that identifies which media queries your browser responds to. The tool gets you thinking about how to exploit lesser-used media queries.

17. Sparkbox media query bookmarklet
Sparkbox released a media query bookmarklet that determines the current media queries. You'll find that having immediate access to screen dimensions in em units is quite the time saver for determining your proportional media queries.

18. BrowserStack
It's increasingly challenging and expensive to test in a representative stack of devices, environments and browsers. While there's no substitute for testing on real devices (so please keep testing on real devices!), BrowserStack provides remote access to a whole host of devices and environments allowing you to do some serious QA. It's even touted by Microsoft as being an effective tool for testing those pesky old versions of Internet Explorer, too.

19. Mobitest
Great performance is an essential aspect of web experiences. Unfortunately, the average web page now weighs over 1MB and 86 percent of responsive sites' small screen view weighs the same as the large screen view here. With Mobitest you enter a web address and then the tool fires up the website on a real device and spits back a whole host of performance stats. You can quickly see how well your site performs by looking at its average load time, average page size and waterfall chart. Performance is an essential aspect of web design, and tools like Mobitest make it easy to see how your designs really are performing.

20. Codepen.io Pro
Codepen is an extremely easy tool to demonstrate a responsive pattern and other techniques quickly. It also comes with a lot of goodies (Sass, Less, popular JavaScript libraries) built in.

Recently Codepen released pro features, which includes a way to see the results of your code on multiple computers and devices instantly as you type. It's an amazingly powerful feature that lets you immediately see the result of your actions on real devices.

21. Adobe Edge Inspect
Testing on real devices is essential. Until recently, the process has been manual and quite painful for all involved. Adobe created a tool called Adobe Edge Inspect that allows you to auto-refresh all connected devices. It also makes it super easy to get under the hood and remotely inspect code on a remote device.

22. Remote Preview
Adobe Edge Inspect is a paid service that currently relies on apps that only work on iOS and Android devices. There's a whole host of other mobile platforms out there, including Windows Phone, Symbian, BlackBerry and more. This led Viljami Salmine to create Remote Preview, which is a simple tool that live refreshes your website on a host of devices.

23. This Is Responsive
A common question asked about 'responsive web design is' where do I go to keep up with all this stuff?' It's a legit question, especially considering how quickly the landscape and best practices change. This Is Responsive is a resource site created for three purposes. The first is to provide the latest news, inspiration, thinking and techniques around responsive web design. The second is to organize and categories a set of responsive resources. The third (and most exciting) is to collect the community's brilliant emerging responsive design patterns all under one roof.

The news section is a running list of all the content about multi-device web design. Great stuff happens in the world of responsive web design every day and, unless you're constantly refreshing your Twitter feed, you're going to miss things. The news section allows you to stay up to date on the latest thinking at your convenience.

The resources section of This Is Responsive is a categorized list of helpful resources. Smart people have written about a whole host of responsive design topics: approach, design process, grid systems, handling tricky interface conventions and much more. In case you haven't noticed, responsive web design is quite the buzzword these days, so it can be hard to separate sound resources from the noise. This Is Responsive's resource section is curated to elevate the best thinking around whatever responsive topics interest you.

The responsive patterns section is where things get exciting. When working across several responsive projects simultaneously, I noticed that each design team was trying to solve the exact same problems, but independently. With this in mind, I set out to create a implementation-neutral library of all the emerging responsive patterns that have been created by the community.

'How do I handle responsive navigation?', 'How do tables translate to small screens?', 'How do carousels work in a responsive environment?': we're all asking these questions on a regular basis. Let's pool our unique solutions together for the benefit of the whole community.

This Is Responsive is entirely open source, which means anyone can contribute a resource or pattern. Thanks to tools like Codepen (http://codepen.io) and jsFiddle (http://isfiddle.net) it's easier than ever to create a quick abstraction of a responsive pattern.

24. Compressive Images
Compressive images have larger dimensions but lower file sizes. Scaled down, they display crisply on hi-res displays. Images make up the vast majority of a web page's weight (see: http://httparchive.org/). One of the biggest challenges of responsive design is preventing sending massive images (especially those created for hi-res displays) down to users on small screens and/or poor connections.

There have been many clever approaches to responsive images, including Picturefill, @srcset and others, but they all require juggling multiple image assets and using JavaScript to swap out assets based on certain conditions. There will still be plenty of use cases where separate assets are required, but it feels like we have to jump through quite a few hoops just to serve up optimised images.

In his post Retina Revolution, Daan Jobsis found that a JPG's compression rate matters more than its dimensions when it comes to determining the asset's file size. That means we can save out JPGs with larger dimensions with higher compression rates, then simply scale the images down to the appropriate dimensions in the browser. This results in crisp-looking images (even on Retina displays), but does so without increasing file sizes.

In fact, these compressed JPGs can often weigh even less than the base image. The Filament Group did some further exploration (compressive image) and found that a compressive image can actually weigh up to half the size of its base.

No responsive image technique is perfect, and compressive images are no exception. It turns out any sort of image scaling can slow down page rendering. But this is true of any fluid image. Therefore, we should be mindful of this implication when crafting responsive experiences.

25. Sass 3.2+
Sass 3.2's ability to nest media queries makes it a powerful tool for authoring responsive CSS. There's been a shift in how we write CSS. Preprocessors like Less and Sass allow us to author powerful styles as well as helping us streamline our CSS workflow.

Many of Sass's default features are fantastic for responsive web design. For example, it's great to be able to store our breakpoint, font-size and spacing values as variables. But where Sass 3.2+ really shines is its ability to nest media queries.

Managing media query blocks has been a hassle. Do we keep our 'medium' styles in a block at the end of our stylesheet? Or do we go a step further and create separate CSS files containing our medium styles?

Either way, it ends up being redundant and we have to update rules in multiple places, which can be a nightmare for maintenance. However, Sass 3.2 introduced the ability to nest media queries within rules.

Here it is in action:

.module {
  padding: 1em;
  @media all and(min-width: $breakpointmedium) {
    float: left;
    width: 50%;
  }
}

This keeps all styles related to a particular rule in one place, so you don't have to sift through all your CSS to find every instance of .module.

Getting better We're just getting starting with all this multi-device web stuff and we're up against some significant challenges. But, as more people get on board with responsive design, we'll see even more solutions, resources and tools released to the community. There's never been a more exciting time to be creating for the web.

Latest Software: New Web Design Tools

Typeplate (Web Typoghraphy)
Design patterns for type challenges, rendered in CSS and SCSS
In the rush to work with the latest frameworks and libraries, it's easy to forget the simple fact that users don't care about clever coding. What they see is content. The sad truth is that the web often does a poor job of presenting text-based information. Typeplate takes steps to address this problem.

Billed as a 'Typographic starter kit', Typeplate provides a set of CSS and SCSS directives covering all the classic textual set-ups without being proscriptive about how or when you set them. What you have is a set of customisable solutions that prompt you to take a more hands-on approach to web typography. And eyeballs everywhere will thank you.

As a developer, it's well worth just working your way through the docs for Typeplate. When you're busy hacking away at the lavaScript coal-face, design concerns can too easily slip. That's a shame because the principles behind web typography, as expressed here, resonate with ideas that guide software design: modularity, re-usability, non-repetition and so on.

You start to realise that the need for structure extends beyond the code-base into the content and it's very often the type-setting which leads the charge on this front. The use of modular scale is a good case in point. Taking a base size, which is visually pleasing in the font you've chosen, then multiplying up and dividing down by a pleasing ratio (such as the golden mean) is a great way to introduce meaningful structure to type size, spacing and pacing.

Using Sass
The use of SASS in this project is central; its only when you condense typographic principles into rnixins and variable declarations that you see the underlying mathematical simplicity. No longer will you need to spend all day fiddling with px values just to find that things still look 'a bit off'. That said, there are no hard and fast rules. It's good to improvise, and the modular nature of Typeplate allows for this. But it gives you a baseline from which, and around which, to vary. Without that any improvisations will look messy at best.

Verdict: Typeplate considers font-size settings, colours, indentation and footnotes with an infored eye, but leaves numbers up to you.
http://typeplate.com/

Sublime Text 3 beta (Code Editors)
Long-awaited update for the popular code. Sublime Text (ST), the code editor of the moment, has just released a beta of its third incarnation.

Available to those with a licence for ST2 (registered users), the latest version is faster, has improved window management and debuts a superb set of Goto commands.

Goto commands? Glad you asked. The most impressive of the editor's new capabilities is by far the ability to search all of a project's files for the occurrence of symbols/classes, enabling you to jump directly to their definitions from any instance occurrence. This is going to be one of those things you do reflexively after a while.

There's a host of additional changes to the functionality, such as find/replace, but this appears to be a nuts and bolts upgrade. Notably with plug-ins now using Python 3.3, Sublime Text 2 plug-ins will have to be ported to maintain compatibility. This will doubtless cause a few raised eyebrows.

Verdict: A strong dev environment with IDE-like feature in an enjoyable and highly efficient text editing format. http://www.sublimetext.com

Koken (CMS)
Designers, artists and photographers are the target audience for Koken, so quite naturally the focus is on the system's easy to use content management system. Uploading, grouping, tagging, controlling access and monitoring traffic. This is a playground for anyone with content to show and tell. That may be the focus, but the free website publishing system is a well-rounded product with a decent templating engine and extensible plug-in architecture. There are a few rough edges but this is still a beta product and given that status, it's an interesting one.

Verdict: The docs are clear; tempting and plug-in development are straightforward; and there's the beginnings of a community forming. Web: www.koken.me

Typeform Beta (Web Services)
There's definitely an art to creating good forms, yet few people enjoy the job. Even fewer actually get it right. Typeform steps in to fill this deficit with a nicely devised web app, which allows you to drag and drop your questions, style the entries and monitor their use. Though still in beta, the Typeform experience is smooth and simple: drop elements into order and provide a few settings. You can choose a theme and customise the colours, but design input is kept to a minimum. It's quick to hook your form into a page to begin monitoring input.

Verdict: A few more customisation options would be nice, but the effort-saving goodness that Typeform offers is hard to resist. Web: www.typeform.com

Event spy (Dev Tools)
Getting a clear picture of the order in which things happen is an important step towards understanding and subsequently taming a web page with a glut of listeners, event triggers and associated handling code. Event Spy Lets you keep tabs on every event for which a listener is registered, as it happens, live in the Chrome developer tools panel. Great for debugging pages or understanding how an app is working, it covers dynamically attached handlers, creating a rapidly growing log of a page's relevant behaviours and the associated code.

Verdict: It'd be nice to have a filtering mechanism given the amount of interaction that causes a log entry, but this is a useful tool all the same. Web: event-spy.blogspot.co.uk

A Simple Guide to Building a Better PC

This post will discuss about building a better pc. We split them into three categories, including Budget, Ingredients, and Performace. Price based on newegg.com website. Here's the list...

#1 BUDGET

Case/PSU: Rosewill R519-8K w/500W PSU $70
Mobo: Gigabyte GA470A-UD3 ATX $100
CPU: AMD Phenom II X4 965 BE $95
Cooler: Stock AMD cooler $0
GPU: Asus Reclean HD 7770 1GB $123
RAM: 4GB (1x 4GB) Corsair Vengeance DDR3/1333 $24
SSD: Samsung 840 120GB $100
Optical Drive: Lite-On iHOS124-04 DVD/CD writer $17
Hard Drive: WD Caviar Blue 1TB $75
OS: Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit $91
Approximate Price: $695

THE BUDGET Box returns this month with a minor face-lift. We are sticking with AMD as a base platform instead of going Core i3 because an unlocked quad-core is still better than a Hyper-Threaded dual-core for multithreaded tasks, and you can over-clock this CPU, whereas the Core 13 is locked down tighter than the Lambda Research Facility after the resonance cascade. We did switch the optical drive from an HAS to an iHOS model, which sounds even sillier but is slightly cheaper. We also swapped the OCZ Vertex 3 SSD to a Samsung 840 model; we had a Vertex 3 fail in the Lab this month, making us a bit skittish about that model. Finally, we made a semi-lateral move on the hard-drive front, and replaced the perennial. favorite Seagate Barracuda 1113 with the WD Caviar Blue 1T B model since they have similar specs but the Blue is $5 less expensive.

#2 INGREDIENTS

Case: Corsair Carbide 200R $35
PSU: Corsair HX650 $100
Mobo: Asus P8277-V $183
CPU: Intel Core 15-3570K $224
Cooler: Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo $33
GPU: EVGA GTX 660 $200
RA: 8GB Patriot Gamer DOR3/1600 $39
Optical Drive: Lite-On iHOS 104-06 $24
SSD: 128GB OCZ Vertex 4 $122
Hard Drive: 1TB Seagate Barracuda $74
OS: Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit $91
Approximate Price: $1.125

WE'LL BE THE first to admit there's not a lot of movement in the midrange-CPU and -motherboard games these days. The Intel Core i5-3570K's price-to-performance chops are simply un-matched by anything coming out of AMD's labs, and it will likely remain that way for some time to come. The same goes for the Asus P8Z77-V. which is such a well-rounded board that it's almost a sphere. We did swap the GPU this month, though, downgrad-ing slightly from an Asus DirectCU II GTX 660 to an [VGA model. just because the EVGA is $35 less expensive, and we are confident that it's almost as quiet as the Asus model. On the 550 front, we took a long, hard look at our Samsung 840 model and decided to toss it in the bin in favor of the faster OCZ Vertex 4. We feel the vanilla 840 model is more suited to budget builds than it is to more performance-oriented machines, such as the Baseline.

#3 PERFORMANCE

Case: NZXT Phantom 630 $180
PSU: Corsair HX750 $120
Mobo: Asus Sabertooth X79 $322
CPU: Intel Core i7-3820 $290
Cooler: NZXT Kraken X40 $85
GPU: XFX Radeon HD 7970 GHz $400
RAM: 16GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3/1600 $91
Optical Drive: Asus BW-12B1ST $60
SSD: Samsung 840 Pro 256GB $226
Hard Drive: 3TB Seagate Barracuda $138
OS: Windows 7 Professional 64-bit $135
Approximate Price: $2,047

BAD NEWS, TWEEPS: The Performance rig's price tag was inflated this month by $72, but such is the price of progress. Were stilt rocking the sharp-fanged Asus Sabertooth X79 motherboard and the Core 17-3820 CPU, but we dropped them both into the luscious NZXT Phantom 630 chassis simply because it offers a lot more square footage than the previous abode—the Thermattake New Soprano—and it uses a 14cm rear exhaust fan. The second point is crucial, since it also let us upgrade our CPU cooler from the still-excellent Corsair H80i water cooler to the slightly quieter and ass-kickier NZXT Kraken X40. The Phantom 630 also gives us the option of installing a double radiator at some point in the near future, and we like having room for expansion.

Another key upgrade made this month was in the GPU de-partment, where we finally have team AMD holding it down with the Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition from XFX. We chose this card because it was less expensive than the GTX 670 while perform-ing slightly better, and as of press time it came with two free games—Crysis 3 and BioShock Infinite, so the deal was too good to pass up. Lastly, we swapped the OCZ Vector 256GB SSD for the Samsung 840 Pro 256GB because they are very close in perfor-mance and the Sammy is $25 less expensive.

10 Antivirus Tested: Which One Is Yours?

Every year, antivirus vendors paint the same gloom-and-doom portrait, their canvases filled with startling statistics outlining the rapid spread of malware. As a consumer, the natural reaction is to look at these reports with a fistful of salt and a sack of skepticism—after all, AV vendors have a vested interest in promoting a need for security software, but are we really as vulnerable as they say? It all depends on your computing habits, but make no mistake, the web is a dangerous place to roam. We've seen firsthand what a malware-infected PC looks like; it isn't pretty. Today's malware strains not only slow down your PC and bombard you with pop-ups, they can also capture your keystrokes and send your bank login information to a cybercriminal thousands of miles away. An innocent mouse click on the wrong URL is all it takes to set the wheels in motion, and the next thing you know, someone else is using your identity to open up a credit card account. Not cool. Careful computing is your best line of defense, but sometimes ifs not enough. Security software adds another layer of protection, which is why we run an antivirus roundup each year.


BitDefender: Total Security 2013
$80 (3 PCs, 1 Year) www.bitdefender.com

Far and away our favorite feature of BitDef ender is its Autopilot mode, which ought to be called -Shut Up and Leave Me Atone" mode. When engaged, BilDefender's autopilot steps in as if to say, "I've got this, you just go about your business." and as you do what-ever it is you do on your PC, any and all security-related decisions that need to be made are handled silently in the background.

This feature alone is a godsend if you're the designated IT guy for friends and family members—no more late-night calls about security pop-ups or, even worse, messed up machines because your mother-in-law granted permission to a dirty download even though a security warning advised against it.

It also requires a fair amount of trust. which BilDefender earned as we did our best to break down its defenses. There wasn't much that BilDef ender didn't recognize right of f the bat as malicious, and the few dirty downloads it didn't immediately iden-tify were thwarted by its cloud-based definitions. Malware stands little chance, though it comes at a small cost.

There's the price of the security suite itself, but you'll also pay in performance. Our 6GB file transfer test took 11 seconds lon-ger to perform with BitDefender installed, which translates into roughly a 10 percent performance hit. Both PCMark scores suf-fered slightly, though oddly enough, there was no increase in boot time. Scanning was also a mixed bag, with an initial sweep taking over half an hour, but reducing to less than four minutes during subsequent runs.

The performance hiccups aren't enough to sour us on BitDe-fender. It offers a tough veil of protection that's unobtrusive, and value-added features like a virtual keyboard for shopping sites, online storage, and a vulnerability scan that detects out-of-date software add to the overall package.

Trend Micro Maximum Security
$90 (3 Pcs, 1 Year) www.trendmicro.com

It's been there long years since we last reviewed Trend Micro, having exiled the program from our annual AV roundups for its particularly poor showing back then. We don't hold grudges, however, and apparently neither do the Maximum PC readers who voted Trend Micro into this year's AV cage match. Have things changed since then?

They most certainly have. Whereas the old Trend Micro cow-ered in the corner when we unleashed a flurry of ma lware, the latest version threw itself in harm's way and made sure noth-ing outwardly awful infiltrated our test bed. Malware was able to sneak in by hiding in zip files, but they were quickly beheaded as soon as they stuck out their necks. As an extra precaution, we recommend enabling real-time scanning of compressed files, an option that's not checked by default.

Independent testing labs generally gave Trend Micro high scores, so between their tests and ours we're much more confident in TM's ability to hold the fort when danger comes knocking. It's also a good choice if you spend a lot of time on social networks. Trend Micro ex-panded the number of social networks it scans for dangerous links to now include Google+, Linkedln, Pinterest, and Sina Weibo, in addition to Facebook, Twitter, and Mixi. There's also a -Privacy Scanner" for Facebook that analyzes your settings and makes recommendations.

Not all is roses and rainbows, however. Trend Micro's active scanner had the biggest negative impact on our file-transfer test, which took nearly 50 percent longer versus a clean install. Were also disappointed Trend Micro doesn't offer more fine-grain control over its settings. Part of the reason is because there's no built-in firewall, just a -firewall booster- feature that aides the Windows firewall. Overall, Trend Micro is leaps and bounds better than three years ago, but there's stilt room for improvement.

McAfee Internet Security 2013
$80 (3Pcs, 1 Year), http://www.mcafee.com/us/

For better or worse, reputations are hard to shed, and some folks still view McAfee as a gas-guzzling dump truck parked out on the front lawn, oftentimes uninvited. OEMs like to bundle McAfee with other trialware on new systems, a two-way relationship that also benefits McAfee, albeit at the expense of street cred. And then there's the recent drama surrounding company co-founder John McAfee, who faked a heart attack to evade Belizean authorities (it's a long, bizarre story that's worth a Google search).

None of that really matters as far as we're concerned, because the reality of how a product performs far outweighs the perception of the masses. So, how did McAfee perform? Like a roller coaster with several ups and a few downs.

This year's build is redesigned with a touch-friendly tiled interface that's obviously geared toward Windows 8 users, though it functions just fine with a mouse and keyboard and on Windows. AU the main functions sit front and center, and it doesn't take much effort to dig beneath the surface to where the advanced controls are located.

When surfing shady websites, McAfee did a good job blocking most malicious downloads, though it did let a few dirty files reach the desktop. Most that touched ground were quickly put under lock and key, but a few slipped through, including a file identified as a keygen by Malwarebytes. System performance was another mixed bag. McAfee didn't affect our test bed's boot time, nor did it bog down our PCMark 7 benchmark run. PCMark Vantage, on the other hand, scored 1,700 points lower. Subjectively, the system didn't feel sluggish with McAfee installed, which hasn't always been the case.

We can't say whether power users are ready to forgive McAfee for past sins, but as it stands, its an above-average scanner filled with features.

ESET Smart Security 6
$60 (1 PC, 1 Year) www.eset.com

ESET Smart Security 6's Dashboard is largely unchanged from versions Land 5 in appearance. It consists of a main window with a handful of navigational prompts in the left-hand pane includ-ing Home. Computer scan, Update, Setup, Tools, Help and sup-port, and Training. The main window changes as you click through each one but the left-hand pane never does, making navigation a breeze. If you find yourself knee-deep in an advanced setting and want to hightail it out of there, just click on Home or any of the other headings.

There's nothing flashy about ESET's interface. It hasn't been modernized for Windows 8 or touchscreen displays, or for 2013 in general, and you can't customize the layout or upload your own background image a la Trend Micro. Dig beneath the surface, however, and you'll uncover a gold mine of options. In the Setup screen, for example, there are headings for Computer, Network, Web and email, and Parental control, and each of those have their own subheadings that you can, at minimum, enable or disable. In addition to all that, there's an advanced setup screen accessible via a link at the bottom of the window. Less-savvy users will find the sheer depth of settings overwhelming, and even advanced us-ers might lose track of everything they tweaked. If you're setting up ESET for multiple clients, you can export and import configura-tions to save time.

We dinged the program last year for letting a few nasty contain-ments through, a rare misstep for a program that's collected a dozen straight VB100 awards from Virus Bulletin in the past two years. It fared much better in our tests this time around. Bundled with the latest version is a Social Media Scanner that combs your Facebook profile for infected content. It's also avail-able as a free download, so that alone isn't enough to tip the scales in ESET's favor. There are plenty of other toots, however, such as parental controls and, new to this release, anti-theft features that can help you locate a lost or stolen mobile device. If someone swipes your laptop, you can engage the webcam. track its loca-tion, or initiate a Phantom Account so that your real account—and all your personal data—is hidden from the thief. You can even send a message, such as -Reward if found.- A slow on-demand scanner and an aging interface are all that prevent ESET from earning a Kick Ass award.

Kaspersky Internet Security 2013
$80 (3 Pcs, 1 Year) www.kaspersky.com

Last year's overhaul gave birth to an interface designed for touch, a theme that's been carried over to the 2013 release, which is a near carbon copy. Intact. our entire experience with MIS 2013 gave us a serious sense of déjà vu.

Familiarity kicked in when we were once again duped by what at first appeared lobe a subsonic installation routine, only to find ourselves mired in an unusually long update process that took north of 10 minutes on a high-speed connection. Subsequent definition updates zip through cyberspace at a much faster pace.

Also like previous versions, Kaspersky's scan engine sprints to the finish line, especially after performing an initial sweep. Our first full scan took 14 minutes and 26 seconds, and a second scan shaved 13 minutes off that time by skipping over files that hadn't changed.

The similarities continue. Once again, Kaspersky watched us download several contaminated files to the desktop before springing into action, whereas some of the other AV programs would cut off the same downloads before they could finish. To its credit. Kaspersky neutralized almost every threat and its track record among independent testing laboratories is very good; it even earned a Product of the Year award from AV-Comparatives.

Brand-new to MIS 2013 is a feature called Safe Run that's de-signed to protect your online banking sessions. Safe Run detects when you navigate to a popular payment service like PayPal or a banking website and opens up a protected browser to isolate your transaction. You can also use a virtual keyboard as an additional layer of protection (from keyloggers).
White the Safe Run feature is unique. Kaspersky hasn't yet jumped on the social-media bandwagon like some of the other programs. Still, it's a fleshed-out and polished security solution that's tough on malware.

ZoneAlarm Internet Security 2013
$80 (3 Pcs, 1 year) www.zonealarm.com

Before windows got its act together, it was imperative to down-load a third-party firewall to keep the bad guys at bay, and Zone-Alarm was often at the top of the list. The firewaLl in Windows is much improved these days, and if you're sitting behind a router, you're further protected against malicious inbound traffic. Does that render ZoneAlarm obsolete?
Not as far as we're concerned. Like the ones included in other advanced security suites, ZoneAtarm's firewall offers more so-phisticated protection and is able to sniff out mischievous code trying to sneak its way in or out) by masquerading as a Legitimate program. We also give ZoneAlarm credit for hushing its firewall, which is much better about making security-minded decisions in the background rather than bombarding the user with pop-ups.

Here's the thing: Even if all. you have is a ball of Lint in your pocket, you can afford ZoneAtarm's free antivirus 4- firewall com-bination, which has many of the same features as the $80 suite reviewed here. Should you decide to plunge into paid territory, the only extras are 24/7 technical support, parental controls, spam controls, and automatic hourly signature updates.

Let's backtrack a moment and talk about AV performance. ZoneAlarm wouldn't tell us which company it licenses its scan en-gine from, though we believe it's still Kaspersky, which the com-pany confirmed several years ago. The initial definition update was just as pokey as Kaspersky, and we also noticed similarities in how downloads are able to reach the desktop before they're neutralized. Scanning our test bed was nearly as quick, too.

ZoneAlarm also includes identity protection. Facebook priva-cy scanning, advanced do-not-track controls, and SOB of online backup. to a welt-rounded feature-set. and it's all available in the free version, too. There's just not enough added value to recom-mend the paid suite.

Norton Internet Security
$80 (3 PCs, 1 Year) www.norton.com

We said that if Symantec ever removes Norton's real-time (and real hokey) Threat Map from the Ul, we won't have anything left to piss and moan about. Well, guess what? Symantec finally got rid of the useless Threat Map, which displayed hotspots of AV activity around the world, and wouldn't you know it, we're fresh out of complaints.

That doesn't mean we can't nitpick. At nearly 24-and-a-half minutes for an initial sweep of our test bed and a little over 10 minutes for a subsequent scan. Norton finds itself a few car lengths behind pole position in this roundup. And as Long as we're pick ing nits, we're a bit disappointed Norton still hasn't ad-opted a virtual keyboard as an added layer of protection against keyloggers. which would come in handy when signing into bank-ing sites. Oh, and it's not free.

Big whoop—our manufactured reprimands notwithstanding, Norton Internet Security (NISI is the total package. Notice we left out the year from the product name. That's because Symantec dropped the annual label and has promised to push out new prod-uct and feature updates throughout the year so that you always have the latest version, so long as your subscription is current.

On the surface, NIS Looks similar to Last year's release, minus the Threat Map and with Larger tiles on the main screen. Between automatic background scansand pulse updates that are doled out every five to 15 minutes, there's really no reason to bring up the interlace, unless you want to check how many days are remaining on your subscription or need to adjust advanced settings. In case of the Latter. Norton allows you to dig as deep as you want to go.

Symantec is constantly improving its SONAR technology, which analyzes how programs behave to determine if they pose a threat. It also takes into account how old a file is and how many other Norton users have downloaded it. This can be problematic for inexperienced developers learning the ropes of clean code, though SONAR is easily disabled. In most cases, we recommend leaving it on and letting it zap potential threats.

Speaking of which, NIS pounces on poisonous downloads like a fumbled football. That is, it it doesn't block the offending site first. On top of it all, Norton had the least impact on system per-formance out of all the paid suites.

Avast Free Antivirus Version 7
Free www.avast.com

For some, a paid security suite is a luxury that just doesn't fit within the budget. Luckily, there are programs like Avast you can enlist as your PC's personal bodyguard for nothing in return.

Well, that's not entirely true. Avast requires a modicum of system resources to work its mojo, and though its free to install, Avast frequently tries to sway you into purchasing ad-ditional protection. It starts during the installation scheme, and again you're encouraged to upgrade to a paid package when you fill out the registration form, which you have to do within 30 days for it to continue working. On top of it all, there's a persistent banner ad integrated into Avast's main menu.

Should you remain steadfast in your conviction to save your money, you won't be the worse for wear since the free version takes security just as seriously as its paid brethren. The level of fine-grain control is almost dizzying, and one setting we recom-mend checking right off the bat is to scan for potentially unwanted programs (PUPs).

Avast usually scores high marks from independent testing labs, and we can see why. It's very good at sniffing out hidden dangers, and when we were finished stepping on virtual land-mines, Avast mitigated the damage, leaving just a few harmless remnants behind. Only Norton blocked more malware.

Avast automatically shoves suspicious programs into a sand-box, thereby isolating them from the OS. Unfortunately, you can't invoke the sandbox at wilt, nor will you find a firewall or antispam controls, features that are reserved for the Pro version.

Unique to Avast is a remote assistance tool. If you (or your parentsi run into a jam, you can share a special code with an-other Avast user to open up a remote support session similar to programs like Log Mein—nifty!

Microsoft Security Essentials 4.1
Free, www.microsoft.com

Move along, Windows 8 users, there's nothing for you to see here. Windows 8 already has its own built-in antivirus solution called Windows Defender, which acts more like MSE than like Windows Defender on older versions of Windows, Microsoft claims.

If you're rocking Windows 7 or earlier, MSE offers more robust protection than Windows Defender, and it's free to boot. But it's also somewhat limited in scope compared to its freebie competitors. There are just a handful of settings to play with, such as enabling/ disabling real-time protection and setting up file-type exclusions. You can also schedule an automatic scan and (optionally) allocate CPU usage from 10-100 percent in 10 percent increments (50 per-cent is the default settingl. Beyond those controls, micromanagers will quickly grow bored.

MSE wielded one of the lowest system footprints of all the an-tivirus solutions we tested. It had virtually no impact on PCMark and only added a few seconds to our 6GB file transfer test. That's impressive, but lest Microsoft pull a muscle patting itself on the back, MSE's scan engine ran abysmally slow in our tests. It took over an hour to sweep our hard drive, more than twice as long as the next-slowest contender, and even a subsequent scan took a comparatively lengthy 25 minutes to complete.

So the scan engine is slow, but is it methodical? That's a bit hard-er to assess. MSE was recently criticized for failing to receive cer-tification from AV-Test.org, though Microsoft contends that 0.0033 percent of MSE users -were impacted by malware samples riot de-tected during the test.- Other labs rate MSE favorably, though in our own tests, MSE was average, blocking most dirty downloads but also letting a few malicious programs write to the registry.

MSE passes muster for low-risk users, but there are better AV solutions.

AVG Antivirus Free 2013
Free, http://free.avg.com

You know that long-distance friend of yours who looks drastically different every time you meet up? If he were an antivirus program, he'd be AVG, which once again is sporting a new style. This latest version is clearly influenced by Windows 8, though the tiled inter-face only runs skin-deep. Once you click (or touch l through to the advanced settings, the tiles disappear and a new two-pane win-dow pops up with categories on the left-hand side and checkboxes shoveled to the right.

There are plenty of options to keep you busy, and like last year's release, you can upload custom sounds and attach them to specific events. One thing we found annoying is that a few of the settings are ploys to upsell AVG's paid security software, and it's not always clear at first glance. For example, one of the main tiles reads Fix Performance, yet there's nothing to indicate it's not included in the free version until after it's finished analyzing your system for regis-try errors and other potentially performance-hobbling cruft.

For anyone paranoid about privacy, the Do Not Track feature integrated into AVG's browser toolbar tattles on websites and ad-vertisers trying to collect data about your online activity. It works with 1E, Chrome, and Firefox. There's also an Identity Alert feature !not to be confused with Identity Protection, which AVG uses to de-scribe behavior-based scanning], but that's another paid extra.

Large file transfers are noticeably slower with AVG installed, though not much else gets bogged down. Scan times were among the fastest, and though we were able to overwhelm AVG's defenses with dirty downloads, it defused most of the payloads, and was es-pecially adept at blocking browser exploits. Out of the three free AV contenders, Avast offers the best bal-ance of performance and features; AVG is a close second.

GeForce GTX Titan: SuperGaming Graphics Card

So, Skynet's amygdala is here in the form of Nvidia's new appropriately titled Titan. It's big and beefy in the sense that a cow is large and constitutes tender moist burger meat, only a cow doesn't run Crysis quite as fast.

Perhaps, as has been suggested by some pundits, the Titan may in fact be too fast. The main stickler apparently being that 7.1 billion transistors and 2688 stream processors is more than any mere mortal needs.

Well, I say the following not because this is PCETTA, but because to me this is common sense: what a load of bull (just to continue the theme).


Yes, the Titan is Nvidia's fastest GPU to date and yes reading its specs is a form of geek porn. But the way I see it, it's barely adequate.

Are you mad Ashton? Why yes I am, but that's beside the point -- we play today with high resolutions, where 1080p is standard and 2560x1440 is taking off; we play with 3D and 120 Hz displays, where 120fps needs to be pushed in 1080p and up; we play with Surround and Eyefinity, driving three monitors as high as 7680x1080 (or more for 16:10 users); and this is to say nothing of AA -- there's a reason FXAA and SMAA have become so important in recent times: no card can run high resolution and high-level MSAA consistently in all games, it's just too computationally expensive By way of example Crysis 2 - a good benchmark of current-gen tech if there is one - uses a mixture of depth of field, post processing and its own temporal-AA to more hide jaggies rather than smooth them out because no card handle it all. Not even the Titan.

This is to say nothing of its 6GB of VRAM which, on one site I read, described this as 'excessive'. Really? That's at best short-sighted, and at worst just wrong. Again with Crysis 2, it breaks the 2GB VRAM barrier of your standard GTX 680 -- the current flagship -- with the official high-res pack installed. A high-res pack, it's worth noting, that represents what_you should be seeing if Titan-class cards were standard two years ago. High-res packs for a game aren't a bonus addon: the textures are often already there in development, then downscaled because hardware can't keep up. You only have to look at games like Skyrim with all the bells on and texture mods hitting close to 4GB here and now, so what do we think the next few years will bring? Of course, multi-GPU users will say if one Titan is not enough you can always SLI or Crossfire, but considering you'll need to mortgage your Nan just to buy one this isn't exactly practical for most people. Which also only serves to highlight how less this, or any card for that matter, becomes if you need two or more to get what fairly I would consider to be a typical gaming goal: to play the latest game with all the bells and whistles, at decent resolution (1080p, but preferably higher), high framerate (120 if you're lucky), and with good AA. Some game engines do allow you to do this, usually older ones. They're less complex and thus faster, if not as pretty. But for tomorrow's games, games that come out this year, the Titan will be just adequate, depending on what you want to play and how you play.

I must be hard to please, I know, but I'd like the hardware to catch up to the software and displays we're using today. I'm looking higher, to whatever's coming next.

http://www.nvidia.com/titan-graphics-card

The Real Texas Review

It's by no means a coincidence that the majority of The Real Texas takes place in a town called Strange. Strange is really the only concise way in which this indie adventure can be described, and we're not just talking about the crude, yet peculiarly appealing, visuals.

For starters, there is the completely nonsensical plot. In short, you are an American holidaying in England only to discover your lodgings are abandoned, populated by ghosts and harbouring a portal to the western-inspired world of Strange, Texas.

And that's pretty much it, at least to start. The Real Texas is an obtuse game with very little in the way of hand-holding. You are given two key quests the minute you land within Strange, but beyond some vague direction as to location, you're left on your own to make your way.

The game describes itself as a mix between The Legend of Zelda and Ultima VI, and it is a worthwhile comparison. Like Zelda, you explore a large overworld filled with characters to interact with, enemies to fight and dungeons to explore. The Ultima VI comparison arrives by way of the conversation system which joyfully apes the 'name, job, bye conventions of Origin's popular series.

This means of interaction is one of the game's most delightful elements. Conversations can be progressed simply by clicking on topics as they come up in conversation, but a text parser also allows for non-signposted actions, often to great comic effect. It is entirely possible to kick someone mid-conversation if you so choose.



Combat fares a little less favourably thanks to an archaic 'move, shoot, but not both' approach to the game's more violent interactions. It is not terrible, but having to stop, draw your weapon and then start shooting feels unintuitive. More upsetting are stun attacks that many enemies unleash which can get you locked in seemingly endless juggle states until you die.

But it's in the exploration of the environment, and the uncovering the game's strange plot, that The Real Texas finds its appeal. The game is delightfully, and irreverently, wacky. But the odd humour never feels forced, and the narrative quickly grows on you. Even the puzzles peppered throughout the landscape provide ample opportunity for the game to flex its weird muscles.

And ultimately it is this taste for the strange that will determine what you get out of this game. Thanks to some ambiguous progression tracking, and a plot that wastes no time in bringing the odd, your first few hours are likely to bemuse more than delight. But stick with it. There is the sense you are playing a deeply personal title when you play The Real Texas. This is a game with definite heart and talent behind it. It's got its fair share of mechanical, interface and even pacing issues, but excellent writing and a flair for the unusual will undoubtedly muster a significant fan following amongst those who stick with it. A flawed and somewhat unusual gem.

Developer: Kitty Lambda Games
Publisher: Kitty Lambda Games
Price: $14.65
Web: therealtexasgame.com

Teleglitch for PC Review

Pixelated though it may be, Teleglitch nevertheless manages to evoke the specific theme it's going for: crazy-tense survival horror in a 2D, top-down plane. Think of it as a combination of Hotline Miami, The Binding of Isaac and Doom. You're the sole survivor of a terrible teleportation-related accident in a military-industrial space colony and you need to get the hell out. Supplies are limited and enemies are not. You will die, and die often.

Like Hotline Miami, combat is fast and ferocious, though not quite one-hit-kill deadly. But the general scarcity of supplies - ammunition and healing items - means that every little wound is something to worry about. Oh, and Teleglitch subscribes to the permadeath school of game design - if you die before reaching certain (long-term, far away) checkpoints, you'll just have to restart from the very beginning.


Items can be combined to create improvised gear like nailguns and automatic pistols, but using up currently-useful items to create potentially-useful items might be an exercise in folly. Levels are randomly generated but are directed enough to maintain a good sense of flow; the random luck element in terms of finding enemies and items can be alternately maddening and euphoric. Enemies are absolute jerks, comprised mainly of varying forms of raving lunatics who run after you with astounding speed and unpredictable evasion patterns. Without something like Hotline Miami's lock-on, you'll find yourself backpedalling down long corridors trying to be as accurate as humanly possible. Ammo wasted is, well, ammo wasted, but knifing dudes is astoundingly difficult with your limited range.

Teleglitch trailer


There's a wealth of fairly well-written text archives on offer if you care much about the story, and it's kind of cool in a Doom-meets-Aliens way. But the most compelling part of the experience is the sensation it evokes of being lost and alone in a hostile landscape, scavenging and combining items to survive, desperate for a chest of ammunition or explosives and flipping out when you open a door and two dozen raving madmen pour out. There's no music, but the sound design is fantastic - the crunch of being hit or the meaty boom of a shotgun, the shrill cries of the sci-fi reanimated dead or the reality-warping noise of a hole in space-time - all of these contribute to the palpable sense of tension.

In fact, Teleglitch's primary problem might that it is a little too brutal. Not in the sense simply that you'll die a lot - that's, you know, expected of these kinds of games - but simply that playthroughs might end up lasting an hour or more. It's all desperately earned progress, but you can't save your game - not even in a form that deletes the save file after you load it again. Slog on until the checkpoints, we suppose, and pray for a merciful God/Random Number Generator (cross out whichever is inappropriate).

Developer: Tael Brothers
Publisher: Tael Brothers
Price: $13
Web: teleglitch.com