Recent Reference reviews

Intel's Sandy Bridge architecture stole the limelight this year, summarily trouncing its predecessors, and the best that AMD had to offer, with considerable performance boosts and power savings. Today, Intel is announcing the Sandy Bridge Extreme Edition, an £800 CPU that distills the lessons the company has learned over the past year into a single piece of premium silicon. read more...

Fusion 4 is the newest version of VMware's virtualisation solution for the Mac, which allows you to run multiple operating systems within Mac OS X. Since we reviewed Fusion 3, VMWare has added support for Lion and the ability to create OS X Lion virtual machines, reduced the consumption of system resources to zero when you aren't running a virtual machine, redesigned the settings window, and much more. read more...

New 16-core AMD Opteron 6200-series CPUs in the Dell R715 bring huge bang for the buck to wide virtualization workloads, but not until your OS supports it read more...

Here's a question most of us can probably answer, at least approximately: How many hours do you spend in front of your computer every week? But here's a trickier one: How much of that time do you spend doing productive work, and how much of it do you spend watching cat videos? RescueTime ($9 per month) is an online service that tries to answer this question, and sometimes even succeeds. read more...

With the demise of MobileMe upon us, you’ll need to come up with a new backup solution if this Apple service is your current backup method of choice. If you’re a fan of online, cloud-based backups, then CrashPlan is one to consider. read more...