TechRadar UK Blogs: Editor's Blog

So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, goodbye; it's been a period of exits for Microsoft with the retirement of founder Bill Gates and now the uber-successful operating system Windows XP finally reaching its cut-off point.

And yet, unlike other Windows versions which have tailed away into oblivion, XP – far from fading away – has enjoyed a burst of popularity in what many thought would be its swansong.

I've already written hundreds of words on why that is; the failure of Vista to catch the public imagination and the proliferation of low-powered, low-cost sub-notebooks, but I suppose in all of that I haven't really focused on the most obvious thing.

The vast majority of people are happy with XP.

Foibles

Oh they hate all the foibles that the average technophile can list ad nauseum, and one look at an alternative might well make an impact on their opinions.

But for Joe Q Public XP does enough. It lets them look at the internet, do some word processing, have a gander at their photos or video clips. In short – without anything to compare it against since their last version of Windows, XP more than suffices.

I think as tech writers, and perhaps it's true of our audience as well, we sometimes get sucked into believing that everyone knows the qualities of Leopard, the openness and promise of Linux and the failings of XP.

I also think that technophiles – by and large – give very short shrift to the industry's 300 pound gorilla. It goes a long way to explaining the widespread glee over Vista's failure to become as stellar as Microsoft had hoped.

So while we often get dragged into that most heinous of journalistic crimes – assuming knowledge from our readers – we are aware that not everybody knows that SP2 was a virtual ground-up rewrite of XP or that key features have been appropriated.

Lies, damn lies and...

But to put things in perspective – although statistically, we have a lot more users of Linux and OS X than more mainstream and less tech-focused sites – the overwhelming majority of our traffic is from XP users.

A healthy percentage of that is work users who do not choose the OS that their business goes for, but there is a large amount who actively prefer Windows.

I still use Windows XP on my own home PC – it's, for me, a gamer, the easy choice and, although I'm aware of its problems, it more-than suffices.

Going forward – maybe that will change.

I've always been a big fan of Creative's Zen MP3 players. Back in the early 2000's, the NOMAD Jukebox range of Zen players were setting the bar in a very youthful MP3 player market.

However, since the brilliant Creative Zen vision M was released in 2005, the company seems to have lost its way somewhat. The new ZEN player hasn't been the roaring success Creative hoped it would be – it's just not as good as the iPod nano.

Extreme audio

However, I think (or more accurately, I hope) that things are about to change. Because while looks, interface and build quality are all important factors for an MP3 player, there's one feature which often gets overlooked… sound quality.

A lot of MP3 players produce a far from inspiring sound. In fact I'll stick my neck out and say that most of those products sound absolutely terrible. That's partly because MP3's are, by their very nature, mutilated versions of formerly awesome-sounding uncompressed audio.

Battery problems

But it's also because the audio chips inside a lot of the players aren't up to the job. They can't decode the music properly, and often you get a muddy, yucky mess clogging up your ears instead of wonderfully smooth, soothing soundwaves. For some people this doesn't matter – they use the terrible earphones that usually come bundled with the players.

But for those people with a more refined ear, and who like to listen with some quality headphones/earphones – a higher standard of audio is needed. And that's where the Creative Zen X-Fi will step in.

Equipped with Creative's awesome new X-Fi (extreme fidelity) chip, the new Creative MP3 player will be able to 'upscale' the bitrate of MP3 music files by restoring the highs (e.g. cymbal crashes) and lows (e.g. bass) that are eliminated when music is compressed.

Creative calls it X-Fi crystallisation. The rumour is that to go with this vastly improved audio quality, the player will come with a pair of decent earphones so you'll really be able to hear the difference.

A bright future?

The reason it's taken so long to develop this tech for portable devices is simple: the processing power involved uses lots of power. So over the last few years, Creative has been trying to work around these battery life issues – it would appear as though it's finally cracked it.

And suddenly, in the blink of an eye, Creative has a unique selling point which gives it a chance to claw back some marketshare from Apple. If you want the best looking MP3 player, you'll still buy an iPod.

But when this new player launches, if you want the best sounding one (and remember, most of the time the player just sits out of sight in your pocket) the new Creative Zen X-Fi might well be the one to get.

When it comes to the titans of the computing industry there is one name firmly at the top of any list and that is Bill Gates. Today the man is stepping away from his role at Microsoft to focus on his charity work.

Gates' incredible impact on the industry he fell in love with in its infancy cannot be understated. His MS DOS played a huge role in bringing the PC into every home, his Windows OS became synonymous with home computing and programmes like Instant Messenger, Internet Explorer, Word and Excel are still dominant in their specific areas.

And yet this success and Microsoft's occasionally heavy handed business tactics have served to make the company unpopular with the very community that first embraced it, and Gates' retirement coincides with perhaps the toughest period in the Redmond-based firm's history.

Vista

Vista has sold in the millions and yet it lacks the popularity that made XP such a roaring success. This week brought the news that long-term partner Intel won't be putting the flagship OS on its own company PCs and Microsoft's shift to promoting its successor Windows 7, while extending support for XP, hints at a company that knows it has fired a blank.

Equally, the high-profile but ultimately unsuccessful bid for Yahoo illustrates Microsoft's realisation that its web strategy is failing in the harsh light of industry leader Google. Ironically, Google's internet search and advertising hegemony is comparable with that of Windows in the OS market.

So Gates' exit is not whilst his company is on a high. Microsoft remains a fearsomely powerful force in computing, but is its empire on the wane? What is clear is that Gates' departure does rid Microsoft of its emperor and figure head.

It remains to be seen who can fill that vacuum – and if they can arrest Microsoft's slide.

It's been a long time coming. NVIDIA has ruled the graphics market for quite a long time now. Its 8-series graphics cards, led by the GeForce 8800 ULTRA, were untouchable on both performance and price.

ATI didn't know what had hit it. Its parent company, AMD, was being pummelled by Intel in the CPU market. And it was being pulverized by NVIDIA on the GPU side of things.

But all of that looks like it might be about to change. ATI has been threatening to make a big comeback for a while – the Radeon 3850 is a very powerful card. But things have taken a step forward this week. Not only have NVIDIA's 9800 cards been an epic disappointment, but ATI is now producing some kick-ass cards of its own.

Radeon 4850 is brilliant

ATI released its new Radeon 4800 series cards today; we've been playing with the 4850 model for a few days now. And frankly, it's absolutely brilliant.

Just when we thought ATI was content with playing second-fiddle to NVIDIA, it springs a new product range which competes favourably with Nvidia's latest offerings in terms of performance, while blowing NVIDIA out of the water on price.

At £130, the ATI Radeon 4850 is an absolute steal. And there's more to come, too.

Radeon 4870 threatens greatness

Our unit of the high-end Radeon 4870 is arriving tomorrow and the early signs are that this could be the one that truly sets a new benchmark in terms of price and performance combined.

The most powerful card on the market right now is the recently-launched NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280. However, we reckon the 4870 will get to within 80% of the 280's performance while costing half the price. Sounds pretty good, huh?

Tune in tomorrow for our review of the GeForce GTX 280, and we'll also be reviewing the 4870 early next week.

But in the meantime, feast your eyes on our full review of the stunningly good ATI Radeon 4850.

Nvidia's fastest ever graphics card, the Zotac-built GeForce GTX 280 AMP went on sale today. It's causing a bit of a stir at the moment, throughout the industry and not least in the TechRadar office.

We're currently benchmarking the overclocked GeForce GTX 280 AMP card and we'll have a definitive review for you on Thursday.

However, that's not the only juicy graphics-related review we've got coming up. We've also got our mits on some very early samples of ATI's 4800-series cards including the Radeon 4850 and 4870.

We can't tell you anything about them yet – even the names are supposed to be a secret – but rest assured we'll be publishing some exciting reviews over the next few days.

We'll also be running a head-to-head feature which pits the nVidia and ATI cards against each other, to decide which is the best.

The GeForce 9-series was disappointing to say the least, so let's hope this new generation of cards gives us something to cheer about.