STORAGE

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...

For the last several years my wife and I have relied on tax professionals to handle our yearly tax prep. We do this not because our tax returns are overly complicated, but because of a particularly stupid and obvious tax mistake several years ago (no, you cannot claim both mileage and expenses on a vehicle when you own a business). We had the “pleasure” of an IRS audit. We made an honest mistake, but it was not an experience that we found all that enjoyable. A tax professional offered the benefit of someone far smarter than us who was able to make sure we got every tax benefit without the obvious downside of accidentally taking more tax credits than we were due. What I’ve noticed more recently, though, is that the professionals who used to take my year-end paperwork and enter it by hand were now using tax prep programs similar to H&R Block At Home to complete my taxes. Suddenly, those $300 tax prep sessions seemed less valuable. read more...

As I mentioned earlier in the Ice Cream Sandwich section, if you want a ROM that doesn't look like stock Android, MIUI is a good choice for you. I find it too much like iOS, but I flashed it and gave it a try all the same. read more...