Can a budget card make you happy?

Can you get great gaming performance for $99? That’s the burning question we wanted to answer when the XFX Radeon HD 5670 arrived. The version we tested, with 512MB of GDDR5, can be found for just under a hundred buckazoids on the web. The other question: How well does it stack up against a similarly priced Nvidia card?

Like other Radeon 5000 series GPUs, the 5670 chip is built on a 40nm manufacturing process. For those still trying to wrap their heads around the huge size of the Radeon HD 5970, the 5670 is a mere 6.5 inches long, occupies just a single PCI-E slot, and has no requirements for a power connector. The two cards, of course, are not in the same class.

XFX's Radeon HD 5670 delivers DirectX 11 on a budget.

The HD 5670 has half the stream processors, texture units, and ROPs of the Radeon HD 5770. The GPU core is also clocked lower, as is the GDDR5 memory. With these specs, we expected something to give when running games. Sure enough, when we tried running modern games at 1680x1050 at high detail, the frame rates were unacceptable. Antialiasing? No way.

We took the XFX card for a spin on our graphics test system, a Core i7-975 with 6GB of fast DDR, dialed the graphics option down a couple of notches and re-ran our benchmark games at 1280x720 (or 1280x768 for Battle Forge). Since we were running at a relatively low resolution, we did pump up AA to 4x, just to keep our eyes from bleeding at all the jaggies. We also ran our suite of tests on an EVGA GeForce GT 240, a $99 card based on Nvidia’s GT 240 GPU. Like the AMD GPU, the GT 240 also has 512MB of GDDR5 running at 790MHz, and a core clock of 550MHz.

The Verdict? The XFX card beat the EVGA card in most benchmarks, but the overall margins were fairly small. The sub-$100 category keeps getting better—but games keep getting more demanding. If you’re willing to sacrifice resolution and graphics detail, the XFX Radeon HD 5670 should get the job done. It’s not a strong card for gaming, but it should shine in home theater PCs and other environments that have space and power constraints.

Before you find yourself being grilled by the Computing Crimes Unit, know where your activities fall on the scale of digital rights and wrongs

Make no mistake, we are living in the future. In a matter of moments, we can publish our thoughts, communicate with people on other continents, or start downloading more information than we can ever consume. We are presented with hundreds of great offers every day—each with a thousand caveats. We hear about hackers stealing identities and kids being sued for copyright infringement, and even a New York socialite slap-fight taking place in an anonymous forum can take the national stage. The future is odd, indeed. To help you get some of it straight, we sat down with various lawyers and asked: How do our rights work in the digital age? Can you get in trouble posting messages about someone online? Are there exceptions to copyright? Is it legal to back up your ebooks? Not all of these questions have clear answers, and some answers don’t make much sense. We might be living in the future, but the legal system was designed to deal with the increasingly obsolete present.

Can I be sued for anonymously posting on the Internet that someone is a 'ho'?

Anyone can sue you for anything, anytime, provided they file the paperwork and pay a fee. Whether they have a case is a completely different matter. “Falsely accusing someone of being a prostitute may be defamation, but, depending on the context, a court might read the statement as mere hyperbole, not an actual accusation that [the person] exchanges sexual favors for money,” says Kurt Opsahl, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. (DISCLOSURE: Quinn Norton does paid photography for the EFF occasionally.)

The intention of the writer matters. “For example,” says Opsahl, “It was not defamation for ESPN to caption a photo ‘Evel Knievel proves you’re never too old to be a pimp,’ since it was—in context—not intended as a criminal accusation, nor was it reasonably susceptible to such a literal interpretation.” (Besides, with Knievel, it’s so clearly true.)

Even if the plaintiff doesn’t know your identity, you can be sued as a John or Jane Doe, or they can use the pretense of the lawsuit to get access to records that will identify you, as was the case with the New York–based model who subpoenaed records from Google to find out which socialite blogger was dissing her. She dropped the case as soon as she found out who had called her a skank. This is yet another reason to use the anonymous Tor web browser when you’re sophomorically taunting D-list celebrities.

Is there any circumstance that allows for legal downloading of copyrighted material through torrents or P2P?

Definitely, but we’ve got to make a few things clear. First off, copyright is automatic and pervasive. “All creative content is automatically copyrighted as soon as it is created—if you scribble on a napkin, that’s copyrighted,” explains Nicholas Reville, cofounder and executive director of the Participatory Culture Foundation.

To “un-copyright” something, the copyright has to expire or be waived, as the U.S. government has done on all content it produces. To legally download something copyrighted—be it over P2P, BitTorrent, or even off an FTP site—you’ll need permission. That second point, authorization, is where the P2P legal action comes from.

“Content that people put online for free download—for example, anything on Legaltorrents.com—is perfectly legal to download and is also copyrighted. The key question is whether the copyright holder has authorized the content to be posted or downloaded,” says Reville.

Is it legal for software that I buy to expire?

Probably, but the vendor has to tell you that up front. What software companies sell you isn’t the stuff they’ve made; they sell you a specialized contract called a license that lets you use the stuff they’ve made. That license, generally printed on the plastic the software is wrapped in (hence, “shrink-wrap license”) or on a webpage in a very small font with an “I agree” button at the bottom, actually tells you what you just bought. “What you see in the fine print is what you get,” says Wendy Seltzer, a fellow with the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. “Under a license, you might be denied the right to transfer or reverse engineer the software, or the amount of time you may use the software could be limited. Some courts have been saying, however, that if it looks like a sale, it should be treated as a sale, in rulings that limit the effect of some of these unexpected provisions.”

While selling you just about any kind of license is legal, vendors have to be clear about what they’re selling. If it says that it’s reliable forever on the box, and in the small print it says it may knock out your power grid, sour your fruit, shave your cat, and stop working after a week, you probably have a case. “If you’ve been misled about what’s in the package, the Federal Trade Commission might like to hear about unfair or deceptive trade practices,” says Seltzer. “If the box or download page doesn’t clearly say ‘time-limited,’ yet the software goes poof in the middle of a critical project, you’d have a good argument that you didn’t get what you paid for.”

The moral of the story is that when it really counts, always read the fine print.

We can 'format-shift' music by ripping CDs; what about movies or books?

Copyright allows you to make a backup of anything you’ve legally acquired for your own use. If you want to scan your books and back up your software or movies for your own personal use, have at it. But (there’s always a but, right?) the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) makes it illegal to get at the things you’re trying to back up if they are copy-protected. “If the media is restricted by DRM... the DMCA forbids ‘circumventing’ the DRM, even for media you own,” says Fred Von Lohman, the EFF’s senior intellectual property attorney. So, while the backup itself is a fair use, making it is breaking the law. “The MPAA has argued consistently that ripping a DVD you own for use on an iPod is always illegal,” reminds Von Lohman. It’s the perfect catch-22 that let former MPAA president Jack Valenti tell consumers, “If you want a backup copy, you buy another one.”

 
Of course, it’s worth noting that as long as your backups remain in your possession and aren’t distributed, there is little likelihood of you ever getting caught.

Is downloading TV shows off BitTorrent illegal? After all, I can have recorded versions of TV content via TiVo.

This issue haunts the space somewhere between “it depends” and “no one knows.” You have to have permission from the copyright holder, except when it’s a fair use. Owning a TiVo gives you permission (for the stuff on the TiVo). The Pirate Bay can’t give you permission—but even so, it depends how you use it. “Where time-shifting is concerned, the most relevant exception will be fair use. If you are a student and need a 30-second clip for a class assignment, that’s likely a fair use. On the other hand, if you download the latest episode of Weeds simply because you don’t want to pay for Showtime, that’s probably not a fair use,” says Von Lohman.

TiVo has negotiated contracts for you, and the court has cleared using a VCR to tape something for later. But P2P is still in legal limbo.

“What about downloading a TV show that you would otherwise have been entitled to TiVo, but the power was out and it’s not on Hulu? I think that’s probably a fair use, but it’s hard to know without a court getting involved,” says Von Lohman. It might even depend on what protocol you’re using, since using BitTorrent makes you a distributor as you download, and you probably don’t have the right to distribute, even if you can argue the right to download.

Also, is that really what you should be using your UPS for?

Is it legal to download Girl Talk, Bootie, and other mashup music, or to host them for download?

Thus far, the answer seems to be that it depends on the musical taste of the judge, which is really no way to run a legal system. The legal question is: Does the remix so transform the music that the mashup itself counts as a whole new form of expression? “At the Organization for Transformative Works, we take the position that remixes, distributed noncommercially, are generally fair use because they represent new creative works that add to the variety of expression available and don’t generally interfere with the market for the originals. That said, not all copyright owners agree,” says Rebecca Tushnet, professor at Georgetown Law and a legal advisor for OTW. It’s even hazier for commercial works, which are OK in some circuit courts and not others—a recipe for getting the Supreme Court involved.

“It would be great to have a bright-line rule, but there simply isn’t one. Larry Lessig has suggested that we should reform the law to make clear that noncommercial remix is legal,” says Tushnet. Then it would be nice to reform the law to make the status of commercial remix clear, as well.

Downloading isn’t legally different from hosting files, but generally, copyright holders send cease and desist letters to the host rather than the downloaders. Since EMI gave itself a public relations black eye by going after DJ Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album in 2004, not many rights holders have pursued the mashup world, preferring to focus on more straightforward piracy.

Next up, what about open wi-fi?

If I bring my work home and my own PC is hacked with my work stuff on it, am I liable?

If you’re following your employer’s rules, you’re OK. “So far, no one has been held liable for someone else’s hacking in the absence of any specific statutory or contractual responsibility to keep the information safe,” says Jennifer Grannick, civil liberties director of the EFF. That bit about “statutory or contractual responsibility” is important, though. If you’re a government employee or contractor, there are certain types of work you either can’t take home or can’t expose to the Internet, like Social Security information. You may have sensitive information from your private employer that’s not supposed to leave the building, as well. It should be a no-brainer that you don’t take that kind of stuff and put it on a home PC connected to the Internet, or leave it on a laptop in the car while you eat lunch, but people keep doing it—and their Data Valdezes keep ending up in the news.

Think before taking work home, or better yet, leave work at work. Your Blood Elf Warlock won’t level himself!

Am I liable if I share my Wi-Fi, or leave it open, and someone else breaks a law from my IP?

The law is all about intention. “People aren’t held liable for the bad actions of others, unless they have a duty to prevent the harm, or they conspire, solicit, aid, or abet the wrong-doer,” says Grannick. If you aren’t nudging and winking at the lawbreaker, and if you had no idea it happened, you haven’t broken the law. But we don’t have court-appointed mind readers yet, and it’s not impossible to find yourself pressed to prove you weren’t knowledgeable of or complicit in a crime committed from your Wi-Fi. “Merely having open Wi-Fi should not cause you any liability, but it does leave open the possibility that law enforcement investigating a crime will think you are the culprit and act accordingly.” Even though you are likely to clear your name, it might be a headache to get there. If someone breaks your WEP key, you could find yourself in the same position anyway—fortunately, both situations are more rare than getting struck by lightning.

Is it legal for my ISP to advertise unlimited Internet, then throttle my usage?

Like buying, ahem, rather licensing, time-bomb software, “the answer would depend on the small-print terms of service,” says Art Brodsky of the nonprofit Public Knowledge. “ISPs often cover themselves with the details.”

But Kevin Bankston, senior EFF attorney in free speech and privacy law, says, “Depending on the facts, such advertising may rise to the level of deception, in which case it may violate state laws prohibiting unfair and deceptive business practices, as well as the Federal Trade Commission Act, which (among other things) prohibits false advertising.” They’d have to make that asterisk on the word “UNLIMITED!” very small to be liable, and the best protection is still reading the annoying fine print in the first place.

If I bring my personal laptop to work, does my employer have the right to search that computer?

The net may be complex, but legally speaking, personal property is pretty well understood. Both taking your property and searching it are issues the law is quite clear about. Your employer can potentially get into all kinds of trouble, both criminal and civil, if you haven’t given your permission for the taking, much less the searching, of your property. If any damage is done to your property in the process, you can sue your employer under various tort laws, with names like “tort of conversion” and “trespass to chattels,” not to mention the crime of theft. Plus, there’s “potential... liability under federal and state laws criminalizing unauthorized access to a computer system,” says Kevin Bankston. “Depending on how invasive the search is and what kind of personal data is stored on the computer, such a search may also constitute an invasion of privacy under state law,” Bankston adds. Of course, you can sign all those rights away with your employment contract. It’s all there, in the really tiny print.

Can my company legally install a keylogger or track everything I do?

We don’t know, and it’s not because we didn’t do our homework. “The federal courts are currently split on whether secretly installing a keylogger violates federal wiretapping laws,” says Bankston. What that means, in a practical sense, is that there either is no law, or existing law hasn’t been interpreted such that the matter is settled.

There’s a lot of law like this in every field—it’s just unknown until the courts take it up and argue over it for a few years. But the Internet is new enough and strange enough that places where it touches (like copyright and privacy) are in real legal turmoil. And if that weren’t enough, these debates get to be hashed out on the state level in every single state, as well.

“One district court in New Jersey has found that it is a wiretapping violation if the keylogging occurs while the computer is connected to the Internet, while another district court in California has found that it is not a wiretapping violation at all, although it did so in part based on the reasoning in another wiretapping decision from the Sixth Circuit that was later vacated,” says Bankston. Meaning that the precedent for that decision fell apart, leaving it on precarious grounds. None of that even gets into the possible privacy claims, which could be harsh and would vary between states.

There is one way your company could surveil you without any trouble, though: with your permission. “A conscientious employer with good legal counsel would likely seek to notify and obtain consent from an employee before installing a keylogger,” says Bankston. Making that a condition of your employment? Perfectly legal as soon as you sign on the dotted line.

When All Is Said and Done...

It’s an interesting time to be a lawyer (if a stressful time to be a PC user) with the legal eight-ball so often coming up “Answer hazy, try again later.” Don’t expect the situation to settle down anytime soon. The law moves notoriously slowly and the net hasn’t shown any signs of waiting for the law to catch up. Now more than ever, it’s important to read the fine print, but often we deal with impossible amounts of fine print. Try to know what you’re buying, renting, licensing, and so on, and be aware that even well-known brands often bait-and-switch their services.

The good news is that this legal incoherence has turned so many of us into scofflaws that getting caught is like winning the reverse lottery—unpleasant, to be sure, but also unlikely. Wait, that’s the good news? Let’s try that again: The good news is that we have so many more ways to express ourselves, be creative, and connect to each other that the law is floundering trying to understand it, and we’re making a new world while it flounders. So happy netting, people of the future!

Quinn Norton has written about the intersection of technology and law for Wired, The Guardian, FAIR, The Irish Times, and more. She knows too many lawyers, and has been known to get them drunk, hang out at their parties, and DM their D&D sessions. Quinn is reachable at quinn@quinnnorton.com.

Like all Google products, it's still a bit beta

On paper, Google’s new Nexus One is the smartphone to beat. It’s got a gorgeous screen, a svelte formfactor, and the hottest phone operating system on the planet, Android 2.1. Unfortunately, just like the Motorola Droid, the Nexus One has some problems that prevent us from recommending it wholeheartedly.

Let’s start with the awesome. The Nexus One’s screen, a 3.7-inch 800x480 active-matrix OLED display, is undeniably gorgeous, rendering pitch-perfect colors at high resolution in a way that makes the iPhone 3GS screen look simply sad by comparison. The Nexus One runs a Qualcomm QSD 8250 at 1GHz, comes with 512MB of RAM and 512MB of onboard flash, and includes a user-upgradeable 4GB MicroSD card. All this is packed into an HTC-designed body that’s slimmer than an iPhone 3GS and waaaay sexier than the Droid.

The Android OS itself continues to impress. The 2.1 edition spit-shines the improvements to 2.0. We dig the speedier application menu and the dynamic wallpaper, which uses cues from the music you’re listening to or the time of day to render interesting (but ultimately useless) visualizations behind your home screen. There are a few more substantial updates, as well—most notably, every text field in the phone is voice enabled. While this won’t make in-car Twittering any safer (you still need to navigate to the right fields with your fingers), we found the feature occasionally useful, especially in the navigation app. It’s worth mentioning that the voice recognition all happens server-side, so even though it’s pretty accurate, it takes a moment or two to complete.

The Application menu in Android 2.1 received some cosmetic and performance improvements. Icons seem to scroll up and over a 3D cube, rather than up a flat surface.

The best thing about Android continues to be the ability for third-party developers to integrate their apps with the phone’s native apps. The widgets that have been part of Android since version 1.5 even allow you to customize your phone’s home screen, something that’s notably missing from the iPhone.

While the Android Marketplace now has more than 14,000 apps, the viewer software does a poor job of promoting the good apps and burying the bad. We still don’t know how to sort by user rating or popularity, and the editorially driven selections are not compelling. All the applications in the world won’t help your platform if your users can’t find the awesome ones, Google.

Android includes a car-friendly nav menu that puts the apps you frequently use in a car at hand, so it is ever-so-slightly less dangerous when you use the phone while driving.

We also experienced some pretty serious problems with the onscreen keyboard, on three separate occasions, with multiple handsets. It simply stopped registering touches accurately, which made it impossible to type. The problem was sporadic and difficult to reproduce but it was annoying as hell. We haven’t experienced the problem since applying the multitouch update, but it’s a serious enough problem that it warrants mentioning. We also feel that the soft buttons on the screen’s fascia (Back, Menu, Home, and Search) are placed too high. It’s too easy to accidently tap them when you hit the keyboard.

Of course, the worst of it is that this Nexus One is really only usable on T-Mobile’s limited network for now. AT&T users can buy it unlocked but will be limited to EDGE speeds. The good news is that the Nexus One is coming out in Verizon trim this spring, with an AT&T version on tap, too. Having this phone on a more capable network would push the Nexus One up in value. Still, as is, even with its little foibles, the Nexus One is clearly the best Android-phone yet.

Too bad looks aren't everything

Thermaltake’s first SpinQ cooler (reviewed February 2009) had style for sure—it looked like a blue-lit stack of bike gears with a fan in the middle, mounted sideways. The SpinQ VT adopts the same basic formfactor—the stack of circular aluminum fins mounted around an 8cm fan—but stands the stack upright, and uses red LEDs instead of blue. Other than that, it’s more of the same—from the variable fan speed to the so-so performance.

The SpinQ VT (we still want to pronounce it “spink”) stands 6.2 inches from base to top, and the fin stack is 4.7 inches in diameter. Six heat pipes lead up from the base into the 50 aluminum fins, and the 8cm fan blows cool air down over the fins. The fan uses a 3-pin connector and includes a variable-speed knob to take it between 1,000 and 1,600rpm, but since adjusting it requires you to reach into the case, we imagine most people will set it once and never adjust it again.

The SpinQ VT’s performance is strictly middle-of-the-road, like its predecessor’s. Eschewing the skyscraper configuration—which we’ve seen on all the best air coolers over the past year—gives coolers like the SpinQ gains in style, but not much else. In our test system, the SpinQ lowered idle CPU temperatures just 1.5 C below the stock cooler, while at 100 percent burn the SpinQ’s temps were 11.5 C cooler than stock. Not shabby, but certainly no match for skyscraper coolers like Thermalright’s Ultra-120 E or our champion Cooler Master Hyper 212+, which dropped burn temps by 19 C from stock.

The SpinQ uses the same plastic mounting clips as its predecessor and the stock Intel coolers, which makes installation easy. It’s also pretty cool-looking. But its great looks don’t translate into great performance, and it requires more than six inches of vertical clearance. Plus, its fan orientation might play havoc with your case’s airflow, especially if you don’t have an intake fan or vent in your side panel.

For $60, you can get a much better air cooler—or even two.

Using just a small fraction of Google's vast application offerings? That's about to end!

Remember that old maxim that says we use only about 10 percent of our brain’s capacity? It’s been proven as hokum by modern neuroscience, but we think we can safely apply the same basic analogy to Google: The vast, vast, vast majority of computer users—even those practiced in hardcore nerdery—are almost certainly using a pitiful fraction of all the applications and features intrinsic to Google’s ever-expanding matrix of software code.

Sure, a Maximum PC reader may be well-versed in Google’s advanced search operators (Google allintext: “advanced search operators” if you missed that chapter), but we’re willing to wager that even the most curious among you haven’t taken the time to play with more than a few Google applications, let alone explore all their advanced features. Indeed, Google HQ is a fan-friggin’-amazing hotbed of R&D, but its developers are relatively quiet about the tools they’ve released. And that’s a shame, because Google’s constant innovation should get more press.

To address your inevitable Google knowledge deficit, we commissioned Gina Trapani to share her favorite tips. Gina launched Lifehacker.com, writes about Google for a bazillion media outlets, co-hosts the “This Week In Google” netcast, and pretty much makes it her job to know as much as possible about Google’s sundry apps and features.

Want even harder hardcore tips? Or did we leave out an application you really want to know about? Send your requests to comments@maximumpc.com. Oh, and by the way: Google Buzz was announced literally minutes before this article went to press. But we’ll certainly cover this app in a future issue—because if there’s one thing this world needs, it’s more social media options. FTW! —Jon Phillips

Maps

Google Maps (http://maps.google.com) is a mapping application and route planner that provides driving, walking, and public transit directions from your starting point to one or more destinations. Launched in 2005, Maps is based on technology created at Australian startup Where2 by brothers Lars and Jens Rasmussen (currently the lead engineers on Google Wave). Along with Gmail, Google Maps was one of the first web apps to extensively use Ajax, a JavaScript programming technique that updates map imagery as you pan and zoom, all without reloading the page.

Preview Which Streets Made Street View's Cut

Not only does Google Maps display aerial imagery in Satellite view, it also offers a huge database of on-the-ground photos via Street View. To switch to Street View from the basic map screen, drag and drop the yellow “pegman” from the top of the zoom control onto the map. When you do, blue lines appear on the streets where ground imagery is available (throughout the United States and in select other countries). Drop the pegman onto the road of your choice, walk down the street by clicking the navigational arrows, and double-click any area of a photo to zoom in on it. Some images are so clear, you can read the hours on No Parking signs.

In-Car Navigation? In Maps Help, search “Using Maps with your navigation device” to learn how to send directions straight from Google Maps to your TomTom, Garmin, BMW, or Mercedes navigation systems.

Add Local Color to Your Map

Don’t miss out on the brave new world beyond the Map, Satellite, Terrain, and Street View features in Google Maps. Under the More button (located between the Traffic and Satellite buttons on the top-right of a map), you can overlay links to photos, videos, Wikipedia articles, webcams, transit maps (in some cities), and real estate listings. This feature is perfect when you want to know the history of a monument, find open homes for your Sunday real estate tour, or see what’s happening on the local zoo’s “panda cam.”

Check Traffic to Avoid the Madness!

Before you start the car, check for clogged arteries by clicking the Traffic button. By default you’ll see live, current traffic conditions—anonymously collected from drivers’ mobile devices—but you can change the day and time to see extrapolated predictions. To do so, in the Traffic pop-up click the Change link, and set the day and time of your departure. Things looking bad out there? Well, when you get directions in Google Maps, you can always opt for an alternate route by clicking and dragging the suggested route to another road. Or you could opt to ditch the car entirely: Click the Public Transit or Walking link on the right panel below the starting point and destination to see how you can get there by bus, train, trolley, or on foot.

Next up, Google Docs!

Docs

Google Docs (http://docs.google.com) is a web-based word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation application that stores any files you create in it, as well as files you upload. While Google Docs doesn’t offer all the functionality you’d find in Microsoft Office, its web-based collaboration features present a whole new world of utility.

Save Time on Formatting with Templates

This personal financial budget shows you exactly where all your money's going. Oh well, at least the spreadsheet is free!

Whether you need an invoice, resume, or calendar, you don’t have to design it from scratch—just grab a template, thousands of which can be found in the drop-down menu of the Create New button. Various spreadsheets, text documents, presentations, and forms are broken down by categories like “Resumes and Cover Letters,” “Personal Finance,” and “Legal.” (Hint: Choose your language from the “Narrow by language” drop-down to hide foreign-language templates.) Google Docs will keep track of which templates you’ve used in the past for easy reuse. The spreadsheet templates—pre-formatted with built-in formulas and charts—are reason enough to check out Docs.

Conduct Surveys with Forms

Feel free to mix in "check all that apply" questions with those demanding "one answer only."

Google’s form templates are awesome for not only collecting data from co-workers, loved ones, and website visitors, but also for tallying responses. In Google Docs, click the Create New button, and chose “form” from the drop-down. Now, enter your questions, as well as the types of answers each question should get. You can format answers for multiple choice, checkboxes, and other common survey criteria, as well as add section headers and choose custom visual themes. Clicking the “Email for” button will send your contacts a link to the form (you also can copy and paste the link to publish it yourself). When your recipients answer the form’s questions, a Google spreadsheet living in the cloud collects and charts the responses for you to see. For example, you can gather all your friends’ vital personal specs—phone numbers, home addresses, even favorite foods—with one simple questionaire.

Chat While You Crunch Numbers

When you give other people access to a document in Google Docs, a blue notification icon on the far right of the menu bar will inform you who else is viewing and/or editing the document while you have it open. In spreadsheets, this bar has a down arrow on it, which you can click to expand a chat panel. Not only will you be able to see real-time updates to your spreadsheet as others change it, you can instant message your collaborators as you work. This feature is conspicuously absent in documents and presentations.

Visualize Data with Interactive Gadgets

Once you’ve got a spreadsheet full of data, you’ll want interesting ways to visualize it without doing too much work. Enter Google Docs gadgets, which are interactive charts, maps, and other data visualizations you can embed in a spreadsheet, publish on a web page, or include on your iGoogle homepage. From your Google Spreadsheet’s Insert menu, choose “Gadget...” to choose and configure a gadget that displays your data in informative ways. You can create your own gadget or use one of the many provided, which include charts, guages, timelines, org charts, and the fun "Bars of Stuff."

Ditch the Thumb Drive and Store Files at Google Docs

Files converted to Google Doc documents don’t count toward the 1GB storage limit. Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel files can all be converted and stored for free, but you might lose features and formatting.

Google Docs isn’t just for office files anymore: You can now upload, store, and share any kind of file, including music, video, photos, and zip files. A simple click of the Upload button will save files to your home in the cloud. File sizes can be as high as 250MB, and you get up to 1GB of space for storing non–Google Docs files. Once your treasures are uploaded, select a file and click the Share link to give others access to it. You can also share entire folders, creating a Dropbox-like meeting space for your friends and colleagues to work on files together.

See a Document's Revision History

When multiple people are working on a document, things can change fast. To see who changed what and to compare revisions, open a document and from the File menu choose “See revision history.” You’ll get a list of all the changes a document has undergone. You can also select two revisions and compare them to see exactly what changed between them. Just be aware that revision history is available to anyone you share a document with—even your boss. So, if you don’t want collaborators or viewers to see the history, make a copy of the document, which wipes away the bread-crumb trail of its changes.

Get Your Documents Offline

Google Gears helps you keep your cloud business in sync.

One of the biggest concerns about keeping data in the cloud—instead of on your hard drive—centers on the question of offline access. So, if you’re wondering how you’ll work on your Google Docs files when you’re on a non-Wi-Fi-equipped flight, Google Gears has you covered. This free browser add-on for Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari gives you access to your files offline, and syncs changes when you connect to the Internet again. You can download Google Gears at http://gears.google.com.

Next up, Google Wave!

Google Wave: Collaboration Made Easy

At first glance, it seems like there's nothing Wave can't do.

Google Wave (http://wave.google.com) is a new, real-time group collaboration tool that’s currently an invitation-only beta product. Combining features from email, chat, wikis, and forums, Google Wave is best described as a mash-up between a real-time wiki and multimedia chat. You do all your group collaboration in “waves” (note the lowercase W), which function as a hybrid conversation/document—wrap your head around that!—that multiple people can view, edit, and add to.
 
Waves are live documents and change right before your eyes: You can watch collaborators’ cursors move about with fury, keystroke by keystroke. You can also embed interactive content—like polls, YouTube clips, and slide shows—and easily discuss a particular sentence in a block of text with the inline reply feature. Wave is young and missing essential features (like the ability to remove someone from a wave), but there’s no mistaking its ambitions to change how power-users work together online.

Calendar

Google Calendar (http://google.com/calendar) is a scheduling application that offers email, SMS alerts, and collaboration features. The interface is similar to Microsoft Outlook’s calendar, with daily, weekly, and monthly views, as well as a customizable time period and agenda views. Launched in April 2006, Google Calendar officially graduated from beta status in July 2009.

Get Your Agenda via Email or Text Message

When you create an event in Google Calendar, you can also configure an email or SMS reminder to come to you minutes, days, or weeks in advance—great for remembering to order flowers for Mom’s birthday. You can also receive your daily agenda via email first thing in the morning. To do so, in the calendar list on the left, click the down-arrow button next to the appropriate calendar, then select Notifications. Check the “Daily agenda” box, and save your settings to get an email each morning at 5 a.m. in your timezone of the day’s upcoming events. You can also get your schedule via text message: Text the word day to shortcode GVENT (48368) to receive your day’s agenda. The word next will get the next event on your calendar, and the nday command will send back tomorrow’s events. (Standard text messaging fees apply.)

Quick-Add Events with Natural Language

We wish more apps—and even people—could intelligently interpret conversational language. 

The Google Calendar app is quite remarkable in its ability to generate calendar items from events you describe in natural, conversational language. For example, if you type “Lunch with Mark tomorrow at 2pm at Maria’s,” Calendar will parse “tomorrow at 2pm,” scheduling the event for the correct day and time, and even fill in “Maria’s” as the event location.

Subscribe to Team Schedules, Birthdays, and More

Does your company give you a paid vacation for Groundhog Day? Your IT department can share your company's complete paid vacation day schedule via Google Calendar.

You can instantly add sports team schedules, holidays, and your contacts’ birthdays to your schedule by subscribing to public calendars. In the Other Calendars module on the sidebar, click the Add link. From the drop-down, choose “Browse interesting calendars” to pick and choose from a selection of calendars, like religious or U.S. holidays, or your contacts’ birthdays (compiled from your Google contact entries and their Google Profiles). You can also subscribe to any public calendar, or any of your contacts’ Google calendars by choosing “Add by URL” or “Add a friend’s calendar.”

Incorporate the Weather Forecast on Your Calendar

Get the weather forecast for this weekend’s softball game directly on your Google Calendar. In Settings, under the General tab, enter your location (either city and state or zip code) and then, near “Show weather based on my location,” choose whether you’d like the temperatures in Celsius or Fahrenheit. Save your changes, and GCal will display a small weather icon for the next four days; click the icon to expand forecast details.

Next up, Gmail!

Gmail

When Google’s free, web-based email service (http://mail.google.com) launched as an invitation-only beta on April 1, 2004, initial speculation had it that the 1GB storage offer was an April Fool’s gag. It wasn’t a gag, and Google has only gotten more generous; as of this writing, Gmail storage capacity is up to 7GB. Thanks to all this storage space—along with threaded conversations, a powerful spam filter, conversation labels, and more—Gmail remains a standout amid other free webmail products that have been around much longer.

Access Gmail via IMAP

With IMAP settings, you can keep Gmail properly synced on all your sundry Internet machines. 

While most email providers offer only one-way POP downloads of your messages, Gmail offers the more sophisticated, two-way sync protocol, IMAP. With IMAP, you can access your Gmail on multiple computers and mobile devices, and changes you make on one device are immediately reflected everywhere else. IMAP syncs the read and unread status of all your Gmail messages in all your labels (represented as traditional folders in your IMAP client of choice). To enable IMAP in Gmail’s Settings, click the “Forwarding and POP/IMAP” tab. You’ll have to configure your email program using Gmail’s secure IMAP settings; click the “Configuration instructions” link to get the details for your email software.

Mute a Chatty Email Thread

Just check the box of a thread you want to silence, then mute it—mute it good.

When an email conversation is stuck in a never-ending “reply all” cycle and you wish you weren’t on the recipient list, open the conversation and choose Mute from Gmail’s More Actions menu. This will silence the thread, meaning that any new replies to it will skip your inbox and be archived automatically. You can still search for and find muted messages; you just won’t get notifications of new replies while it’s going on. To find conversations you’ve muted, enter is:muted into Gmail’s search box.

Master Gmail's Keyboard Shortcuts

If you receive a lot of email, Gmail’s keyboard shortcuts are essential, and should be committed to muscle memory as soon as possible. To enable keyboard shortcuts in Gmail’s settings, go to the the General tab, and select the “Keyboard shortcuts on” radio button. Now you can move forward and back between your messages using the J and K keys, tap R to reply to a message, C to compose a new message, and the / key to move your cursor to Gmail’s search box. Some keys even perform multiple actions. For example, if you’re done reading a message, press ] to archive it and move to the next message. See all the available keyboards shortcuts at http://goo.gl/hlBI.

Catch Embarrassing Email Mistakes Before You Send

Google has a very canny way of making us feel slightly incompetent, doesn't he?

Just sent an email you wish you could take back? Told someone the file was attached and sent the message before you actually attached it? Gmail Labs, Gmail's “testing ground for experimental features,” offers two tools that can help. The Undo Send feature gives you a few minutes to click an undo link after you’ve sent a message you immediately regret. The Forgotten Attachment Detector checks to see if you mentioned the words “attachment” or “attached” in your message but did not attach a file. If it suspects you’ve made a mistake, it prompts you with a dialog box that asks if you forgot your attachment—all before it sends the email. To enable Gmail Labs and get these and other Labs features mentioned on this page, click the Labs tab.

Send Repetitive Replies Faster with Canned Responses

Whether you need a uniform reply to server-outage complaints, or just want to tell that latest Nigerian 419 scammer that you thank him for thinking of you but aren’t currently interested, a Canned Response will get the job done.

When you receive a lot of email that requires the same response, you need not suffer the indignity of same-replying from scratch every time. Gmail’s Canned Responses feature (another tweak from Gmail Labs) lets you set up email scripts that you can choose from a drop-down to send as a reply to a message. For example, you could have a Canned Response called “thanks” associated with the message, “Thanks for letting us know, we’re working on it!” With Gmail Labs and Canned Responses enabled, open a new email, compose your canned response, and from the Canned Responses drop-down under Save, choose “New Canned Response” and enter a name for it. Then, any time you want to use the response when replying to an email, click the Canned Responses link, and choose its name from the Insert section. Canned Responses also work in filters. For example, you could say that any email from certain addresses should automatically get a particular canned response.

Send and Receive Mail from Other Accounts in Gmail

Which email identity does Gina want to use today?

 

Switching to Gmail sounds tempting, but what if you don’t want to change your email addresses? You don’t have to. Gmail comes with a built-in POP fetcher, which can retrieve messages from up to five existing email accounts and drop them in your Gmail inbox. You can also set up multiple “From:” addresses that match your existing accounts. This way, when you send an email in Gmail, you can have it originate from your Gmail account, or from your alternate “From:” addresses. To start using other email addresses within Gmail, go to Settings and enter your other account details in the Accounts tab.

Add an Email to Your Task List

If a message has a chore attached to it, just add it to Tasks, and it will loom over your to-do list like the proverbial albatross.

Gmail’s built-in to-do list application, Tasks, makes it easy to turn messages into to-dos. You can manage your tasks, subtasks, task descriptions, and due dates just by clicking the Tasks link in the Gmail sidebar. And if you’ve got an email message that contains a to-do item in it, choose “Add to Tasks” from the More Actions menu to add it to your list with a link to the message.

Next up, alerts and feeds!

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Crawler Alerts: Let Google Do the Search Work for You

 

Want to know how many people are referencing your name online? Setting up a Google Alert will keep you appraised.

 

You want to see the latest, greatest search results for a brand name, person, or any keyword, but find it too time-consuming to manually search Google every few days? Then turn to Google Alerts (http://google.com/alerts), which will automatically deliver these hits via email or RSS feed. Simply enter the keyword you want new results for, what sources you want to monitor (News, Blogs, Web, Video, Groups, or Comprehensive), how often you want the email alerts, how many results the alerts should contain, and what email address the alerts should go to. Then, as Google crawls the Internet and indexes new content that contains your keyword, you’ll get an email summarizing those results. If you’ve already got too much email, choose Feed from the “Deliver to:” drop-down to subscribe to alerts in your feed reader instead.

Reader

Google Reader (http://reader.google.com) is a news aggregator that lets you subscribe to website RSS and Atom feeds, organize them into folders, share items with followers, and read their content offline. Billed as “an inbox for the web,” Reader displays the number of unread items per feed (and per folder of feeds), just like an email client does.

Follow People in Addition to Feeds

Once all your pals begin following each other, your reads on good reads will grow exponentially.

Your friends are your most trusted informants, and seeing what they’ve been reading might bring you the news you care about more quickly than a faceless website could. To get started following people in Reader, click the “People you follow” link in the sidebar. You can find people to follow by name or email address, as well as configure access to your own shared items. Click the Follow button to add someone to the “People you follow” area, where each person’s profile will display a count of things they liked, shared, or commented on.

Read Your Feeds Offline To read your feeds somewhere other than in a web browser, try the free desktop newsreader FeedDemon (http://goo.gl/ALNW). It syncs with Google Reader, and maintains your subscriptions, tags, and read and unread item status whether you changed them on the desktop or in the web application.

Sort Feed Items 'By Magic'

Is Doug Henning still alive? Something tells us he'd like this feature.

You can instantly see the most interesting feed items first, using Google’s version of magic: Hover over any feed, and from the drop-down menu change the sort order from “newest” (the default) to “by magic.” The “Sort by magic” algorithm ranks items based on your reading habits as well as global Google Reader activity to predict which items will interest you most. The more feed items you like and star in Google Reader, the better the magic will work.

Graph Your Reading Habits

Spending too much time reading, and not enough time writing? The Trends feature can chart this in living color.

How much time do you spend reading and sharing feeds? Click the Trends link on the Reader sidebar to get an overview of how many feed items you read per month, with navel-gazing stats like what day of the week and hour of the day you read feeds most. Trends also shows you which of your feeds are most frequently updated, inactive, and least subscribed-to, as well as how active your Reader friends are. To see how much you interact with an individual feed, click it and then click the Show Details link on a feed’s blue menu bar to see a bar graph that displays how many items that feed has published compared to how many you’ve read.

Next up, Chrome!

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Chrome

Google Chrome (http://google.com/chrome) is an open-source, tabbed web browser developed with a focus on simplicity and speed. Its design is extremely minimalist, stripping away many of the menus and buttons common in other web browsers. A mere 16 months after it launched, Chrome is the third most widely used web browser, after Internet Explorer and Firefox. The latest stable build of Chrome is available as a free download for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Willing testers can also use beta versions of Chrome, which include previews of new features that are in development.

Customize the 'New Tab' Screen

Stabbing a tab with a thumbtack insures it will remain stationary on your thumbnail view.

When you open a new tab in Google Chrome, by default you get the aptly named “New Tab” screen, a smart grid of thumbnail previews of your most visited websites. You can customize the look, layout, and position of the thumbnails on this launcher page to make it more useful. To remove a thumbnail, hover over it and click the X in the upper right-hand corner. To relocate a thumbnail to a different position in the grid, hover over it, then drag and drop it to its new location. To pin a thumbnail to a spot—so it’s always there, no matter how often you visit it—hover over it and click the thumbtack button on the upper left-hand side.

Honey, I Hid the Pr0n If you want to web surf without leaving behind traces of your activity—“to plan surprises like gifts or birthdays," according to Google's faux-naïve language—you can activate Incognito mode, which is under Chrome's Tools menu. Downloaded files and visited webpages won't appear in the browser's history, and new cookies will be closed upon exiting the incognito window.

Manage Tab and Extension Memory Usage

Chrome is a speedy browser, but once third-party extensions are in the mix, you’re a bit vulnerable to memory leaks and slowdowns. To see what’s eating Chrome’s memory, launch its internal Task Manager using the Shift+Esc keyboard shortcut. Much like the Windows Task Manager, it will show you how much memory, CPU, and network bandwidth each tab and extension is using. Select a runaway memory hog and choose “End process” to nix its greedy activities.

Sync Your Bookmarks—Everywhere

If you're running Chrome on several computers, you don’t have to worry about missing bookmarks you saved while working on another machine. Press Ctrl+Shift+B to launch the Bookmark Manager, and click the “Synchronize my bookmarks...” button. Sign into your Google account, and Chrome will merge and sync the bookmarks in your current instance of Chrome with every other installation of Chrome that has sync enabled (and is signed into your Google Account). Chrome actually saves your bookmarks in Google Docs. After you sync your bookmarks, you’ll find a Google Chrome folder in your Google Docs account with a Bookmarks subfolder, and all your links stored within. This way, if you want to access your bookmarks from a different browser, you can access them by logging into Google Docs.

Add Features to Chrome with Extensions

The latest stable version of Google Chrome includes support for third-party extensions: installable plugins that add features to Chrome, like ad blocking, email notifications, or a session manager. To start exploring extensions, choose Extensions from the blue-wrench menu on the far right of the Chrome menu bar. If you have extensions already installed, they’ll be listed here. Otherwise, click “Get more extensions” to browse a catalog of extensions categorized and ranked by popularity. We especially like the One Number extension, which adds a button to Chrome’s toolbar that displays the number of unread messages in your Gmail, Google Reader, Google Voice, and Google Wave accounts.

Picasa

Google’s Picasa photo management software (http://picasa.com) comes in two flavors: desktop software you install on your PC or Mac, and an online version called Picasa Web Albums (http://picasaweb.google.com). While you’ll want to sort, organize, tag, rate, and edit the gigabytes of digital photos you’ve collected on your desktop, Picasa’s Web Albums interface makes publishing and collaborating on those photos easier.

Group Your Photos by the People in Them

Both Picasa and Picasa Web Albums can recognize faces in your photos, and let you identify those faces by assigning Name Tags to them. Once your photos are loaded into Picasa on the desktop, it will scan them and place all the images with faces in them in an Unnamed People album (under People in the left column). Browse that album, and add a name to each person pictured to identify them. If you’re signed into your Google account, link those photos with the corresponding person in your Google Contacts list. For each person you identify, Picasa creates a person-specific album, and continually scans your library for new photos that include faces matching ones you’ve already tagged. Picasa will ask you to confirm its name tag suggestions on faces it finds. The suggestions are often, but not always, accurate. Regardless, you can always correct an inaccurate name tag. Picasa Web Albums also uses name tags, and can list photos by the people in them. To turn on this feature, click the Try It button on the right side of your album list, in the Name Tags section.

Put Your Photos on the Map

Picasa let's you geotag in a Google Maps view, and you can also "View in Google Earth" by hitting the link at the top right.

You can easily add location information—aka geotags—to your photos and display them on a Google Map, with each photo pinned to the location where it was shot. To assign location data in the desktop app, click the Places button on the bottom right, between People and Tags. In the Google Maps panel that appears, search for an address. Once you’ve found the location where a photo was taken, click OK in the “Put photo here?” dialog. In Picasa Web Albums, choose a photo, and in the information panel on the right, click the Add Location link to find an address in Google Maps, and then put the photo there. Once you’ve geotagged your photos, you can view a map of photos by clicking the View Map link for an album.

Automatically Sync Photos (and Edits) on Your Computer to the Web

Behold, the Picasa desktop app in all its glory.

Once you publish a photo album in Picasa Web Albums, you don’t have to re-upload an image by hand every time you change a caption, add a name tag, or crop a photo. Instead, you can automatically sync changes to photos. To do so, go to the desktop app and select an album or a folder of photos. Toggle on the “Sync to Web” control, and sign into your Google account. Now, configure your sync settings—what size photos should be, whether they should have a watermark, whether they should be public or private—and start automatically syncing that local album to Picasa Web Albums. With web syncing on, any photos you add to the album or edits you make to existing photos automatically update in Web Albums—all without having to manually upload them again.

Get Arts-and-Crafty with Your Photos

Notice that you can set the aspect ratio of your Picture Pile so that it matches the dimensions of your desktop.

The desktop version of Picasa comes with several built-in tools to create nifty projects from your photos. To get started, choose an album or folder of photos, and from the Create drop-down menu choose Picture Collage, Movie, or Gift CD. Picasa’s built-in Movie Maker tool can create photo slide shows with music, transitions, text, and captions, and includes an option to instantly upload your project to YouTube. The Picture Collage maker organizes a set of photos into various layouts, such as a picture pile, grid, contact sheet, or mosaic. You can save the collage to edit later, or set it as your desktop background. Finally, the Gift CD maker burns a disc of selected photos and an accompanying slide show.

Make Your Photo Albums Collaborative

Inviting friends and family to collaborate on albums is as simple as sending a quick invite.

When you’ve taken photos at an event with other attendees—say, a wedding—everyone’s got his or her own pictures, and they’re not always stored in the same place. But when you share a photo album in Picasa Web Albums, you can allow others to edit the photos in it, as well as add new photos to make that album collaborative. In both Picasa and Picasa Web Albums, choose an album or folder of photos, and click the Share button at the top. In the Share Photos dialog, enter the email addresses of the people you want to see the album, and check the “Let these people contribute to my album” box to grant them permissions. Now your collaborators can add and edit photo captions, apply name tags, edit the photos themselves, and add photos to the album. Just remember that any photos added by collaborators will count toward your Picasa storage quota, which is 1GB if you haven’t yet upgraded from a free Picasa account.

Upload Photos via Email

Don't even try uploading a photo go Gina's Picasa account. You will be stymied!

Sure, you can upload photos to your online albums from within Picasa itself, but you can also upload photos via email—a perfect method for your camera phone. To set up your secret upload email address, go to Picasa Web Albums and click the Settings link in the top-right corner. Under the General tab, in the “Upload photos by email” section, check the box next to “Allow me to upload photos by email.” Enter a secret word to get your unique email address, and click the Save Changes button. Now add that secret email address to your contacts. Next time you snap a photo from your smartphone and want to instantly upload it to Picasa, send it via email to that address. To add a photo directly to a particular album, enter the name of the album in the subject line of your message.

Next up, Search!

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Search

The front door to the grandaddy of all of Google’s web applications—its web search engine—is an unassuming text box that doesn’t give you any hint to what it can do. In July 2008, Google’s index exceeded 1 trillion unique websites, and a billion new web pages are purportedly added per day. Here’s how to twiddle Google’s knobs and levers to find your needle in that haystack.

Find Business Hours, Restaurant Menus, and What's Nearby

The Maximum PC crew can't get enough of Google's savvy in finding food menus.

Get business hours in your Google search results by searching for the business name, city, and the word “hours.” For example, a search for Seaworld, San Diego hours includes the days and times the park is open, right on the results page. Likewise, a search for a restaurant name and the word menu (like Ranchos Cocina Ocean Beach menu) includes a blue link directly to the menu in the first result. Finally, when you visit Google.com in the browser on your location-aware iPhone or Android phone, you’ll see the name of your current location. Click the “Near me now” link to see restaurants, coffee shops, banks, and ATMs in your vicinity.

Calculate, Convert, and Get Local Time Instantly

Google’s search box doesn’t just return links to web pages, it can also perform calculations and conversions, as well as tell you the local time in places around the globe, and what time a plane flight might arrive. For example, search for 20% of 37.45 to see how much you should tip the waiter for dinner. To see what the local time is in faraway places like Tokyo, you would search for what time is it in Tokyo. Google also comes in handy while you’re cooking: Enter quarter cup in teaspoons when you can’t find your measuring cup. Finally, to quickly check whether a flight is on time, search for it by airline and flight number, e.g., JetBlue flight 185, and you’ll get arrival and departure times at the top of the results page.

Find Images and Videos of a Certain Size and Type

Sure, but can it find a video of a Simpsonized Christopher Walken reading Goodnight, Moon?

Google Image search has special filters you can use to specify the size and type of the image you’re looking for. For example, if you’re looking for desktop wallpaper images of the moon that are 1024x768 pixels, first go into Google Images, search for moon, then in your results, click the Show Options link to set the exact size. In those options, you can also narrow down results by the type of image you’re looking for—images that contain faces, a photo, clip art, or line drawing. Google’s Video search offers similar options. You can specify the length of a video you’re looking for as well as whether it’s a cartoon, slide show, or high quality.

Add Custom Sections to Your Google News Page

Google News (http://news.google.com) comes with built-in sections like Top Stories, Business, Entertainment, and Sci/Tech, but you can also create a custom news section that you monitor over time. For example, to track news related to the Apple iPad, in News, search for iPad. Then, at the bottom of the search results page, click “Add a custom section for iPad to Google News.” This will add it to your section list on the Google News sidebar.

Search Within a Single Website

Many websites don’t offer their own built-in search box, and those that do don’t usually provide results as good as those you get from Google. Luckily, you can search a single site from Google’s search box using the site:example.com operator. For example, to search maximumpc.com for the word Google, search for site:maximumpc.com Google.

Profile Enhancement: Finally, for the Eternally Anonymous

When potential bosses, dates, clients, and old high school friends type your name into Google’s web search box, what do they get back? If you’ve got a common name or just don’t have the time to keep up an active web presence, you can still get listed in search results with Google Profiles. Head over to http://google.com/profiles to set up a personal page with your name, a head shot, a short bio, places you’ve lived, schools you’ve attended, and your websites. You can even include photos from Flickr, Picasa, or any online photo feed. (Hint: specify an album that contains pictures of you so that searchers can identify you!) Once you’ve added enough information to your Google Profile, a search for your name will include your profile (along with anyone else who has your name) at the bottom of the Google results page. The more information you add, the higher you’ll move up the rankings.

Chrome OS: Just a Lean Browser Wrapper?

Google Chrome OS is a yet-to-be-released, open-source operating system whose sole purpose is to quickly get you online. As such, only a single, installed application runs on it: the Google Chrome browser, which provides shortcuts to web applications like Google Calendar, Yahoo Mail, Hulu, Facebook, and Twitter.
 
Everything you do in Chrome OS happens in the browser, on the web. Speed is the highest priority in Chrome OS development, and early builds running on netbooks boast promising boot speeds of four to seven seconds—which Google engineers say they will work to reduce! Currently, only source code for the open-source project—called Chromium OS—is available (find it at www.chromium.org/chromium-os). In the fall of 2010, Google and its hardware partners are slated to announce netbooks and other devices running this most lean of OSes. For more on Maximum PC’s unique take on Chrome OS, go here.

For more info on Gina Trapani and all her Google projects, go to http://ginatrapani.org.

The venerable chipmaker gambles on multithread madness with its hexa-core Core i7-980X

Meet the world’s fastest CPU. OK, so we just gave away the big reveal to our report before you even flipped one page, and without so much as the common courtesy of a spoiler alert. For that, we do not apologize, because it’s not like you couldn’t have guessed how this one would end up. After all, Intel’s new 3.33GHz Core i7-980X builds on all the goodness of the ass-kicking quad-core 3.33GHz Core i7-975 Extreme Edition, but is smaller, cooler, and has an additional two cores under its heat spreader. With Hyper-Threading enabled, that’s a cool 12 threads at the ready. How could anyone screw that one up?

In fact, Intel’s Core i7-980X seems to be one of the most flawless launches we’ve seen from the company in some time. By flawless, we mean there are no contortionist acts, such as explaining to consumers that a new socket (LGA1156) will have the same CPU branding as an incompatible existing socket. Nor is there the head-scratcher of a very novel, yet very limp, integrated graphics chip in a CPU (Clarkdale), which, by the way, won’t work in boards that lack graphics output ports.

With Core i7-980X, you update your BIOS, drop the chip in, and—voilà—you spend hours rocking a six-core high. Put simply, Core i7-980X is 24-ounces of prime-rib red meat for performance enthusiasts who really haven’t had much to gnaw on since the original 3.2GHz Core i7-965 Extreme Edition came out two years ago.

So we’re done, right? You don’t need to read on? Sorry, there’s still more to learn. If you want to know if your motherboard works with the new chip, what applications can really exploit the six cores, and how this bad boy performs, you’ll have to keep reading.

What's in a Name?

We know that, by now, enthusiasts should be immune to Intel’s confusing model numbers, but there’s one thing that sticks in our craw about the Core i7-980X: Despite it being the world’s first consumer x86 hexa-core, and despite it using the latest 32nm process, it’s label is a mere five notches greater than the quad-core Core i7-975 Extreme Edition part it ostensibly replaces.

Surely, all the goodness of two more cores and a total 12 threads of computing would warrant a Core i9 designation, or at the very least, a much higher model number, right? No, Intel officials told us. The company said that, despite previous reports that it would call its hexa-core Core i9, Intel backed off when retailers and vendors complained of too many blasted brands. And as to why it isn’t a 999X or 9900X, Intel said such gestures are unnecessary. The part is designed for enthusiasts and the folks who buy it will know that it’s not a mere five clicks more than a Core i7-975.

Beneath the Surface

Fortunately, the chip is fairly simple to understand. It uses the new 32nm process that was introduced with the dual-core Core i5/Core i3 Clarkdale CPUs. For code-name junkies, that makes it part of the Westmere family—not part of the original 45nm Nehalem family. All six-cores reside on a single contiguous piece of silicon. Like the original Nehalem CPUs, each core has 2MB of L3 available to it, giving the CPU a total of 12MB of L3 cache. The cache is shared across all the individual cores, which means a single core can have up to 12MB of L3 cache if the other five cores are sleeping.

As is the case with all Extreme processors, the chip is fully unlocked letting you change multipliers as well as Turbo Mode ratios. Turbo Boost is present but not as pedal-to-the-firewall as the LGA1156 parts. The Core i7-980X will give you a Turbo Boost up to 133MHz if more than one core is active. With single-threaded apps, the CPU will Turbo Boost up to 266MHz. That’s boring compared to the Core i7-870, which will boost from 2.93GHz to 3.6GHz, or about 733MHz. We’d be remiss, though, if we didn’t point out that the Core i7-870 starts out at a much lower clock speed.

Tick-Tock

Keeping with Intel’s tick-tock model, with ticks being little jumps and tocks being huge jumps, 980X is a tick. For the most part, besides the process shrink, there’s very little that’s changed from Nehalem to Westmere. The most notable new feature is the inclusion of advanced encryption instructions, which accelerate encryption.

Overall, Westmere is just a smaller, denser 45nm Nehalem. How much smaller? The Core i7-975 Extreme Edition weighed in at 731 million transistors and occupied 263mm2 of die space. Core i7-980X has 1.17 billion transistors but occupies just 248mm2 of die space.

Westmere will run its course until 2011 or 2012 when Intel introduces its Sandy Bridge CPUs. Where Westmere is a tick, Sandry Bridge will be a tock, introducing a new microarchitecture that will include advanced vector extensions as well as other enhancements. For entry-level CPUs, Sandy Bridge will also move the GPU core onto the die. Initial Sandy Bridge chips will be 32nm with a shrink to 22nm due soon after.

Pushing the Boundaries

Normally, a smaller process leads to enhanced overclocking and the same holds true for the Core i7-980X. With the original Core i7-965, we’ve never exceeded 4GHz on air. The D0-step Core i7-975 improved overclocking, but even there, we’ve never seen production machines exceed 4.2GHz reliably—and that’s with water cooling. With the Core i7-980X, we went into the BIOS and dialed the base clock up until the processor was at 4GHz. From there, we had no stability issues and ran multiple benchmark runs without incident. Mind you, this was without tweaking core voltage for the CPU, the QPI, RAM, or other various knobs we could have turned to get more reliability. We even got the machine to POST at 4.5GHz on air cooling, but then it crashed. The verdict is that the Core i7-980X looks to be a wonderful overclocker.

Early Adopters Get the Respect

Let’s face it: When Intel introduced its LGA1156 Lynnfield CPUs last year, every single person who bought into the Core i7 CPUs and LGA1366 motherboards had a panic attack. Would Intel, as some feared, abandon the LGA1366 platform altogether in favor of the more cost-conscious new socket? It’s happened before. Think of Intel’s short-lived Socket 423 and AMD’s original Socket 940. With those, early adopters got one or two upgrades and then were left waving their DIMMs in the wind.

Fortunately, users who chose the early adopter route will be rewarded for once. The Core i7-980X is an LGA1366 CPU that should be drop-in compatible with nearly every LGA1366 motherboard. To keep things compatible, Intel even kept the official spec for the Core i7-980X to DDR3/1066 only. Even though the CPU is quite capable of supporting memory at far higher speeds, Intel said it didn’t want to require motherboards makers to recertify boards for higher speeds of RAM. For what it’s worth, we tested both the Bloomfield and Gulftown LGA1366 Core i7s at DDR3/1333.

You’ll still have to update the BIOS before dropping in a Core i7-980X, but we haven’t heard of any LGA1366 motherboards being incompatible with the new chip. That’s quite an accomplishment for Intel, which has a history of burning people when new CPUs are launched. We don’t want to rehash ancient history, but let’s just say we’re happy it worked out for early adopters for once.

 Next Up: Exclusivity!

Extreme Exclusivity

Intel has long had a dilemma with its Extreme series of CPUs. Only folks with deep pockets actually purchased the Core i7-975—most consumers just bought the poor-boy Core i7-920 and overclocked that puppy up to the 3.7GHz+ range. There was simply very little incentive to buy the top-end part when the low-end part overclocked so well. That little cheat no longer works, though. To get a hexa-core chip today, you’ll have to pay for an Extreme series. That’s why we were actually surprised when Intel priced the Core i7-980X at $999. Sure, it’s still too rich for most, but as the only game in town, we expected Intel to charge $1,500 for the CPU. At $999, the Core i7-980X is actually the same price as the Core i7-975 part that it will slowly replace.

When will Intel offer a friendlier-priced hexa-core? The company won’t talk about unannounced product but several Internet rumor sites have reported that Intel has a hexa-core Core i7-970 in the $500 range on tap for the end of the year.

If You Build It, Will They Come?

If you think it’s all sunshine and lollipops for hexa-core computing, it’s not. As always, the problem is finding applications that will actually use the available threads. That was a problem with the original dual-cores and quad-cores; now with a hexa-core and Hyper-Threading, the situation hasn’t improved much. The apps aren’t nonexistent, but they’re certainly not as prevalent as you would hope. That makes upgrading to the Core i7-980X something you’ll want to think about first. Certainly, if you are a mega-multitasker, more cores don’t hurt. But if your primary applications are single- or dual-threaded, the extra cores will just sit idle, so you’ll need to seriously consider whether paying for a hexa-core makes sense.

A Close-Up Look at the Core i7-980X

All six cores of Intel’s Core i7-980X share 12MB of L3 cache on the die. The 1.17 billion–transistor CPU also has two QPI connections but only one is enabled on consumer CPUs. The second QPI is use for multi-CPU Xeon configurations.

Even 100 Cores Won't Help Lazy Code

Multiple cores are only useful if there’s software that takes advantage of them. Thus, we queried a couple leading software developers on where they saw the multicore sweet spot to be. Their answers shed interesting light on the quest for more threads.

Jeff Stephens, president of Bibble Labs: “Bibble 5 ‘supports’ unlimited cores, and with fast enough disks and efficient OS-level scheduling, we can scale up to about 30 CPUs (performance benefits stop there, so 32 CPUs runs as fast as 30—right now). Without sounding glib, the reason no one else is doing this is because it’s hard.… To scale beyond four or so threads, all aspects of a program must be built around parallel processing of huge amounts of data, efficient scheduling of processing tasks, and disk reads/writes to prevent starving CPUs of work to do by waiting for data, etc.”

With the Core i7-98X, 12 threads can be processed simultaneously, but only if a given app supports them.

Paul Schmidt, president of Photodex: “In my opinion, more cores don't solve the biggest problem. The biggest problem is how the code is written—most code just isn't written to take advantage of more cores. I don't see that changing soon because writing code for multiple cores is hard and the development world is moving away from hard and toward easy. I think the trend is due to the same old brute-force single-core speed improvements that have been happening combined with how cheap computers are now. Why rewrite for more cores when you can wait a year and get a CPU that is another 20 percent faster?

AMD Responds with Phenom II X6

By now, we’ve pretty much become accustomed to AMD taking a back seat to Intel, particularly in matters of core count and performance. This year, however, it doesn’t look like AMD fans will to wait as long for a six-core proc.

AMD expects to release its own hexa-core processor, the Phenom II X6, hot on the heels of Core i7-980X this spring. The chip will be a derivative of the company’s Istanbul CPU that’s been available for some time in Opteron-based servers. The chip is likely to have 6MB of L3 and will be compatible with AM3 sockets. It’s not clear if the new chip will work in AM2+ boards, as we’ve been told that DDR3 will be mandatory for the new chip.

One other trick AMD may have up its sleeve—if a news report from Xbit Labs is correct —is its own spin on Turbo Boost. Using so-called Dynamic Speed Boost, Phenom II X6 processors may overclock individual cores when the full complement of cores is not in use.

AMD is also continuing to forge ahead with its Bulldozer core, which the company hopes will put it back on a competitive edge with Intel. Bulldozer’s new microarchitecture will support advanced vector extensions and will be built on a 32nm process. Bulldozer is expected to be available in early 2011.

Next up, let the benchmarks begin!

Let the Benchmarks Begin!

Intel's new hexa-core a favorite in all multithreaded events

For our showdown, we decided that the new hexa-core has two primary competitors: the Core i7-975 Extreme Edition and the LGA1156-bound Core i7-870. We considered adding AMD’s Phenom II X4 965 to the mix but the pricing ($185) and performance of that CPU puts it in a different class than the three Intel chips. When AMD’s Phenom II X6 hexa-core hits in the near future, we’ll certainly put it into the mix.

For our benchmarks, we used both older and newer benchmarks to stretch the Core i7-980X. We used both synthetic and real-world applications for video editing, encoding, 3D rendering, and memory tests, along with a handful of gaming benchmarks. Be advised, when we review a CPU, we set resolutions fairly low in order to remove the GPU from the equation.

The verdict: We have no problem proclaiming the Core i7-980X as the world’s fastest. Obviously, it shined the brightest in our multithreaded 3D-rendering benchmarks, where its performance surmounted the already ludicrously fast Core i7-975 by 37 to 55 percent. Encoding also gave us a healthy 25 percent performance boost. Likewise, video editing saw the hexa-core achieve anywhere from 10 to 25 percent performance boosts. In applications where multithreading is minimal, the Core i7-980X was usually tied with the similarly clocked Core i7-975. We do suspect that the larger L3 cache of the Core i-980X paid off dividends in several of our gaming benchmarks.

One figure we couldn’t quite square was the memory performance of the Core i7-980X. We expected its memory bandwidth in the synthetic tests to be equal to the Core i7-975’s, but the hexa-core was at a disadvantage. The lower memory bandwidth didn’t seem to hurt in the other benchmarks, though.

In the final analysis, this is a CPU that turns in performance that is, at its worst, equivalent to the Core i7-975 it replaces. At its best, the i7-980X offers up to 50 percent more performance than its closest competitor. That’s pretty much unprecedented and certainly helps the Core i7-980X earn its crown as the new performance king.

Best scores are bolded. We tested both LGA1366 CPUs using an Asus P6X58D Premium motherboard with 6GB of Corsair DDR3/1333, an EVGA GeForce GTX 280, and 64-bit Windows 7 Professional. The LGA1156 CPU was tested with a Gigabyte P55A-UD6 motherboard, 8GB of Corsair DDR3/1333, an EVGA GeForce GTX 280, and 64-bit Windows 7 Professional. Both configurations used a 150GB Western Digital Raptor hard drive.

The perfect device for leprechauns

The Sony Vaio P is a weird device. It’s much smaller than a netbook, but much better-equipped. It has wireless broadband access from Verizon, onboard GPS, a ThinkPad-style pointing stick, and an eye-straining high-resolution screen. It’s also incredibly expensive. So who exactly is the Vaio P for?

At just 9.8 inches across, 0.8 inches thick, and 4.8 inches deep, and weighing just one pound, five ounces, the Vaio P is made for mobility—it makes a 10-inch netbook look like a desktop replacement. Into those tiny dimensions Sony crams parts that—on paper—put your old Atom netbook to shame. The Vaio P uses a 2GHz Atom Z550 paired with the US15W chipset and GMA500 integrated graphics. By comparison, last year’s typical netbook used a 1.6GHz N280 on an Intel GSE945 chipset with GMA950 graphics. The Vaio P also ships with 2GB of DDR2/533 and a whopping 256GB Samsung MLC SSD, which itself is responsible for $700 of the Vaio P’s price tag. The full Windows 7 Professional OS is a welcome change from Windows XP—or worse, Windows 7 Starter.

The Vaio P’s eight-inch screen offers an eye-watering 1600x768 resolution. This is the first time we’ve ever seen a screen that was too sharp; reading text on it for more than a few minutes hurt our eyes.

The Vaio P's 1600x768 resolution is sharp--but you have to move in really close to appreciate it.

In fact, everything about the Vaio P is just a little too small. The chiclet-style QWERTY keyboard, though bigger than boards found on most MIDs and UMPCs, is still too small to type on comfortably, unless you have very nimble fingers. And the lack of a track pad hurts—the pointing stick, though reasonably sensitive, isn’t as precise. The speakers have zero low end at any volume; you’re much better off using the included headphones.

In our netbook benchmarks, the Vaio P fared about as well as we’d expect from a device with a faster CPU, more RAM, slower integrated graphics, and a smaller battery than our zero-point. It was 22 percent faster than the zero-point in our Photoshop benchmark and 50 percent faster in our MainConcept test, but 67 percent slower in Quake III, thanks to its crappier graphics chipset. Quake 4, which is unplayable on any non-Ion netbook, wouldn’t even run on the Vaio P. To our surprise, the Vaio P bested the Toshiba Satellite T115 ultrathin notebook from last month in MainConcept, though in nothing else. Battery life, at two hours, 24 minutes, is impressive only in light of the Vaio P’s size and the corresponding miniature battery.

So what do you make of a tiny, yet full-fledged computer with a screen that causes eyestrain, a keyboard that’s hard to type on, and a nearly $2,000 price tag? The Verizon-enabled 3G wireless data connection and turn-by-turn GPS (utilizing Microsoft Streets & Trips 2009), offer some clues. The Vaio P is for the ultimate road warrior: someone who values portability above all else. And we mean all else—battery life, usability, even money. But given that modern smartphones offer a more usable, albeit smaller, interface along with mobile data and turn-by-turn navigation, we’d warrant that even the hardiest road warrior would prefer the combination of a smartphone and an ultraportable that’s easier on the eyes and fingers. This leaves us with only one possible target demographic for the Vaio P: leprechauns. We can’t think of anyone else with the small fingers, sharp eyes, and pot o’ gold required to get the most out of this device.

If your system has muscle, this card will flex it

There’s no doubt in our minds that the HIS Radeon HD 5970 offers superlative performance and extremely high frame rates. The combination of dual AMD Cypress GPUs, each coupled with its own dedicated 1GB pool of fast GDDR5 memory, makes this graphics card one of the fastest we’ve ever tested.

This particular card is based on AMD’s reference design, so the two GPUs clock in at 725MHz, while the memory clock is set at 1GHz. It’s an enormous card, too, at just over 12 inches long. If you buy the card from Newegg, you get a compact PC toolkit, though HIS is looking to expand the toolkit bundle. Also included is a coupon for a free Steam download of Dirt 2, the DirectX 11–capable racing game from Codemasters.

Assuming HIS built the cards to AMD specs, there should be plenty of headroom for overclocking. The beefy cooling system, with its full-length vapor chamber, can dissipate up to 400W of power. Of course, for best results, you’ll want to tweak the card’s voltage. AMD initially offered its own tool for overvolting GPU and memory, but has since withdrawn the utility. However, MSI’s Afterburner tool (http://event.msi.com/vga/afterburner), which apparently works with any AMD-based graphics card, allows you to tweak the core voltage but doesn’t provide a way to alter memory voltage.

The HIS Radeon HD 5970 is best experienced on big or multiple displays.

We put the HIS Radeon HD 5970 up against AMD’s last-gen dualie, the Radeon HD 4870 X2, Nvidia’s dual GeForce GTX 295, and the two fastest single cards from both vendors. As was the case last month, when we reviewed XFX’s HD 5970, HIS’s HD 5970 blew the doors off any other graphics card currently available. But at $600, you should ask yourself if you really need such a massive, heat-generating monster of a graphics card.

There’s no question that if you’re running on a 1920x1200 or 2560x1600 display, the huge pixel-pushing power of the HIS HD 5970 makes a difference. Do owners of more modest systems and displays need one—or can they even make use of that much GPU horsepower? The current generation of moderately priced LCD displays typically offer native resolutions of 1680x1050 (20- or 22-inch displays) or 1920x1080 pixels (23-inch and larger units.)

To answer this, we ran our suite of game tests on the HIS Radeon HD 5970, HIS Radeon HD 5870, and the XFX Radeon HD 5850 cards at different resolutions. To simplify the results, we took the geometric mean of all our tests at the different resolutions. With a 22-inch 1680x1050 panel, even the $300 Radeon HD 5850 will average above 62fps. At 1920x1080, that 5850 remains above 62fps. By moving to the Radeon HD 5870, you can average 76fps at 1920x1080 and 74fps at 1920x1200. The 5970 at 1920x1200 puts you in the 92fps range, and on a 30-inch 2560x1600 panel, you’re still running at 70fps. The bottom line: If you’re not running a big display, the HD 5970 is pretty much wasted. In fact, at the 1680x1050 resolution of most 22-inch monitors, you’ll still average higher than 60fps with all the graphics goodness turned up (but no AA or AF) with even the $300 Radeon HD 5850.

There’s no question that the HIS Radeon HD 5970 is an awesome piece of kit, but you really need an awesome system and display to take advantage of it. If you’re system isn’t riding the bleeding edge, you might opt for a lesser card. You’ll save money and watts and still get great performance. On the other hand, if you’ve got a 30-inch monitor and the badass PC to drive it, you can’t do better today than this card.

A super-duper amount of RAM!

There are two things we think of when we hear the word “supercomputer.” The first is the failed 1970s NBC show Supercomputer (now available on DVD from Shinehart Wigs). The other is a massive room full of HAL9000-like scary boxes just two MIPS away from declaring thermal nuclear war on humanity.

So, what was Gateway thinking when it decided to call its FX6831 a Gaming Super-computer? This is, after all, just a simple desktop housing a single 2.8GHz Core i7-860. Surely, that’s not the stuff of supercomputing, is it? OK, we know that in January, Fabrice Bellard used a single Core i7 to smash a record set by, umm, a supercomputer for calculating pi. Still, Gateway’s gone way over the line, right?

Perhaps. The specs certainly aren’t extraordinary. Besides the Core i7-860, this Gaming Supercomputer packs an ATI Radeon HD 5850, a 1.5TB hard drive, and a DVD burner and Blu-ray combo drive, all running on a motherboard using Intel’s new H57 chipset.

A single Core i7 bested a real supercomputer, so maybe Gateway's Supercomputer can do the same.

We know many enthusiast users think OEM boxes are boring, but as we saw with Alienware’s Aurora ALX (reviewed in February 2010), large OEMs are quite capable of turning out innovative cases. Gateway’s Gaming Supercomputer is another such example: It features a hidden compartment up top for holding an external USB drive, with nearby access to two USB ports. Brilliant.

The most eye-catching spec of the Gaming Supercomputer is the amount of main memory it packs: 16GB of DDR3/1333. That’s the most RAM we’ve ever seen in a production machine. Unfortunately, that kind of excess has limited utility. To be fair, you can probably say the same of a machine with three graphics cards or a four-drive SSD RAID. Still, if we had our druthers, we’d probably sacrifice 8GB of that RAM to buy a sweet SSD.

The Supercomputer had the honor of being the first machine christened with our latest benchmark suite.

For a midrange system, the Gaming Supercomputer does well, but it lagged behind our updated zero-point system. Our overclocked zero-point has a 25 percent clock advantage, and for the most part, it turned in scores about 23 to 24 percent faster.

The Supercomputer had the most difficult time trying to catch our zero-point in gaming. That’s no shocker, though; the Gateway packs an ATI Radeon HD 5850, which is currently the reigning champ of the $300 videocard world. Our zero-point, however, runs an ATI Radeon HD 5970, which is currently the best graphics card. Period. However, it’s a $700 videocard. Since few things today can be scored independently of price, consider that our zero-point rig totals about $2,300, which puts it in the category of high-end gaming machines. At $1,700, the Gaming Supercomputer is a solid midrange rig.

That doesn’t mean we don’t have our complaints. As we said, we’d forego the shock value of 16GB of RAM for an SSD or an upgrade to a 5970. So Gaming Supercomputer? Probably not. But then again, where’s the allure in Nicely Balanced and Affordable Gaming Computer?

'Cuz what you see you might not get

Somehow, blowing things up never gets old—especially blowing up Nazis. Sixty-five years after the fall of the Third Reich, it’s still a gaming favorite.

As the titular Saboteur, Irish mechanic turned French freedom-fighter Sean Devlin, you throw a wrench into the gears of the Nazi occupation in 1940... except this wrench is actually a wad of TNT that detonates in a spectacular fireball. The game equips you with an ample pile of explosives and turns you loose in a target-rich open-world version of Nazi-occupied Paris (complete with Eiffel Tower and Louvre) and its surrounding rural areas. Much of the joy of playing comes from planting bombs on poorly guarded Nazi equipment and casually strolling out of the blast radius before it blows, then watching it crumble down, jackbooted thugs and all.

Sure, the story, which follows Sean’s quest for revenge against a sadistic S.S. officer/race car driver is a little hammy and more than a little absurd, but it doesn’t take itself too seriously. In fact, it works well with the roguish Indiana Jones–style attitude of the character. The voice actors play along, delivering entertaining performances with caricature Irish, French, and German accents.

Blowing up Nazi equipment gives you resources you can use to buy bombs that you can use to blow up more Nazi equipment. Everybody wins! (Except the Nazis.)

There’s a touch of Schindler’s List here, too. Until you liberate them by completing a few missions, Parisian neighborhoods under the heel of the Third Reich have the color drained from them, except for important items like weapons and red swastika armbands. The effect gives The Saboteur a distinct and very cool look, as well as effectively helping you spot threats quickly in a firefight.

Sean borrows driving and shooting skills from Grand Theft Auto, wall-climbing and stealth-killing abilities from Assassin’s Creed, and a knack for Nazi uniform–stealing from Hitman. All of these elements blend together surprisingly well, allowing you the freedom to approach your bombing and assassination targets by running and gunning, sniping from the rooftops, infiltrating in disguise, or simply bombing their cars. A few story missions are designed like corridor shooters, such as a battle through the inside of a burning zeppelin, but they’re usually brief and enjoyable. Simplistic enemy AI and rapidly recharging player health keep the third-person Nazi-killing action fast-paced and cartoonish, and it feels great on a mouse and keyboard. Driving feels a little too “bumper car” in its lack of damage modeling or consequences for running down Parisian civilians, though, and the menus and map screen could’ve used some more work to improve mouse-friendliness.

It’s unfortunate that the campaign of this single-player-only game doesn’t finish as strong—the story deteriorates in the third act, failing to tie up loose ends, and lazily concluding Sean’s revenge quest. But that doesn’t interfere with the core enjoyment of blowing things up, so it’s easy to let those flaws slide.

However, in a staggering failure of quality-assurance testing, out of the box The Saboteur simply won’t work with ATI graphics cards. As of this writing, EA has released a beta version of a patch to remedy the problem that has shown some success in tests, but until it’s finalized, cautious Radeon owners shouldn’t risk sabotaging themselves.