Consumer Thoughts

Check out Adrian’s Guide to 2007 freeware games!

I’m very disappointed with GameTap.
If you don’t know what GameTap is, it’s a subscription-based gaming network for PCs. It features tons of classic games - currently they’re boasting over 600 games. It’s $9.95 monthly.
I have more than enough system resources according to their minimum requirements, as well as bandwidth (minimum 384k download speed [...]

Microsoft’s Zune will place DRM on any song you share with someone else, regardless of whether that song has DRM in the first place.
Amazon’s Unbox video download service has some of the worst terms of service ever, including a clause that lets them report on what software you have installed on your computer.
German company Akuma [...]

Wow, check out this article. It seems that running Yahoo Messenger 8 slows down a fresh Windows install more than even Microsoft Office or Photoshop! It came in third place - the worst offender was Norton Internet Security 2006, and the 2nd worse was having over 1000 fonts installed on your system.

Rather than giving you a best case scenario prediction of the battery life in your notebook, Battery Eater Pro uses every power-hungry option to try to drain your battery as fast as possible. This is in many ways a better benchmark, since it’s consistently repeatable, and lets you know what you can expect under the [...]

From CNet News:
Default Program is a new feature Microsoft has added to Vista to avoid the problem of applications taking over common functions, such as playing music or browsing the Web, from each other. Rather than letting competing applications fight, it will give the user a single interface for deciding which programs should do which [...]

In order to keep computer sales going around the holidays (a very popular time for computer upgrades), rumor has it that some PC vendors are going to ship their new PCs with coupons for a free Vista upgrade.  This would help them out a lot, because since Vista is supposed to come out in January, [...]

Software programmers: Stay out of my “My Documents” folder! If I wanted your programs in there, I’d invite them.  Don’t make the My Documents folder the default for anything.  Not downloads, not saved games, not music files… nothing!  (And it’s even worse when certain IM programs put oddly-named folders in like “filelib,” thus making it [...]