Welcome everyone to a new and very exciting part of PC Pitstop. Roughly a year ago, as part of the incredibly popular OverDrive test, we began collecting user input about PC satisfaction. We began asking the following three questions:

• * How satisfied are you with this PC?
• * Is this PC running slow?
• * Is this PC hanging or requiring frequent reboots?

Welcome to the Top Free Software Report. There are two problems with free software. First off, there is a lot of free software and it is hard to know what free software is the best. Secondly, because it is free, free software makers can't spend money on advertising to get the word out on their cool creations. We hope that this new feature in TechTalk will solve both of these problems.

Netbooks - those ultra small portable PCs - are they a niche product, a passing fad or an up and coming product just in its infancy? PC Pitstop analyzed the prevalence of netbooks that ran our on-line diagnostic scans during Q4 2008 and Q1 2009. For the purpose of our analysis, we looked at processor descriptions as well as the display size for portables. For the most part, we found that the netbooks usually contained the Intel® Atom™ processor. We also set a filter for portable display size of less than 11 inches for the purpose of our analysis.

With sales approaching only 400,000 units in 2007, netbook sales exploded in 2008 reaching 11. 4 million units. Small, light, and super-portable are the catchwords describing a netbook. Definitions vary but the determining factors are price and size. Generally they have a screen size of 10” or below, a reduced power/performance processor with 1.0 and 1.6 gig. the most popular of sizes. Price is dictating the use of limited amounts of memory but drive size has been creeping up.

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...the element of choice. A recent trip drove home the importance of battery life in laptops. Although my laptop was relatively new at less than a year old, it lasted just under 2 hours on battery power. I had all the energy saving features on and I had dimmed the screen, but it didn't seem to help much. When I got home I did some checking to see what was coming in the way of battery technology. While I found some information on new technologies, most seemed far from being ready to use. In fact there were only hints that there would be anything new within the next five years.

What graphics cards were surfacing as the top 3D video perforrmers based on the test results captured during the first month since its roll out?

Since its release in early May 2008, there has been plenty of press concerning the issues with Microsoft's XP Service Pack 3. Common sense would tell us that such negative press would drastically slow the rate that folks would update to the release. PC Pitstop analyzed the percentage of XP users that have updated their systems to SP3 during the first three months since its release and compared them to the adoption rates of SP2 during its roll out.

I am very excited and proud to present a brand new report from PC Pitstop. Given the outrageous traffic on our web site, we are able to see the absolute fastest PC's in the world, what technologies they use, and why they fall into an elite performance standing. It took a lot of culling of the data, but I am pleased to announced the PC Pitstop Notebook 500. This month we will look at the fastest portables that money can buy. So let's get to the results.

Back in May 2006, when Microsoft announced Vista system memory requirements of 512 MB for "Vista Capable" and 1 GB for "Vista Premium Ready" classifications, the average XP system had 833 MB and 659 MB of installed memory for Desktop and Portable systems respectively. Once Vista was released in early 2007, most users determined that "more memory was better" as the average installed desktop memory rose relatively quickly to over 2 GB on Vista systems. In recent months, it is not uncommon for PC manufacturers to market Vista systems with 3 GB of RAM. The emergence of 64-bit architecture has also likely played a role in the increase of average RAM.