It’s hard to describe if you’ve never experienced it. It’s the day you get glasses with a new prescription. When you first put on the new glasses, it can be like seeing the world in a new way. You notice details you didn’t realize were there. Everything looks amazing. This is similar to what I experienced...

In the movie industry where “time is money”, technology is being developed and deployed rapidly in order to capitalize on creative opportunities, and to shorten time-to-market for these productions. In my last post , I gave an overview of how RED Digital Cinema is innovating with 4K and 5K motion picture...

The year was 1982. My sister and I had decided to pool our resources and together we saved up enough cash to buy the ultimate gaming console: the Atari 2600. We spent many hours playing games on that console, and I can still remember the sound of the tanks driving in Combat. I would later move on to...

If you want to see just how serious Windows gamers can be- you really need to go to a LAN party. One of the largest gatherings in the United States happens three times a year in Portland, Oregon. Since it was so close to Microsoft’s offices in Redmond, I decided to attend PDXLAN (July 13-16, 2012) to...

If you are working on professional tasks related to CAD/CAM, photo editing, video editing, or 3D animation, you need a powerful PC. But what if you don’t have the space for a separate tower, external displays, and all of the cables? HP has released a PC targeted at this scenario: the Z1 all-in-one workstation...

NVIDIA has been hard at work this year rolling out a series of new video cards including the GeForce GTX 690 , GeForce GTX 680 , GeForce GTX 660 Ti , and many others. These new 600-series video cards are based on NVIDIA’s latest architecture: Kepler. I recently spent some time running the GeForce GTX...

Hello everyone, my name is Gavin Gear, and I am going to be blogging regularly here on the Extreme Windows Blog. My background includes working on the Windows sensor team (see recent talks from BUILD HERE ), and before Microsoft I graduated with a degree in Mechanical Engineering. Some of the things...

Selecting a mobile PC is a process of balancing trade-offs. Screen size, computational horsepower, battery life, weight, size, and price are all factors that vary from one type of laptop to another. In the past, you had to choose between capabilities like battery life, size, and performance. These tradeoffs...

Today’s enterprise workstation PCs are being used for tasks that are more demanding than ever. Applications have scaled and become more capable, and the tasks they perform have become more intensive by orders of magnitude. Machine specs also continue to show increasing capabilities year over year to...

If you’ve been to the movies lately, it’s likely that you’ve seen the amazing images that RED Digital Cinema cameras capture. Many of the big budget blockbusters recently released or about to be released were shot on RED cameras. These movies include The Amazing Spiderman, The Great Gatsby, and The Hobbit...

A while back, I decided it was time to get my hands dirty with the Kinect for Windows 1.5 SDK (see Tapping Into the Power of Kinect for Windows ). It was a fun project, and a great way to get started with Kinect for Windows. Here’s a high-level view of what’s already in 1.5 version of the Kinect SDK...

Today, NVIDIA launched a graphics card that’s packed with powerful high-end features, but will be available at an affordable price. This new card is called the GeForce GTX 660 Ti , and is based on the latest NVIDIA Kepler architecture (which debuted with the GeForce GTX 680). Here are some features and...