A week or two ago I got a Lenovo IdeaPad U160 , a sharp looking little bright red, brushed aluminum 12” ultraportable packed with a Core i5 processor and 4GB of RAM. It looks great, feels great and performs great – effectively a performance PC disguised as a netbook. That’s why when Lenovo gave me the...

UPDATE (8/4/10, 10:47ET): Corrected the contest end date. I’m on my way to New York City with some of my Windows colleagues to attend BlogHer’10 , where we’ll join over 2,000 bloggers and journalists to share ideas about how to take advantage of technology to make our blogs more...

The first-ever Windows PC Holiday Showcase was a huge success! Over 40 press, analysts, enthusiasts and contest winners joined me , Brandon , Ryan and dozens of the season’s hottest Windows PCs for a night of great food, cool music, and fun gadget talk. Rather than make you to read a long, wordy post...

Last week I said “Keep it up, Acer!” after they released a pike of hot new notebooks. I guess they listened, because today they announced the brand new Acer Aspire AG7750 gaming rig , affectionately known in the gaming world as the “ Predator ”. Why? Because 1) It has some of the most impressive specs...

Normally when I review a laptop, I spend most of my time on performance and design – how it looks, how it feels to hold and type on, how it performs under various workloads.  Today’s post on the MSI GX640 gaming laptop is a bit different, because I wanted to focus on MSI’s implementation of Windows...

About two weeks ago I got a present – a pre-release unit of the Samsung X430. This carbon-look fiber clad PC is a Microsoft Store exclusive – it’s only sold in our new “brick-and-mortar” stores and at the Microsoft Store Online. First, its impossible to miss the...

Today I have big news about a little PC – Dell just announced that they are refreshing the Inspiron Zino HD mini-PC ! If you’re not familiar with the the Zino HD, it’s a full featured desktop that’s packed with an impressive array of technology – like an AMD Athon II V140...

After 3 days on the show floor in Vegas, it’s nice to sneak away for a little peace and quiet.  Darren Gladstone, HP’s Blogger-in-Chief, agreed with me, so we camped out in one of the Microsoft booth meeting rooms to talk about HP’s brand new, AMD Fusion powered Pavilion dm1, and the ultra-premium...

Over at the "Next at Microsoft” Blog , my buddy Steve Clayton wrote up a short piece on what I carry in my gear bag as part of his “Tools of the Trade” series.  As you can see from this shot of my kit, it’s a lot of stuff – usually one or more laptops, headphones, camera, food, etc.  I...

A few weeks ago I got a brand-new Lenovo ThinkPad X220 . It’s a 12.5” PC loaded with a second-gen Core i5 processor, 8GB of RAM, and a 160GB Intel SSD. It also comes with a big 9-cell battery, as well as an additional 9-cell “battery slice” that clips to the PC’s underside. Together, Lenovo claims that...

UPDATE 10/4/10, 11:15am PT - Clarified Signature Upgrade requirements. Sorry for the confusion! Last week I had the opportunity to talk with Ken Fowles, the company’s “Signature Samurai” and the man responsible for running the Microsoft Signature lab. We had a chance to talk about...

Hot on the heels of our Holiday PC Showcase events , I had the opportunity to do live-via-satellite interviews with over 20 national & regional TV and radio stations from all over the country. I talked with show hosts and news anchors about my thoughts on the hottest tech gifts for the holiday season...

That’s the question Lenovo poses in its “Boot or Bust” ads that promote its new RapidBoot for Windows 7 campaign . The premise is simple; toss a computer out of an airplane, boot it and have it auto-run a program that deploys the chute. If it boots fast enough, it lives. If it doesn’t, well…it doesn...

It’s been quite a week at CES 2011 and before I sign off for a bit, I wanted to leave you with a few final thoughts: Of course, there was a ton of great The trends that I noticed were really catching on this year were: 3D might finally be ready for prime time. That’s largely due to the affordable availability...

I’m sitting here in on my in-laws’ deck overlooking beautiful Lake Chelan . Evan sleeping by my side, Audrey is down for a nap and the house is otherwise empty, so I thought I’d take my mother-in-law’s HP G62 out for a test drive. Yes, this is the same one I was conscripted to configure just a few weeks...

At today’s grand opening of the Bellevue Square Microsoft Store I got the chance to sit down with Michael Tatelman, Dell Consumer Sales & Marketing Vice President and General Manager, to talk about the Dell Inspiron duo (which I reviewed this morning ), as well as the brand new Dell Venue Pro Windows...

This is the next in the series of “PC Snapshots” - short 2-3 minute overview of PCs that Ryan and I think are awesome. If there’s a PC that you’d like to see us cover, hit me on Twitter , send me mail , or leave a comment. We’ll try to get to it ASAP! Today’s PC is the Toshiba Portege r705 .  It...

Last week I got my hands on a brand new ASUS VX7 Lamborghini gaming laptop.  It’s a beautiful PC, as I noted in my unboxing photo gallery blog , so I wanted to devote this piece to the PC’s performance, which looks to be seriously impressive.  What’s inside My VX7 is loaded with a second-generation...

Every month I get a huge volume of questions about how to pick the right PC. Lots of them are about specific machines, (“Should I buy PC X or PC Y?”), some are about features or specs (“What’s the best PC to run program _____?”), but most are to the effect of “I’m...

Here on the Windows Experience Blog we spend most of our time talking about consumer PCs. But there’s a whole world of commercial grade hardware out there that are used by business professionals worldwide. Lee Sabow, a colleague of mine who works on the commercial side of the Windows business, and I...

Saturday afternoon had a shoot that I was really looking forward to all week – ORIGIN .  If you haven’t heard of them, ORIGIN makes some of the world’s most powerful gaming PCs, all custom designed & hand-built.  My first experience with ORIGIN came when I picked up the massive, blow-you...

By now you’ve probably seen our “To the Cloud!” TV commercials where we highlight some of the cool new stuff you can do with an awesome new PC with Windows 7 and Windows Live.  The ads are great, but they’re only 30-60 seconds long, which isn’t a lot of time to dig into each PC and scenario. ...

When I say “ Lenovo ” to most PC users, their immediate response is “Oh, the guys who make ThinkPads ?”  That’s to be expected; Lenovo is world-famous for building some of the best business PCs on the market.  What most people don’t know is that they also make some really beautiful consumer...

For this month’s roundup, Ryan and I wanted to share some of our favorite netbooks. Unlike the “original” crop of netbooks that were small, underpowered, and cramped to type on, today’s netbooks are bigger, faster, and more beautiful – and run any version of Windows 7 like a dream. Some even have full...

It’s summer! Well maybe not so much up here in Seattle, where we’re still dealing with 60-degree temps and cloudy skies, but definitely in other parts of the country. That means it’s time to get out of the house and enjoy the sunshine with a few days away from the office. If you’re like me, your PC comes...