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- In Depth: 5 of the best lightweight window managers for Linux
- Opinion: Apple and Valve have got app stores right, but can Microsoft?
- Review: AMD Phenom II X4 980 Black Edition
- Review: Advance Tec AT-FX Tron
- In Depth: How to speed up your broadband
- Review: NoFan SET A40 fanless bundle
| In Depth: 5 of the best lightweight window managers for Linux Posted: 03 Jul 2011 01:00 AM PDT If you do a lot of work on a Linux computer, continuously switching between many windows, the right window manager can make you much faster and more productive than an extra 2GB of RAM. In this context, 'right' means any combination of two different qualities: raw speed and correspondence with your actual needs, habits and personality. If you need to make the most of an obsolete PC, you'll probably want something slimmer and nimbler than either Gnome or KDE. In other cases, what saves you more time is whatever does by default, with one click or keystroke, what you want to do most often. Be it vertical maximization, iconization or jumping around virtual desktops. The possibility to use the mouse as little as possible is another big productivity boost. Whatever your needs, Linux has more than Gnome or KDE. This month we present five alternative window managers that were chosen with these criteria: first, they had to be lightweight, in order to be usable on low-end computers. Next, they had to be installable with normal package managers, so that you can try them quickly if you run the most common distros. Finally, we gave precedence to lesser known window managers, rather than those normally pre-installed by those same distributions. That's the only reason why excellent products like Xfce aren't present: you've probably already got it in your login menu. How we tested... The programs have all been tested on a dual core AMD 64 3800+ system with 8GB of RAM, running Fedora 14 with all the updates available as of April 2011. We've looked at how easy it is to install and configure each window manager, how many options it has and how much its look and feel can be modified by the user. We've also looked at how well they work with the most essential applications you're likely to use. Enlightenment DR 16 (E16) The Enlightenment DR16 Window Manager, or E16 for short, was born in 1997, when most inhabitants of Linux-land were fiercely debating the One True Desktop Way, Gnome or KDE. In the middle of all that, Enlightenment arrived and showed a different and, for many, much more visually pleasing way to handle a desktop. Today, the E16 version of Enlightenment is still, as its home page says, "graphically stimulating". E16 is the only window manager in this roundup that is able to maximize windows vertically or horizontally, when you click with your left or middle mouse buttons on the middle icon in the window's title bar. The first feature (present in many other window managers) lets you read as many lines of text as possible without scrolling. The second is great for typing very long lines in terminals or editors without wrapping them around or losing sight of other windows. You can customise every single detail of how E16 looks, feels and behaves. Doing so is what makes it so fun and quick to use, so be prepared to spend some time on it. The configuration panels have so many options, it takes half a day to look at them all. E16 also has shelves, or boxes that work more or less like Gnome panels. The main, if not only, problem we've found in E16 is that its default application menu is a mess. Instead of first level sub-menus such as Games, Internet, Office and so on, you get KDE, Gnome, and Others, each with its own Games, Office, etc... sections. So a novice should first know if he or she wants to go Gnome or KDE and only then tell the computer if it's time to work, surf the internet or play. On top of that, probably due at least in part to packaging bugs in Fedora 14, a lot of entries are repeated with the same or different names. Firefox, for example, is present both as Firefox and Firefox Web Browser. Finally, as weird as it may seem, you cannot change E16 menus without editing the text files in $HOME/.e16/menus/. Luckily, they have a very simple syntax. If you do that or install epplets (more on them later), remember to select Maintenance > Regenerate Menus from the System menu. In the same place you can also clear the many caches that E16 uses to work faster. Looks matter
E16's default theme has very tiny window borders but you can change its look in lots of ways. By default, you have two virtual desktops. Each is twice as wide as your monitor, but it could be as much as 64 times bigger. Pushing the mouse cursor on the edge of your screen moves you to the other half of the current virtual desktop. This takes a while to get used to, but many users like it (eventually). The top bar of each workspace has two tiny triangles at its edges that open the system menu and windows lists. In the right bottom corner of the screen lives an iconbox, a sort of panel with a slider that holds all your icons without cluttering the screen. You can even use more iconboxes simultaneously. Each window is configurable individually and you can tell it to remember its settings. Different move and resize effects exist and visual tooltips pop up so learning E16 by doing is easy. Nearly everything can be done with the keyboard. E16 can be launched alone or inside KDE or Gnome, replacing their default window manager. We strongly suggest you do the former. At least in Fedora, E16 alone starts, and runs single programs, faster. Above all, E16 + KDE looks like two screenshots pasted over each other, fighting over who should be on top. Gnome + E16 isn't much better. It is possible to write small, graphical add-ons for E16, such as clocks or mailbox and system monitors, called epplets. Those installable as binary packages in Fedora frankly failed to impress: a system monitor such as Gkrellm does the same things better and looks much cooler too. Verdict Enlightenment E16 is wildly configurable, fast and fun but maybe a little erratic. Rating: 8/10 Openbox Back in the 90s, if you wanted a lean and mean but flexible window manager, that was able to do what you wanted with minimal eye candy and few distractions, but that didn't look like some GUI experiment from a decade earlier, sooner or later you'd try Blackbox. Over time, that application has spawned several variants, recognisable by the 'box' suffix. Today, Openbox is the window manager of that family that you are most likely to find pre-packaged for your distribution. That's why it's here. Keep in mind, however, that most of what you read in this page also applies to Openbox's relatives.
If you aren't prepared, the first time you start Openbox you'll find yourself nervously wondering whether your graphics card passed out. A basic design idea of the *box window managers is that it's not just panels that are unnecessary; you don't really need icons either. By default it's a dull, dark grey background and nothing else. Don't despair, though, everything is here and the wiki on the Openbox website lists plenty of options to add panels. System menus are accessible with the right mouse button. Menus are almost the same as Gnome's, with one notable addition: Openbox knows its users aren't afraid of the command line, so it has a whole Terminals sub menu. This will give you immediate access to Konsole, Gnome Terminal, Emacs terminal or the old, but immortal Xterm. Speaking of sub-menus, one little but really neat feature of Openbox is that it makes it really easy to create dynamic ones. Quoting from the Openbox wiki: "Pipe menus are dynamic menus, built on-the-fly from scripts. The output is piped back to Openbox and used for the menu". For example, let's say that you already have a shell script that downloads RSS feeds, stock tickers or whatever you want from the internet. If you tell that shell script to save titles and URLs of all those feeds in one plain text file with a simple markup, you'll have created a 'News' Openbox sub-menu that lists the most recent news every time you select it, and opens in your favourite browser the ones you click on. Virtual desktops
The not-so-complicated instructions to create your own pipe menu scripts, including links to existing ones, can be found at http://openbox.org/wiki/Openbox:Pipemenus. Openbox also supports virtual desktops. To move from one to another without using the mouse, press Window Key+D. As we said, Openbox doesn't use icons. When you minimise a window, it just disappears from the screen. You can reopen it in the same root menu used to switch between virtual desktops, that is also accessible by pressing the middle mouse button. If you aren't comfortable with this system, but want the minimised windows to remain visible on the screen anyway, Openbox (E16 and Window Maker can do it too) offers an alternative to icons. You can 'roll up' windows, as if they were drapes, inside their top/title bar and only leave that visible on the desktop. In order to save space, Openbox doesn't draw side or bottom borders. For the same reason, even the title bar is optional. If you right click on it and select Un/Decorate, it will become one pixel wide just like the other sides of that window. To get it back, go to the very border of the window itself until you see a small segment close to the pointer, then click with the right button. All in all, even if it does look really bare, Openbox has almost everything you'd expect from a modern window manager. What isn't there can be added, with minimum effort, by following the good documentation on the website. Probably the only major function that you'll have to add manually is session management (if you use Openbox without Gnome or KDE, otherwise it will integrate with their session managers) and there are step-by-step instructions on the Autostart and Getting Started pages of the Openbox wiki. Verdict Openbox Rating: 9/10 Window Maker Another veteran window manager that has been around since the 90s, Window Maker has a very characteristic look and personality. After you've used it for a few minutes, you'll probably recognise any screenshot of it immediately, no matter how heavily it has been customised, due to the two pillars of its interface: the Dock and the Clip. The Dock is a sort of panel from which you can launch your favourite applications by double-clicking on their icons. You can add more applications simply by dragging their icons over it. And dragging icons out to the root window is all you need to do to remove stuff.
Drag and drop A lot of configuration in Window Maker is done by dragging and dropping. The main limit of the Dock, at least for some users, is that its layout is fixed: you can put it on the upper or lower left of the screen, but it will always be a vertical single column. The top left corner of your monitor is the default location for Window Maker's second distinctive feature: the Clip. This widget, unlike its Microsoft equivalent, does have a reason to exist. The Clip can be placed wherever you want and besides switching from one virtual desktop to another, it also works as a temporary container for the icons of all the applications running in the current workspace - which is why some Window Maker users call the Clip a Dock enhancer. You can also drag an application icon away from the Clip and drop it on to the Dock if you decide you'll need it in all of your future Window Maker sessions. You start applications in Window Maker by clicking on the corresponding entry in the root system menu. Unlike Openbox, Window Maker only offers Xterm as a default terminal but the root menu includes a Run widget in which you can type whatever command you need. To declutter the screen, you can configure the Clip to AutoAttract the icons of all active programs that aren't in the Dock. Otherwise icons of open applications will be placed in the lower left of the screen and you can choose to make them appear on all workspaces. Wherever the icon is, clicking on it with the right mouse button lets you change settings, configure startup options and choose if you want it to start automatically every time you log into Window Maker. The screwdriver icon in the Dock launches the Window Maker graphical configuration editor, a program called Wprefs. You can also start it from the root menu, where it is listed, oddly, as Preferences Utility at the bottom of the Appearance section. You can do all sort of things in Wprefs, including changing the default icons. Remember, however, that if you do that, you must first tell Wprefs to change the Icon Search Path. If you're unhappy with how you have configured the desktop, you can reset it to Window Maker's default values; but if you like it, you can save it for future logins. One thing that causes confusion among first time users is how to launch the same program more than once from the same icon. The solution is simple but long-winded, so look for it before you start experimenting in the official FAQ, which can be found with the user guide and some useful tutorials on the website. Graphical widgets
What's left to say? Oh yes, of course: dockapps, are little graphical widgets designed for Window Maker (but also usable in other window managers) that do the most diverse things. You can find lots of them at www.dockapps.org, from temperature indicator Dwgo (Don't Want to Go Outside) to Wmtext, which displays the output of a shell command with the font and background of your choice. Summing up, Window Maker starts up fast, stays fast, is easy to use and has a nice retro look. On the down side, it didn't read the Gnome and KDE menus and windows are hard to resize. Verdict Window Maker Fast, full-featured and good looking, but less integrated with modern apps. Rating: 7/10 Fvwm Fvwm is probably the most ancient window manager here, but it still has a reason to exist and is very usable on current GNU/Linux distributions. Don't be put off by its pre-Windows 95 look. Fvwm has a rich start menu, and its utilities have the same structure as Gnome's application menus.
The most important parts of Fvwm , however, are modules. The right combination of modules will replicate almost all the real functionalities of more modern window managers, if not the eye candy. Some modules are shown in the screenshot, but there are more. Banner, Console, Pager, ScrollBar and WinList - which creates a row of currently active application icons at the bottom of the screen - are the most useful. There are also four default virtual desktops. Of course, all of this becomes available only when everything is configured. In this sense, Fvwm remembers Openbox. The first time you log in you'll see the default desktop background and nothing else. But after configuration, Fvwm will look much richer and much less intimidating. Click to open the Minimalistic Root menu. Select Setup 95 Script > FvwmForm-Setup, which is the graphical interface you need to use at least once in order to create the configuration file ($HOME/.fvwmrc2) that Fvwm will need in all its future sessions. In FvwmForm-Setup you can and should select which modules and respective configuration files you want to activate. Select all of them and press F3 to restart the window manager. The overall memory consumption of Fvwm remains low enough - even with all options activated - that it won't make a difference except on very limited computers. The Fvwm task bar is normally only a few pixels high - an almost invisible stripe that will expand when you push the cursor to the bottom edge of your screen - and you can access it even when it is in 'stripe' mode. Verdict Fvwm There's lots here... it's just hard to remember it if you look at its themes. Rating: 6/10 Ratpoison Of all the applications in this roundup, Ratpoison is the one that will look and feel most alien to Linux users who have never gone beyond Gnome or KDE. Ratpoison isn't just lightweight, it's different. In fact, it is very lightweight because it is very different. Inspired by Gnu Screen, its official design criteria was to be the ultimate keyboard-based window manager and to never waste any screen space.
Basically, Ratpoison has nothing to make a screenshot of: no panel, no icons, no Dock, nothing. The screenshot you see here just proves that Ratpoison can run more than one modern, GUI-based application simultaneously. By default, Ratpoison displays one program at a time, full screen, without window borders, bars or anything of the sort. That's very efficient, but what if you want, as in the picture, to look at two or more windows together? No problem. Ratpoison will split the screen in non-overlapping frames that fill all the space. Each frame holds one application, maximised as we already explained. Oh, and it also has multiple workspaces and session management support. All interaction with Ratpoison happens through keystrokes. This, plus working full-screen without decorations, clocks, email alerts and other widgets, makes working in Ratpoison so fast, immersive and efficient that it may become addictive - if you survive the initial cultural shock, that is. You can download a decent configuration script at http://danielwebb.us/software/ratpoison/. Ratpoison is so different, however, that we suggest you try that script only if you like this program anyway, in the default configuration discussed here. Of course, don't even try to start testing Ratpoison without reading the tutorial on its website. You risk losing your mind staring at a blank screen. Verdict Ratpoison Ratpoison is proud to have nothing to show off about. Rating: 6/10 The best lightweight windows manager for Linux is... Apart from personal taste, the three most important factors when choosing a window manager are its memory requirement, one-click or one-keystroke support for your most frequent actions and which applications you use most often. The last point means that you shouldn't expect to see huge differences in overall performance if you use a light window manager to run only, or almost only, KDE or Gnome applications that load lots of libraries in RAM anyway. The programs presented here are all fast enough to make the user the real bottleneck.
Window Maker was the slowest, but we noticed it only because we were specifically paying attention to things like that. Ratpoison is terribly efficient - if you can stand the learning curve - so we do recommend you give it a try. It may even be the best solution if you just do everything in the cloud. If you spend all your time in a browser because Gmail, Flickr, Dropbox, Google Docs and similar services do everything you need, does it make sense to run a heavier window manager just to keep open Chrome or Firefox? Ratpoison might also be interesting to use to set up an internet kiosk. No surprises Fvwm is a very fast application, that has and does all you really need in a more or less intuitive way, without surprises or attempts at special effects. However, it looks the oldest, and is less extensible than its competitors. E16 and Openbox are both really great products. The first is much more fun, as long as you take the time to configure everything. Do seriously play with it, at least once. Openbox, instead, is all business. The fact that there is much less to configure is what makes it very efficient. You install it, choose a theme, memorise four or five mouse and keyboard actions and off you go. Pipe menus make it as extensible as your scripting skills allow, through a very simple mechanism. Finally, Openbox has good support for all the relevant standards that guarantee good cohabitation with Gnome, KDE or any single application originally developed for those desktop environments. That's why we declare Openbox the winner, with E16 a very, very close second. 1st: Openbox: 5/5 
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| Opinion: Apple and Valve have got app stores right, but can Microsoft? Posted: 02 Jul 2011 05:00 AM PDT Sometimes, you've got to feel sorry for huge companies like Google and Microsoft. Not very often, admittedly. Several billion [insert local currency here] in the bank doesn't buy as much sympathy as it does, say, sports cars for executives, especially when the main problem they struggle with is not being able to use that money to snap their fingers and make the world dance to their tune. Still, every now and again, something happens that makes you realise that even internet billionaires need a cuddle. Case in point, the Apple App Store. I've been using this over the last month or two, and it's amazingly good. Whatever you think of Apple and its hardware, it's one of the best implemented software stores I've ever seen - instant access to all your major software on any platform, automatic updates, an easy way to browse for new software, and one-click access to new goodies. It also begs the question, why the hell has Microsoft never done the same, incredibly obvious thing on PC? The truth is that it's tried before. Remember the Windows Marketplace? Probably not, and now it's closed anyway. How about the Games For Windows Live store? That's relatively new, but far from impressive, typically offering poor prices compared to other services, direct-download or not (the ancient Age of Empires III, for instance, currently goes for £27.49, compared to £14/£18 on Amazon, while the mediocre-at-best James Bond: Blood Stone is £40 versus £30 on Steam), and with borderline patronising offers. 'Sign up today for free Bulletstorm wallpapers!' it screams, then starts shuffling uncomfortably under the pitying glare. 'These games are Live enabled!' it promises, apparently oblivious to the fact that Games For Windows Live integration is currently about as tempting as an advertising message to the average gamer as 'Free poo in every box!' At the same time, look at Steam. Steam has issues. When not running specific sales, its prices can often be high. You're locked into its DRM, and its dedicated client application. If Valve suddenly vanished, so would your library. Yet people don't simply use it, but love to use it. People will buy games they already own on Steam, just to save them the effort of walking to a shelf and finding a CD. Why? What's Microsoft missing? A matter of trust Trust. It all comes down to trust - not that the company will still be around in a few months time, but that its goals will still align with customers at that point. Apple, for all its faults, has a reputation for making the best kit it can, so when it produces something like the App Store or iPhone, people sit up and take notice immediately - or at least give it the benefit of the doubt. Valve has the same thing on both the gaming and digital distribution sides. Unfortunately, most of the other big companies either don't have this factor, or have whittled it away over the last decade. In Google's case, its big services remain great, but its approach to new services and products (launching them apparently on a whim, then immediately getting bored) has burned a lot of bridges. Much like Microsoft, Google entering a market used to be scary for its present incumbents. Now, unless they're specifically facing its biggest guns, it's not much of a problem. Knol. Buzz. Wave. Notebook. Jaiku. Google Video as a store. Answers. Orkut. Picasa. Who cares? Even if they work well, too many services have been closed down to get very excited about new launches. Microsoft is in an even trickier position - the result of things like launching Windows Marketplace and letting it die, or trying to get the industry to back its PlaysForSure media platform, then not using it on its Zune player. People rely on its software, but don't really choose it in the same way that they may choose to buy a Mac. This lack of the warm fuzzies isn't a problem in the corporate world, but it's a killer whenever the company tries reaching out to consumers. This is the time to fix that. It's effectively confirmed that there will be a Windows App Store baked into Windows 8, and that makes sense. Broadband is more available than in 2004, when Windows Marketplace first hit, and people are more comfortable about buying online than ever before. It's a chance for Microsoft to claw back some popularity, publicly support its developer community, and use its colossal power to establish fairer rules for things like DRM and online sales. Do I expect that? Frankly, no. Still, a columnist can dream - and I'd love to be proven wrong. 
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| Review: AMD Phenom II X4 980 Black Edition Posted: 02 Jul 2011 03:30 AM PDT While Intel has the performance end of the CPU market sewn up, AMD has been looking out for the little guy, focussing squarely on the mainstream market and cheap chips with competitive processing chops. The Sandy Bridge family might be your go-to guys at the moment for CPU upgrades thanks to Quick Sync and Turbo Boost technologies, but if every penny counts, AMD's Phenom II chips squeeze every drop of performance out of a middling budget. The compromise though is some architecture that's getting rather long in the tooth. The X4 980 Black Edition is no exception. Pound for pound, it delivers excellent performance. HyperThreading though is off the menu on the AMD side so you're relying on four threads and four cores to slice through processing tasks. How much of a problem that is depends on your CPU's workload – video encoding and design apps make good use of multi-threaded processors, and although games have been slow off the mark, we've seen some big titles recently that do work with multiple cores and threads to speed up rendering tasks. That X4 architecture's a bit old now – it was after all AMD's first quad-core architecture. Intel's 32nm chips are superior in a straight fight, but with the X4 980 BE you still get 6MB of L3 cache and an out-of-the-box clockspeed of 3.7GHz – AMD's fastest ever quad-core. But of course, it isn't a straight fight. At £140, the 'enthusiast' X4 980 is priced against Intel's entry-level Sandy Bridge chip, the i5 2400. That means it has a 500MHz faster clockspeed, but doesn't have the Turbo Boost and Quick Sync chops of the i5. A stalemate, roughly. That double-edged sword of older technology gives the AMD chip another selling point though. It's an easy upgrade. Any Socket AM3 motherboard will support it, so you can reinvigorate two-year-old machines with this chip. It's certainly an easier, and cheaper, upgrade than the jump to Sandy Bridge.
Benchmarks Rendering performance Encoding performance DX11 gaming performance Enemies within Here's where things get weird though – it's not Intel that's muscling the X4 980 BE out of the market… it's AMD itself. Its focus on the sub-£200 CPU market has led to a product range that caters for literally every budget. Can't go a penny over £140? X4 980 it is. Won't budge an inch on £135? X4 975 then. In fact, the range is so overpopulated that some CPUs start pushing out others. Ladies and gentlemen, meet then the Phenom II X6 1090T. It's a six-core, 3.2GHz brute that's also happy in any AM3 board. It shreds the X4 980 Black Edition to bits in processing tasks… and incredibly it's £15 cheaper. While the X4 can't live with the X6 in video encoding, it does still have the edge in gaming thanks to that faster clockspeed. What's more, they both overclock well – topping 4GHz on air. So which to buy? We're back to multi-core support again. If you're happy getting the most out of a single core in your applications, the X4 980 Black Edition is looking good. As games step up their multicore support though, the X6 has the potential to blitz the 980 for less cash. 
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| Review: Advance Tec AT-FX Tron Posted: 02 Jul 2011 03:00 AM PDT Intel's new Z68 chipset has a lot to offer. In short, P67 and H67 functionality are combined onto one board, with SSD caching. It might not have a tremulous impact on gaming performance, but that increased functionality is surely welcome in any desktop PC. There's also serious power saving potential with Lucidlogix's Virtu software, which can turn your GPU practically off when it's not needed. This is where AdvanceTec has made its first mistake: the ATFX-Tron doesn't come with Lucid Virtu installed. Sure, you can install it yourself by digging out the motherboard's driver disk, but that seems at odds with buying a system builder's machine – the hard work should be done for you. It seems a bit like ignoring one of the Z68 chipset's best features. The counter-blow to this is that AdvanceTec has set up Smart Response over your SSD and HDD for you. To be fair to AdvanceTec, it's set its stall on this issue based on pure gaming performance – there's a clear advantage in Smart Response, but it doesn't want Virtu messing with frame rates. Even so, when we road tested the Asus P8Z68-V Pro, we certainly didn't find that the software had a negative impact on gaming performance. Identity crisis
The apparent emphasis on gaming highlights other issues with AdvanceTec's choice of components. Does a thoroughbred gaming rig really need a Blu-ray RW drive? Probably not. Is 16GB of RAM going to improve gaming significantly, compared to 8GB? Negative. And yet there they are, sitting in this gaming rig. Surely the star component of a gaming machine is the GPU. We've waxed lyrical about how good AMD's HD 6950 is ever since its release, and we're pleased to see it make an appearance in the ATFX-Tron. Again, bearing in mind that this is a gaming rig, it's disappointing to see the 1GB incarnation of the card instead of the beefy 2GB. There's hardly anything between them monetarily, but in gaming performance terms it's a big deal – that extra 1GB of frame buffer makes all the difference, especially at higher resolutions. AdvanceTec has done a good job in building the rig. Cables are fastidiously tidied and the Core i5 2500K has been handily bumped up to 4.6GHz. Other system builders have this price point sewn up for gamers, but it's a misallocation of funds, rather than a cheeky mark-up, that's hurting the ATFX-Tron.
Benchmarks CPU performance DirectX 11 tessellation performance DirectX 11 gaming performance Read TechRadar's Palicomp Phoenix Hydro-X review If you built this rig yourself it would be just £43 cheaper – as teeny as mark-ups get. It would be excellent value, if you wanted all the components you're getting. Ultimately, the problem is focus. This is actually a decent image manipulation/3D design rig – the RAM makes sense for chewing through hefty applications, and the SD card and other storage device inputs on the front panel would be useful to anyone working with large image files. It's hard to recommend to hardcore gamers, though. But consider it if you're constantly Alt-tabbing between Illustrator and Portal 2. 
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| In Depth: How to speed up your broadband Posted: 02 Jul 2011 03:00 AM PDT Every ISP in the UK promises its customers fast and reliable access to the internet. Despite this, many of us are still putting up with connections without enough bandwidth to power iPlayer, and with so much lag that online gaming is impossible. Other web users tolerate draconian deals where downloads are monitored and restricted to particular times of day. If you're angry about your sluggish broadband speed, you don't have to take it any more. We know how you can get the best from your connection. We want to give you targeted advice specific to your needs, whether you're an online TV viewer, gamer, downloader, mobile broadband user or on a budget. But there are some tweaks that everyone can benefit from. If your broadband speeds are slow, it could be down to a host of issues. Some could be to do with problems at your telephone exchange. These can be fixed by BT through your ISP. Other issues could be related to problems on your side of the line, so it's best to get those sorted out before calling your ISP to complain. Rule number one - don't use extension cables to connect your router to the ADSL filter. Use the cable supplied with your router, and make sure the filter is plugged directly into the socket in the wall. The more cabling you add, the more line noise and packet errors you introduce - so the shorter the cable, the better. While you're looking at your phone sockets, make sure that any extension sockets have ADSL filters fitted too. Every extension in your building needs a filter attached, whether you use it for broadband or not. That's why routers are often supplied with several. If your download speeds haven't improved after a few days, it's time to get friendly with your neighbours. Do they have problems with slow broadband speeds too? It could be that they're suffering alongside you. If that's the case, get online and find out what the optimum line speed is for your area. The superb broadband resource Sam Knows has an online broadband checker that will tell you what the best line speed for your area should be. To find it, go to www.samknows.com/broadband/broadband_checker. Armed with this, you're ready to get into some more serious tweaks depending on your specific needs. Speed up media streaming When watching streaming media, you have a right to expect stutter-free film and TV. With current broadband speeds, you should even be able to watch at resolutions of 720p or even 1080p. Whether you'll get this depends on three factors. Your hardware is one of them - and we'll come back to that in a moment. The actual speed of your broadband is a crucial factor too. Less obvious is the overall stability of your connection, which can contribute as much to the perception of speed as your actual bandwidth. Dropped packets result in jerky performance and buffering loops that pause playback. The tips we've already given you for stabilising your connection are a good place to start. You may also want to try some of these more advanced hardware tweaks. The right router
ADSL has advanced a great deal since broadband was introduced, so a newer, better router that supports current protocols may help stabilise your connection. When your router tries to sync with your broadband connection, it does so using multimode - a protocol that listens for a range of ADSL variants and then connects using the best method it can find. An older router may well be connecting to broadband successfully, but using a legacy method. It also means that as a first step, you could try getting a better connection using that age-old method: turning your router off and on again. As long as the connection isn't in its primary training period and you don't make a habit of it, this won't adversely affect the stability and speed of your broadband, but it may help you resync using a steadier, more stable protocol. Before you splash out on new hardware - especially when a top-of-the-range router can cost around £60 - try visiting your router manufacturer's website to search for new firmware. The software that runs your router is upgraded periodically, and if you've never updated it, you could be missing out on features and protocol support that your hardware is capable of delivering. Remember, a router is basically a small computer - so adding features in firmware is fairly straightforward. You just update the device's operating system. Over the years we've been trying and testing routers, it's surprising how often a different router can affect the speed and stability of a broadband connection. It's an odd fact of complex systems that some chipsets work better with certain exchanges (and the equipment they have installed) than others. If you currently have a router that generates errors or drops periodically, especially when under high bandwidth loads, it'll be worth borrowing a couple from friends to see if you can get a steadier, faster connection from another brand. Netgear routers are among the best at syncing and hanging on to flaky connections in our experience. Get wired Another way to reduce errors and dropped signals is to simplify your system. First, if streaming speeds are unsatisfactory, try a wired Ethernet connection rather than Wi-Fi. Remove other machines from the network to reduce the competition for bandwidth, and while you're at it, make sure that your media player - whether it's BBC iPlayer running in a browser, YouTube or an ISP-provided service like BT Vision - is the only thing sucking bandwidth from your net connection. That includes updaters, antivirus programs that call home, and VoIP tools like Skype. If tweaking your connection doesn't improve your viewing sufficiently, streaming may not be the best option for you. Few people notice that you can download programmes on BBC iPlayer, but you can. Click 'Download options' when you've selected the program you want to watch. You have a choice - a version that plays on iPlayer Desktop, a DRM-crippled download for Windows Media Player, or a lean version for portable devices. iPlayer desktop gives you the best quality, and is the choice to make if your computer's up to speed. If you're watching TV on an older machine, there's no shame in picking the version for portable playback to speed things up. Test your phone socket To eliminate client-side socket and filter problems from the broadband chain, begin by connecting your router directly to the master socket without a filter. Monitor your connection speed and stability. If there's no improvement, you can rule out your microfilters. It could be a problem with the socket itself, so you can try plugging your router into the test socket. You can find this by removing the BT faceplate - it's the same size as the master socket at the bottom right of the recess. If you see an improvement this time, you can make the improvement permanent by fitting a BT I-Plate. This is an add-on that sits in between your existing telephone socket and the faceplate, routing your connection directly through the test socket. The device costs under £10, and we've seen impressive results in testing. For online gaming, you need a steady, stable connection with minimum lag. To start bringing down that ping, you can use an expert software tweak. Windows 7 is already heavily optimised for network use, but with file transfers in mind, not steady streams of game data. Nagle's algorithm is the culprit. It delays small chunks of data and gathers them into bigger packets. It's fine for files, but not so great for World of Warcraft. Use the free software SGC Optimizer to disable Nagle's algorithm depending on how you use your machine. Under the Advanced Settings tab, you can apply changes to the Registry without adding keys yourself. For general broadband optimisation, there's a simple 'Optimise' button that applies a range of tweaks. If your ping speeds seem slower at certain times of day - or when you're using different types of application - then your ISP could be throttling traffic to optimise its network. Most ISPs won't admit it, but it's standard practice to reduce or block the bandwidth available to some applications to free up space for mainstream activities, like web browsing. It could affect you if you're a gamer, using VoIP apps like Skype, or downloading files using BitTorrent or uTorrent. Traffic management
Most providers are secretive about traffic management, but others use it as a selling point, recommending and targeting specific packages at different user requirements. PlusNet's Value package limits gaming bandwidth to 2MB. Upgrade to PlusNet Extra though, and you'll be able to enjoy full speed gaming. Be Broadband claims not to throttle any specific type of traffic, and if you opt for its Unlimited product, you get access to a control panel that lets you optimise your connection profile for gaming. If all other tweaks fail, call up your old, sluggish ISP and demand a MAC (Migration Authorisation Code) so you can move to a provider that's prepared to meet your needs. If you're serious about gaming, pay a little extra for a static IP. It's the ultimate stability upgrade. Your gaming experience will only ever be as good as the weakest link in your system, so it's essential you match a tweaked broadband connection with a machine that can keep up. Don't bother with network cards aimed at gamers. We've yet to find one that's worth the small performance increase you'll reap. Spend your money on extra RAM and a better graphics card instead. Firmware We've already suggested that streaming media users might upgrade their firmware to the latest version from the manufacturer. Gamers and downloaders may want to go a step further and try downloading a tweaked and optimised version of the firmware for their router.
There are several hacked and patched options, using open source software to replace or enhance the existing router operating system. Tomato replaces the firmware in certain Buffalo or Linksys routers, and other models that share the same chipset. Netgear users should take a look at DGTeam. In both cases, additional commands are added to your router's control panel, letting you directly optimise your connection, making it faster or more stable. Speed up downloads If you're downloading large files regularly, then you'll want to make sure you're using the full capacity of your broadband package. Your first step should be to find out whether your ISP throttles or otherwise manages download traffic. Virgin, for example, has been vocal about its management of filesharing traffic, reducing the amount of bandwidth available for this activity at peak usage times. You therefore need to find a provider that's friendly towards P2P traffic. Some ISPs allow full bandwidth for P2P traffic at specific times of day - usually from midnight until early morning. Antisocial hours, in other words. If you're planning to be in bed then, you can schedule your large downloads to run automatically. For example, in uTorrent - a widely used BitTorrent client - you can set up a schedule that only permits downloads between specific hours. Set up the scheduler, start your download and leave your computer switched on. It will begin automatically when the scheduler allows it. Drop freeloaders Assuming your ISP lets you to use all your bandwidth allowance for downloads, it's important to make sure that external parties aren't hitching a free ride on the service you're paying for. Your Wi-Fi router should be secure out of the box, but some people try to solve connection issues by switching off password protection. This is a very bad idea. We'd even go so far as to suggest that simple WPA protection isn't enough protection. Most routers let you narrow down permitted machines by their MAC address - the unique ID code of the network card in your computer. Have a poke around in your router's configuration page and you should find a way to do this. Spot malware It's not only unscrupulous neighbours who might be stealing your bandwidth and making downloads slow. We've already suggested switching off legitimate programs that use up bandwidth, but there could be other code on your machine phoning home and using up your valuable megabits. If you download files online, especially from dubious sources, you could have viruses, trojans, spyware and worms hidden away in archives. Clean up your system with free tools like AVG Free and Malwarebytes Anti-Malware. Botnets are perhaps the worst culprits when it comes to adversely affecting download speeds, not only eating up bandwidth by connecting back to their source network, but using it to send spam emails. It's sometimes difficult to track them down, but TrendMicro's RUBotted is one option if you suspect that your system may have been compromised. The software runs in your system tray, quietly monitoring traffic to and from your router. It will alert you if it spots a pattern it recognises as potentially suspicious activity. If you've tried all our suggestions and you're still not satisfied with your download speeds, sometimes there's just no substitute for more bandwidth. Right now, ADSL2+ speeds top out around 20Mbps, with average connections actually capable of 8-10Mbps. But what if you could have two ADSL lines? Or four? You can. This is known as bonded ADSL, and it uses multiple broadband lines to increase the bandwidth available. The only problem is, it's expensive. BT offers bonded ADSL as a business service, charging £30 per line after a set-up fee of £275 and a connection fee of £60. Digital line management If you're experiencing slow downloads, one common culprit is a line speed that's been set too low. When you're connected to a new broadband account, the line goes into a 10-day training period at the beginning of the contract. If there are errors on your line during this period, your line speed will be lowered at the exchange. With modern ADSL2+ lines, you can even experience line speed problems later than that, because Digital Line Management on these packages checks your line capability periodically. If your line drops frequently, it may become 'banded', which means that a maximum download speed has been set to stabilise the connection. If you can diagnose and stop the cause of the instability, you can then contact your ISP and ask it to arrange for the cap to be lifted. However, it's important to note that if problems remain, your speed could drop again. When consistently downloading large files, that's a real possibility. 
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| Review: NoFan SET A40 fanless bundle Posted: 02 Jul 2011 02:30 AM PDT Desktop PCs are noisy, obnoxious critters. They're filled with fans, you see, cooling everything from PSU to CPU to GPU. Not only do they make a ruckus, they collect dust too. That dust can slow down and damage systems over long periods of time. So to get round these problems, NoFan has created a fanless system. The SET A40 is a really interesting bundle for your eyes, ears, and tech geek glands. Just look at that CPU cooler for starters. What's going on there? Well, it's a passive cooler. Most current generation air coolers contain a passive cooler with a fan attached to disperse the heat. In case you've never destroyed your CPU cooler to look inside, the heat pipe strapped to your CPU works by cycling a thermally conductive liquid/vapour to disperse thermal energy. Liquid absorbs heat at the source, evaporates, and the wick guides it away to a cooler area, where it liquefies once more, dispersing the heat from the source. With most air coolers, there's a fan to disperse that heat further. But the CR-100A IcePipe isn't most air coolers. NoFan is being understandably cagey about the exact nature of its innovation, but what it comes down to this – inside the CR-100A IcePipe, there's no internal wick.
Mr S C Lee, the inventor and founder of Zalman, worked with physical principles discovered some 30 years ago that no one had previously been able to implement in practice, and created a heatpipe that disperses heat much more quickly and efficiently than the traditional wick design. How he managed this – well, it hurts our tiny brains here at PCF just thinking about it. In real-world application, the possibilities are staggering. Revolutionary, even. This tech extends to refrigerators, motor vehicles, industrial machinery and beyond. We'll see what the future holds for the IcePipe, but right now it's proving to be a pretty nifty CPU cooler. Cool under pressure
The machine NoFan supplied us with is fitted with an Intel Core i7 2600K. It's a powerful chip with great overclocking chops that throttles at temps over 80°C. Most overclockers will want to keep load temperatures under 70°C. The CR-100A IcePipe will retain temperatures within these remits, without any moving parts – with stock speeds, not overclocked. Secondly, the cooler and case are designed for each other. The CS-30 case wouldn't work well with a traditional fan-cooled system because there's no airflow as such. It's designed for heat to escape from every surface equally, not flow over and out of certain areas. Equally, that crazy heat pipe wouldn't work as well inside a traditional case for the same reason. It needs heat to disperse evenly from every surface of the case. It's certainly not a simple tag-in cooling solution for your current machine. Considering that it out-prices nearly all CPU coolers (including self-contained water coolers) it might seem irrelevant. This is the first cooler of its kind, though. Power down There's also the P400-A PSU to add to the equation. Naturally, power supply units get seriously hot given that they're busy powering your entire rig. NoFan's PSU, though, is passively cooled, and silent. The compromise here is that it's only 400W, so there's not much juice for this generation's power-hungry GPUs (and forget about multi-card setups), but that fits in with the system's philosophy. There's no point ruining that peace and quiet by sticking in a discrete GPU – for starters, the massive CPU cooler blocks off the top PCIe slot and the PSU only has one six-pin PCIe power connector. You could install a passively cooled card, though. A CPU like the i7 2600K in our review sample would be ideal, offering lightning operating speeds and formidable on-die graphics that allow you to leave your PCI-e slots empty. The 'K' part is a little irrelevant though – this isn't an overclocker's cooler. It can be done, but you won't achieve the performance boosts that a cooler half the price would allow – but again, that's not what the NoFan cooler is about. If you're a serious gamer or overclocker you won't want the compromises the IcePipe makes for silence. You need to commit to this technology really, and there is a clear incentive to do so – silent PC operation.
Benchmarks Idle CPU temperature performance Load CPU temperature performance Silence is golden It's unnerving – turn on a system built around this bundle and nothing happens. That sound of a Victorian smelting works powering up we've come to expect from fan-cooled PCs is eerily absent. In a home recording situation, the advantage is obvious. There's also fantastic potential for a work machine or media centre – anything but a gaming or 3D design rig that requires the heft of a discrete GPU. Of course you'll need an SSD rather than a hard drive to avoid disk whirr. There are downsides to this bundle that extend further than simply not being able to loop the Metro 2033 benchmark over and over, though. The case is great at working with the cooler against the common enemy of heat, but leaves a lot to be desired in other areas. It's got a visual style only its case mother could love, and that's a shame because the cooler inside looks great. NoFan could have worked the weird angle outside as well as in to create something really desirable from a design standpoint. Instead, it's ended up looking like a turn of the millennia Packard Bell case-cum-metalwork project. Taking off the rear panel, you can only access half the cooler's rear mounting from the back. If you want to take off the cooler for any reason, you have to remove the whole motherboard. This in turn highlights how cramped it is inside. You need to be really clever with cable management – Quiet PC will build this bundle into a system for you if you'd like to avoid the hassle. The case is a workhorse then that does its primary job well but throws in a few niggles. We really don't have anything bad to say about the CPU cooler and PSU though. The PSU never gets too hot to touch – or even anywhere near close. The IcePipe could be huge – for PC components and beyond. For those who can do without a discrete GPU, it's a no-brainer. It keeps load temperatures well below the danger zone and offers 0dB operating levels, zero dust and serious power savings. For gamers and overclockers though, the compromises it makes to keep operation silent might just prove too much. 
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