Slashdot Mirror


PC World's 100 Best Products of 2005

insensitive clod writes "PC World published its top 100 best products of 2005. These include Firefox(1), GMail(2), OSX 10.4(3), Alienware Aurora 5500(6), Seagate USB 2.0 Pocket Drive(7), Skype(8), PalmOne Treo 650(10), Google(16), PSP(19), GeForce6600GT(20), Ubuntu(26), iTunes(34), Half-Life 2(38), Wikipedia(60), ThinkPad X41(67), Mac Mini(75), Acronis True Image(83), Opera(88). Surprisingly, iPod only has IPod Photo at 78."

5 of 286 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Product Inflation by MrHanky · · Score: 4, Informative

    GMail is good web based email. That in itself sets it far ahead of its competitors. It's really the finest example of what a web interface can do.

  2. Re:Product Inflation by FidelCatsro · · Score: 4, Informative

    10.4 is a lot faster in my experience , It works more swiftly on my old g3 iMac (400mhz g3) (turned off the widgets) .. but besides that .
    It has a great number of functional improvements on the command line and in the system programs .. not to mention the user land programs .. though i do prefer the 10.2 look I don't think there are that many differences on the GUI front
    On my g4 machine it simply flies . spotlight is also grand
    I would rather that Ubuntu had placed higher though (not strictly a 2005 thing )

    --
    The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
  3. Re:Product Inflation by FidelCatsro · · Score: 4, Informative

    It does require at least 512MB RAM but I have never had a problem with it (both my Macs have 768 , though it was not bad on a 256MB mac mini i had a go on .. till you open up too many programs , a ram upgrade fixed that little glitch)
    I am more a *nix Zealot (though not really a zealot) than a mac zealot , but OS X is one of the best User level *nix's I have ever had the pleasure to use .10.4 has some noticeable improvements as a client computer and some great user level improvements . If your friend can afford it , tell him to get 256MB more ram in the machine , s/he will notice a world of difference .
    Honestly though , the GUI has not really changed bar some of the removed um .. bars . I suspect the problem they are having is to do with Spotlight or running Dashboard .

    --
    The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
  4. Re:Treo 650? Guess he hever had to Support Them by aCC · · Score: 4, Informative

    It's strange that you had such bad experiences them because you seem to be quite alone with that as far as I know.

    I have one for some months now and I absolutely love it. I occasionally read the forums for treo users (mytreo.net, treocentral.com, ...) and I haven't seen anything like you mention on there. And those forums are normally very quick in showing if a product has problems. Like they did when the first version had problems with the memory which finally got resolved by Palm. I have the GSM version, so maybe it's the CDMA version that you have problems with?

    Personally I think it is finally a usable pda-phone that works as it should. I can totally recommend it.

  5. Sometimes the results are suspect. by Futurepower(R) · · Score: 4, Informative

    In my opinion, PC World, and all the product reviewers, sometimes skew results in the direction they want them to go. Sometimes they do that by not reviewing the most popular product, but comparing the competitors only. Sometimes they change the results with tricky writing.

    Very unfortunately, it has become entirely acceptable in the U.S. culture to take money to allow corruption. For an example, look at the U.S. government.

    An example of what appears to be corruption is that magazines and columnists are recommending Sunbelt Software's CounterSpy. Until September, at least, CounterSpy would crash Windows if it couldn't get an internet connection. None of the reviewers noticed that, giving me the impression that they didn't test the software thoroughly. If they didn't test the software thoroughly, how can they say it is the best? Who supplied the collection of spyware they used to test?

    Also, CounterSpy seems to try to take advantage of customers who don't have technical knowledge. For example, CounterSpy sometimes tags text (.TXT files) as serious threats, even when the text file has nothing but printable ASCII characters. Is this done to try to make customers think CounterSpy is more important than it really is?

    What I say here about CounterSpy has been verified for me by Sunbelt Software employees.