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Intel's Sandy Bridge architecture stole the limelight this year, summarily trouncing its predecessors, and the best that AMD had to offer, with considerable performance boosts and power savings. Today, Intel is announcing the Sandy Bridge Extreme Edition, an £800 CPU that distills the lessons the company has learned over the past year into a single piece of premium silicon. read more...

Fusion 4 is the newest version of VMware's virtualisation solution for the Mac, which allows you to run multiple operating systems within Mac OS X. Since we reviewed Fusion 3, VMWare has added support for Lion and the ability to create OS X Lion virtual machines, reduced the consumption of system resources to zero when you aren't running a virtual machine, redesigned the settings window, and much more. read more...

New 16-core AMD Opteron 6200-series CPUs in the Dell R715 bring huge bang for the buck to wide virtualization workloads, but not until your OS supports it read more...

Last year's Envy laptops were a bit of a disappointment. The design that wowed me in 2010 had grown stale by 2011; at that point, the rest of the world had caught up to and surpassed the Envy's design, while HP was content to update only the system's internal components. The new Envy 15 and 17, which HP released right at the end of 2011, finally feature a whole new design. For the most part, it's great, but a few nagging issues keep the system from being an easy recommendation. read more...

O&O AutoBackup (free in January 2012; $30 with a 30-day free trial starting in February 2012) is a generally easy-to-use backup program with one feature especially handy for frequent users of external drives. It will back up any data you choose, automatically, without user intervention, when you insert a removable drive you've defined as the repository for your backup. That's a neat trick, but the program is otherwise limited in ability, suffers a number of design oversights, and occasionally employs unexplained and possibly confusing language. read more...