This article will show you when and for what to use VMware Player.

VMware Player is quite similar to Sun Virtual Box. You can also configure almost everything, from CPU count over memory to graphics acceleration. VMware Player can’t assign more cores than the computer actually has to the VM, but features better hardware graphics acceleration and up to 256MB of video memory. This also enables Windows 7 to run Aero and the glass effects smoothly.

I installed Windows 7 64-bit in the VM and compared the performance to my native Windows 7 64-bit. Like in VirtualBox, hardware acceleration is supported, but not required. The installation is even easier than in VirtualBox: Tell VMware Player which OS you plan to install, and it automatically suggests hardware configuration and manages the installation process by clicking the right buttons. After installation, it will install the VMware tools that include 3D driver support and other programs that make using the VM more comfortable.

A nice function that both VirtualBox and VMware Player support is the option to assign devices either to the host OS or the virtual one. This enables the user to connect two mice and keyboards and assign them to host and virtual OS. Now the virtual OS can be moved to a second screen and both users can use the computer simultaneously.

Performance:

Settings:

CPU count: 2

RAM: 1500MB

GPU acceleration: yes, 256MB, DirectX 9

First of all, the Windows 7 System Rating shows that both CPU and GPU performance in the VM are quite good, only the memory is a bit too slow:

To test how strong the VM really is, I ran SuperPI and got these results: It took the VM 0.773 seconds longer to complete the calculation, which equals a performance loss of 3.3%. This is a quite good result, similar to Microsoft Virtual PC, but not as good as VirtualBox.

Since the graphics acceleration really seems to work here, I tried some games to prove it. Older games such asCall of Duty, Couter-Strike 1.6 and Civilization were running nicely, Warcraft 3 had some texturing problems, and quite new games like Call of Duty 5 – World at War didn’t really run (I got around 4 FPS).

All in all, VMware Player is quite good in all fields: CPU performance, GPU performance and ease of use (installation and VMware tools). Moreover, working with it felt smoother than in VirtualBox or Virtual PC, but that may be due to Aero. This means one can work with VMware Player and even play older games. Regarding the possibility to connect keyboard and mouse to the VM and moving it to a second screen basically enables you to create a second, virtual computer that allows another user to work, play or watch movies on the same hardware at the same time.

Related posts:

1. Assessing Virtual Machine Performance: #2 Sun Virtual Box
2. Assessing Virtual Machine Performance
3. Assessing Virtual Machine Performance: #1 Microsoft Virtual PC

This article will show you when and for what to use Sun VirtualBox.

For these tests, I used a quite uncommon configuration: I ran a virtual Windows 7 on my native Windows 7. Most users probably won’t do this, but there is a reason why I chose this OS configuration: Sun VirtualBox allows you to use more CPU cores than you actually have.

The OS installation with Virtual Box is quite easy, just insert your install DVD into the real drive, create a new VM with the hardware configuration you like and tell VirtualBox which OS you’re planning to install. Then allocate your DVD to the VM and start the installation. Worked greatly with Linux, Windows XP and Windows 7 and VirtualBox automatically installed its tools to enable automatic mouse grabbing and this kind of stuff.

In contrast to Microsoft Virtual PC, VirtualBox comes with GPU acceleration, but only allows you to use up to 128MB of video memory. Moreover, the drivers are still beta, so the performance is not as good as you would like it to be.

Performance:

For this test, I didn’t choose settings that any serious user would try, but decided to test the option of using 8 cores.

Settings:

CPU count: 8

RAM: 2048MB

GPU acceleration: yes, 128MB video memory

I searched for a benchmarking program that can use any number of threads and found wPrime. Since it can be scaled to 4 or 8 cores, it was capable of running on both my real quad-core and on the virtual octo-core and still using all the cores.

The virtual octo-core was 0.303 seconds slower, which equals 1.9% performance loss. This is quite surprising when you consider that four of the cores are just simulated and the real OS and processor have to split up the work somehow. These results are even better than the ones I got from Microsoft Virtual PC where the performance loss was about 3.9%.

Hardware graphics acceleration should be there, but don’t expect too much. The drivers are still beta, the video memory is just 128MB and the graphics performance of VMs has never been close to the CPU performance. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get the DirectX acceleration to work, neither on Windows 7 64-bit nor on Windows XP 32-bit. That’s a pity because the only VM supporting graphics acceleration is VMware Player then.

All in all, VirtualBox is a really nice tool due to its possiblities of configuration such as using 8 cores, its easy installation and the CPU performance. There is no such feature as direct integration into the host OS as with Virtual PC, but nobody would expect such a feature, and the graphics power isn’t that awesome either, but still better than other VMs supplying just a standard VGA adapter without hardware acceleration or DirectX support.

Related posts:

1. Assessing Virtual Machine Performance: #3 VMware Player
2. Assessing Virtual Machine Performance: #1 Microsoft Virtual PC
3. Assessing Virtual Machine Performance

This article will show you when and for what to use Microsoft Virtual PC and the XP mode that comes with Windows 7.

The first thing to mention is the fact that Virtual PC requires hardware-assisted virtualization which must be supported by both CPU and mainboard. Many older and mainstream mainboards do not include this function and thus render the user unable to use Virtual PC. Most other Virtual Machines can profit from virtualization, but do not require it.

A nice feature Virtual PC has is that it can be directly embedded into the host OS (Windows 7). Like in other VMs, you can launch XP Mode normally in its own window with its own desktop and stuff, but all the programs you installed in XP Mode will be directly available from the Windows 7 start menu. Just click the shortcut, wait a few seconds for the VM to boot, and you will see your application running in an Windows XP environment, but the window is on your normal Windows 7 desktop.

Performance:

Settings:

CPU count: 1 (not adjustable)

RAM: 512MB (not adjustable)

GPU acceleration: no

Basically, Virtual PC doesn’t leave you the option to change any settings for your Virtual Machine, but if you really want to do so, you can edit the configuration file manually. Just open it with notepad and change the settings: C:\Users\Lennart\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Virtual PC\Virtual Machines\Windows XP Mode.vmc

Since there is just one CPU and no graphics acceleration, I decided to test the only thing I can, CPU performance. I ran SuperPI first on the VM and then on my native Windows 7 and here is what you get:

The virtual Windows XP took just 0,848 longer than the native Windows 7, meaning a performance loss of 3.9%. This are really good values that basically enable you to work with applications running in the virtual machine as if they were running natively and you shouldn’t feel any slowdown (except for multi-threaded work such as video encoding).

All in all, Microsoft Virtual PC enables you to run old programs that can’t run on Windows 7 for some reason without any major loss in performance. Since there is no GPU support, you can’t use it for gaming, not even some very old games I tried were running. But if you just want to work, XP Mode will be a  good choice.

Related posts:

1. Assessing Virtual Machine Performance: #2 Sun Virtual Box
2. Assessing Virtual Machine Performance: #3 VMware Player
3. Assessing Virtual Machine Performance

As Google Chrome has been the fastest browser for a while and the alpha version of Opera 10.50 caught up quite well with Chrome’s performance but didn’t beat it yet, I decided to check the benchmark results given in the blog post by Opera. I ran all the benchmarks with the same settings as Opera did and also tested all four browsers. The only difference is that I used Chrome 5 (alpha) instead of Chrome 4 which is justified since Opera is also using non-stable builds of their browser. I summed up all the benchmark results in a diagram quite similar to the one used by Opera in order to make comparison easier:

The diagram published by Opera looks like this:

As you can see, the latest version of Opera really beats Chrome in Peacekeeper and Dromaeo, but Chrome is far ahead in both Sunspider and V8. I ran all the benchmarks several times to verify my test results and they are perfectly valid, but still differ from the ones published by Opera somehow. Now one has to ask why there is such a big difference regarding Sunspider and whether Opera faked its scores or the latest version of Chrome really improved in this sector.

All in all, it’s quite clear that Opera is really trying to beat all other browsers when concerning JavaScript performance and manages to catch up with Chrome. It will be interesting to see whether the final version of Opera 10.50 will beat Chrome in all tests or not.

In contrast to Opera, I want my  benchmark results to be rock-solid and not to be challenged, so I took screenshots of each result and also created an Excel file that contains all results and the calculations made to create the diagram. You can download the screenshots and the Excel file to check my results.

Related posts:

1. Peacekeeper Browser Benchmark – Safari clearly performing best!
2. New version of Opera catching up with Chrome’s performance?
3. Google Chrome 5 comes with automatic page translation

When you search using Google, you get more relevant, useful search results, recommendations, and other personalized features. By personalizing your results, we hope to deliver you the most useful, relevant information on the Internet.

If you use personalized search and have the new beta search interface enabled (enable the new Google Search Interface), Google will show this message on the bottom of each search results page:

Related posts:

1. Try the new Google Search Interface
2. New “intelligent” search engine Wolfram|Alpha launched
3. Increased Google speed with Caffeine

Obviously, they reached their goal of increasing the search speed, but didn’t change the search behavior. When searching for normal terms, you can feel a speed increase of up to 75% in my tests, but when using more complex searches with quotes, there is almost no difference.

You can test the new Caffeine search here: http://www2.sandbox.google.com/

Some speed tests:

As you can see, when using quotes, the difference is not that big.

Related posts:

1. Google Personalized Search saying “you’re awesome”
2. Iron: Clone of Google’s Chrome without spying code
3. Peacekeeper Browser Benchmark – Safari clearly performing best!

Why would you need a browser benchmark? The better a browser performs on your system, the faster websites are shown and can interactively been used. This is especially needed when browsing Web 2.0 websites, and on low-end PCs such as netbooks the difference can really be a barrier. I experienced this using my favourite browser Firefox 3.0 on my Asus Eee PC 900: When typing and address into the address bar, the “intelligent search” feature needs so much computing power that the whole browser is stuck. Also using GMail or Facebook doesn’t make fun when you have to wait for a second before you can click, scroll, type, etc… That’s why I switched to Google Chrome. Jukka Mäkinen, Head of PC Products and Services at Futuremark, said:

“People have more choice now in how they experience the internet than ever before. But they may not realize that performance between browsers can vary dramatically, especially on lower-end PCs. With Peacekeeper, it’s simple to compare different browsers and see which one offers the best performance on your PC.”

Benchmark your browser now using Peacekeeper!

I compared all the major browsers on my computer (Pentium 4 3.2GHz with Hyper-Threading, onboard S3 graphics) and got quite interesting results:

[poll id="6"]

As expected, Internet Explorer is performing the worst, but that shouldn’t surprise anyone. An interesting fact is that the old IE 6 is running slightly faster than IE 7.

To my surprise, Firefox is second to last. I  never thought that Firefox would be the fastest browser on earth, but didn’t expect it to be so slow compered to Chrome and Safari. But using the future versions of Firefox (version 3.1 beta and 3.6 alpha), there is a drastic increase in performance. Enough reason to see forward to the release of these versions!

The test clearly shows Chrome’s superiority over Firefox in means of performance, as I already experienced on my netbook.

But I never expected Safari to be that fast, especially since it is designed to run on Mac and not on Windows. Perhaps I should consider using it on my computers from now on, if it has the features I need (saving tabs, plugins like Ad-Block Plus, …).

I also tried to benchmark Konqueror, the default browser on Linux systems using KDE, but Konqueror refused to start the test (I was using version 5.1 of Knoppix on Live CD).

More about how Peacekeeper works:
http://service.futuremark.com/peacekeeper/faq.action

More about Futuremark:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futuremark

Related posts:

1. Opera 10.50b claims to be fastest browser on Earth
2. New version of Opera catching up with Chrome’s performance?
3. eyeOS – Operating System running completely in your browser

Download MultiInput.dll Version 0.1

I also created a game demonstrating how to use this class and what multiple mice can be used for. I think there are many games that could make use of more than one mouse to enable a cool multiplayer mode. Currently the game is in Alpha stage and doesn’t have many features. It supports up to 6 players (if that many mice are plugged in) who have to stop zeppelins from reaching the other side of the screen by shooting them down. Although there isn’t much to do except shooting the zeppelins, it’s quite funny already.

UPDATE: NEW VERSION AVAILABLE: Download Airship Assault here!

Download MultiInput Sample Game Alpha Version 0.1

Download and install the necessary XNA Framework 3.0 here

Each crosshair can be controlled by one mouse/player. The number in brackets on the bottom is the amout of shots you’ve left in your magazine. Leftclick to shoot, rightclick to reload. When a zeppelin reaches the other side, you will lose a life.

I tested the game only with USB mice, they’re working fine, but it should also work with PS2 mice. If you encounter any errors, please tell me!

Using MultiInput.dll

The usage of this class is really easy. Copy the DLL file to your project’s folder and set a reference to the DLL and a reference to the “System.Windows.Forms” namespace (don’t forget this!). Load the dll using

Inside your Game class, you can use the code like this:

class Game1
    {
        MultiInputController inputController;
        Color[] mousecolors = new Color[] { Color.Red, Color.Blue,
Color.Green, Color.Yellow, Color.White, Color.Pink };

        public Game1()
        {
            inputController = new MultiInputController(this.Window.Handle);
        }

        public override void UnloadContent()
        {
            // YOU MUST!!! USE THIS LINE, otherwise your game won't exit
            inputController.Dispose();

            content.Unload();
        }

        public override void Update(GameTime gameTime)
        {
                foreach(RawMouse rawmouse in inputController.Mice)
                {
                        // do whatever you like here
                }

            base.Update(gameTime);
        }

        public override void Draw(GameTime gameTime)
        {
                spriteBatch.Begin();

            // Draw each cursor
            for (int i = 0; i < inputController.MiceCount; i++)
            {
                RawMouse mouse = inputController.Mice[i];
                spriteBatch.Draw(cursor,
new Vector2((float)(mouse.X - cursor.Width/2),
(float)(mouse.Y - cursor.Height/2)), mousecolors[i]);
            }

            spriteBatch.End();
        }

    }

Related posts:

1. Airship Assault – First game using MultiInput-technology
2. New version (1.1) of Airship Assault released!
3. How to decompile/reverse engineer/disassemble any XNA Game!

Just yesterday I started a new site with the best receipes for milkshakes and cocktails. I write it only in German, but the Google Translation isn’t that bad actually. I hope you like it and enjoy the drinks!

Original (German) site: http://www.multimolti.com/rezepte/

English Google Translation: Link

Related posts:

1. Add my site to your iGoogle!
2. Iron: Clone of Google’s Chrome without spying code
3. New Google Translator with improved quality and real-time translating

Today I’ll show you how to build a remote trigger with your old cell phone. You don’t need much stuff and the trigger will be useful for all kind of stuff that I’ll show later.

Requirements:

• Old cell phone, must support silent mode with vibration
• Old SIM card (working)
• 2 wires
• Screwdriver
• Diagonal pliers
• Small block of wood/rubber/plastic
• second, working cell phone to trigger the other one

WARNING: YOU ARE DOING THIS EXPERIMENT ON YOUR ON RISK! I WON’T BE RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY DAMAGE CAUSED TO YOUR PROPERTY!

Here I’m using my old Nokia 3200, but you can apply this tutorial to any other cell phone model.

First of all, remove the casing of your phone. That should be quite easy. Next take out the battery and SIM card. Now, and that may depend on your phone model (my one has torx) use a screwdriver to disassemble the internal parts of your phone. Usually they have 6 screws of the Torx 6 format.

My Nokia 3200 consists of 2 parts, one curcuit board holds the keyboard and screen, the other one the computing stuff (memory, processor, SIM card, …). It looks like this:

When you look into the casing, you should see a small electric motor with a weight at its axis:

When this motor rotates, the weight, hanging only on one side of the axis, creates a momentum force perpendicular to its current line from center of gravity to mid of axis, pulling the phone in the direction of the phone. Since it’s rotating, the direction of this force changes all the time, and the phone is pulled in alternating directions, thus creating a vibration.

But we don’t want the phone to vibrate, it should trigger something. So we remove the motor (you can simply pull it out), but use its power supply.

As you can see in the image above, the motor has 2 metallic contacts, used to transfer the power. We need to connect them to our trigger, so when somebody calls the phone and it would usually vibrate, it now gives a signal to whatever you want to trigger.

You can either solder 2 wires directly to the phone’s board’s contact counterparts, or do it the way I did it: By creating an block with 2 contacts similar to the motor we removed.

Here you can see the phone’s contacts for the vibration motor:

You will need a hole in the phone’s back so that the wires can come out, so just drill one where the weight on the axis has been:

Then take a wooden block the size of the motor and placed it where the motor previously has been:

Now punch two holes into the block with a needle at the same distance as the contacts, so you can plug in the wires later:

Now take two equally-long wires, remove around 5-7mm of the isolation from one end, and twist them around each other:

After that, bend the unisolated ends around a screwdriver and make a knot in the cord, so it won’t drop out of the hole you drilled:

Now insert the blank ends of the wires into the holes in the wooden block, and pull the other end through the drilled hole. It should look something like this:

Hold the phone’s computing board over your construction and check whether the blank ends of the wires touch the contacts on the board, so that the power will be transfered.
Then reassemble the whole phone excluding the vibration motor, screw in the screws, put in SIM card and battery, and give it a try

Now start the phone, enter PIN, switch to silent mode and call it from another phone. If you connect a voltmeter to the wires coming out from the body, you should be able to measure the current! If not, check the contacts inside the phone.

Here it’s working fine!

I will continue this post tomorrow, it’s after midnight already and I should get some sleep… I hope you enjoyed reading this!

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2. Remote controlled rats – sensor in brain let scientists control their movements
3. iMovio iKIT: Micro-Netbook as small as an iPod