On Sunday we watched a short segment on CBS Sunday Morning about Google. The company, 10 years old this month, represents the best of what came out of the dot-com bubble in the 90's. Today they are madly profitable, focused on their core services and yet, still crazy after all these years. Massages, naps and gourmet food? Why, that's the kind of hubris that brought down dozens of companies in the first boom, so what's Google's secret sauce?

The fact is, Google is known to the mass market as "how to find stuff on the internet." Their success, like most success stories, is wedded to a fortuitous series of events: the price of computers and internet access dropping like a stone and the democratization of page creation and monetization. That's a mouthful, for sure. Cheaper computers and easier, faster access made computing and creating pages within the grasp of more people. As more people came online, they saw ways to make money by generating content and running the drop-dead simple AdSense on their pages. From memes to spy shots, Google helped the new wave make their wee blogs fiscally sensible.

What all this brought was brand recognition. The average person uses Google as a verb now, and that really means something. Another happy coincidence was the emergence of mobile and mobile browsing. Now you've got a vector of adoption that can reach even more folks who merely see the home computer as a porn/game machine but use their mobile devices every day. So the brand is unquestionably huge, which brings us to Chrome...

We love kick-ass programs that run from our flash drives and don't take up a ton of space - especially when they come at us with a truckload of useful features.

CPUID's PC Wizard is a portable system analysis and benchmarking with tricks to spare. Apart from offering an incredible amount of information about the hardware and software in your computer (file associations, driver versions, hardware revisions, system uptime, etc.), it'll benchmark it, monitor sensors and voltages, and even stress-test it.

Benchmarking functions are surprisingly rich, testing everything from cpu, ram, drives, and even DirectX and MP3 performance. You won't get a huge assortment of systems to compare with, but you will get a good idea of how your rigs stacks up to some common configs.

We've had trouble with some portable system information apps missing the mark - especially on laptops - but PC Wizard worked like a charm, providing a ton of information about our test rig's proprietary mainboard. For an encore, PC Wizard can even figure out and display many MS application passwords and list them on the configuration screen. It's one more unexpected bonus feature that makes this program worth keeping on your flash drive.

If you're the sort of person who starts to feel like your new PC with the 250GB hard drive is running out of space about two days after you bring it home from the store, hard disk space analyzers can be your best friend. While we're big fans of WinDirStat for finding the largest files and folders on a disk, Xinorbis packs a few features that WinDirStat lacks.

For example, not only does Xinorbis analyze all of the files on your hard drive, but it will actually sort them into categories like music/sound, movies, programs, graphics, and system files. You can view the results in a pie or bar chart. And you can customize Xinorbis to show files by frequency or size. You can also compare two different hard drives.

Depending on your hard drive size and how many files you've got, it can take a while to run Xinorbis, and it may seem to be unresponsive, but don't give up hope. Odds are it's still working. For ease of use, we still like WinDirStat, but Xinorbis looks like a great tool to have for detailed disk space analysis.

[via gHacks

It's one thing when a blogger or a journalist harps on Microsoft for one thing or another - but it's something else entirely when the president of the world's 4th largest PC manufacturer claims "the whole industry is disappointed with Windows Vista." In a statement to Financial Times Deutschland this week, Acer president Gianfranco Lanci bashed Microsoft and their latest OS, citing the fact that many home and business customers of Acer, Dell, HP, Lenovo (formerly IBM) and Toshiba are so upset with Vista that they're demanding Windows XP be made available for order. It's a bold statement from a company on the up and up in the paper-thin margin, highly competitive PC industry.

Not surprisingly, the other companies joining Acer in the XP bucket haven't made any kind of statement, but they have to be feeling at least some of the same burn. With mainstream users getting confused by Vista's new features and a 3rd party industry dragging their feet to offer support for the new OS, Vista is stuck between a rock and a hard place, struggling to gain market share from adopters who are reluctant to make the leap until support for all their existing software and peripherals arrives. Frustration and hesitation is further compounded by the fact that Windows 7, or 'Vienna,' is right around the corner for 2009 or 2010, as it is reported to be a complete rewrite of the Windows code base from the ground up, requiring everyone to follow suit with complete rewrites of their software and drivers.

Aside from niche markets and power users, Lanci might have been half right with his statement. Though instead of being 'disappointed' with Vista, it seems like the industry might simply be 'disinterested' in the OS, at least for now.

[via 1 Microsoft Way]

Did you know the Windows Task Manager doesn't show you the whole picture of system processes running on your machine? Of course you did, but finding an app that will give you this info on a silver platter and leave a mint on your pillow is a different story. That is presumably why you're smart enough to read Download Squad. Its because we bring you the good stuff to so this kind of thing, process exploring, baby. If you want detailed process info and the ability to kill processes to boot, go download Process Explorer from SysInternals (now Microsoft owned). Process Explorer goes quite good with Killbox, and works great for witch-hunting a notorious virus or spyware in the thickness of the dark jungle. Creepy.