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Archive for December 19th, 2009

gmail adds duplicate Contact auto-merging

Posted by John on 19th December 2009

Fairly handy, for those that have “more than a few” contacts . . .

One button to merge all duplicate contacts

Tuesday, December 15, 2009 2:54 PM

Posted by Dominik Marcinski, Software Engineer

Managing a big address book can be a challenge, so it’s no surprise that the top request for Google contacts is a fast, easy way to merge duplicate contacts. You’ve been able to merge contacts one-by-one for a while, but now we’ve added a single button that merges all your duplicate contacts at once. To clean up your contact list in one fell swoop, just click the “Find duplicates” button in the contact manager, review the merge suggestions (and uncheck any suggestions you don’t want merged), and hit the “Merge” button.


If you’ve been considering getting all your contacts into Gmail or syncing your Gmail contacts to your phone, now’s the time to do it. As we’ve written about previously, you can sync your contacts to a wide variety of devices (including Android, iPhone, Blackberry, SyncML, etc). So if you were dreading spending hours getting your contacts in order, now you can do it with a couple clicks.

(via Permalink @ gmail’s blog)

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Windows 7 And Windows Vista: Performance Compared

Posted by John on 19th December 2009

Thanks to Tom’s hardware. I’ve been exceptionally pleased with Windows 7 (x64) from the closed beta, through launch . . .

Windows 7 And Windows Vista: Performance Compared

How Much Better Is Windows 7?

Despite lots of innovation with SuperFetch and ReadyBoost, Windows Vista wasn’t popular. In fact, many users avoided upgrading from Windows XP to Vista altogether. Though the operating system was the first version of Windows with 3D animation, and it offered many new features, it didn’t deliver enough compelling reasons to replace XP, which can now be considered really mature (if not over the hill).

Indexing updates could be retrofitted to Windows XP, and Vista turned out to be more hungry for resources than previous Windows versions. Windows 7, however, has been out for a few weeks, and feedback has generally been great. We decided to revisit our first look at testing these two operating systems head-to-head and directly compare Windows Vista and Windows 7, to see if the reported benefits are really noticeable.

What is Performance at the OS Level?

Most people think of application performance when they talk about performance in general. However, the operating system plays a major role in the process chain that creates everyday computing experiences. The OS is what switches a processor between power-saving and fast operating states (or even intermediate active states that determine performance in Intel’s Turbo Boost mode via P-states). The OS, or to be more precise its dispatcher, distributes threads across available processor resources, and Windows 7 is more aggressive about using thread headroom for the sake of performance.

However, performance also has to be defined by the user experience during ordinary operating system actions, such as system bootup, standby, application launching, hibernation, or shutdown. If the OS were a bit quicker on applications but consumed several minutes during start-up or shutdown, you’d probably want to ditch it. Hence our second round of testing not only includes benchmarks and application tests but also a look at these everyday operations.

(for much more, head on over to http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/windows-7-performance,2476.html )

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