Content creators have flocked to WordPress since its 2003 debut (version 3.0 alone has been downloaded over 10 million times since its June release) due to its ease of setup and use. Over the last seven years, a rich universe of plug-ins has emerged, giving the already user-friendly publishing platform the extra flexibility to tweak SEO, the ability to display popular posts, and much more.

There are over 10,300 plug-ins available at the current count, which can make it a chore to discover plug-ins that would be beneficial to your site. If you visit WordPress’ Most Popular Plug-in Directory to see the top 15 most download plug-ins of the moment, you’ll find some great stuff. But there are plenty of other great plug-ins that don’t make the list.

We’ve dug through the site and created our own list of a dozen that will help your WordPress-powered site perform like a champ. Please note: Plug-ins can only be installed in self-hosted WordPress sites—if WordPress.com is your host, you won’t be able to add plug-ins. If you’re ready to super-charge your WordPress installation, check out these 12 can’t-miss plug-ins.

Akismet

By Automattic
http://wordpress.org/extend/plug-ins/akismet/
Comment and trackback spam are an unfortunate price of website success. The more traffic you accumulate, the more likely you are to be inundated by fake comments. Automattic’s Akismet checks comments and trackbacks against the Akismet Web service to see if they look like spam. If the comments and trackbacks are deemed bogus, they’re automatically shuffled over to your WordPress installation’s spam folder. Clicking Aksimet Stats (located in your Dashboard) shows a breakdown of your spam, missed spam, ham (Akismets term for real comments), and false positives (legit comments and trackbacks mistaken for spam by Akismet that you’ve since flagged as genuine).

All in One SEO Pack

http://wordpress.org/extend/plug-ins/all-in-one-seo-pack/
Widely considered a WordPress essential, Michael Torbert’s All in One SEO Pack should be one of the pillars in your search engine optimization efforts. With it, you can give your page an SEO-friendly title (which shows up at the top of a Web browser), homepage description (which appears beneath your URL when people search for it via Google or other engine), and keywords related to your topic. Warning: Be careful with your keyword density. If Google suspects that you’re stuffing keyboards or using black-hat SEO techniques, your search engine placement may be penalized.

Dagon Design Site Map Generator

By Dagon Design
http://wordpress.org/extend/plug-ins/sitemap-generator/
Dagon Design’s useful plug-in generates a fully customizable sitemap that helps search engine spiders easily rifle through your content. Dagon’s tool manages this through multilevel categories, pages, and permalinks support. The plug-in lets you choose which links to display, their order, comment counts, and post dates. In short, this is everything you need to create a highly searchable WordPress site for both people and search engines.

SEO Friendly Images

By Vladimir Prelovac
http://wordpress.org/extend/plug-ins/seo-image/
SEO Friendly Images, designed by Vladimir Prelovac, is a WordPress optimization plug-in that updates your uploaded images with proper ALT and TITLE attributes. The ALT attribute is considered an important part of SEO as it provides an image description to search engines, and helps create a match when someone keys in a search query. The TITLE attribute plays lesser role; the text associated with this attribute appears when a visitor mouses over an image.

SEO Smart Links

By Vladimir Prelovac
http://wordpress.org/extend/plug-ins/seo-automatic-links/
Vladmir Prelovac’s other must-have plug-in lets WordPress automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your site. After installing the plug-in, you simply open its configuration option and enter the keywords you use the most often and the links that you’d like to associate to them. So, for example, if you want to link the word “cat” to “cat.com,” the plug-in can do this automatically. SEO Smart Links lets you determine how frequently a single keyword or phrase is linked within a single post so that you don’t end up with link overload

Ultimate Google Analytics

By Wilfred van der Deijl
http://wordpress.org/extend/plug-ins/ultimate-google-analytics/
Google Analytics is the favorite site-analytics tool of many webmasters due to its meticulously detailed graphs, charts, and traffic numbers—it’s also free! Wilfred van der Deijl’s Ultimate Google Analytics plug-in adds JavaScript to each page (without making any changes to your template) so that you can track outbound links, downloads from your own site, mailto: links, and more without requiring you to install the code manually. Simply sign into your Google Anaytics account to see your traffic data. The only downside? Google Analytics doesn’t supply real-time traffic numbers. See the next plug-in for that.

StatPress Reloaded

By Manuel Grabowski
http://wordpress.org/extend/plug-ins/statpress-reloaded/
Created by Manuel Grabowski, StatPress Reloaded (an improved version of the original StatPress) displays real-time information about visitors, spiders, search keywords, feeds, browsers, operating system, and more. Unlike Ultimate Google Analytics, StatPress ReLoaded immediately collects information so you can view up to date traffic numbers at any given time. Use it in conjunction with Ultimate Google Analytics for a solid handle on your traffic, past and present.

Viper’s Video Quicktags

By Viper007Bond
http://wordpress.org/extend/plug-ins/vipers-video-quicktags/
If you’re tired of copying and pasting HTML into your site’s backend when you want to embed video, this plug-in can simplify the process. After you install Viper007Bond’s plug-in, icons representing your favorite online video respositories (YouTube, Vimeo, DailyMotion, and more) appear above the main content area. Clicking one of them lets you enter the video’s URL and dimensions. Clicking “Okay” inserts the video (centered) into the blog. It’s just that easy.

WordPress.com Popular Posts

By Frasten
http://wordpress.org/extend/plug-ins/wordpresscom-popular-posts/
This is one of the few plug-ins that actually requires the use of another plug-in—WordPress.com Stats. But once both are installed, Frasten’s WordPress.com Popular Posts can work its magic by displaying your site’s most popular posts and pages over the course of a user-selected number of days. You can exclude select posts and pages, show excerpts (when applicable), and select the number of posts to be shown.

WordPress Database Backup

By Austin Matzko
http://wordpress.org/extend/plug-ins/wp-db-backup/
Consider this the ultimate WordPress safety net for when disaster strikes. This sanity-saver backs up all of your files to either your server, desktop, or inbox once you select the frequency (hourly, twice daily, once daily, or weekly). The speed with which your file is restored depends on the amount of content that’s been backed up (it once took me two hours to restore my personal site, 2D-X after a mishap), but I was more than happy to wait, given the alternative. You shouldn’t go without Matzko’s excellent plug-in.

WP Greet Box

By Thaya Kareeson
http://wordpress.org/extend/plug-ins/wp-greet-box/
Thaya Kareeson’s plug-in is all about welcoming new visitors and building loyalty. It displays a user-defined greeting to fresh readers depending on the referrer URL. For example, when a Digg user clicks through from Digg, they might see a pop-up that asks them to digg your post. For new visitors who don’t come from any matching URLs, you could set a message that suggests that they subscribe to your RSS feed.

Yet Another Related Posts Plug-in

By Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine
http://wordpress.org/extend/plug-ins/yet-another-related-posts-plug-in/
Yet Another Related Posts Plug-in (YARPP) displays a list of posts and/or pages related to the current entry, which introduces readers to other relevant content on your site. Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine’s plug-in uses a user-customizable algorithm that weighs post titles, content, tags, and categories. It also lets you select the relevance limit in order to display more or less closely related posts

The rumors of a $149 price tag for Microsoft’s Kinect accessory for the Xbox 360 were true.

Microsoft on Tuesday finally announced the pricing for both a standalone Kinect bundle, which will ship with the Kinect hardware and the Kinect Adventures game for $149, as well as a bundle of the Xbox 360 hardware, a Kinect unit, and Kinect Adventures for $299.

Rumors of the $149 price tag began circulating months ago, and were all but confirmed just a week after E3 when Microsoft’s own online store listed the peripheral for that price, despite the company not yet announcing it. Earlier reports had pegged it as low as $80, and as high as $200.

Along with the pricing on the Kinect hardware, Microsoft is also releasing a replacement for its Arcade console bundle that uses the same smaller, and quieter form factor introduced at the end of Microsoft’s E3 press briefing. The new unit, which can be found in the $299 Kinect console bundle, as well as on its own for $199, ships with 4GB of built-in Flash memory, and features a matte paint job instead of the high-gloss finish found in the current Xbox 360 “S” units. The console will otherwise remain the same as the $299 Xbox unit, with front and back USB ports, a Kinect-specific I/O port, and built-in 802.11n Wi-Fi.

According to Microsoft director of product management Aaron Greenberg, who spoke to CNET on Monday, the new version of the Xbox 360 has been “selling quite well.” The console has been on the shelves a little more than a month, but it’s already jumped to first place in console sales. Greenberg pointed to data from The NPD Group for the month of June that pegged sales just north of 452,000 units, putting it on top of Sony’s PlayStation 3 and Nintendo’s Wii, despite those consoles having a two-and-a-half-week lead.

As for why Microsoft didn’t announce Kinect pricing at last month’s E3, Greenberg said it was due to not wanting to oversaturate its press briefing with too much news. “We had a tremendous amount of news,” Greenberg said. “We had to unveil the Kinect name, all the experiences, and the brand new consoles. We had more than enough to talk about there.”

Kinect, and the new 4GB console are shipping worldwide on November 3.

Need to get a new network up and running quickly? Follow our our step-by-step guide.

A computer network is an essential element of modern business, and it’s increasingly indispensible in the home, too. A network lets your computer connect to the Web so that you can check e-mail, update a website, or teleconference. It also lets you communicate locally with other computers on the same local network. Creating a network is simple—all that’s needed is to connect a computer to a router with an Ethernet cable. That’s a very rudimentary setup, however. You’ll need other components if you want to add multiple computers to your network, share files, stream multimedia, share a printer, or control which computers can access data on the network. And complexity increases if you decide that some links in your network will be made wirelessly. Fortunately, we’re here to assist. We’ve gathered together a list of all gear you’ll need to quickly and easily set up a home or small home-office network, and some key hints for getting it all to work together.

Choose a Wireless Router
You can’t have a home or small office network without a router. And for almost every network you’re likely to build these days, that means a combination of wired and wireless connections. A wireless router can provide both.

The router acts as a bridge between your home network (your local area network or LAN) and the Internet (the wide area network or WAN), and also allows all computers connected to it to share the connection. Your router also typically acts as your network’s DHCP server, enabling each device that you connect to have an individual and private IP address. This is vital if you need the devices on the network to communicate with each other. Wireless routers also have embedded firewalls to protect a network from threats and intrusion. Use WPA or WPA2 security for protecting your Wi-Fi network, and never leave the router’s administrator password at its default setting.

Routers are known for being notoriously complicated to set up, but units such as the $149 Cisco Valet Plus come bundled with special software that makes creating a network super simple. The one limitation with the Valet Plus is that it only operates on the 2.4-GHz band. If you plan to add a storage device, multimedia server, or your own Web server, you’ll want a router that supports the 5-GHz band and that has Gigabit Ethernet ports for speedy wired connections.

A dual-band (i.e., 2.4- and 5-GHz) router such as the $169 D-Link DIR-825 Xtreme N Dual Band Gigabit facilitates faster throughput for demanding tasks such as sharing files and streaming video. Remember, the 5-GHz band won’t make an Internet connection faster. Web speeds are controlled by your ISP and your local telecom (or cable) infrastructure. If you’re shopping for a speedier ISP, read Internet Speed Test: The Fastest ISP in the U.S. 2010. What using the 5-GHz band can do, however, is make your internal network peppier.

Choose a Networking Standard
Another important consideration is which wireless networking standard to go with. All of the latest routers, wireless devices like the iPad, and even desktops such as the Apple mac Mini are shipping with the 802.11n networking standard (or just “N” for short). If all the devices on your network support N—best practice warrants running your network in N mode (done through the router’s settings). N devices have theoretical maximum transfer rates of 540 Mbps— faster than legacy standards, b and g. However, you won’t actually see 540 Mbps due to interference, overhead, and other factors, but you will get better throughput in your network.

Of course, you may have older devices that don’t support the N standard. This won’t be a problem with connectivity; devices that are only 802.11 b and g capable can still connect to wireless-N routers, provided the router is set to operate in “Mixed Mode.” Keep in mind though; an older device connecting at b or g can slow down the entire network. If you can swing it, upgrade your devices and adapters to N. This will let you take advantage of the 5-GHz band, if you’re using your network for streaming multimedia or sharing other large files.

Wire Your Network
A laptop, desktop, or other device transmits data faster over a wired Ethernet connection than a wireless connection, particularly when you’re transferring or streaming large multimedia files. Ethernet cables usually come with NAS drives, routers, and gaming consoles. Still, you may need to purchase extras as your network expands and you want to wire more devices via Ethernet.

All Ethernet cable nowadays is Cat5, but there’s also Cat5e, Cat6 and Cat7. Which one do you choose? As mentioned earlier, if you have devices that use Gigabit Ethernet (also denoted as 10/100/1000) you need to use Cat5e. Cat5 only supports Fast Ethernet (or 10/100) networks, so if you want devices that are wired to a Gigabit Ethernet to take advantage of the 1 GBps speed, you need to use Cat5e. Most Ethernet cable sold in retail stores these days is Cat5e anyway, though. Cat6 and 7 are certified for Gigabit Ethernet transmission, they’re more expensive than Cat5e, and unnecessary in the typical home or small-business network they have special shielding and can transmit over longer distances than you’re likely to need.

Cat5e cables can be purchased from big-box stores like Best Buy and will run anywhere from $14-$30 bucks depending on the length.

Powerline adapters can be used in places where you can’t or don’t want to run Ethernet cables. Powerline adapters extend your network connection via electrical outlets. They are offered by an increasing number of vendors. Plaster Networks‘ PLN3 adapters are available in a 2 adapter starter kit for $149.90. D-Link offers a powerline starter kit for $160.

Devices connected via Powerline adapters are somewhat slower performers than wireless and Cat5 wired devices. But, it’s a cheap and simple way to connect devices throughout a home, as there’s no need for extra cabling and there’s no additional electrical costs. Some users have complained that when they use electrical devices in their homes, devices connected to the powerline adapter often suffer performance degradation, but we are seeing more robust adapters such as those mentioned above.

Pick the Right Client Adapters
Each computer connecting to your network needs a wireless adapter in order to pick up the Wi-Fi signal if you don’t want your computer wired to the router; out of the box, most laptops and other Web-ready devices have built-in wireless adapters. Servers and other devices utilize network Ethernet ports, which are also usually built-in. If the object that you’re trying to connect to your network has neither, you can purchase a USB wireless adapter, or wireless adapter card.

A device such as the $69.99 Cisco Linksys AE1000 High Performance Wireless-N Adapter is a good selection. It’s optimized for Cisco products, but can be used with any vendor’s router. It also supports legacy 802.11 b and g.

If you don’t want to use a USB port for an adapter, then you may want to check out the $42.95 Cisco-Linksys WPC600N Ultra RangePlus Dual-Band Wireless-N PC Card, which slips into a computer’s PC card slot.

There are also several good adapter choices for desktop computers that snap into the PCI slot. For example, the $79.99 D-Link’s DWA-522 Xtreme N Desktop Adapter has three external antennas to give a desktop superior Wi-Fi performance.

Consider Switches and Hubs
The typical router has four Ethernet ports for wiring computers, storage devices, gaming consoles, and servers. If your network setup requires additional ports, you can purchase a switch. Wiring either to a router gived you more ports, which lets you add more devices and clients (known collectively as nodes) to your network as well. While the 3Com OfficeConnect Gigabit PoE Switch, is a good product, may be overkill for a home or small office. A good, cheaper option is the $49.99 Netgear ProSafe 5-port Gigabit Ethernet Switch. You can also opt for a hub, which offers similar functionality but lacks a management interface.

Manage Homegroups in Windows 7
After you’ve set up your network, you have to manage it by adding users, files, folders, and printer sharing options. Fortunately, Windows 7 has built-in functionality for managing a small network, so you don’t need to make any extra purchases. You can create a Homegroup in a couple of clicks, and other Windows 7 PCs can join it to share Libraries (folders that store specific data like images, music, or documents).

Homegroup setup takes just a few steps. First, simply open the Control Panel. Under Network and Internet click on Choose homegroups and sharing options. Click the Create a homegroup button. For each computer you want to connect to the Homegroup, go to that machine and follow the same steps. Instead of selecting Create, however, select for Join a homegroup. Now you can share printers and files. Simple!

If one or more of the computers that you want to connect to the Home Group isn’t running Windows 7, don’t fret; there are other ways to achieve sharing and control permissions on a small network. You can share folders by right-clicking on each folder you want to share in either XP, Vista, or Windows 7 and selecting Properties and then the Sharing tab. Choose the users in the network you want to give access to the folder, as well as the permission level you want to give them: Read only, or Read/Write. Users access the folders you have shared from their machines via the machine name the folder resides on and the folder name. For example, on my computer named CLIENT1; I have created a shared folder which I named Music. Those to whom I give permission can access the folder by typing the following into the Run or Search window: “\\CLIENT1\Music”.

When you have a network setup where each computer shares files and folders with the others, this is what is known as a “peer-to-peer” network, which is what Windows 7 Homegroups is all about. If, instead, you plan on having more users, say for a small business network, and want to store data in a central location and exercise more control over who accesses what, you want to set up a “Client/Server Network.” You can set up this type of network with a traditional Windows or Mac OS X server running your network, or with a NAS device as described in the next sections.

Server Management
A server is one of the most basic ways to control your network and set up file sharing. However, it may not be a necessity for small networks. Many of today’s NAS devices can act as a network server (more on that later).

When would you choose a server? If you’re brand-new to networking, sticking with the familiar interface of Windows or Mac OS X[link to snow leopard review] (which servers use) may be easier than diving in and learning the UI of a NAS device. Also, if you’re running a business and need a customized Web or e-commerce server, you will have more flexibility and granular control with your own server than with the built-in services that typically come with most NAS devices.

The $999 Apple Mac mini with Snow Leopard Server is an excellent server for a small home or SOHO network. It’s easy to set up, even for those who lack server experience. It can perform network duties, and works well with Windows client machines, so you won’t have problems accessing files. Microsoft’s Windows Home Server features similar functionality as the Mac mini with Snow Leopard Server, and it may prove a better option for those accustomed to the familiar Windows interface.

Get Network-Attached Storage (NAS)
As mentioned, a NAS device can also function as a server; the great thing about a NAS is that everything is already set up for you, you just have to configure your settings and services. If you don’t want to bother setting up a server, there are many NAS drives on the market that not only provide extra storage, but can double as FTP, Mail and Web servers (although without the level of customization a traditional server offers). Another difference between a NAS box and a server is that you can control user logins, groups and permissions for the entire network from a server. With a NAS device, users and permissions are usually limited to controlling access to the NAS and data that resides on it. That, however, may be all that a small network requires, so in many cases a NAS will suffice.

Confused? Manufacturers do their best to make the situation worse, unfortunately: many NAS drives are branded “Home Servers.” The $599 Lenovo IdeaCentre D400 Home Server is a prime example. The IdeaCentre actually comes with Windows Home Server installed on it. But the design with the boxy enclosure, easily removed drives, and no way to add a keyboard and mouse, make this a NAS—it’s clear, however, that the line is getting blurrier all the time. The IdeaCentre provides just under 2 TB of storage as well as the means to create User Accounts, backup jobs and, of course, file sharing. The only downside is that the $599 MSRP may be a little pricey for the typical start-up home network.

USB-based NAS drives such as the $139 Editors’ Choice wining Pogoplug may not have the deep feature sets, but they’re incredibly easy to set up, and allow file-sharing via the Internet at a wallet-friendly price. In addition, the four USB ports give considerable USB storage capacity as you can hook up the drive to external storage drives.

NAS devices often offer sophisticated options (just like traditional servers).You can set up RAID on most of them for improved performance, or for fault tolerance. What does fault tolerance mean? RAID can provide disk mirroring, which gives data redundancy in that data gets “mirrored” from one drive to another. With a multi-disk HDD-based NAS device, if one disk fails (and one will, eventually) RAID fault-tolerance means your data isn’t lost.

Get Power Surge Protection
Once your home network is in place, you have to start thinking like a network administrator. This means recognizing that disaster will strike, be it a power spike, data corruption, or a failed hard drive. Being proactive about a recovery plan can help you weather the storm.

At the very least you’ll need to invest in power surge protectors for your equipment. Once of the most common causes of equipment failure is power surges. If you’re running a small home business and your server goes down, it could cost you precious time and money. Consider a protector such as the APC Back-UPS HS, which features surge protection, and battery backup in case of an outage. It can also be remotely managed from a Web browser.

Plan for the Worst
Backup plans are the most critical element of your network. You’ve got to protect your data, whether it’s your precious personal pictures and home videos or critical business data. Schedule regular backups of your data. Also, periodically test your backup system’s restore capabilities to ensure that the backups are valid and free from any data corruption.

There are of course, several ways to back up your network’s data. Most NAS devices have robust backup capabilities which are relatively easy for anyone to setup. Windows servers also have a built-in back-up feature, and Mac, of course, offers Time Machine[link to time machine review]. You can set up your own local backup system given enough external storage space. If you’re going to take this course, we recommend creating not just a backup, but a whole drive image—that is, a backup of not just your data, but your entire PC—everything from your files to all the tweaks you make to your OS and apps so that they perform the way you want them to. The best software for this, hands down, is ShadowProtect Desktop 4.0.

Additionally, there are backup solutions out there that use the Internet for your storage—a great option if you have a peer-to-peer network and no NAS or server for storage. Online backups have the further advantage that, since they’re not local, your data is safe even if a local disaster like a flood or fire completely destroys all your on-site storage. Check out our feature on Easy Online Backup to get started. Our current favorite service is SOS Online Backup.

These are the key ingredients for establishing a small home or business network. In fact, they’re the basic building blocks for a network of any size: a network as described above is just a scale model of any computer network—even those in huge enterprises. You can add complexity and size to a network, but once you’ve got your home or small-business network set up, you’ve mastered the basics of setting up any size network.

Dell has a lot of catch-up to do when it comes to creating cool devices like Apple has. A key piece of that strategy is the Dell Streak tablet, a tablet device that has a 5-inch multitouch touchscreen and can make web phone calls.

The Android-based Streak is launching sometime this summer in the U.S.. O2 has already launched the device in its stores in the United Kingdom. It is billed as a device that will help you live your digital life on the go, allowing you to play thousands of Android Market widgets, games and apps. It has built-in Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and 3G connectivity. You can use it to download music or videos, update your social networking status, and stay connected with people via e-mail, text messages, instant messages and voice calls.

It’s targeted at students, mobile professionals and active families. And it’s for corporations that want to give their employees something more functional than a BlackBerry. The large screen is aimed at presenting web pages in their natural form or to make turn-by-turn navigation through Google Maps simple and safe. It has Qualcomm’s 1-gigahertz Snapdragon processor and a five-megapixel camera in the back as well as a VGA front-facing camera so that you can conceivably engage in video phone calls. It has two gigabytes of internal storage, and you can fit Micro SD memory cards up to 32 gigabytes in capacity.

The device is a hybrid between a smartphone and a large-screen tablet; it is small enough to fit in a pocket, but it’s somewhat awkward if you’re going to hold it up to your ear and talk. The design is much different than Dell’s first smartphone, the Dell Aero. The Streak is 10 millimeters thick and it weighs 7.7 ounces. There’s a proximity sensor that disables the screen while making a call, so you don’t shut it off by accident.

The platform will support over-the-air updates for Adobe Flash 10.1, video chat, and other software updates coming later this year for Android. There’s a virtual keyboard that has haptic feedback. The device comes pre-loaded with Microsoft’s QuickOffice, which can be used to view productivity documents.

The home screen can be much cleaner than the cluttered look you get with some smartphones that have lots of apps. You can look at a menu bar at the top of the screen that has commonly used functions or apps, or you can expand that view to include the icons for all of the apps you have. There is easy access to apps such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Battery life is about 10 hours.

We got a close-up look at the Dell Streak. Kevin Andrews, product manager for Dell’s Communications Solutions Group, showed it to us this week in San Francisco. Andrews said the product has been under design for about two years. Below, you can see how big the Streak looks compared to an iPhone 4. Check out the video with Andrews at the bottom.

Could Windows 8 be the Windows 2000 of the 21st century? When Microsoft released Windows 2000, it was largely embraced by the corporate world, but few consumers (except hard-core geeks) ran it on their home machines. Windows 95, Windows 98, and the doomed Windows Millennium targeted the average user. A decade later, rumors and hints point to a Windows 8 that appears poised to walk the same business-centric path.

The successor to Windows 7 is probably a few years from release, but there’s already considerable speculation on what the upcoming operating system will entail. A post at Ma-Config, a French tech news site, has piqued OS-watchers’ interests, as it hinted at Windows 8′s potential business-friendly features. Analysts, including ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley, are pondering the heavy focus on virtualization due to certain statements made on the French blog:

Virtual machines (VMs) become key platform components for data centers and Microsoft products such as Win8, System Center, and Azure.

On the website of Microsoft Research, we learn that virtualization should be one of the key components of Windows 8. It seems to confirm that Bernard Ourghanlian, technical and security director at Microsoft France, interviewed on the site itrmanager in March 2009. Version 3 Hyper-V is now scheduled run on workstations and Windows 8 only.

Virtualization is certainly one of the more intriguing potential Windows 8 features, one that could drastically improve the IT/developer, business user, and cloud-computing experiences. Here are the potential improvements that Windows 8′s virtualization can bring to the business sector.

IT and Developer Benefits
If virtualization is indeed the core of Windows 8, IT departments and developers will see a number of benefits. The new architecture (possibly with a hypervisor, a software technology that makes virtualization possible), applications would be isolated and no longer intertwined with the operating system. This could make for a lightweight and high-performance desktop operating system, as the OS would reside locally and other applications would be delivered virtually. Although the debate continues as to whether virtual machines are safer from attack than physical ones, Ma-Config’s post points out that the hypervisor would be secure from attacks when paired with a TPM (Trusted Platform Module) chip.

This virtualization would make it a breeze to upgrade to a new version of Windows without worrying about compatibility and driver issues. It also means users could potentially run other operating systems such as Linux or Mac OS X alongside Windows 8.

Plus, the ability to stream applications within Windows 8 (which could conceivably happen via application virtualization much like Microsoft’s Application Virtualization) without having to setup additional hardware, software or change an infrastructure would make for the ultimate in end-user control in an IT business environment without a lot of pain or additional cost.

Business User Benefits
Business users may have the ability to have the virtual machines updated when they are turned off (sparing, for example, a work interruption) and Windows Update may include the ability to update third-party applications. Virtualization would also let users try out applications without having to uninstall and install them—a plus for software developers, as well. The lighter operating system means that boot time will likely be much shorter, too.

Cloud Computing Benefits
Forget about the traditional on-premise server as you know it. Windows 8 could be the perfect client OS for a revamped Window ecosystem, which would include both virtualizations and hosted cloud infrastructures using Microsoft’s Azure platform. Virtualization could serve as a data center’s private cloud, and Azure may give businesses the ability to scale and have sophisticated hosted infrastructures that would be very expensive to deploy and maintain on-site. Virtualized servers (already possible with Hyper-V) may become far more commonplace.

Early Days
The virtualization benefits, as described, could radically change the way companies operate. Microsoft’s new focus means that Redmond will most likely peddle Windows 8 to businesses, which may make it the first OS that finally gets the majority of companies on board with virtualization and cloud computing—and make those new platforms as ubiquitous and familiar as the client/server on-premise model that has dominated business for years.

Of course, this is all speculation, based on rumors and leaks. Even granting that what we think we know is right, Windows 8 is probably at least a couple years from release, and Microsoft is famous for the extent to which its projects can change in development. Witness, most famously, Windows Vista. Rest assured, we’ll be looking closely at the details as they continue to emerge.

While it lacks many basic features of modern day consumer video editing software (such as captioning, transitions, and image stabilization), it makes up for it in convenience. All your video files, and the rendering, is taken care of by YouTube’s server farm, meaning you can do some very involved HD video editing on older machines that would be otherwise woefully inadequate.

YouTube has its own introductory guide on what the editor’s various features are, but we thought it would be a good idea to walk you through how to create something, as if you had just come back to your computer with a digital camera full of clips you wanted to put into one, cohesive video. Read on to see how to do it.

1. Upload

(Credit: Screenshot by Josh Lowensohn/CNET)

First things first, you need to upload your videos. You can’t actually do this through the editor–they need to be on YouTube before you even begin. If you’re new here, that involves hitting the large “upload” link on the top of the YouTube home page, then following the directions.

Tip: if you’re working with several clips that you wish to string together, but that you don’t want to have exist as their own, standalone videos, simply check the “unlisted” or “private” option while they’re uploading. This way, they won’t show up on your public profile, but they’re still in YouTube’s system. (More on unlisted videos here.)

2. Arrange

To get to YouTube’s editor, you can either head to TestTube (a directory of YouTube’s Skunk Works projects) and click the “try it now” option, or visit the direct YouTube.com/editor link.

Once here, you’ll see a listing of your videos in chronological order. For the purposes of this story, we’re going to start with these three at the top:

To add clips to your video you can drag them from the “my videos” section, down to the time line, or you can hit the plus icon that’s in each clip’s top right hand corner. In case you’re not sure what a clip contains, you can mouse over it and hit the play icon to watch the whole thing without leaving the page.

3. Cut

At this point, if you don’t need to make any edits to your videos, you can just give your work a title and hit the publish button. But that’s no fun, is it? To make use of the editor’s power you need to make some cuts.

YouTube’s editor lets you trim a video, but not split it, so if you want to cut a single clip into two or more parts you need to drag more copies of that video down into the time line.

One very important thing to note right up front is that you can have only seven clips in your time line; this means cutting up something longer into several smaller clips will take up more of that work space. It’s definitely something to think about when you’re capturing video and know that you’re going to use this editor.

Once you’ve added clips to your time line, you want to hit the scissors icon that appears when you mouse over the time line. This pulls up the edit dialog, where you can pick the in and out points of the clip. From there, you just need to drag the start and end markers to contain the segment of the clip you want to use.

To view the edit you’re in the progress of making, you can just hit the play button and it will start wherever you set your in point. Work the start and end points into the spots where you want them, then hit save to finish the edit for that particular clip.

Tip: If you want a finer level of control, you can hit the little left and right arrows that are on the top and bottom of the in/out points. These “nudges,” as YouTube calls them, go forward or backward by 1/15th of a second, which can help give you a more exact stop or end point than you’d get with your mouse.

4. Audio (optional)

While you can’t adjust the volume level, or add an audio track of your own, you can use YouTube’s AudioSwap feature to add music to your creation.

It’s worth noting that just like using AudioSwap on a standard YouTube video, using it in YouTube’s editor completely removes any audio that was already in your video. You can add only one audio track to your work, so you have to choose wisely.

Tip: If you’re planning to use YouTube’s audio over your own, you should do it once you’ve published your video. The AudioSwap interface you can get to from the video editor page offers a much better browsing experience, as well as a way to whittle down the list of songs to those that match the length of your finished product.

5. Publish

When you’re done, just give your work a title and hit the publish button. This takes you to the same screen you’d see if you went into the “edit video” dialog.

YouTube took about 15 minutes to process our less than two minute clip, so expect some downtime if your creation is longer. Just go watch some cute kitten videos while you wait.

For reference, here’s the video I put together with three different clips that were cut into seven within YouTube’s video editor (yes, the camera work is awful, but the editing was easy!):

Some other things to note:
• While YouTube doesn’t let you download a video from the editor itself, you can download the finished version when it’s done processing.
• If you shot your video in HD, you have to wait for it to be processed in HD to see a properly sized version of it in the editor.
• The finished version will be in HD too.
• You can cut together HD and non-HD clips.
• You can delete the original video clips you used, and your new creation will continue to exist.
• YouTube’s video editor doesn’t have any image stabilization algorithm built-in, which, as you can see from the above video, means you need steady hands.

Panasonic plasmas sure do.

(Credit: Sarah Tew/CNET)

Initial testing of 3D-compatible HDTVs has revealed that, in the default picture settings, displaying 3D images can indeed draw more power than in standard 2D mode, especially on plasma models.

We tested four televisions, namely Panasonic’s 50-inch TC-P50VT25 and 65-inch TC-P65VT25 plasmas, as well as two LED-based LCD models, the Samsung UN55C8000 and the Sony XBR-52HX909. The results show that the plasmas used 62 and 101 percent more power, respectively, whereas the Samsung used 29 percent more and the Sony, oddly, used more power in 2D than in 3D mode. Check out the measurements below.

The main reason for the extra power draw in 3D, as far as we can tell, is that 3D needs a brighter image. The active LC shutter glasses required to view 3D on these TVs alternately block off each eye very quickly, so it stands to reason that the 3D image needs to be brighter than the 2D version to have similar impact. A quick eyeball observation sans glasses confirms that the 2D image is dimmer than 3D on the Panasonic plasmas. On the other hand, we couldn’t see an obvious brightness difference on the LED models.

In addition, the glasses themselves have a slight tint even when “open” and not blocking an image–Sony’s glasses seem to have the lightest tint and Panasonic’s the heaviest–so the TV must be brighter to overcome it. A Panasonic engineer told us to think of it as “watching TV through sunglasses.”

Naturally the different makers can and will use different default picture settings, and different brightness offsets for 3D, but unfortunately we can’t compensate for those differences in our testing yet. For example, the Sony’s image in 3D (with the glasses on) seemed dimmer than in 2D (glasses off) with the same picture mode, but we can’t say for sure and we can’t properly test it (see below).

Even with 2D material the 50-inch VT25 used more power than the equivalent 2D TV, the 50-inch Panasonic TC-P50G20; we measured about 28 percent more juice (which costs about $14 more per year) after equalizing for light output. Of course, plasma in general uses twice to three times as much power as LCD, especially these LED-based models.

Power use aside, in our opinion the Panasonic is the superior-performing 3D (and 2D) television compared with the other two. It’s also worth mentioning that 2D will likely be used much more frequently than 3D on these TVs for years to come, so the monetary and energy use impact of this increased power use will be minor.

We’ll test other 3D-compatible TVs for power use as part of all future reviews, and include the updates here. For more info, check out CNET’s Quick Guide to TV Power Consumption and 3D TV FAQ.

Test procedure
Unfortunately a rigorous test of 3D power use, with a comparison that specifies equalized light output in both 2D and 3D modes, isn’t in the cards right now. It would require a measurement of light output through a pair of 3D glasses–literally placing the glasses over the lens of our light meter–which introduces variables that are difficult to control. Alternately, we could forget the glasses and just compare the light output of the screen in 2D and 3D mode with the same content, but at the moment we lack the proper 3D test patterns to do so.

In lieu of a test that controls for light output, we’ve elected to simply compare the power consumption in each TV’s default Standard picture mode (with ambient light sensors disabled). We used the first 10 minutes of “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs” because that Blu-ray allows an in-menu choice of 2D or 3D presentation (in 3D mode we skipped past the 3D Blu-ray and Sony promos, which don’t appear in 2D mode, before we began the 10-minuter period). All TVs were tested using the latest firmware versions. We used our standard test procedure, including hour-long warm-up times, for each measurement.

OnLive could be one of the most disruptive gaming technologies since Steam.

The much-hyped OnLive PC gaming service has soft-launched to a limited preview audience, and we’ve spent the past several days putting the streaming service through its paces. OnLive allows nearly any laptop or desktop to play high-end PC games, by offloading the CPU and GPU-intensive tasks of actually running the game software to a remote render farm, then beaming the gameplay back to you as a streaming video.

As unlikely as that scenario sounds, in practice the system actually works quite well, at least at these initial stages. The game selection is decent, the hardware requirements are very flexible, and the overall image quality and gameplay experience runs from acceptable to very good. The big question mark in OnLive’s future is how well the system will scale for a mass audience.

For high-end PC gamers, OnLive won’t replace your turbocharged, water-cooled quad-GPU gaming rig, and the insane screen resolutions it can pump out (OnLive is currently limited to 1,280×720 pixels), but for casual gamers who are interested in sampling the latest PC games, there’s a lot of promise here.

Dan:
My first hands-on experience with OnLive at the 2009 Game Developers Conference was a mixed bag. The online gaming service felt like an overly ambitious idea that was sluggish in execution, with plenty of unanswered questions about its technology and business model.

The final version of OnLive is finally, well, live, and Rich Brown and I have spent the past several days testing it across a wide range of laptop and desktop computers, with overall very satisfying results.

The main interface is very widgetlike, almost easier to navigate with a game pad than a mouse. One of OnLive’s only onerous requirements is a hard-wired Internet connection, and the software wouldn’t even install on a Wi-Fi network (OnLive says good-quality Wi-Fi connections can theoretically work, and may be implemented in the future).

The built-in game store offers recent games such as Splinter Cell: Conviction and Borderlands, alongside a handful of casual games, including World of Goo. Demos give you time-limited access to the full games, and paid access options vary by game, but generally offer three-to-five-day access for a few dollars, or the full game at its current retail price (up to $59.99).

Note that, unlike Steam, you’re not actually buying the game, but just the right to access it via OnLive’s servers, “while it is available on the OnLive gamer service,” which the company says will be until at least June 2013 for the games currently listed.

I tried several games (Borderlands, Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands, FEAR 2, Unreal Tournament III, etc.) on a variety of systems, including a 13-inch MacBook, a standard Netbook, and a high-end gaming rig. Being able to play Borderlands on a MacBook (one with Nvidia’s basic GeForce 9400 graphics) was great, and any of the OnLive games will work on either OS X or Windows 7/Vista.

Image quality was generally good, but could look soft at times, almost like watching a YouTube video of a game. The onscreen image is running at 1,280×720 pixels, which is well below what enthusiast gamers go for, but well-matched for most laptop screens. Lag wasn’t a problem in the games I tried, but frame rates, though never stuttery, weren’t as smooth as what you’d get from high-end gaming machines. Interestingly, all the games had essentially customized menus that eliminated any display, graphics, or resolution options–as all that is presumably handled remotely, with games set to 1,280×720 pixels and details that look set to medium at best.

A welcome feature is that the games keep your save files in a kind of online cloud. For example, when I loaded up Borderlands on a second laptop, the game resumed right where I left off. Steam has promised cloud saves for some time, but the implementation there has been very limited.

My next test was on a Netbook with an Intel Atom N450 CPU, 1GB of RAM, and Windows 7 Starter. This Toshiba NB30 did not meet the minimum hardware requirements of OnLive, because of its single-core CPU, according to a warning message that popped up during the install process, but the installation was allowed to proceed (unlike when using a Wi-Fi connection, in which case the client software would not install at all).

Borderlands actually played fine on the Netbook, and looked even better on the smaller display than it did on bigger laptop screens. This is a potentially killer app for Netbooks, as long as you’re near a hard-wired Ethernet cable (and it certainly expands the library of games appropriate for Netbook users).

Any kind of connected gaming experience today really needs to take advantage of the social media proclivities of its target audience. OnLive feels like its halfway on the right track, and the platform’s most impressive social feature is a section called the Arena. There, you see a scrolling gridlike view of other players’ game screens, and can zoom in on individual sessions as a spectator (in the privacy settings you can choose to only allow friends to see your games, or opt out of the Arena altogether). Your interest in watching strangers play games may be limited, but it’s a fascinating window into other people’s computers. The Arena grid unfortunately doesn’t list how many players are currently online, but we saw that Borderlands, Assassin’s Creed II, and Just Cause 2 were by far the most popular games.

It’s also worth noting that most gamers already have more than enough friends lists to connect with, and some kind of implementation of Facebook Connect could be a killer app.

The handful of issues we ran into included touchy support for Microsoft’s Xbox/PC USB game pad, and online multiplayer support that’s limited to others playing the OnLive version of these games (which could be a major issue for popular online shooters such as Call of Duty).

I’ve still got plenty of unanswered questions about OnLive. How well will it scale if millions of users sign up? Will game licenses (that you’ve already paid full retail price for) expire on a regular basis? Will gamers be willing to pay $4.95 per month (early adopters get their first year of service free) just for access to the OnLive network, then pay for games on top of that?

Despite these very important questions, OnLive was an overall very impressive experience, and several minds around the CNET offices were officially blown–a difficult task among this jaded bunch.

Rich:
Like Dan, I spent a large part of the weekend with OnLive. The experience was surprisingly good. I tried demos for most of the A-list titles, but I spent most of the time with Just Cause 2, which I’d been meaning to play. I tried it on both my laptop and my wife’s two-year-old Dell budget desktop, and in both cases the games ran flawlessly. The only problems came down to the Internet connection (thank you, Time Warner Cable of NYC). That’s not the fault of OnLive, but it does suggest that bandwidth limitations are a real issue to its business model.

Although I had a positive experience with OnLive this weekend, I’m more interested in its future. On paper, it has the potential to become the most disruptive force in gaming since Valve reinvigorated the PC game retail market with its Steam download service. Just don’t expect the rest of the gaming industry to stand still.

For gamers, OnLive overthrows the tyranny of system requirements. Almost any modern computer can become a gaming system thanks to OnLive’s streaming capabilities. PC gaming enthusiasts will still run their games locally for the higher-resolution graphics and more-granular image settings (unless OnLive catches up), but for everyone else, you no longer need to think about whether your hardware is fast enough. With a fast enough connection (OnLive recommends 5Mbps or better), the service just works.

For game developers and publishers, OnLive offers all kinds of benefits. Streaming games eliminates piracy and the need for customer-aggravating DRM. By offering free 30-minute trial-play for each title, OnLive also makes the traditional game demo unnecessary, thus saving gamemakers time and resources, and giving gamers a potentially more-accurate sense of gameplay before they buy.

OnLive could also make development and technical support dramatically easier. If developers only have to consider the specs of the OnLive host computers, they no longer have to worry about coding for, and supporting, an infinite number of PC configurations.

Those who might have some concern about this potential disruption include graphics chip vendors, game console makers, and game retailers.

OnLive could seem like AMD and Nvidia’s worst nightmare. After all, why buy a 3D card when all the rendering happens in the cloud? Hard-core gamers will continue to buy 3D cards, but the bulk of sales go to more-casual gamers, arguably OnLive’s primary target.

The good news for Nvidia and AMD is that OnLive says its host hardware needs one GPU for every gamer using its service. If OnLive achieves Steam-like popularity with a couple of million concurrent users, that would be quite a GPU contract. You can expect that Intel, Nvidia, and AMD are all watching closely.

Game console makers should have similar wariness. OnLive will need to be resilient before it can legitimately challenge Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo in your living room. OnLive plans to offer a set-top box to bring its service to your TV, but given its humble local hardware requirements, it’s not too difficult to image someone selling a TV with the OnLive service built in.

OnLive has also launched with some big-name gaming titles from the likes of 2K Games, Ubisoft, Electronic Arts, Square Enix, and Atari, among others, but I suspect it will need more clout by way of a large user base before it can offer a truly competitive gaming library.

On the retailing side, it’s not so much the brick-and-mortar shops as it is Steam and the other direct-download services that seem to compete most directly with OnLive. Valve has built an enormous stockpile of goodwill among PC gamers for both its Steam service and the games it develops, which include the Half-Life series, Portal, and Left 4 Dead. Steam boasted almost 2.5 million concurrent users over this past weekend, and such loyalty is part of the reason Valve was able to build Steam’s large library of downloadable games.

As successful as Steam has become, OnLive boasts some significant advantages. By streaming gameplay, more people can play the games OnLive offers. Because it hosts games remotely, OnLive can also offer more flexible pricing than Steam, which it does for certain games with a three-day trial for $5, and a five-day trial for $7.

We don’t know how pay-as-you-go pricing might shake out in terms of long-term revenue for game developers. It could reduce the number of people who are willing to pay $50 or $60 for a full game. It could also open the door to subscriptionlike pricing for more-popular titles. Just ask Activision Blizzard for how well that model can work.

The challenges for OnLive are many and varied. In the short term, OnLive must demonstrate that it can consistently offer a responsive, visually pleasing gaming experience as its membership grows. That comes down to rendering headroom and connection bandwidth, over which it has little to no control on the user end.

In order to attract and retain users, OnLive must also offer compelling content, which means continually adding new games, if not other services as well. The social aspects of its service, including the Arena feature for watching others’ OnLive sessions, will be important here.

We haven’t seen any mention of 3D gaming from OnLive (meaning “popping out of your screen” 3D), and we also have no indication that motion control is in the offing. It will also need to contend with the resources of the established PC gaming services like Valve’s Steam and Activision Blizzard’s Battle.net. We wouldn’t put it past either company, or past Electronic Arts’ or some other large publisher, to offer streaming services of their own. To that end, OnLive might even look like a tempting acquisition.

Despite all of those questions, so far OnLive does exactly what it’s supposed to do. It makes playing games on your computer far more accessible than it was previously. The rest of the gaming industry must now react to OnLive. We look forward to those reactions, as well as to seeing how well OnLive holds up as it adds users.

If you’re serious about digital photography, it’s a given that you shoot with a D-SLR or maybe one of the new compact interchangeable-lens cameras. And you shoot a lot of photos. But you haven’t only outgrown your point-and-shoot camera, you’ve also outgrown your consumer photo application. These apps offer rudimentary photo-management and are becoming more and more capable photo editors all the time, but when it comes to importing, rating, tagging, optimizing, and outputting myriad high-resolution image files, they can’t compete with the professional photo workflow programs in this roundup: Apple’s Aperture 3 ($199), Adobe’s Lightroom 3 ($299), and ACDSee Pro 3 ($169.99). These photo-workflow apps take you through the whole import-organize-optimize-output process.

Modal or Non-modal?
Lightroom and ACDSee use a “modal” interfaces, in which you select one mode for importing and organizing (usually with advanced tagging options); another for adjusting images exposure and color; another for output like slideshows; and depending on the program, possibly one for printing and one for web. Apple Aperture departs from this trend, letting you do any of the above at any point in your process, using tabs on its Inspector to get the set of tasks you want. Both Aperture and Lightroom let you tag and apply preset adjustments to photos even as they’re imported, which sets them above ACDSee for users who need to get things organized and tagged on the fly for quick processing.

Aperture offers a couple more big advantages aside from this simpler user interface—its Face tagging and impressive geotagging options, actually ported up and powered up from its consumer iPhoto app. Face tagging lets photographers find photos containing certain individuals, something particularly useful for those who shoot weddings, portraits, or events. And the geotagging is nifty tool suited for the landscape or travel photographer, showing photo shoots on a zoomable world map. Overall, it’s a must-have application for the Mac-using photographer.

Aperture and Lightroom can both accept external plug-ins, which pros depend on for powerful effects like noise reduction (such as Noise Ninja) or sharpening (such as Nik Sharpener Pro). Another type of plug-in they offer is the export plug-in, which eases uploading to photo sites like SmugMug and Picasa Web Albums. Lightroom also has a large base of community-produced presets to choose from, but Aperture has more for outputting to book format.

Shooting RAW
If you do get a DSLR, I recommend that you shoot in RAW format, as this lets you do more with the photos in one of these software packages (it may require a lot more storage space than JPG, but it is a lossless format that saves all the information the sensor records). Not only do the apps here offer more advanced import and organization options, but they can get the best out of each image by adjusting properties of the camera’s RAW files—exposure, white balance, and sharpening.

I saw a palpable example of this while testing these programs: A shot of an old, white exterior next to a darker interior wall showed cracks and texture when I made adjustments to a RAW file. I could get none of this detail from the same image in JPG format. Sure, your DSLR comes with software that can display and do some editing of raw files (my Canon T1i came with at least a half dozen apps on its installer disk), but the apps in this roundup are far more capable and usable than the software bundled with your camera.

And these programs offer other advantages: They usually will handle those large RAW files far more quickly than consumer products, especially Lightroom, with its graphics hardware acceleration. Note, however, that with any app that has to juggle 20MB image files pixel-by-pixel, you’re still going to need a PC of decent power. And don’t expect your laptop’s battery to last too long when you’re applying adjustments to photos with these apps.

Compensating For Your Camera
The photo workflow software here can also can compensate for physical limitations of lenses—chromatic aberration (discolored fringes on objects edges), vignetting (darkening around an images outer edges), and geometric distortion. Lightroom and ACDSee are the only ones that can do that last one. Lightroom also had the best image noise reduction in my testing, smoothing out those stubbly areas in low light that result from the way light hits the sensor and electronic transmission.

Nondestructive Editing
And with these programs, all the edits you perform can be undone at any time. In fact, the original image file is treated like a negative and never touched. Instead, any edits are saved in a separate database and applied to the image as you view it. You can export the edited image to a new file for an end product with all your changes.

What about Photoshop?
You may be wondering at the absence from this group of a very well-known, high-end photo editor that’s also known for its ability to accept plug-ins—Adobe Photoshop CS5. That $700 app is really a different animal than what we’re looking at here, and indeed, the programs in this roundup can do a lot of what Photoshop does, but they offer more in the way of organization, where Photoshop is more about creativity, using layers and effects. These also let you launch external editors like Photoshop–and Lightroom’s feature for this the slickest, as it shares that app’s parent, Adobe.

When you’re done organizing your digital photos and getting them to look their best, most of these apps make it easy to sharing them online, offer flexible printing options, create polished slideshows, and even will build Web galleries—completing the full workflow. For details on what each of them excels at and which suits your needs best, click the links on the summaries below to read the full reviews.

ACDSee Pro 3

$169
ACDSee gives you nearly everything in Adobe’s Lightroom, though the interface is a bit less polished. It lacks the lens calibrated adjustments, chromatic aberration tools, and excellent noise reduction of Lightroom, but it’s a surprisingly versatile, powerful application for the price.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3

$299
Lightroom has been the pro photographer’s choice of digital darkroom, and this version brings increased speed and even finer image rendering. Its image noise correction tops all others in this group; it will even correct lens distortion for popular lenses. Lightroom 3 can’t keep up with Aperture’s much more usable interface, but it’s the best pro photo application for Windows users.

Apple Aperture 3

$199
With face recognition for organizing people pictures, smart geo-tagging, a rich plug-in ecosystem, and all the adjustment and nondestructive versioning and organizational tools you find in Lightroom, Aperture is one of the best photo applications around, and hands-down the best available for Mac users. It’s our Editors’ Choice for photo-management. Of course, if you have a PC, you’ll want to stick with Adobe Lightroom 3.