Keep your calendar out of the cloud with Efficient Calendar

When it comes to desktop calendar software on the PC, there is little argument that the big dog in the park is Microsoft Outlook. However, while Outlook comes with a hefty feature set, it also comes with a hefty price tag—more than most people would want to pay to schedule their time. Efficient Calendar takes the core calendar functions of Outlook into a standalone desktop application at a small fraction of the price.

The Calendar view shows your upcoming events at a glance.

Calendar events are very easy to create. You can specify the start and end times, control recurrence, assign a color-coded label, and attach or link documents. Comments can be entered in a full rich-text editor, and the labels can be easily customized if the provided default labels are not to your liking.

Similarly, the Tasks function is very robust—perhaps overkill for people just looking for a basic to-do checklist. You can set start and due dates, assign a status (such as "not started" or "on hold"), and specify how complete you feel the task is as a percentage. Tasks also have labels, attachments, recurrence settings, and rich-text comments like calendar events do.

The software makes automatic local backups of your calendar file, and the application moves your deleted events and tasks into a Recycle Bin folder, so you can recover something you accidentally deleted very easily.

The Tasks view shows the status of your currently active tasks.

The Achilles heel of Efficient Calendar comes down to data portability. As an Outlook substitute, Efficient Calendar can import and export Outlook-compatible CSV files. However, it does not import or export the much more common iCalendar format (*.ics) used by Google, Hotmail, Yahoo!, Apple, and a litany of others. It does not sync with any cloud calendar providers, which is great if you are anti-cloud but not so great if you need your calendar on your Android, Blackberry, or iPhone.

Efficient Calendar does, however, have a server solution that lets you share a calendar with mutliple users. The server itself is free, while the Network edition costs more to license than the Personal edition does.

If a Task or Calendar event is deleted, it gets moved to the Recycle Bin.

For the people who don't need (or don't want) their calendar on their mobile devices or on the Internet, Efficient Calendar is a great buy. For everyone else, the 30-day trial is fully functional and should give you an idea if the limitations are something you can live with or not.

Note: The Download button on the Product Information page will download the software to your system.

Nathanael is a freelance writer who lives with his family in Caldwell, Idaho. Besides writing about software, he also specializes in eBook conversions.
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GeForce GTX 680 Review: Nvidia's Impressive, Efficient New Graphics Card

Only members of a small class of PC enthusiasts will spend $500 on a graphics card. You have to have pretty stringent requirements--perhaps a large high-res monitor or two or a taste for extreme image quality--to make use of that sort of performance. Most modern games run well enough on a graphics card costing half as much. But if you're not satisfied with "well enough," the GeForce GTX 680 may be for you. Among expensive graphics cards, it takes the crown for delivering the best performance, with excellent features and very impressive energy efficiency.

The GeForce GTX 680 is Nvidia's first card to incorporate a new graphics chip architecture, code-named Kepler. It's similar to the Fermi architecture found in the GeForce GTX 580 and the GTX 480 before it. Nvidia has taken the fundamental principles of the Fermi architecture and reworked it for greater efficiency, improving performance per watt and performance per square millimeter. The Fermi chips are also manufactured on a smaller 28-nanometer process, whereas the GTX 580 was made on a 40nm process. The 28nm process means lower power draw, higher clock speeds, and more-densely-packed transistors. In fact, Kepler is considerably smaller than Fermi at less than 300mm2 (full-size Fermi chips are 520mm2).

The new GPU reduces the amount of control logic in each cluster of stream processors, sacrificing some potential performance in GPU-based general computation for better performance in 3D graphics applications. The resulting chip has three times as many stream processors of Fermi, twice as many texture units, and a clock speed of just over 1GHz. There are fewer render back-ends and a narrower memory bus, but those limitations are offset by the higher clock speeds. Nvidia harnesses these features to produce a high-end graphics card that delivers industry-leading graphics performance while drawing very little power (for a card in its price range).The GeForce GTX 680 is so energy efficient that the standard board design features two six-pin PCIe power plugs, whereas most $500 graphics cards require one six-pin and one eight-pin to supply enough power.

Nvidia is introducing a handful of new technologies with the 600 series GeForce cards, too. GPU Boost is very similar to the Turbo Boost and Turbo Core technologies you find in Intel and AMD processors: If the card is running fairly cool and not drawing too much power, GPU Boost automatically bumps up the clock speed for better performance. AMD does this with its graphics cards, and it's nice to see Nvidia adopting the concept. A new form of antialiasing, called TXAA, should help provide smoother edges with less of a hit to performance than other forms of antialiasing impose. Our tests show it to be a very good tradeoff between performance and quality. Adaptive vsync is another nice compromise between the smoother performance of having vertical synchronization disabled and the artifact-free gaming of enabling vsync.

Of course, if you're in the market for a $500 graphics card, you're primarily concerned with how fast it is. The good news is that focusing on energy efficiency hasn't cost Nvidia the performance crown. The GeForce GTX 680 manages to outpace its obvious competitor, AMD's similarly priced Radeon HD 7970, in most of our tests.

The improved tessellation performance in Nvidia's new chip helped it shine in synthetic tests like Unigine Heaven. It cranked out a very impressive score in 3DMark 11, too.

When we average the performance of the two cards among four popular, modern, demanding games--Crysis 2, Just Cause 2, Dirt 3, and Metro 2033--we see the GTX 680 just barely edging out the Radeon HD 7970. In some games it's a bit faster, and in others it's a bit slower; but the overall performance is a little higher. This is with a graphics card that is slightly cheaper (around $20 to $30 less if you shop around online) and uses a tad less power.

At the end of last year, we praised AMD's Radeon HD 7970 for its extremely high performance and fantastic energy efficiency. In the months since then, AMD has improved the card's performance further with driver updates--and yet Nvidia's new GeForce GTX 680 still manages to beat it on both counts, typically drawing less power and delivering slightly faster performance. Those advantages, together with the new TXAA and Adaptive vsync features, make it a clear winner. AMD's 7000 series relies on a graphics architecture that is drastically different from previous AMD chips, so we may still see much better performance with driver improvements; but right now, if you have $500 to spend on a graphics card, the GeForce GTX 680 is the better buy.

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Norton Internet Security 2012 Review: Solid and Efficient PC Security

An all-around solid defender and efficient performer, Symantec's Norton Internet Security 2012 ($70 for one year and three PCs as of January 25, 2012) comes in second in our 2012 security suites roundup on the strength of its slick, user-friendly interface and its solid malware detection and removal capabilities.

The Norton suite fully blocked all attacks in our real-world tests, which indicate how well security software will protect you against brand-new threats. It also detected 99.94 percent of known malware samples, the fourth-best result among the 14 products we looked at (the top package, G Data InternetSecurity 2012, achieved a detection rate of greater than 99.99 percent). In addition, the Norton software detected and deactivated all active malware components in our cleanup tests, and removed all remnants of malware half the time (which is about average). The Norton suite flagged nine known safe files out of 250,000 as being potentially dangerous; that’s quite a low false-positive rate percentage-wise, but it’s higher than average for the suites we tested.

In recent years Norton has claimed that its products won't slow down PCs, and for the most part that holds true in 2012. This year's edition added about 3.7 seconds to startup time compared to our test PC with no antivirus software installed, and added about 3.5 seconds to shutdown time. In both cases the Norton package performed somewhat better than average for the suites we tested. We saw the same kind of results in other performance tests, too, as the Norton suite had a lower-than-average impact on overall PC performance across the board.

The Norton package completed our scan tests quickly: It finished an on-demand scan (that is, one that occurs when you click the Scan button manually) of 4.5GB of data in 1 minute, 8 seconds--the second-fastest result in the test group. The on-access scanner (which fires up when you open or save files) completed scanning 4.5GB of files in 2 minutes, 34 seconds; again, that was the second-fastest time among the products we looked at.

We like Norton’s interface, too: It’s clean and well designed, and it installs with a click. Although it isn't the dead-simplest interface we've seen, the main panel is straightforward with a clear status indicator and links to common features. That said, while Norton's settings panel gives advanced users plenty of options to toggle, it may be a bit much for beginners. Still, in the end, Norton should be friendly enough for most people.

Even though G Data's suite edged out the Norton one overall in our roundup this year, Norton Internet Security 2012 is a very good option, and is easily worth your consideration.

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