Early on, we showed you completely non-scientific evidence of Win 7’s pleasingly fast boot time. (Shutting down is another matter—my build (6801) sometimes takes forever.) I was glad that Kingsley-Hughes—using a Phenom 9700 quad-core system with ATI Radeon 3850, 2GB of Corsair Dominator RAM and WD’s 10K RPM Raptor as primary drive—managed to demonstrate that the fast boot isn’t a fluke. By the way, Vista SP1 had the slowest boot.

In two other tests, PassMark Performance and PCMark Vantage, Win 7 pre-beta beat the Vista builds, though it failed to trounce them in the CineBench R10 test.

Remember, this is a pre-beta, so nothing is guaranteed, but what makes this newsworthy is that Kingsley-Hughes—who incidentally is in no way a Bond villain—ran similar tests with Vista a few years back, and early Win 7 makes a mockery of that noise. Check the ZDNet article for the full system specs and benchmark scores—I’m sure at least some of you will want the nitty gritty. [ZDnet via Lifehacker]

Here’s a look at a handful of different tests and what each one tries to accomplish.

Liquids

Nokia places a phone under a bunch of needle-sized water dispensers and then lets it drip all over the phone, which tests for resistance in situations like rain, or splashing from a pool.

The humidity simulation, which tests the durability of phones in up to 95% humidity, is helpful in determining if a phone will hold up in particularly damp areas like South and Central America, where gadgets don’t have the longest lifespan.

Nokia also tests how the phone reacts to various liquids, creams and gels (lotions, hand sanitisers, etc…), since stuff like that tends to accidentally spill while sitting in a purse or backpack with the phone.

Sturdiness


Tests for bending and twisting are pretty straight forward and self explanatory. Still, you can’t help but cringe to see a phone placed in such an unnatural position. Nokia says when you have your phone in your back pocket and you sit on it, it’s susceptible to bending.

One of the cooler stress tests that exists is the Drop test—not only because it uses a giant friggin’ machine, but also because they record the drops using a camera that can record 100,000 frames per second, which is 3,000 times faster than the normal video camera. The videos are then analysed frame by frame, determining the degree to which a device becomes distorted upon impact. Check it out.

When Nokia drops a phone, they drop it from about the height of a shirt pocket onto concrete, since that’s a likely scenario for dropped phones. They also attatch a phone under a steel device that pushes down 100 newtons of force.

Wear and Tear

Nokia has a series of wear and tear stress tests, when gauge the phone’s ability to take bumps, scratches from daily use. Dust testing involves throwing a handful of phones in a dust filled box and letting everything co-mingle. How much dust gets inside? And do buttons stop working when foreign substances get under the surface? This is where you find out.

They also let phones roll around in a bunch of pieces of hard, pointy plastic to see where it might scratch, scuff or crack under duress. These pieces are like plastic chocolate chips and bite-sized pyramids, and they’re pretty sharp. This phone met an unfortunate demise in the name of quality control.

***

Other weird tests include rubbing a piece of denim up against a phone to test the effect of friction when the phone rubs up against your clothes and subjection the phone to temperatures ranging between -40 and 85 degrees Celcius; this determines whether or not the phone can survive in the most extreme conditions on earth.

When testing is finished, they have a battery of analytic procedures to determine how well or how poorly a phone held up. This includes analysing a phone under electron microscopes, 3D X-rays and X-ray Spectroscopes to check for any related damage; possible micron-sized soldering cracks, component failure or any breakdowns in the materials.

As you can see, these tests aren’t lightweight by any means, and most of my Nokia phones over the years have been pretty durable. What about yours? [Nokia on Giz]

We got a chance to look at all of the top dollar gear used to put everything found in CR’s electronics pages in a complete vacuum of testing, basically removing every possible outside variable to test the pure hardware performance. That means anechoic chambers built on their own foundation (at a cost of $US2.5 million in 1980) for total sound isolation; industrial-quality cell tower base station generators inside fully RF-shielded rooms that can crank out every possible mobile phone frequency at any strength; a “head and torso simulator” named Pedro, able to be calibrated down to the millimeter for testing every aspect of mobile phone call quality possible, and a nameless human finger simulator composed of, well, meat (in action below as well).

Unfortunately, what makes CR so exemplary as a reliable testing lab also contribute to its fate to be found mostly on grandmother’s end table next to the bowl of fossilised peppermints. As a non-profit organisation, CR doesn’t sell any advertising to anyone, anywhere, nor do they accept any review units or advance loaners from the company–everything they test, from a new BMW to an electric toothbrush, they buy.

While that means employees get pretty sick re-sale discounts on new cars every year, it also means CR is fighting an eternally uphill battle vs. the other tech pubs that don’t keep such high standards, and that CR must keep all of its online content walled within a pay site for subscribers only. The subscribers it has are among the most loyal of any magazine, but the vast majority of them are older.

(The aforementioned human finger simulator gets put to the test on a mower that CR’s resident high-RPM blade expert refers to as “the most dangerous thing I’ve ever tested.” – video edited by BBG)

And due to the natural constraints of a magazine with no ads, the mountains of test data gathered for any particular product end up truncated and distilled into CR’s famous comparative charts, where their scores are rendered in linearly receding bars and crimson doughnut dots. CR’s benchmarks are designed to place all new products on a relative continuum, rating them “fair” to “excellent” in comparison to how products over the last several years have fared with the same rigorously standardised tests. But a problem there, obviously, is that often it looks like CR loves just about everything–this year’s television are naturally going to present marked improvements over what’s been available over the last few years, which tends to stretch the data toward the good end. Kind of like how you have to search forever to find a review on CNET with a score of less than 7.0.

(Inside the soundproof womb of the anechoic chamber – video edited by BBG).

Such are the dilemmas of serious hardware testing that makes any type of claims towards ultimate authoritativeness. But it’s also the reason why the old bound volumes of Consumer Reports are the most well-worn volumes in the periodicals room of the public library where I used to work. The data is there, and it’s rock solid. Taking a tour of their labs and meeting the engineers that do the work, it’s immediately apparent that what goes on in Yonkers is among the more vigorous and pure analysis of technology being done by anyone, anywhere.

After all, don’t you just have to trust folks who keep this poster hanging above their main laptop test bench?

[Consumer Reports, video courtesy Consumer Reports, edited by the good gentlemen of Boing Boing Gadgets - see them for more]

When you got to twelve months, you got somewhere between considerable fade and severe fade, which makes the page no longer usable. The lesson here is that if you’re printing out movie tickets for tonight, cheap ink is fine. If you’re printing out photos from your trip to Japan, go for quality. [Trusted Reviews via Crunchgear]

The carbon isotope, C-14, is present in all bodies born since the first atomic weapons tests took place. In the first couple of years of an individual’s life, the isotope forms transparent proteins, or lens crystallines, which enable sight. These remain unchanged—rather like dental enamel— for the rest of a person’s life. By measuring the level of C-14 in the person’s eye, and comparing it to records of levels in the atmosphere, the corpse can be dated.

The team, from the universities of Copenhagen and Aarhus, thinks that, as well as being a forensic breakthrough, the method will be able to tell us more about the behaviour of cancerous cells.

“We think that carbon dating of proteins and other molecules in the body could be used to study when certain tissues are generated or regenerated,” says Associate Professor Niels Lynnerup from the Dept of Forensic Sciences in Denmark. “This could, for example, be applied to cancer tissue and cancer cells. Calculating the amount of C-14 in these tissues could tell us when the cancerous tissue is formed and this could further our understanding of such diseases”. [Telegraph]

That’s why we’ve registered to become Beta testers for the service. Sure, we probably won’t be selected, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t. All you need to do is answer a bunch of questions, sign an NDA and sell your soul agree to do weekly homework assignments.

But hurry! We’ve already filled out our second survey to try and win the TiVo lottery ticket, and we don’t think this entertainment gravy train will be waiting for long.

UPDATE: Ok, so as some of the commenters have pointed out (thanks guys!), TiVo have actually stopped accepting applications for beta testers.  There may be a second round though, so check back frequently for the latest updates…

[TiVo Beta testing]