Never mind fussing with a mouse: Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 Professional lets you talk to your PC to take care of all kinds of business. Dictate directly into Word and Excel; whisk off e-mail messages; create calendar entries; run searches on Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, and other sites; hop around your desktop from app to app; and search for files containing the keywords you utter. Though previous versions of Dragon's software converted speech into text (after appropriate training), this latest iteration delivers better accuracy out of the box, more-intuitive ways to format text, and additional ways to interact with your programs vocally, such as by adding an entry to Outlook's calendaring option.

When the dust settled in the lab after two long months of testing Microsoft's Hyper-V and VMware's ESX in the areas of performance, compatibility, management, and security, it all boiled down to two issues: experience and religion.

Both hypervisors have requirements for the hardware they can run on and the VMs they can support.