5. Testing the Yoggie Pico Pro

We used both a desktop and notebook computer (the intended target) for our tests with a few basic testing tools. Most of the tools we used were online bandwidth measurement utilities (most notably, the speed test at DSLReports.com). We opted for this approach for a few simple reasons:

• these tools are easily to obtain and use
• these tools require no commercial licensing to install or publish results
• these tools work across a number of platforms (anything that runs a Web browser will do)
• these tools reflect real-world environments, and thus may be compared to results from other platforms with relative ease and not much need for adjustment.

Probably the most important of these reasons also asserts that you should also be able to test your own hardware in much the same way we tested ours, without having to worry too much about the differences between our test environment and your target environment. What happens in the lab under ideal conditions and in the real world under less-than-ideal conditions is far too often worlds apart, and not really comparable, and explains why we opted for a rude, crude and basic approach to measuring impact. At the same time, it’s probably dangerous to make too many assumptions based on simplistic tools, but we figure they do illustrate what the Pico can do, and why it may be of interest to our readers.