November 12, 2011
Do you want to know if your computer will work with Ubuntu? Head to Ubuntu Friendly to quickly find out. It’s an ever-growing database of computers known to work flawlessly with everyone’s favorite Linux-based operating system. Do you want to help make that website useful? Run the system test on your computer running Ubuntu right now. You will run tests on your wireless card, your sound and more.
October 20, 2011
I’m one of those people who like to have their computers “just so”. Before Windows 7 came along, I was an avid Litestep user for years. Windows 7 offers a beautiful interface that is actually usable (a great improvement), but still, there are plenty of things that could be changed and customized. EnhanceMySe7ven is a free app for tweaking these settings, and it also provides lots of system information.
September 22, 2011
Since a majority of people today own laptops and external hard drives, which get dragged around quite a bit, a realistic hard drive lifetime is probably around 3 – 5 years. This is an extremely short time to reliably store important data. In the best of cases, hard drives fail gradually, giving you the chance to react, get a copy of your data, and replace the storage device before facing a fatal failure.
September 20, 2011
Sometimes, the gaming experience can be legitimately distorted by computer hiccups caused by background processes or problems with a game’s files structure. One solution that we’ve reviewed in the past is Game Booster, which has just received an update to its third incarnation.
July 4, 2011
Months after you purchase and use a Mac—or any computer for that matter—it may stop performing at a rapid speed like it did fresh out of the box. Magician Monitor is a little application that you can park anywhere on your desktop and click on it to get an overall view of how your Mac is running.
June 29, 2011
Bad pixels often occur on brand new screens. Since a single bad pixel can become a great annoyance once you know it’s there, any new display with a warranty on it should be checked for bad pixels instantly. When you discover one however, you do not necessarily have to take the new display straight back to the shop. You may be able to fix it yourself.
February 15, 2010
Quite often we need to find out the detailed configuration of a computer. You may have just bought a new computer, or you might want to send information for troubleshooting. Collecting such information manually and then creating a unified report can be a daunting task. One free computer diagnostic software application that makes such a [...]
January 23, 2010
Networks are finicky at best. Wireless or Ethernet, almost everyone has had their share of network connection problems. It could be anything from not being to access the Internet despite being connected to the network, to not being able to connect to the network at all. Unfortunately, network connection problems are sometimes hard to diagnose. [...]
July 15, 2009
Windows machines are often the subject of jokes within the computer geek community, and much of that bad credit is due to cryptic error messages that reveal very little information even to the veterans of this operating system. Of those type of errors, BSODs (Blue Screen of Death) are the worst and are often caused [...]
May 4, 2009
You are working on a vital spreadsheet and Microsoft Excel comes crashing down. MS Office applications do go down and all we can do is wring our hands or ring for support. But what if we could do a bit of sleuthing and get to the root of the cause ourselves? Sometimes the glitch may [...]
