Spring is finally here! With the warmer weather, however, comes the frenzy of throwing out old garbage, scrubbing our homes and reorganizing our belongings. Unfortunately, PCs rarely get the love they deserve during this all-inclusive scrub down – but they should. After all, even a PC or laptop that is just a few weeks old [...]
There are a million articles focusing on backup and data safety on the web, but the sad truth is, only six percent of all PC users back up their data regularly. And it’s really a striking figure, considering the fact that data these days can entail one’s memories and entertainment, not to mention even one’s [...]
Windows 7′s taskbar is quite a versatile tool. It acts as both a task switcher and program launcher. Microsoft even allows you to pin certain items, such as Control Panel or websites to the taskbar. Unfortunately, if you try pinning a drive, like your C: partition or a DVD drive, to the taskbar, it will [...]
Windows is in constant communication with the Internet – in fact, dozens of Windows features send data to and from the Internet. So if you need or want more control over what’s flowing through your data pipes, this blog post will help. This is not your typical “Microsoft is spying on you” blog post. Instead, [...]
In last week’s blog post, we performed some early performance benchmarks and compared Windows 7 SP1 with the recently released Windows 8 Consumer Preview. While speed improved in some scenarios, other aspects suffered a bit. However, the important thing to remember is, performance doesn’t just depend on the underlying operating system (OS); it also relies [...]
Don’t let the shiny new Metro interface of Windows 8 fool you—the new operating system (OS) has been improved not just with a spanking new outfit but also in the performance department. For instance, Microsoft’s future OS needs to work with both high-end PCs as well as small-factor devices like ARM and low-powered Intel tablets, [...]
Over the course of the past 2 years, we’ve shown you many ways to optimize your PC: from turning off autostart programs, to turning off entire programs and even tuning netbooks for best performance. Unfortunately, if your PC or laptop is still painfully slow, you might be dealing with “DPC latency” issues – and that [...]
Even the best-equipped PC can’t deliver performance if it’s “heart”—the processor (or CPU)—isn’t strong enough. Despite all the amount of RAM and the power of graphic cards, the processor is what really determines the overall speed of a PC. In this blog post, we’ll take a quick peek behind the scenes [...]
I admit it—I’d rather play Monkey Island (1990) or Wing Commander III (1994) before even thinking about Crysis 2 or Skyrim. My passion for PC gaming started at the tender age of 10 when my dad got us a 486 DX4 with 100 MHz, 8 MB of RAM, a 1 MB Cirrus Logic VGA graphics [...]
Ever got told by Windows XP, Windows Vista, or Windows 7 that you can’t eject an external storage device, such as a USB thumb drive, an MP3 player, or a hard disk? Something’s obviously blocking your device—but what if all of your applications are shut down? Unplugging is not a good idea [...]
