I am making an adjustment in how PCMech is represented on Twitter. For some time, I have had new posts from PCMech.com tweeted out over my personal Twitter account, @davidrisley. I had the account @pcmech registered, but rarely used it. That is now changing. In short, there are two very different aspects to David Risley. I am the founder of PCMech, a tech site...

I am sensing a rising tide of ill-will toward Apple and AT&T with regard to the Iphone. Apple is typically quite adept at public relations, but I believe their moves with regard to tight control of the Iphone is beginning to get out of control. One of the arguments against Apple has always been their control over their devices. With the Mac, I think it is a...

Ordinarily I am not for a national US-wide ban of anything, as I do believe that each individual state should make their own laws concerning how they handle things. But not on this issue. I’m going to say this flat out: If you text while you drive, you’re an idiot. It is one of the dumbest things you could possibly do behind the wheel of a car. If...

In an article I read recently titled “Exposed: the PC repair shops that rifle through your photos and passwords“, I do not want to say I was surprised (as very little surprises me), but I was disturbed by their findings: [After repairing the machine, the technician] then begins browsing through our hard drive. A folder marked ‘Private’ is...

No, this does not mean that Yahoo! the site is going away. Far from it. It means that Y! has officially offloaded it to Microsoft. Yahoo! has made it very clear these days (and their CEO even said so) that they are not a search company, so now Y! is all about content. This is part of the reason why Y! has been making major changes over the past few years –...

(Just about) every time you go to do anything on the Internet, be it check your email, visit a website or whatever, your network has to submit a DNS request to find out the target machine(s) to communicate with. So a lot of your Internet performance and security is effected by the DNS servers you use. By default, most everyone uses their ISP’s servers, but...

Note: This is for Windows 7 users only. In Windows XP and Vista, when you use the Windows Live Mail client, you can right-click the icon at the bottom so that it only appears as such when the app is minimized: When using the Windows Live Messenger, by default it will also have a small icon: However the problem is that these Windows Live applications do not...

LCD monitors are great. No question. They’re thin, can be moved around easily, don’t use much electricity, don’t produce static when turned on or off, have a crisp picture that stays crisp, and so on. However there is one failing of LCD monitors and a big one at that. It’s a lack of vertical resolution. I’ll explain. Let’s say...

If online privacy is important to you, the ability to be anonymous on the Internet should be one of the items on your list. If this is the case, a tool you should look at is Tor: Tor protects you by bouncing your communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world: it prevents somebody watching your Internet connection...

Microsoft has recently achieved the milestone of Release To Manufacturing (often abbreviated simply as RTM) for the Windows 7 product. This is the last step before the final shipped product arrives on store shelves. As most of you know, Windows 7 will be widely available on October 22, so you can be sure to see tons of deals on laptop and desktop computers. It...

Many of you may already know this, so this tip is really for those who do not. Properly wrapping your wires (also called cabling) is the process of consistently ‘winding up’ wiring, cables, power cords, etc into a organized loop. Here are a few quick reasons why proper wire wrapping is important:Preserves the life of the wire. Prevents damage (i.e....

I received a question in the PCMech Premium area that asked if Windows 7 will have an improved Add/Remove that will completely uninstall programs compared to the way XP does it. My answer was an easy no, and I explained why. In this article I go into detail on that. First I’ll say programs that leave crap behind is definitely not a Windows-only thing. On...

If you have a lot of MP3 or other media files which support tagging, having them property tagged is essential for use with many of the media players available today. If you use Winamp as your media player, the built in Auto Tag function is a very simple way to tag your entire library. The Auto Tag function communicates with Gracenote’s database to download...

Games on your cell phone are a great way to kill time anywhere. Whether you are waiting in a doctor’s office, getting your oil changed or are riding in a car (as a passenger of course), a game is an entertaining way to pass the time. To find games for your cell phone, check out MobileRated. MobileRated works with the best mobile developers around the globe...

The title for this tip is the tagline of the open source application, Rainmeter. This application is capable of monitoring just about any system information you might want to view in just about any format. There is plenty of documentation available which details how to customize the data you want to monitor as well as how you want to see it. You can also extend...

Many of you have probably seen the commercials. Some young person wants a laptop with a 17” screen, bunch of memory, bunch of power, and they don’t want to spend more than $1,000. They look at the Apple laptops and conclude it is too expensive. So, they go buy some cheap PC for $699 and go skipping down the yellow brick road. Its the stuff dreams are made...

Putting instant messaging on your web site has never been easy. The only way people could get any messaging on their web sites was to use IRC. The popular way to do it was to embed a channel such as with PJIRC. And later on there was the ability to create an IRC chat "widget" with Mibbit. Both methods are so-so at best because they rely on IRC servers...

With today’s tip I am going to do something a bit different. I am going to pose a question and see what you think. By protection / clean-up utility, I am referring to software such as anti-virus programs, registry cleaners, defraggers, etc. Personally, I tend to avoid these types of applications. I don’t use anti-virus programs, don’t mess with...

Yahoo, yes (that Yahoo) made some significant changes to their main web site. While this angered some, to those I say this: Yahoo is not Google, and I’m glad it’s not. If you’re expecting Y! to be another Google clone, it isn’t. And it shouldn’t be. The first thing I do on Yahoo is switch over to the compact view and change the...

First of all, a little clarification: when I say “a lot” in the title, I mean an absurd about of data (i.e. 100+ GB). If this is the case and you want to use a remote backup service which uploads your files to their respective servers, initialially loading your data can be a huge problem for a variety of reasons (bandwidth limits, slow upload speeds,...