There is no doubt that social networking is an improvement in the way we communicate on the internet, as it allows for people to connect in ways not possible prior to it. For example, Facebook allows to search people by name; this is much easier compared to connect with old friends, family members, acquaintances, coworkers and so on. However, social networking...

Sometimes, particularly with plain text files, you want to save a file as a certain extension. For example, you might want to save a text file with an INI or an XYZ extension. One option you have for doing this in the Save As dialog box is changing the option in the “Files of type” drop down appropriately and then typing the filename. However if you...

Windows 7 is out, and along with it a whole new batch of commercials to tell us how great it is. I’m not going to bash Windows 7, which by all accounts seems to be a huge improvement over Windows Vista. However, Microsoft’s advertising department thus far is living down to its reputation. First, we have the “Good News” series (view it...

This is an update to Want To Shoot Rich In The Face? Quake Live is an FPS style game that’s completely in-browser, and that means it’s cross-browser/cross-platform compatible. The plan here is to schedule an event to get a bunch of PCMech readers (yes, that means you’re invited) into the game to see if you guys and gals actually like it or...

Internet Addiction Disorder, commonly abbreviated as IAD, is a disorder that is not officially classified by medical science at present. I want to make that clear right up front. However it may, if you can believe it, exist in the next edition of the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) which will be published in May 2012. It is being...

With Windows 7 seemingly gaining more and more popularity, a question some people may have is how legacy games will work in the new OS. The solution to this may be as simple as using a virtual machine (ala Microsoft Virtual PC) to run the games. While Virtual PC does not support hardware acceleration, you can see that it runs the FPS Quake 2 quite well using...

Tablets can be a cool addition to your input/output for your computer. It will allow you to hand-write into your computer (useful for signatures, etc) or draw into an image-editing program. Adesso and Wacom are two companies in this space. Adesso sent us their entry-level Cybertablet 6400 to check out. Adesso’s CyberTablet comes provided with the tablet...

A filename extension is a suffix to a filename. There’s the name of the file itself, then a period, then the extension. When you see Document.pdf, the ".pdf" is the extension. The filename extension is one of those things that’s a necessary evil in computing to differentiate one type of file from another. Some UNIX/Linux environments...

For those of you who have upgraded to Windows 7 and are looking for some shortcuts which were not previously available in Windows XP, check out this quick post: The Best Windows 7 Shortcuts. These shortcuts were derived from a huge list of shortcuts available in Windows. I do not yet have Windows 7 so I cannot test them, however I can see the quick closing of...

The Portable Document Format, which you know simply as PDF, is in fact a very good format for documents mainly due to four facts:They’re usually significantly smaller compared to a DOC (especially if there are images within). They look exactly the same no matter what OS you use. It is true WYSIWYG concerning printers. What you see on screen is...

One of the big no-no’s in online security is using the same user name and password for different sites. The reason is simple: if one site gets compromised, your login information for other sites is now “floating around”. While having separate passwords is great in theory, practicing it is another story. To help with this, check out the Firefox...

Recently Google released Google Dashboard which tells you “what Google knows about you”. The dashboard lists some of the information associated with the Google services you use: your name, your email address, the number of contacts, the number of conversations in your Gmail inbox, your Google profile, the most recent entries from the web history etc....

If you do a task which requires you to have several programs open, a time saving thing you can do is create a batch script to open these programs and/or files at once. This is accomplished by using the START command. Using the syntax: START /D “path_to_program” program_name For example, to open both Firefox and IE, the batch file would look like...

Microsoft Security Essentials is an antivirus/anti-malware/anti-spyware application. It is free and runs on the Windows operating systems XP, Vista and 7. This review is not going to concentrate on how much stuff MSE can detect but rather boiled down to a simple question: Does it get in your way? I’ll explain that further. Applications specifically...

Browser skinning simply means to change how it looks. The functionality remains the same, but the icons, background, menus and so on have an altered appearance. In some instances, browser skinning can also include adding in functionality it didn’t have prior. Here’s how to use an alternative skin for Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera. Internet...

If you have a hard drive with some unallocated space on the end of (i.e. not currently assigned to a partition) and want to use that space to add to an existing partition, a simple and effective tool you can use is Diskpart. This tool is included with Windows XP and later. The documentation is pretty easy to follow, but for example suppose you want to extend the...

In the context of this article, long haul computing means to build a computer box that will remain untouched per its internal hardware for a period of 5 to 7 years, but be used on a daily basis. If you want a really good example of where a box like this would be needed, look no further than your local church. Traditional churches by nature are all non-profit...

If you are the only person who uses a Windows 7 computer, one thing you can do is have your login information saved so you are automatically logged in when your machine boots up. To accomplish this, I am partial to the the Sysinternals Autologon tool (because it support any version XP and later), however you can configure this directly in Windows 7 as...

There have been some who read PCMech that would like to shoot me in the face. Well, you may get your chance. Last week on PCMech LIVE, the subject turned to gaming and I said I wanted to give PCMech readers an option to play a game with a real live PCMech author, that being yours truly. The problem has been that people have different computers that use...

A problem with instant messaging is that it can be tough to get the same screen name on all services you use. Most people these days choose to employ the use of a multi-protocol instant messaging program such as Digsby, Trillian, Miranda, Adium or Pidgin, and having all those different names can be aggravating for others to remember. You can, however, use your...