Mac users looking for a virtual machine solution have probably heard about Parallels, which the currently the premier product for OS X. Another product you might want to take a look at, however, is VirtualBox. VirtualBox is free and runs on any OS. Additionally, you can run any guest OS you want inside of it. For example, if you want to run Windows within Mac,...

For those that have built PCs long enough, you probably remember a time when several hard drive manufacturers routinely offered 7-year warranties. Western Digital was one of them. They proudly stated that their HDDs would last that span of time easily. Then at one point, most of the 7-year warranties on HDDs vanished. What happened? What happened is that some of...

One of the Windows components that optimization programs target is the registry which is essentially the “brain” of Windows. Because of the danger associated with this, I very seldom touch my registry and I never run registry cleaners. I know there are claims that cleaning your registry will improve your system performance but I don’t really...

The Nexus One (a very creepy name I must say) has been leaked that under contract will be $180 through T-Mobile, and for an unlocked version will be a whopping $530. I’m not kidding. Yes, this is a Google Android phone and quite a ritzy one at that. Per that $530 price tag, some will be more than willing to pony up the cost to have a completely unlocked...

If there’s one thing that internet has taught us, it’s that privacy issues have always been a hot-button topic. Whether it’s social media, online shopping, email or even searching the internet, privacy matters. Why does it matter? The answer is protection. Protection from identity theft (which almost always leads to having money stolen from...

The USB port is an amazing thing. You can plug almost anything into to do a variety of tasks, one of which is recharging batteries. While this may not seem useful at first, it can come in handy for situations such as the airport. If your MP3 player runs out of battery power, you can just charge the batteries from your laptop. Of course, you will be trading power...

For a while now it’s been possible to map an internet FTP shortcut in Windows Explorer, with emphasis on shortcut and not drive letter. Most of you out there are very familiar with the "Map Network Drive" feature of Windows, but when mapping an FTP location as a shortcut, the steps to take are slightly different. Here’s how to do it in...

We have all heard of open source software which produces many popular programs, but have you ever heard of open source hardware? Basically the premise is exactly the same as open source software – the specs for building the hardware are freely available for you to do anything with. To view some of the open source hardware projects of this past year, take a...

I am a diehard Mozilla Thunderbird user. Even though I’ve tried out just about every single email there is (Yahoo! Mail, Gmail and Hotmail included), and just about every single mail client there is, I always go back to Thunderbird. It’s because it does the job that good. But unfortunately I can’t say that anymore. Now I have to say I’m a...

If you do any kind of development or tech support work, it is important to have multiple environments to perform your testing. Traditionally the only way this was possible was either by multi-booting or having dedicated machines for these environments, however this is now easily accomplished through the magic of virtual machines. If you have some old boxes which...

If you find yourself with some tech gifts you need to return for some reason or another, there are a few things you should keep in mind. The first thing being the return policy of the item. For example, many places will have no problem taking back unopened items, however if something is open and not damaged (i.e. software), you may not be able to return it...

A time-honored American television classic is A Charlie Brown Christmas. This has been aired every single year on national affiliate broadcast television since its debut in 1965. This show is just as much of a Christmas television staple as It’s a Wonderful Life. What makes the internet great? I can bring this show to you right now via Hulu. Below is the...

Out of the box, Firefox comes Google search ready. Both the default home page and the search strip return the respective Google results, so an add-on which makes improvements to your Firefox Google searches is OptimizeGoogle. OptimizeGoogle is a Firefox extension that enhances Google search results by adding extra information (like links to Yahoo, Ask, MSN etc)...

It could be argued that the second biggest shopping day of the year after Black Friday is today, Christmas Eve. All the people that forgot to buy stuff when they had plenty of time to do it figured they could quickly get in some last-minute items at the local department store or mall. You may be one of them. If you decide to venture out today for shopping...

Something fun you can do on Christmas Eve is track where Santa is currently visiting using the NORAD Santa Tracker. The site is pretty simple. When you visit, you see where Santa currently is via the ‘radar’. The site is updated every few minutes as Santa travels across the world. Wikipedia has a history log of Santa’s visits over the past few...

One of the newer features on Weather Underground is the ability to see weather using a first-person-shooter style environment. No, you don’t get to actually shoot anything (if you could that would certainly be different), but you do get the 3D environment using your mouse and W, A, S and D keyboard keys. As far as the usefulness of this, well.. I’ll...

When you are purchasing a flash memory drive, you have tons of brands to choose from, so how do you know which ones are the fastest? For some help with this, check out Nirsoft’s (the same guy who writes awesome Windows utilities) page: USB Flash Drive Speed Tests Summary. The chart on this page covers over 175 different flash drives (different storage...

Quite often I listen to radio shows or music on my computer while working. So whenever I get a call or someone comes in my office I have to turn down the volume. I was having to reach for the speakers every time which can be cumbersome depending on what I am doing at the time, but now I use Volumouse. Volumouse provides you a quick and easy way to control the...

Anybody with more than one monitor on their computer has experienced this. You want to watch a Flash movie on one monitor while doing something on the other. Perhaps a Youtube video or a Hulu movie. But, the moment you click on anything outside the movie, it goes back to the small view again. Annoying! Well, one astute guy came up with a work-around. He created...

A few questions many have asked are, "If Big Telecom is so.. well.. big.. why is it I can’t get perfect reception everywhere with my wireless phone? Can’t they afford putting up towers where need be?" Yes, Big Telecom can afford it, and rather easily. Why don’t they do it? The answer is something most people don’t give a second...