The ISP I use, Brighthouse Networks, dropped their personal home pages service (which they called PHP, not to be confused with the scripting language of the same name) in late 2010; that meant no more web space, meaning no more free FTP. Verizon internet, amazingly, was still offering free FTP access to their personal home page service all this while but not...

Pressured to keep "innovating", there are many software-makers that release versions which, to be honest, just plain suck. They sucked so bad in fact that this is why sites like OldVersion and OldApps exist. Here are 3 software titles where the newer version is worse than the older, and why: Skype The makers of Skype ticked off not only Windows users...

I remember when HP was a big deal. But, today, they seem to be hell-bent on destroying themselves. The rather public failure of the WebOS is just the tip of the iceberg with HP. They took a nice tablet with a nice OS – honestly, the only tablet OS that had a chance at competing head on with Apple’s iPad – and they destroyed it. In no time...

Windows Live Mail 2011 is one of the few mail clients that stores mail in MailDir format, and yes that’s a good thing because if one mail corrupts itself for whatever reason, it doesn’t affect your other emails (whereas with mbox it can). If you want to backup all the mail that’s in WLMail 2011, where are the locally cached emails? They do...

I find PC repair guys to be funny, as in ha-ha funny. These gentlemen drive around town in their beat-up pickup trucks or vans with magnetic signs on the driver’s door with "PC REPAIR" printed on it. Some even use stick-on letters that are supposed to go on postal mailboxes. These ‘businessmen’ operate out of shacks – as in...

In the article just before this one I talked about the LG500G from Tracfone; a smartphone that can be bought new for 30 dollars. At present, a feature phone’s rock-bottom price is 10 bucks, but if QWERTY smartphones continue to drop in price, will this mean the end of the feature phone? To put this in perspective, a QWERTY phone was $100 just six months...

In the world of wireless phones, the two major types are feature phones (sometimes called "dumbphones") and smartphones. What’s the biggest difference between a feature phone and a smartphone? The smartphone is MMS-capable; feature phones are not. In order for a phone to qualify as MMS-capable, it must be able to take photos and/or video and...

It’s been said that 90% of people don’t know how to use CTRL+F in a web browser. Is this true? Probably. If you happen to be one of those 90%, you won’t be anymore after seeing the video...

A telephone answering machine (TAM) is a standalone box that sits next to your landline phone where if a call isn’t answered after a certain number of rings, the machine picks up the line, plays a message and instructs the caller to leave a message. Yes, I know, you’d think everyone in the world would know that. However bear in mind there are more...

If running a modern browser like the latest Google Chrome, IE9 or Firefox 6, there are some pretty darned good freebie titles out there you can play right now. Yes, they’re all free and yes, they’re all good.  World Golf Tournament I was not expecting this to be any good, but surprisingly this is a very detailed golf game. The mechanics do take...

In the US, Irene is coming. Maybe. It could be a Category 3 hurricane in Florida where PCMech is based. There are many write-ups on the internet describing the best ways to protect your electronics during weather disasters, however there’s a few things they don’t cover in too much detail that are pretty important. A UPS is little good to you if you...

Windows, love it, hate it or tolerate it, has definitely changed concerning what’s considered "standard maintenance" for the OS these days. A few things that applied to older Windows do not apply to newer editions, or not as often. Here are a few of them. Reinstall the entire OS once every 6 months It was standard practice to do this with Windows...

Upon hearing news that Firefox 7 (and 8) had memory management in it that actually worked, I downloaded it and decided to give it a go. There’s not really any screenshots I can show because if you’ve seen Fx 5, you’ve seen 6 and the upcoming 7/8, so there’s nothing new in the how-does-it-look department. The way to make Firefox 6 or...

DuckDuckGo is a search engine, and I know what you’re thinking. "Oh great, another engine I’ll never use." Well, you might use this one. People normally mention DuckDuckGo concerning its better privacy practices compared to Google or Bing. Yeah, yeah, DDG has good privacy, blah blah blah, but how does it do when you use it for search?...

A lot of people aren’t actually aware that Gmail has more than one look to it. Laugh if you will, but it simply doesn’t occur to a couple folks that they can customize their email experience. Even those who would like to usually have absolutely no idea where to start. Here’s a short, simple how to guide on creating your own theme. 1. Open the...

Small-and-fast utilities are great things, and QJot definitely falls into that category. QJot is a free and very fast document editor for Windows that’s only a single executable file. It has full rich text support so it’s not "just another Notepad". You can bold/italic/underline, colorize words, set justification and do just about...

You’d think that all browsers would be the same concerning how well they render Flash content, but they’re not. Some do better than others. Below is my experience using Flash in modern web browsers, meaning out of the ones used, you’ll see which I found to be the best-performing. #3: Mozilla Firefox 6 Firefox’s biggest problem when it...

Personally, I’ve never much cared for the antivirus/antimalware market. To me, it’s always seemed like something of a protection racket- “Lovely system you’ve got there, it’d be a shame if something were to happen to it.” Thankfully, there are actually several rather excellent antivirus programs available on the ‘net...

A computer’s usefulness these days pretty much depends on whether it’s internet-capable or not. It doesn’t matter how the whatever-it-is connects to the internet be it by wired network, Wi-Fi, 3G or whatever is used so long as it can get there. On the vintage computer side of things, the one thing just about any computer can do from the 1980s...

It’s still true to this day that the screen is the most expensive part of a laptop, and replacing it on an out-of-warranty unit is never cheap and never has been. In addition, replacing a screen on a laptop is exceedingly difficult compared to a standalone monitor. Lots of tiny screws, dealing with a proprietary chassis, probably literally cracking apart...