Over the last few years there’s be a large effort by a dedicated few to preserve as much software as possible; this has especially ramped up considering many of those old floppy diskettes – particularly the 5.25-inch kind – are literally disintegrating due to age. A major problem that those trying to preserve software run into is trying to get...

It’s a truth more often than not that people don’t replace monitors because the old one broke, but rather because they wanted something bigger or with the newer LED-backlighting methods that provide better light and color. What this means is that you probably have an older LCD panel monitor that’s in perfect working order and aren’t doing...

You don’t have to go far in the PCMech community to find people who don’t own a smartphone, citing that they "hate smartphones". Smartphone haters hate two things primarily:Wireless plan contracts of any kind The ridiculous prices of the phones themselvesIt’s never the actual phone that these people hate, because if it did sell...

Warren writes: Just curious to know if anyone has tried waterfox web browser. It’s for 64 bit systems and is from mozilla. Installed it a couple days ago and while I have no tools to benchmark it, seems faster than the others with no compatibility issues with any site. Not easy to find on mozilla’s site but maybe someone could give it a spin and see...

Social media means big business for marketing firms. It should come as no surprise that some slimy individuals want to exploit that for their own gain. No, I’m not talking about Zuckerberg and his crew- what they’re doing might be unethical, but it’s technically legal. Not so with all of the criminal elements that have set up shop on social...

Today (Jan 18th) is a large-scale protest day to SOPA/PIPA. No doubt, you’ve heard all about it. Many large websites are going black today in protest of the bill, including Wikipedia, WordPress and Google (in the form of a censored logo). If I had more time available, I might have set things up to black out DavidRisley.com and PCMech.com. But, I...

Instant messaging using a real client is definitely on the rebound these days because it’s one of those things that people really enjoy using. Those who remember how popular it used to be do miss it, and the younger generation also appreciates IM as well. These days, no IM client is worth using unless it connects to Facebook, and AIM was one of the first...

When most people hear "flag" concerning email, they mistakenly think that means "mark as spam" all the time, and that’s incorrect. Email flagging has been around more or less for as long as email has existed. It’s a special mark you can place on any message so that you can quickly retrieve it later. Small example: An email comes...

It is possible for just about any cell phone (even for plain featurephones) to send messages to email addresses as well as other mobile phone numbers. The drawback to this is that on reply to a message via email, HTML formatting by default is enabled, which on receive of the phone comes across as mostly gibberish (all the formatting code can be seen). The...

The Secure Digital card, commonly abbreviated as SD (or SDSC, SDHC, SDHC, SDIO, microSD, etc.), is an old enough technology at this point where many of you have cards that are several years old. SD cards are used by a whole bunch of different devices, but the most common applications are in digital cameras/camcorders and mobile phones. Like with all memory...

External hard drives are great. As an iMac user (yeah yeah, whatever )… I make use of external hard drives for backup purposes and redundancy. The thing is, they take up space. And then there’s a wire on your desk. If you’re trying to get rid of desktop clutter, then a good option is to put some of your computer add-ons (like external hard...

Back in 2007, Mozilla released Weave which was then rebranded as Firefox Sync. In Firefox, this is a cloud service that can store your bookmarks, passwords, browser history and so on (you choose what you want to store out there). Some of you may have tried Firefox Sync and decided to stop using it in favor of something else like LastPass or Xmarks. Or maybe you...

Kenny writes: How can I move/remove data/pictures/emails from a WinMe PC to a Win 7 PC using either a wired network, USB or Ethernet cable? I have been unable to network the WinMe to the Win7 PC. This is a bit of an odd one, because what Kenny is attempting to do is connect an MS-DOS based Windows (WinME was the final Windows using MS-DOS as the actual OS) over...

With the advent of the social network, more and more of our lives and consequently our identities, are finding their way to the net. Names, interests, social relationships, birth-dates, and sometimes even financial information. All very valuable information for the right (or wrong, depending on how you look at it) person. It shouldn’t come as any surprise...

Believe it or not, there are more games on the Chrome Web Store than just Angry Birds. I know, I found it shocking too. Know what’s even more surprising? Some of them are actually good. As in…really, really good. I suppose it’s not surprise, really. I’ve compiled a list of games you should take a look at, if ever you’re bored and...

For this article I’m going to cover the technical side of things first, then the actual television content. Rewind the clock back 20 years to 1992. Everyone is using tube-type televisions, none of which could ever produce a true white ("really light gray" was the best you could get in all honesty). The average size of the screen in most homes was...

Barbara writes: I’m running Win XP Professional with Office 2007, Windows Live Mail (version 2009, seems that’s the most current one) along with IE8. I have Cablevision as my provider for Internet/TV/phone services. Is there an open source (I take it that means "free", right?) fax program that’s easily installed/used with...

At this point, those of you who don’t have a great deal of technical knowledge are probably wondering “What exactly is a non-Unicode Application, and why would I want to run it?” A Non-Unicode application is, essentially, any program that’s not written in the default language of the Windows platform. That’s a horrifically simplified...

This is an attempt to explain to you why your computer tells you "conflicting" (but not really) information on exactly how much usable space you have on any given storage medium. In my possession I have a really old 512MB Sandisk cruzer micro USB stick. To make absolutely sure I was going to get the maximum space out of it, I low-level formatted it...

In the realm of photo-sharing, we’ve got it made. There’s Imgur, Minus and others than allow stupidly easy drag-and-drop-with-no-account-required to upload and share. I had mentioned SoundCloud recently, and that’s a good audio-sharing site. Truly. My thought was, "Well, it can’t get any easier than this, right?" Wrong. There is...