Whether one is doing some PC repair or assembly work at home or does mobile repair work for clients, there are some basic tools that everyone must have. Obviously, those who do such work away from the house or office are going to need to put some more attention on their toolbox than others, and we will address that, too. But, our site is entitled “PC...

Over the course of the last couple years, PC cases have been evolving. We are seeing less of the old boring beige boxes and more cases that have some imaginative features. We are now seeing different colors, windows, cooling fans in strategic locations as well as a whole range of decorative contraptions of one kind or another. But, where it used to be that...

Developer: LIUtilitiesPrice: $39.95 PC owners often hear about the importance of backing up the data on their PC. The importance of this could not be overstated. For most people, the value of their PC is not in the hardware itself nor the software on it, but the data that is housed on its hard drive. Hard drives fail. They all do at some point. So, it is...

The PnP/PCI Configuration section of the BIOS controls the settings for the motherboard’s PCI slots. This includes the plug-and-play capability of the BIOS. Lets look at those BIOS settings.PNP OS InstalledIf all your operating systems support Plug & Play (PnP), select Yes so that they can take over the management of device resources. If you are...

System Speed Control With some motherboards, all of the CPU and Voltage settings are controlled via the CMOS rather than via a series of jumpers on the motherboard. In fact, most boards on the market today do it this way. Only the older boards still have you set the processor settings via jumpers. the placement of these options varies from BIOS to BIOS....

Intel actually beat AMD to the gun by releasing Pentium IV Willamette in November of 2000 before AMD could release their Thunderbird-based Athlons. Pentium IV was exactly what Intel needed to again take the torch from AMD. Pentium IV is a truly new CPU architecture and serves as the beginning to new technologies we will see for the next several years. The new...

Intel made some major changes to the processor scene with the release of the Pentium II. They had the PentiumMMX and Pentium Pro’s out into the market in a strong way, and they wanted to bring the best of both into one chip. As a result, the Pentium II is kind of like the child of a Pentium MMX mother and the Pentium Pro Father. But like real life, it...

The Pentium Pro was Intel’s next step beyond the Pentium. It had many innovations enabling it to outperform the plain jane Pentium. It ran at speeds from 150 to 200 MHz. It used a design innovation named Dynamic Execution. This was a kind of microarchitecture which is more advanced than the superscalar architecture of previous CPU’s. In general,...

Matrox Graphics has long been a contender in the video card arena of PC computing. Despite this long-standing company, they have done little innovation as of recent. They have not had a major chipset revision since the G400. The G400 was a powerful chipset at the time of its release. While the company was well-known for its 2D power with the G200 chipset, they...

Not too long ago, I reviewed Click-n-Burn 2.0, from Stomp, Inc. It is a CD recording suite which you can use to record all types of CDs. Now, I am taking a look at RecordNow MAX, recording software that operates much like Click-n-Burn, but with the added ability of doing DVD recording. When it comes to program operation, this software operates much like...

If you use your computer alot like I do, you may grow impatient waiting for the system to boot up. You have all this work to do, and you have to sit there and wait for that thing! Well, there are ways to speed up the booting process. This is discussed here. One thing to keep in mind, though, is that it is possible to speed up the boot process too much. Yeah, you...

Computer memory is one of those areas that causes quite a bit of unnecessary confusion for newbies. Memory is a fairly straight-forward thing and, for the most part, there is not a whole lot to consider. There are, though, a few terms and concepts that are thrown around, and I will seek to explain them here. Memory Speed There are various specs used to specify...

No doubt, most Windows users do nothing except turn on the system, do what they need to do, and complain about Microsoft when the system crashes or does something that indicates the PC is unstable. I know. I’m generally one of them. But, with a little bit of learning and the aid of a program such as the one we are looking at here, you can exert detailed...

These days, if you have not yet used your PC to burn a CD, then you probably will soon. CDs are, bar none, the most convenient way to make backups, distribute data, etc. (at least with today’s technology). Besides a CD recorder drive, you’ll also need a program to operate your CD burner. There are many of them out there, some better than others....

Windows XP….the long awaited version that is supposed to revolutionize the way we think about Windows. This is the largest and most important upgrade since the release of Windows 95. Without a doubt, the release of Windows XP has been touted as a pretty big deal. It is designed to close the gap between consumer and business level...