We are going to begin doing giveaways here on PCMech.com. And first things first, I’m going to start unloading some of the hardware I have stocked up around here.So, here are the requirements to enter our contest giveaway:You must be subscribed to our weekly newsletter list. You can subscribe from our newsletters page or via the form to the right. The...

One out of many things that I credit Google for is thinking outside the box. Nothing demonstrates that more than a story coming out of the UK today. Apparently, Google is considering launching their own “computer navy”. “Data barges” that are anchored offshore. Google has datacenters all throughout the world. Google is historically...

I am attempting to practice a new habit when managing my email: not having things stack up. As I write this article, my Gmail inbox sits with zero messages in it. I find that my head is much clearer with just that one thing in place. So, how can you go about getting your inbox down to zero? In this article, I will outline my personal advice for doing so. This...

Malware is a constant and continual threat to your computer and, if you run Windows especially, your computer has a big target on it. The field of malware is shifting constantly and this leads to security products that sometimes fail to protect the PC against something which is brand new. For this reason, we expect to see an industry shift to whitelisting to...

This last weekend, I got a call from my Dad. As any geek can attest to, when you know computers, you end up being the family computer tech. My Dad’s computer had been attacked by a pretty bad virus which screwed up the computer, hijacked Windows files, and then attempted to blackmail him into buying a product to fix the damage. This came out of the...

When you hear the word “Microsoft”, most likely you think of Windows or MS Office. These are their signature products. Microsoft, though, is active in a lot of different areas. Some of their projects are quite groundbreaking, but often don’t get the attention they deserve because Microsoft’s marketing is, at best, schizophrenic and...

Apple Event Fails to Dazzle Large Hadron Collider: Why You Really Won’t Die Today Are Linux Programmers Getting Too Fat? New satellite to give Google Maps unprecedented resolutionThanks for...

For development and testing reasons, I wanted to set up a local server on my Mac Pro so that I could operate a local copy of PCMech.com. I thought I would document how I went about it for the benefit of others down the road. The easiest method to set up a quick LAMP server under OS X is to use MAMP. MAMP stands for Mac, Apache, MySQL and PHP. Now, both Apache...

You might not realize it, but losing a laptop is a very common problem. In fact, according to a story in July of this year, a study by the Ponemon Institute shows that up to 12,000 laptops are lost at airport security checkpoints EVERY WEEK. How do you say “holy S**tballs” in geek? But, there are solutions and, among them, is a free, open source...

We may not make a regular habit of discussing television technology here on PCMech, but we are all about cool technology and helping you get the most out of it. And what’s coming in the world of flat screen televisions is exciting and is sure to affect the world of computers, too. Plasma TVs are so yesterday. And rear projection has long been dead. LCD...

“One Bad Apple“, by Dan Lyons over at Newsweek. In this episode, David comments on this Newsweek piece. Thanks for listening.

Very impressive are the reports I am seeing across the Internet about the percentages of users who are now using Google Chrome. Techcrunch, for example, reports 6.23% usage on their site. So, I thought I’d check for PCMech.com. I went into Analytics, set the report to be from this last Tuesday (since that’s when Chrome was launched) up to today. The...

One of the things about being a geek is that we like finding odd ways to use existing technology. Google Docs has been around for a little while now and I am a fairly avid user. Part of the Google suite I don’t use much, though, is Spreadsheets. But, what uses might there be that one might not have thought of?To Do List It continues to boggle the mind...

Everybody has been talking about Google Chrome this week. First they announce using a comic book on Labor Day (slow news day), then they launch yesterday and it seemed everybody and their family was giving it a try. Some have gone so far as to make it their new default browser. Some even uninstalled Firefox. Others, still, have proclaimed it to be a Windows...

Google Chrome Download Twitter: Far more than “what I had for lunch today” Introducing Picasa 3.0 Fail BlogThanks for...