In recognition of the recent events in Japan, many major carriers are offering free communications (calls and/or texts) to Japan for a limited time. While other carriers may join at any time, Engadget is currently reporting that the following carriers are participating:AT&T Sprint Verizon ComcastWhile this is a limited time offer (you should check up on...

Everyone out there is probably familiar with the head to head game Rock-Paper-Scissors. While statistically no one player has an advantage over the other, computers can analyze player behavior and predict what they will choose. This simple page demonstrates this artificial intelligence in action: Test your strategy against the computer in this...

Having taken batch scripting about as far as I think I can,  have recently started playing around with Windows PowerShell which allows you to write scripts to do just about any OS level task. While tutorials are helpful, I have found simply creating scripts via old fashioned trial and error works best for me. A tool I have found incredibly helpful is the...

Whenever you install a new drive (hard disk,optical, etc.) or plug in a removable device such as a flash drive or camera, Windows assigns the device a drive letter. If you have previously used the removable device, for the most part, you should get the same drive letter. If you have the need to change drive letters you can do this through Disk Management in your...

If one of the performance metrics you keep your eye on is your overall system boot time, rather than keeping a count in your head or whipping out a stopwatch, take a look at the freeware utility BootRacer. This tool takes the simplistic approach of doing "one thing well" and features:Automatically calculates your Windows boot time. BootRacer uses...

For those of you who design websites or like to tweak your HTML source to be optimized for Google’s search engine, you can test your knowledge using this Google SEO Quiz. This brief quiz covers questions much more deep than the "what is the most important tag" variety. If you find yourself in need of some studying, then you can check out...

For those of you who do a lot of Windows 7 installations, creating a slipstreamed installation disc with the newly released service pack 1 already included can really save you a bunch of time. The process of actually creating a slipstreamed disc is very easy and for step-by-step instructions, check out this article. To get started, you will first need to create...

For those of you with Android phones looking for some free apps to load it up with, take a look at Gizmo’s Freeware list of "Best Free Android Apps". Like all of the lists on Gizmo’s site, the applications are organized into categories with a brief write-up on each. There is something on this list for just about any category you can think...

I am a huge fan of using hibernation over a system shutdown when I am done using the computer for the very simple reason that I can immediately pick up the next day right where I left off. When you do a system shutdown, not only does your system take longer to start up, all of your open programs and files have to be re-opened. On the other hand, resuming from...

The default behavior in Firefox 3.6 for new tabs which are opened by clicking on a link is for them to appear immediately to the right of the tab that opened it. While this can work for keeping your tabs somewhat organized, it can throw off tabs you want to always have in front. With a simple tweak, you can have Firefox open all new tabs at the end of your open...

The title of this tip is taken from a recent post The Windows Club which addresses this very question. The article is short and sweet and a recommended read for anyone who has ever pondered this question. To get right to the “meat” of it: Now it is very important to understand one thing! The Aero interface is rendered by the graphics card in your...

Consumer reviews can definitely be helpful as they provide a way for anyone to give feedback on their experience with a product or company without having to have a platform (i.e. PCMech) to share it. Unfortunately, this system can be easily "gamed". Because of this, you have to always be wary of fake reviews which are possibly written by those who have...

It isn’t news to anyone here that Google has a lot of products and services it offers. But while most people only really know about their end user products (i.e. search, Adwords, Chrome, Analytics, etc.), Google also features loads of API’s (application programming interfaces) which developers can use to incorporate Google technology into their...

It is no secret that I am a big time supporter of reducing our impact on the environment, so I enjoy reading tech related items on the subject. One article that caught my eye recently was an Ars Technica post titled "Ask Ars: are "green" hard drives really all that green?" This article is a great read and breaks down the "green"...

I read a tip on Lifehacker recently where a reader offered a very simple tweak which may boost your Firefox performance. Essentially, if you have multiple languages set in Firefox, it will slow down the rendering engine (as each language gets processed separately). By default, US installations will have 2 languages configured: English and English/US, so by...