Video editing is taking the world by storm. Everywhere you look, you see videos made by average people. If you just bought a DV camcorder and want to show the world or your family what it’s seeing, you need video editing software. It’s possible some software was included with the camcorder, but you might want to take a look at the options before...

We’ve all heard it: “Backup, backup, backup.” Do you know why you need to back up? Yes, being prepared for the unknown is important, but this is actually a known fact: MOST HARD DRIVES WILL BE DEAD WITHIN 3-5 YEARS, and many do fail within the first year. Read that again. Now think about your 3 year-old PC… that hard drive is a ticking...

Have you not imagined the idea of being able to have internet access on your laptop at all times no matter where you are? For ages, the only way to do this was to get an expensive serial modem computer kit ($200) for your cell phone and use it to dial into a dialup ISP at approximately 9.6-19.2 kbps. As you can imagine, this was terribly slow and expensive....

Even after a decade of promises, we still aren’t living in the paperless world. You’ll still need to have a printer. Older printers may have issues with the newest OSes, and many computers today are not sold with the parallel ports that older printers require. Newer printers are usually faster and have better print quality, and they can integrate...

Introduction Multiple monitor functionality was brought to the Windows world with Windows 95. Unfortunately, that implementation had some problems, and monitors were so expensive that most people didn’t use more than one. Now, however, monitors are fairly inexpensive and many video cards have built-in support for 2 or more monitors. Quite a bit of software...

Purpose of Benchmarking The idea behind benchmarking is simple. We want to know how the performance for one piece of hardware compares to another piece of hardware. Benchmarks measure how long the computer takes to perform a given task, ranging from a mathematical problem (calculate pi to 1000 digits) to scripts of applications manipulating the same data...

Router Basics Wireless routers with built-in switches are everywhere. Although there are differences between the routers, they have largely the same features. This guide provides a summary of the common aspects of the routers currently on the market. Reading your router manual is still necessary to know exactly what features your router has and where they are...