Hey there, ladies and gents. Today, I’m going to toss a little scenario at your feet and I’m sure you’ve experienced it before. It’s an ordinary day and you’re there going about your merry business doing what you ordinarily do on an ordinary day. At some point, like hundreds of millions of others, you decide “You know, I want...

Mobile gaming is fast coming into its own. While I’m sure there are still some ‘hardcore’ elements out there that would disagree, iOS, Android, and Windows Phone games are every bit as legitimate as the AAA titles you’d find on an Xbox 360 or a gaming rig. Sure, some of them might not be as complex or deep as their counterparts, but at...

Twitter’s been gaining a lot of momentum lately. And why shouldn’t it be? It’s the essence of the modern social network – a constant, online stream of people’s thoughts, opinions, and ideas. A means of sharing cool links and information in a quick, easily-read format. There’s a lot of reasons Twitter’s popular but...

In this week’s edition of In Layman’s Terms, we’re going to look at a few definitions specifically related to mobile phones. Let’s begin. SMS: SMS, which stands for “Short Message Service” is essentially text messaging in its most basic form. Pretty much every mobile phone on the market is capable of sending and receiving SMS...

Let’s say your 360′s starting to get slow. You’re starting to notice strange glitches in your games. Video is experiencing slowdown where there should be none, load times are through the roof, and generally, your system’s just not co-operating with you in any way, shape or form. Alternatively, maybe a game update has all but bricked...

The problem with laptops is that, as a result of their portability, they tend to get quite a bit of use outside of your typical computing environment. As a result, their keyboards tend to be subjected to a lot more dirt and grime than usual. Unfortunately, the fact that the keyboard’s embedded in the system makes cleaning it something of a chore compared...

For some reason, you want to erase your online tracks. We’re not going to discuss why – I’m sure you have an excellent reason to do so. The process involved in deleting your history and all the files associated with it depends entirely on what browser you happen to be using.  We’ll start with Google Chrome. Chrome: First, click on the...

Social networks are great, aren’t they? They let you share your thoughts on Life, The Universe, and Everything with, well…everyone and everything in the Universe, really. You can tell everybody what you ate for breakfast! You can let your friends know how awesome (or terrible) that new cafe that opened downtown is! You can tell advertisers and...

I think you’d be hard pressed to find a single human being who isn’t aware of YouTube on at least some level. As more or less the most popular video streaming site on the ‘net, it’s spawned a wide array of copycats and poor imitations. At the same time, it’s caused the birth of a number of rather excellent addons, features, and...

In this edition of Layman’s Terms, we’ll take a look at a few more definitions related to the web. Specifically, we’re going to look at some of the languages in which the Internet is coded; a few of the languages which makes it what it is. HTML: “HTML” stands for “Hyper Text Markup Language.” Now, that’s not really...

Sometimes it’s tough staying focused. No matter how hard you try, your brain simply doesn’t want to co-operate with you. The presence of the Internet certainly doesn’t help matters, either – it’s way too easy to click away from what you’re working on, and then realize you’ve been looking at pictures of cats for five...

While the Toshiba Satellite line of laptops are fairly high-quality and packing some reasonably high-end components, they aren’t exactly perfect. One of the most common issues I’ve come across involves the sound card. For some reason, after coming out of sleep mode, the system will occasionally forget that it can play sound. The card simply stops...

This may be a bit of a departure from our usual fare here at PC Mech, but some things are just too awesome to leave unreported. Everybody remembers IBM’s legendary computer “Watson”, right?  You know the PC that defeated both the legendary Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in Jeopardy? The system with rudimentary AI that allows it to answer...

The digital age has already changed the way we communicate. Thirty years ago concepts like social media, ideas like the constant, online sharing of personal thoughts simply didn’t exist. Computers were already becoming an important part of society, but no one had yet heard of the ‘net. Then the world changed. Now, there’s barely anyone in the...

Interested in giving Linux a go, but not sure if you want to get rid of Windows to use it? Well, you could always try booting it in a virtual machine, or replacing the operating system on an old PC. Alternatively, you could try dual booting. Now, this is easier said than done, because most Linux builds don’t really get along all that well with Windows 7,...