Big-space hard drives always arrive first for desktop PCs simply for the reason they can run hotter without issue, and the fact you can add in cooling in several different ways should the heat become an issue. Laptops are typically 2 to 3 years behind when it comes to drive technology, or at least the platter-based ones are. The wait exists it takes the OEMs...

Recently I took a trip to Islands of Adventure on a mini-vacation, and if there’s anywhere you’ll see cameras, it’s there. I saw digital cameras. Lots of them. Were I to hazard a guess, around 90% of the people I saw using cameras were point-and-shoots and the other 10% using DSLR full-bodied type. I was also specifically looking around to see...

Stone is a material that’s been considered a luxury item ever since man learned how to carve it. In today’s modern world it’s still considered a luxury item. People to this day still pay good money to get a marble countertop in their kitchen, so you know stone will most likely always be the "in" thing. In the tech world there’s...

There have been several articles published about the dangers of cell phones, specifically concentrating on what most of these stories call "radiation". The word used in that context is, of course, used to attract readers, much like I used DOOM in mine. In factual terms, a microwave oven radiates a whole lot more than a cell phone ever would. Or a...

In the early days of home computing, the two most-used types of displays were television sets and monochrome monitors. I’ll talk about TV sets first. In the 1980s, TVs were cheaper than monitors. All you needed to do your computing was acquire the cheapest TV set you could find, hook up your computer to the television via the built-in TV OUT port to a RF...

Stand back, folks. This article’s going to be just a touch more technical than some of my other stuff. So, here’s the deal. You see a new desktop processor on the market. It runs at about….2 GigaHertz. Now, those of you with any computing experience will know right off that 2 GigaHertz in a desktop is a pretty abysmal clock rate (the rate at...

Chances are, you’d want to game with your Xbox controller instead of the archaic mouse-and-keyboard setup. Maybe you’re frustrated with the traditional controls and want to try something different. Could be you’re playing a game that originated on a console, and you want to capture that authentic feel. Hell, maybe you just bloody well feel like...

On a laptop, I will admit widescreen is better not for visibility but for a completely different reason – it’s easier to carry around. When a laptop is closed, a rectangle shape is easier to deal with compared to a square. Under the arm, the likelihood of you dropping a widescreen laptop is less compared to if you were holding a square-shaped one...

I’ll note up front that if you have a DSL modem and not a cablemodem, that’s fine – go ahead and rate it by posting a comment below. I’ve gone through several cablemodems and one DSL modem over the years. The majority of them were provided by the ISP directly, and in a few instances I had to use what the ISP provided because they would...

In this issue of “In Layman’s Terms”, we’re going to look at a few terms related to a computer’s start-up process. BIOS BIOS stands for Basic Input/Output System. If you strip away the primary operating system of your computer, you’re left with the BIOS. It’s essentially the software that controls things behind the...