Can you believe the Wolfenstein 3D game is 20 years old? It’s true. To commemorate the occasion, Bethesda software (who bought iD Software a few years ago) has released a full (it includes everything, all levels) of the classic first person shooter. You can play the game right now by going to wolfenstein.bethsoft.com. Pretty cool? Absolutely. And, if you...

Most people don’t realize this, but many of us are still using Netscape – save for the fact it goes by a different name today, that being Firefox or Thunderbird. What makes Netscape Mail notable over the course of internet communications history? Pretty much the fact that it had some fairly advanced features that other mail clients of the time...

Ed writes: Thanks for your excellent website and helpfulness ! I am NOT a tech person at all ! Newbie so you may already have answered this before. My AMD came with Linux and I took it out to put in Windows XP Pro about 10 years ago that was given to me by a "friend". It was a group certificate I later learned. {The Microsoft Office he gave me at the...

Although it’s highly doubtful you would have to install all 23 patches that have been released from Microsoft concerning Windows, Silverlight, Office and .NET Framework, chances are you’ll be installing at least 10 of them. On my end, I had to install 13:Will installing these updates require a reboot? Probably. I can’t say a definitive yes or...

There’s still a lot of people out there who use the tried-and-true method of email using the Post Office Protocol, otherwise known as POP (or POP3) using a mail client like Windows Live Mail or Mozilla Thunderbird. POP is the receiving mail server, and SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) is the sending server, and they are separate. For example,...

Normally when one wants to look up WHOIS information on an IP or domain name, one uses a site like whois.domaintools.com. However there is a really easy way to get this same functionality without having to go to a web site at all, and that’s to use the free Sysinternals WHOIS. It’s a single file you can put in your C:\WINDOWS directory so you can get...

For this Retro Friday article we’re going to take a trip into the danger zone and I’m going to talk about how to deal with old viruses/malware/spyware on older computer boxes. Fact: Older PC boxes with Windows XP that haven’t been used since 2008 are usually loaded with viruses and spyware. Since the release of Service Pack 3 for WinXP in...

Your antivirus software is scanning your computer or you are downloading or installing a program. You know that it will take some time but you cannot wait for it to finish, so you can shut down your computer. This is where a program called Auto-Shutdown comes in. You just set the time at which you want your computer to shutdown and it will shutdown automatically...

Home automation is something that I’ve never quite agreed with. I’m not against advances in technology, but I am against things that serve no genuinely good purpose. An example of this is HomeOS, which Microsoft is currently testing, and will eventually lead to the "smart house". My primary reason I disagree with the idea of a smart house...

If your laptop was manufactured after 2007, it’s guaranteed to have at least one USB 2.0 port on it and probably also has a SD or CF (CompactFlash) slot on it. Someday at some point the laptop’s hard drive is going to die on you. However you can prepare for the worst by having a fully-loaded flash card or stick with a Linux OS ready to go for that...