It could be argued that the second biggest shopping day of the year after Black Friday is today, Christmas Eve. All the people that forgot to buy stuff when they had plenty of time to do it figured they could quickly get in some last-minute items at the local department store or mall. You may be one of them. If you decide to venture out today for shopping...

Mozilla just released Firefox 3.5.6, and while the fix list isn’t that long, the one to pay attention to that was repaired is: Crashes with evidence of memory corruptionFF 3.5.5 for whatever reason just blew up in memory use, and so far since upgrading to 3.5.6, that rapid overuse of memory seems to have decreased quite a bit. This upgrade did not break...

The vast majority of you out there have an IPv4 type address. This is the type we’re all familiar with, that being the four octets of xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx. Many of you also know the difference in IPv4 classes as well, such as the fact that home wireless routers assign Class C addresses. Something that has been a legitimate problem ever since the internet as a...

The Garmin nüvi 255W GPS has been on the market for some time now, but I just got one (upgraded from my nüvi 205), so here’s the scoop on it. I’ll be concentrating on what matters most to the PCMech audience (and if I miss anything you want to know about it, chime in with a comment as I’m very familiar with the nüvi line of products.) In...

When using social media, you have to be really careful what you do because you can inadvertently give away WAY too much information. In this video, I demonstrate one way that people give away WAY too much info on Twitter. Many mobile Twitter clients that are used on GPS-enabled phones have the ability to update your location on Twitter with your GPS coordinates....

I made a decision a while back that the most icons I would have on my desktop is one column worth, meaning if the icons on the left side of the first monitor "skip" to another, there’s too many and it must be cleaned up. The only icon I have on the right is the Recycle Bin. I have entertained the idea of removing that from the desktop, but I find...

Wi-fi theft, as in the act of stealing someone’s internet connectivity by breaking into a wireless network, has been around ever since we first started using wireless routers. Before covering the topic of how likely you are for wi-fi theft, I’ll first say that wi-fi security has never been that good. If one is desperate enough to steal your signal,...

There are lots of available online virus/malware scanners out there. I think these are great since it allows you to test your system against a scanner other than the one you have installed (if you even have one installed). Unfortunately, many of them simply detect threats but do not actually remove them from your system. On the other hand, Windows Line OneCare...

Yes, this is a retro article, but with a modern twist. The Commodore 64 is to date the best-selling computer of all time and hasn’t been topped. An all too common item to be seen next to the C64 was the 1541 floppy disk drive. This actually was in fact more than just a disk drive. It was a computer because it did contain a microprocessor (this one, in...

Have you ever needed to order a pizza (or any other type of food) but only had your cell phone with no way to locate the closest place? Rather than dialing 411 and paying a fee, try dialing 1-800-GOOG-411 instead. The service is simple to use and free. From their ‘Learn More’ page: You don’t need a computer, an Internet connection, or even the...