Our illustrious leader Dave puts a good amount of effort into making pcmech.com look the way it does. A nice easy-to-recognize logo at top, a proper layout so you can easily tell where you are at any given time on the site, thumbnail images on home page articles to more easily separate one article from the other (which is totally for your benefit), and so...

One can never have too many resources on the internet when it comes to finding information. After all, the primary purpose of the internet is to be an information repository first. With that said, here’s the list:Archive.org Wayback Machine – Find archived copies of web pages. Especially useful for web sites that are now offline. Example use would...

Every year I take notice of what we have available now compared to the previous year to see if the somewhat-aged question of "Can you live a digital life with the browser being your only program?" be answered with a definitive yes. At present, that answer is still a big fat no. Before I get into why that is, the dream of "living in the...

Sometimes the simplest tools are the best kind. Web developers/designers absolutely require a utility to resize a browser window so they can see what their projects look like under certain resolutions. The best utility for this, which unfortunately does not work in any version after Windows XP, is Sizer. But what if you’re running Windows 7? Or a Mac? Or...

The title of this post is taken from the tag line of Microsoft’s free WebMatrix offering: It includes IIS Developer Express (a development Web server), ASP.NET (a Web framework), and SQL Server Compact (an embedded database). It streamlines Web site development and makes it easy to start Web sites from popular open-source apps. The skills and code you...

Chrome is a browser that doesn’t have a lot of market share at the moment (it’s nowhere near IE’s or even Firefox’s share), but is slowly and steadily gaining more usage as more people find out about it. The current version of Chrome is 5. How to use Chrome is fairly easy. Watch the video below to learn some basics. Below are some...

When it comes to TLDs (top level domains, i.e. COM, NET, ORG, etc.) on the internet, several attempts have been made to generate the popularity of COM. All have failed, but that doesn’t mean the people who give us alternatives to COM stop trying. One of the weirder TLDs out there is TEL. This is billed as a mobile calling card of sorts.. I think. Right off...

One of Google Chrome‘s best selling points is speed, and beta 5 of the browser is the fastest yet (for JavaScript anyway) according to Google’s benchmark tests. I’ve never been one to pay attention to benchmarks when it comes to web browsers because it does not take into account ISP connection speed or any extensions/add-ons you have...

Wonder whatever happened to the Netscape Communicator suite, and wish you could use it again with a modern engine? You can. It’s called SeaMonkey. Suite? SeaMonkey is more than just a browser. It also has a full email client, an IRC client (ChatZilla) and web page editor (Composer). It’s also compatible with some Firefox add-ons, so it is...

Internet Explorer 8 has two features that are underutilized by many, that being Web Slices and Accelerators. The following video shows you how to use them. Once you do (particularly with Accelerators), you can enable quick shortcuts all by using just a few clicks of your mouse, such as quick translations, shortening URLs, sharing out things on Facebook and a...

Opera‘s latest version of their browser is 10.50, currently only available for Windows (although I suspect Mac and Linux versions will be released very shortly). This versions of Opera, said very honestly, is the best version I’ve ever used. It has Windows 7 Aero Glass support, the menus are more streamlined than ever, and it is the ONLY browser that...

Before Google, the way people used to check to see if their internet was working properly was to load up yahoo.com. I remember those days. It was a long, long time ago. The only thing people are buzzing about when it comes to Yahoo! these days is how much nobody cares about them anymore. The last big thing they did which caused a huge wave of nostalgia is when...

In the context of this article I’m referring to the Windows Live Mail the email client and not the email service (Hotmail). When composing an email in WL Mail, most people use HTML to use features such as colored text, bold/italic/underline, and so on. It is true that any email composed in WL Mail can be saved as a web page, and it’s quite easy to...

I have to admit this caught me by surprise. IE8 is evidently the world’s most-used browser, according to a report by Net Applications. The surprise comes from the fact it’s not IE7 that’s holding the top spot. It is true that IE8 is the best IE you can use, due to the fact it’s the least-crashable, the most secure and so on. You’ve...

Why would you want to block sites? Maybe you have kids you don’t want going to specific places on the internet. Maybe you’re trying to cut down on data usage because of a bandwidth cap forced upon you by your ISP. No matter the reason, people do have need to block specific sites from time to time. It’s an unfortunate truth that there...

If there’s one thing that internet has taught us, it’s that privacy issues have always been a hot-button topic. Whether it’s social media, online shopping, email or even searching the internet, privacy matters. Why does it matter? The answer is protection. Protection from identity theft (which almost always leads to having money stolen from...

Browser skinning simply means to change how it looks. The functionality remains the same, but the icons, background, menus and so on have an altered appearance. In some instances, browser skinning can also include adding in functionality it didn’t have prior. Here’s how to use an alternative skin for Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera. Internet...

For those that remember internet in the late 1990s, you remember your dialup being slow, there was no such thing as tabbed browsing, web sites were clunky/cumbersome and difficult to navigate, low screen resolutions of the time meant lots and lots of scrolling, and well, you get the idea. Thankfully we don’t have to deal with that anymore, right? Wrong. A...

If there was any universal immutable truth to the internet, it’s that things vanish from it all the time. Those pages you bookmarked last year? They may be gone. Those forums posts that contained a wealth of useful information? They may be gone as well. There are several different ways to archive web pages. You could use ScreenGrab for Firefox. But the...

Before social media was even a twinkle in a programmer’s eye, there were the early days of internet, affectionately known now as Web 1.0. Nobody knows the exact date of when Web 2.0 started, but it is believed to have started some time in 2004, which at this point is five years ago (oh, how time flies..) Many of you out there will remember these pre-2004...