ComputerDumb.com

Tips & Tricks Category

If you’ve invested heavily in Steam’s growing portfolio of games, you’ll know that aside from offering a large enough selection of PC games to make GameStop blush in shame, the service also has a slick Graphic User Interface that makes keeping track of your downloaded titles a breeze. With very little effort, you can leverage Steam’s awesome library interface to keep track of and open all of your favorite web browser-bound games in exactly the same way.

From the get-go, the Steam client is designed to allow users to add executable files to their game list, but isn’t too keen … [Read More...]

Corrupted system files don’t have to ruin your day

Nothing will put a crimp in your computing style quite like a Windows error. Although Microsoft’s OS has gotten exponentially more stable over the years, it’s still very possible for Windows system files to become corrupt, which can cause your system to slow down, freeze, or (in the worst case) refuse to load your operating system at all.

When you encounter a Windows error, your first instinct may be to back up your data, grab the ol’ installation disk, and weep silently as you press the Reformat button. We’re here to … [Read More...]

Don’t Leave The Past Behind

There’s an old saying that goes “You can’t take it with you when you die,” but we disagree. Sure, you might suffer an XP loss or have a nifty +3 bastard sword disappear from your inventory, but all in all, your belongings remain intact in the event of an untimely character death. The saying should be “You can’t take it with you if you don’t save your game data.” We can’t help with your lack of FPS skills, but we can help you transfer your game data to a new PC or hard drive.… [Read More...]

Find

Anyone can buy a PC.  Most of you astute Maximum PC readers can build a PC.  And an elite cadre of you can even build a tricked-out PC with lights, and tubes of fluid flying everywhere, and a beautiful side panel that shows off your system’s tricked-out insides.

But the last thing that you’ll want to see through your pretty plexiglass is a PC that’s covered in dust.  In fact, you don’t want to have a dirty PC regardless of your level of desktop sophistication: It can lead to system overheating, it’s gross, and it only gets worse the longer … [Read More...]

After our social media background check, are you afraid of what a future employer may find out about you? Rest easy as we have some tips to help you remove your personal information from more than a dozen online background check websites.

How Do These Sites Get My Information?

There are hundreds of online background check websites that gather information on people. In the US, these online databases are populated with information from public records like real estate transactions, arrest records, court cases, marriages, divorces, etc.

Before the Internet, investigators would have to go to the local town hall or … [Read More...]

Can we build a serviceable rig for just $340? With AMD’s Fusion APU, we’re gonna try

In past months, we’ve shown you how to build rigs for less than $1,000, and we even built a surprisingly speedy $667 PC Value Meal. But what do you do when your budget is half that? Let’s face it, not everyone has half a grand or more to spend on a new computer, and not every build has to be a tricked-out gaming rig. Sometimes you just need a second computer for the family, or an HTPC that doesn’t break the bank. Heck, sometimes … [Read More...]

Photo remixed from an original by Shutterstock.

You may not be ready to ditch Facebook for good, but now that you’ve had a chance to kick the tires on Google+, you might be ready to make it your go-to social network. The problem: You’ve built up a lot of friends, photos, videos, and other data on Facebook over the years, and you don’t want to simply lose all that data. Here’s how to migrate it all from Facebook to Google+.

When Google+ came out, it’s success was very much up in the air (remember Google Buzz?). However, it seems a … [Read More...]

Of the many new features introduced in Windows 7, the humble Problem Steps Recorder was one of the least talked-about. At first glance, the application—which combines an automatic screenshot utility and a sort of low-grade keylogger—appears to be nothing more than a tool to make life a little easier for Microsoft’s legion of support personnel. Upon closer inspection, there’s actually much more to the Problem Steps Recorder.

For one, you don’t have to be a Microsoft support rep to view the files created by the Problem Steps Recorder, which means that if your clueless friend insists that his PC doesn’t … [Read More...]

Is it possible to convert a standard home office into a surround sound home theater with minimal fuss?

I have an average-size spare bedroom that mostly functions as a home office and gaming room, and has been used primarily by me. Given the cramped quarters of San Francisco apartments, I set out to make the room less me-centric and more family-friendly by transforming this home office into a home office theater. The goal was to create a room suitable for three things: normal PC computing, big-screen surround sound movie viewing with no reconfiguration needed, and big-screen gaming. Ancillary goals were … [Read More...]

Using Prey, you’ll have the upper hand over thieves

A laptop is a lot of things—it’s a mobile entertainment center, a portal to the web, and a way to get work done away from home. More than anything, though, it’s a freakin’-expensive piece of hardware that you absolutely do not want to lose.

Of course, the best way to keep your laptop is to not get it stolen in the first place. But if you do, you can be prepared to try and track it down. Plenty of companies are more than happy to charge you a recurring fee for … [Read More...]

When all of the walls of a system are transparent, where do you hide the cables? Answer: behind all the awesome insides

Were there a Mount Everest of PC builds, the see-through PC would likely be it. The difficulties are great, and the possibilities for failure high, but there’s nothing that gets me more excited than the opportunity to crack my knuckles and customize the lighting and electrical setup of a transparent desktop system.

The most fearsome part of this build is the acrylic case I’m using: There’s nowhere to hide any mistakes. Nor can I just stuff a mass … [Read More...]

Spruce up your multiple desktops

Running multiple monitors has become something of a necessity for serious PC users. You don’t have to take it to the sort of extremes we do in this month’s display challenge, but anything less than two monitors is risking serious damage to your nerd cred.

Unfortunately, running multiple monitors can make it difficult to keep your desktops looking nice with custom wallpapers. If you’re running displays of two different resolutions (a laptop display and a 24-inch monitor, for instance), you’re likely to end up with a wallpaper that looks good on one, but ugly on … [Read More...]

Email. We all have it. We all hate it. From Outlook to Gmail to the Great Email Beyond, here’s how to make the most of it.

They say that the kids don’t use email that much these days. Doesn’t that sound dreamy? We adults, unfortunately, have no such luxury. For better or for worse, email is a major part of our personal and work lives.

We’re tempted to just leave it at that. But there’s no need to feel hopeless. We took a good, long look at the center of our communication universe with an eye toward improving, upgrading, and … [Read More...]

From Windows 95 right on through to Windows 7, the Start Menu has always been just a wee bit short of perfection when it comes to increasing your productivity. Requiring users to seek out content through an seemingly endless series of nested drop down menus, and folders with company names you can’t remember having ever seen before, it’s a user interface element that was designed to make our lives easier, but in actuality slows our workflows down to a crawl. Fortunately, Launchy has been helping Windows users get back up to speed since 2007.

For those of you not familiar … [Read More...]

With Vista and Windows 7, Microsoft has been making some big strides in the quality of Windows’s native search. For regular, targeted searches (finding a file in your downloads folder, for instance), it does a great job of giving you near-real-time results. Unfortunately, that’s not always good enough.

Sometimes you know you’ve got a file, but you just can’t remember where you put it. That means you’ve got to resort to the dreaded Search Local Disk (C:), or even worse, Search Computer. It doesn’t take as long as it used to, but it can still take quite a while to … [Read More...]

There are few services on the internet today more ubiquitous than Google Maps. Originally designed to be downloaded by users as a desktop application, it quickly became a web-based service once the company that gave birth to it was acquired by Google in 2004. By 2005, the user-friendly mapping solution was a household name. Six years later, developers are still discovering new ways to leverage the venerable mapping service to produce more information and expand its functionality, making an already awesome free service even better. To show you what we’re talking about, we’ve put together a list of our ten … [Read More...]

When the Kinect first launched last November, gamers were (to put it charitably) a bit skeptical. Here was a device with incredible technological potential, and the most impressive game that came out with it was a dance simulator.

Still, the Kinect has become a bona fide hit, selling more than eight million units in the first 60 days alone and being named the “fastest-selling consumer electronics device” of all time by Guinness World Records. But more importantly, the software problem has been solved. Not by Microsoft, whose Kinect releases have been few and far between, but by the ever-growing legion … [Read More...]

We set out to build a Sandy Bridge box that takes up little space in our entertainment center and fulfills all our streaming needs

Back in the August 2010 issue of Maximum PC I built a 3D HTPC that I was pretty damned happy with, but the times have changed. The CableCard quad tuner that was featured prominently in that machine is no longer needed, as I have joined the ranks of the Cable Cutter Movement™. So without the need for a CableCard, I wondered if I could build a rig with all the same capabilities but make it much, … [Read More...]