ComputerDumb.com

Posts Tagged ‘com’

We round up nine high-end and midrange stand-alone webcams to find the best one for your needs

Don’t think you’ve got it good with that dinky cam built into your laptop. Whether you’re exploiting that five-second window of opportunity on ChatRoulette, posting your latest Polka performance to YouTube, or catching up with your folks over Skype, a good webcam can make all the difference. An external cam doesn’t just offer vastly superior video and audio quality. The flexibility of being able to freely maneuver and position the device opens up lots of possibilities, letting you take photos and video of … [Read More...]

How do you create what might be the world’s cheapest computer? Easy: You strip it to the absolute bare minimum.

Toshiba’s NB505 netbook isn’t quite as skeletal as that, but it’s awfully close. And at all of $288, asking for much more would probably be a bit greedy.

The specs don’t merit a whole lot of notice: A 1.66-GHz Atom CPU and a paltry 1 GB of RAM ensure performance scrapes rock bottom. Though it couldn’t actually run most of our benchmarks, those that the NB505 did complete were near-record-breaking … on the bottom end, that is. A 250-GB hard … [Read More...]

Which AV product is up to the task of keeping your PC squeaky clean and immune to malware?

In some ways, visiting cyberspace is kind of like entering a crowded subway car during the peak of flu season. You’re surrounded by all sorts of germs—in the form of trojans, spyware, viruses, rootkits, etc.—just looking for a vulnerable host to invade and feed on. Once you’re infected, these pests can wreak havoc on your system, swiping your personal information and passwords, annihilating your credit rating, and stealing your identity. To avoid a potentially virulent attack, you need to take precautions.

Wouldn’t … [Read More...]

It’s official: 2011 is the year of incremental progress. Mobile handsets have settled into a groove featurewise and are now gently nudging their way upward in speed, power and capabilities.

If we’re going to be stuck in a climate of baby steps, at least Samsung’s Galaxy S 4G is an example of baby steps done right.

From the moment I got my mitts on the S 4G, something felt eerily familiar. I’d seen many of its elements before — the unsettlingly light chassis, the glass and faux-chrome accents, and even the flashless 5-MP camera. As it turns out, the feeling of … [Read More...]

And the winners are…

If Nathan Edwards had known that our Art Director would re-color his fancy Glowstone trophy, he wouldn’t have spent so much time mining ore in Nether.

Another year passes, and PC games continue to deliver a healthy dose of shock and awe, sometimes in surprising forms. The advent of DirectX 11 is making games look better than ever. But this year’s Game of the Year delighted us not with spectacular graphics, but the nostalgic look and feel of a 32-bit console. We played through hundreds of titles collectively, and after heated debates, secret meetings, and clever-award-title … [Read More...]

A few weeks ago Mike Duncan, Director of Business Development at SUPERAntiSpyware.com asked me to take a peek at their software. Being the Geek that never sleeps and challenge accepted off we go on passage into the world of SUPERAntiSpyware.

The results of the testing are beyond the scope of where this post leads but let’s say this, SUPERAntiSpyware has replaced the previous Anti-Malware software installed on this geeks PC’s and no computer leaves this shop without a free version installed.

The masses of features that come with the Free Version launch SUPERAntiSpyware right to top of the class … [Read More...]

There’s now a veritable all-you-can-eat buffet of HDTV available. You just need the right media streamer to serve up the goods.

1. Logitech Revue

Supercharged with Google TV, the Revue grabs content via the web, cable, or apps and aggregates it all in a slick menu system. Search for Daily Show and you get everything from 15-second YouTube clips to full episodes on Comedy Central. You can even record directly to your DVR. It can multitask, too: Need to settle a debate on whether Shaq was ever on Curb Your Enthusiasm? Check IMDB without interrupting SportsCenter. … [Read More...]

I’ve stopped buying music.

Now hold on, before you jump to any wrong conclusions – I don’t illegally download it either. I rent it … sort of.

These day it seems, the music industry are doing what they can to make it harder for honest people to get the music they want (and according to some, encouraging them to “steal”). Some smart people have come up with a great solution: Legal Streaming. Almost with the industry’s blessing.

There are several online solutions for streaming music legally – but in my book there are only two worth checking out: Spotify… [Read More...]

The Finder is the most complained about application on the Mac, and rightly so—it’s just not very powerful, and often behaves in unexpected ways. Today, we’ll be taking a look at several tweaks that will make the Finder suck less.

Some of our tweaks will be in the form of setting changes that make more sense, and then others are tweaks or add-ons that enhance the Finder. Keep reading, and then give us your thoughts in the comments.

Image by abooth202

Add a Path Bar to the Finder

The Finder has an option for a basic path bar like that … [Read More...]

When one wants to use Linux instead of Windows usually finds many problems and discovers that one still needs many Windows programs or data. The usual option is to use double booting into either Linux or Windows, but the article suggests a better solution which allows to use Windows in a Linux terminal session and to access data in both Linux and Windows.

We believe that everyone who considers themselves a computer enthusiast should have at least some experience with a Linux environment, but it can be daunting to just jump into the deep end of a completely unfamiliar operating system. One way to get your feet wet is with Cygwin, a free program that provides you with a Unix-like command line, without having to leave Windows. Cygwin is not a Unix emulator (it cannot run native Unix programs, although it does contain the tools needed to compile and run a program from source code), but it does have a wide array of … [Read More...]