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Posts Tagged ‘computer’

Can we build a PC that’s quiet and cool without sacrificing performance—or spending a fortune?

Anyone can build a gaming PC. Seriously, it’s easy. Minus a few technological bits of know-how here and there, there’s really nothing that tough about buying the fastest components you can afford and slapping them in whatever chassis you happen to have on hand. Done, right?

Maximum PC never shies away from a challenge, however, and Sr. Associate Editor Nathan Edwards has upped the ante for this month’s build-it. One of the key problems of building a tricked-out rig is that you’re sure to increase … [Read More...]

Cirago’s device fills plenty of media roles, but it doesn’t excel at any

The Cirago TV Platinum CMC3000 is a small, network-connected box with HDMI output and an internal hard drive. This box can play back all manner of content, record TV from your set-top box, and provide 1TB of network-attached storage. You get all this for a street price less of than $200. What’s not to like? As it turns out, the Cirago is a classic jack-of-all-trades and master of none.

The box connects to your TV or A/V receiver via HDMI, and it has three USB ports on … [Read More...]

Ultimate peeper protection—for outside and in

Wiley X XL-1 Advanced

Wiley X is all about eye protection. All of the company’s sunglasses exceed the ANSI Z87-1 standard for high-velocity impacts, and many models—including the XL-1 Advanced—exceed the military’s much more stringent standard for ballistic impacts. The XL-1s might look unremarkable, but besides offering protection against flying shrapnel, they come with an elastic strap and removable “ultra foam gasket” that effectively turn the sunglasses into motorcycle goggles.

First, attach the elastic strap directly into holes in the XL-1’s arms. Now, insert the foam gasket (inset), which provides a form-fitting layer of … [Read More...]

So, you’ve got a terabyte of media on your home PC—movies, music, TV shows, the works. On top of that, you like to watch streaming videos on the web and listen to Internet radio. Isn’t the future great? But how are you getting at all this media? Do you keep all your files in folders on your desktop, or are they just sitting on a NAS box? Maybe you use something like iTunes, and then fire up your browser to get at streaming content.
There’s a better way.

What you need is a media front end, which can help you … [Read More...]

The opening of the Mac app store last week occasioned the release of a long-awaited official Twitter desktop client for the Mac. It’s actually an upgrade to Tweetie, an early and winningly spare desktop client that so enamored Twitter, the short-message service bought the company.

When it was first released two years ago as “Tweetie,” such things were called “software.” The desktop client is now an “app” called “Twitter.” Unfortunately, these changes in name and delivery method telegraph the lack of any real innovation. While “Twitter” … [Read More...]

Headphones are for wimps

OK, we’ll admit that headphones—and headsets—have their place, especially when it comes to gaming. But when you’re ready to rock the casbah, you need a set of speakers driven by a no-holds-barred amp augmented by a beefy subwoofer.

The gaming-speaker market has been so quiet lately that we feared Logitech’s budget boxes had driven everyone else away, so we’re happy to see two brand-new players enter the ring. The Antec and Corsair names are familiar enough to enthusiasts who enjoy building their own rigs. Antec manufactures a number of very solid power supplies, a host of … [Read More...]

Location, location, location!
These high-end PC enclosures are stacked and feature-packed

Whether you’re rocking a big videocard or a boatload of drives, these deluxe mid-towers are move-in ready.

Are mid-towers the future of PC chassis design? Used to be that a mid-tower case was a compromise—an admission that you were willing to sacrifice a few features for a rig that could fit under your desk (or on top of it) without making drastic changes to your decor or furniture. Based on the products we’ve seen in the Lab over the last few months, those days are all but over. 

The … [Read More...]

Recently, I asked iTunes to organize my music directory (getting music from different sources other than just the iTunes store left it a little messy and I decided I’d let iTunes do its thing) and it did a great job; however, it left a bunch of empty directories. Although these empty directories didn’t pose any performance impact, they just looked… messy and I decided I’d delete them. I started doing this one by one and soon realized I had over 50 empty directories and sub directories. Being lazy, I decided to run a command to remove these directories. I’ve done … [Read More...]

In this guest post, James Ricketts discusses how to handle PC sound card problems. Find out more about James at the end of this post.

You just double-clicked your favorite song, turned the volume up, but guess what – there is no audio! You wait wondering what the cause could be, but still no luck. Your speaker simply refuses to produce any sound.

You frantically scan your sound file for a virus and the scan results show everything is clear. Your computer is new, so the cause cannot be a faulty sound card, or incorrect entries in the windows registry.… [Read More...]

Fractal Design’s Define R3—the first Fractal case that will be widely available in the States—marries cool Scandinavian design with a hefty dose of acoustic foam and lots of nice touches. 

It’s easy to install a 12cm or 14cm fan on the side panel in place of that acoustic damping foam. 

The Define R3 is available in four colors: black, grey, silver, and white. We chose the white one because, damn, something about an all-white case with a great paint job just gives us the warm-and-fuzzies. And it really is a great paint job—it’s all smooth and glossy on the … [Read More...]

Awesome Duplicate Photofinder is a great freeware program designed to help you find those duplicate stored photos on your hard-drive.

But Awesome Duplicate Photofinder (say that fast five times in a row) does more. It even help you look for similar looking photos, using a comparison routine you would expect to find in an expensive commercial solution.

Simple and fast

Using  Awesome Duplicate Photofinder is very easy. Add the folders to search and wait for the program to show you the results. Most times Awesome Duplicate Photofinder comes out right, but … [Read More...]

In this guest post, James Ricketts explores the basics of computer drivers. Find out more about James at the end of this post.

Device Drivers – An Introduction

Computer operating systems, such as Windows, Linux and Mac, and hardware components, such as sound cards, memory cards, and video cards do not speak the same language. To communicate effectively, hardware devices and operating systems require an interface. This interface is provided by device drivers. These drivers enable the computer operating system and installed software to communicate with the hardware devices.

In this article, you will learn:

• Why it is necessary to use

… [Read More...]

Do you have several physical hard-drives on your computer, but would like to have them collaborating as one? This can be useful for smaller SSD-drives or similar.

A quick Note before we continue!
Spanned volumes are not RAID volumes and they are not fault tolerant. If one of the disks in the volume should fail, you lose the data on both disks. That being said, let’s continue…

Preparations

There are two ways to combine volumes into one: the Disk Management tool or the command line utility. Both methods require you to have Administrative privileges. You should also make a backup … [Read More...]