ComputerDumb.com

Posts Tagged ‘desktop’

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...]

A few years back during the Vista era, Lenovo introduced the ThinkPad X301. That PC was absolutely awesome – one of the best that Lenovo ever made. It was a 13” ultrathin with a Core 2 Duo processor, a 128GB SSD (very rare for that time), and killer battery life. I used it as my daily carry for nearly 2 years.

Since then, Lenovo has made a number of great ThinkPads – the X200 comes to mind, as do the new X120e and X220 – but they haven’t made a direct replacement for the 13” X301. Until today.

That’s … [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...]

Toshiba has finally updated their high-end gaming laptop line with the new X770 model. This is a hefty desktop replacement unit, but it has slimmed down compared to the last generation. Still, it doesn’t compromise on the specs. The X770 can blow a lot of desktops out of the water.

The X770 has a 17-3-inch 1920×1080 screen (the old X505 had a 18.4-inch display). At its heart lay the Intel Core i7-2630QM processor, 8GB of RAM, and 1.25TB of storage space in the form of two hard drives. Of course, it wouldn’t be much of a gaming laptop without a … [Read More...]

From the caliber of their parts to the breadth of their abilities to their unconventional shapes and sizes, today’s small form factor PCs are a tasty treat for power users

It has long been considered common wisdom that the smaller the size of a PC, the greater its compromises. Notebooks, no matter how fat, for example, will never touch the power of a desktop machine.

The same held true for small form factor rigs. But is that still the case? To find out how today’s SFF rigs compare with their full-size desktop brethren, we tasked five top PC makers with … [Read More...]

Adobe has announced the release of Flash Player 10.3 for Android, Linux, MacOS, and Windows. The latest stable release of Adobe’s ubiquitous plugin packs a bunch of new features and security enhancements. But its most notable user-facing feature is the ability to clear hitherto hard-to-delete Flash cookies, or local shared objects (LSOs) as they are formally known, from the comfort of the web browser’s privacy settings.

Till now, there was no way of slaying Flash cookies alongside normal web cookies from within the browser’s privacy settings. Although there has been an option for clearing Flash cookies separately, it is far … [Read More...]

Last night Microsoft Hardware hosted a launch reception at the Greene Space in New York City to unveil the Studio Series: Artist Edition, a brand new collection of Wireless Mobile Mouse 3500’s designed in partnership with artists Kirra Jamison, Matt Moore, Linn Olofsdotter, Mike Perry and Jonny Wan. The new mice are really beautiful by themselves but they look even better when paired with a chic new PC. 

Check out our pairings and other photos from the event:

Linn Olofsdotter’s design with the Sony VAIO P Signature Edition

Matt Moore’s retro-cubist design with the Toshiba NB505 netbook

Jonny Wan’s tribal … [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...]

About a year ago I reviewed the Toshiba Satellite E205, one of Best Buy’s second generation “Blue Label” PCs.” It was a really good computer for the time and sported never-before-seen technology like Intel Wireless Display (aka “WiDi), and you could get it for about $1,000. Flash forward to today, and you’ve got the brand new Toshiba Satellite E305, the follow up to last year’s Satellite E205. Like its predecessor it’s reasonably priced ($899), loaded with top-end specs (14” HD display, second generation Core i5 processor, 4GB RAM, 7200 RPM 500GB hard drive, USB 3.0, LED backlit keyboard, built in … [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...]

Don’t worry about the cold and rainy weather sweeping through parts of the country, it’s okay to bust out your open source swimming trunks anyway. Canonical today invites you to dive into Linux with the release of Ubuntu 11.04, otherwise known as Natty Narwhal. This latest Linux distro, which has been in beta form for about the past month, supports laptops, desktops, and netbooks, and supersedes Ubuntu Netbook Edition for all PC netbooks, Canonical says.

“11.04 continues Ubuntu’s proud tradition of integrating the latest and greatest open source technologies into a high-quality easy-to-use Linux distribution,” Canonical said in a press … [Read More...]

Life is filled with important choices. Chocolate or vanilla? Ketchup or mustard? Heads or tails? Choice is awesome – it’s what makes life interesting & personal.

You know what’s even more awesome than choice? Not having to choose. That’s exactly the concept behind the new Acer Iconia Tab W500. Rather than having to choose between a slate PC or a traditional laptop, the W500 gives you the convenience of both via a powerful slate PC that “docks” into a portable, attachable keyboard. It’s an interesting, unique take on multi-touch computing.

The 10.1” Iconia Tab W500 goes on sale starting today … [Read More...]

We’ve got mixed feelings about flash.

On the one hand, Adobe’s platform has caused us a lot of grief–keeping it installed and updated is a pain, and even then the sheer number of security holes caused by flash is cringeworthy. It can be a system hog, too, and don’t even get us started about how Flash single-handedly set UI design back 5 years.

But still, where would we be without Flash for free, addictive web games? There would be no Desktop TD, no Line Rider, and no Crush the Castle (and therefore no Angry Birds). So how can we waste … [Read More...]

Why switch from Yahoo! Mail to Hotmail? There are lots of reasons. For example – if you email photos to friends and family, Hotmail lets you send them without clogging up your friends’ inboxes. Hotmail uploads your photos to SkyDrive and lets your recipients view in a slide show or download. You can view or edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents directly in Hotmail – even on a PC without Office installed. And Hotmail has made a lot of progress in protecting you from spam and malware with SmartScreen. Hotmail is the only email provider that allows you to take … [Read More...]

Boy, are my Instagram friends going to be jealous. Now, when I share a photo using my favorite Lomo-Twitter mobile app, my photos are going to look sharper, crisper and better than everyone else’s.

Why? Because I’m not using the crappy camera on my phone. I’m using a nice prosumer camera with an Eye-Fi Mobile X2 card in it. Every time I press the shutter, my photo transfers wirelessly and directly to the phone in my pocket. From there, I can add whatever fancy, appy goodness I want, and share it on the internet.

Eye-Fi has been making waves for … [Read More...]