ComputerDumb.com

Posts Tagged ‘windows 7’

Last week our colleagues in the UK launched The Collection, a hand-picked group of best-in-class Windows 7 PCs. The Collection is a way for customers in the UK to find the perfect PC, regardless of what they love to do or how much they’re looking to spend. There’s a great online tool to help you choose at The Collection’s homepage (we have a similar tool here in the US, called Windows PC Scout, that’s an interactive and fun way to find your next PC), and if you’re in the UK, you’ll be able to find Collection PCs at PC World, … [Read More...]

From January 4th through April 7th, Windows asked filmmakers from around the world to show off what Windows 7 and Windows Live could do. The contestants were asked to submit a short video that spoke directly to students with the chance to win over 20,000 in prizes. The Grand Prize was huge: a trip to the Tribeca Film Festival in NYC for 2, a special screening of their film and $8,000. With these stakes on the line, videos flooded in and in took an agonizing few days to choose the top finalists and one grand-prize winner.

Grand Prize: Detention by … [Read More...]

If you have a bunch of photos shot at a huge 10 megapixels (and thus the huge file size) that you want to quickly share with your friends and family via email, Facebook etc., and if you are too lazy to fire up a slow-loading-and-complex image manipulation application, Image Resizer is possibly the best solution for you.

Image Resizer is an evolved product from the Image Resizer Powertoy Clone (which we have covered previously) by Brice Lambson, which allow the user to resize images with just a few clicks. Once it is installed, it sits comfortably in your right click … [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...]

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...]

Breaking the 250MB/s barrier with no moving parts

If the automotive world progressed as fast as the computer industry, the old joke goes, we‘d all have $1,000 cars that get 400 miles to the gallon, never need maintenance, and crash catastrophic-ally every eight weeks for no reason. Ancient punch lines aside, comparing this year’s storage options to those of even half a decade ago would be like entering a Bugatti Type 35 in the Preakness Stakes.

Half a decade ago, we were all still chasing the fastest mechanical hard drive. Today, solid-state drives are where the action is. And the … [Read More...]

“They have been training their whole lives to save the world,” said Jane McGonigal, world-renowned game designer and author, in reference to the students who participated in the Microsoft Imagine Cup.

For one member of the winning Software Design team, his solution not only stands to change the world, but to also affect his day-to-day life. David Hayden, the team captain from Arizona State University, was born legally blind. He used his first-hand experience struggling to see the teacher and take notes simultaneously as inspiration to create Note-Taker.

Note-Taker is a system that enables low vision students to take notes … [Read More...]

Can we build an AMD machine—any AMD machine—that can compete with an Intel-powered rig?

In the forever war between CPU vendors, AMD and Intel have traded places many times—one leads, then the other. Since the advent of Intel’s Core i7, though, AMD hasn’t been able to touch the performance of Intel’s high end, and Sandy Bridge further increases the gap. But, well, you couldn’t buy Sandy Bridge motherboards when I wrote this build-it story in February for the May print issue—something about a bad chipset—and I’d been meaning to build an AMD-powered machine for a while now—with CrossFire, even. Why? … [Read More...]

There are a lot of reasons why I love Windows 7. One of those reasons is seeing people use Windows 7 in surprising new ways. Innovative people seem to create extraordinary solutions on our platforms. In particular, this ingenuity is evident in students.

As part of the Imagine Cup, students from Brigham Young University have designed an application that allow pregnant mothers in rural parts of the world to receive ultrasounds from doctors who otherwise wouldn’t have access to expensive machines and equipment. This problem, which is omnipresent in the developing world, has in the past been responsible for a … [Read More...]

Remember I told you about the HTC Home weather gadget (Here) a while back? HTC Home is a Desktop Gadget developed to look like the weather and clock gadget found on the HTC phones. Last time I wrote about it, version 2 was still in Beta. I recently decided to check back with the developers and found that they have recently released version 2.4.

The New and improved

Where the 2.0 beta promised more gadgets and functionality, this version delivers. The weather gadget now comes bundled with 4 free weather providers, and several skin options (about 30 skins to choose … [Read More...]

As hard as it was to leave 85-and-sunny weather, the team and I are back in Redmond from a really fun PC Showcase in Miami.  The Spa at the Viceroy was beautiful, the crowd was interesting (and interested), and the PCs looked and performed great.   Below are some of my favorite photos from the event – some taken by me, and some taken by our outstanding professional photographer, Gustavo Caballero.

I also shot a video of the event that includes a run through of the venue setup and a look at some of my favorite PCs.  It should be ready … [Read More...]

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...]

The purpose of this post is to confirm the confidence I have in RAID technology as expressed in the earlier post “RAID“. It is occasioned by my recent plans to write a very different piece.

Background: the Warning Signs

Summers can get pretty hot here in Auckland. The average temperature for this time of year is 24 degrees Celsius (that’s 75 degrees Fahrenheit to North Americans) with 99% humidity so it’s no simple matter to keep a computer cool.

Your computers resources are not infinite and each time a new program is called, a portion of the total resource is … [Read More...]

Wireless is really convenient until you drop your connection or get really low speeds. Thanks to DD-WRT, it’s easier than ever to extend your home networks range with a few simple tweaks and a spare router.

DD-WRT is a fully feature-packed alternative firmware for your router. If you don’t know what it is or how to get it on your device, you should start off with Turn Your Home Router into a Super-Powered Router with DD-WRT.

This article was written by How-To Geek (Source)… [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...]