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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...]

Say what you will about Twitter, but it’s ubiquity is startling. Consider the following statistics:

•    An average of a billion tweets are sent each week. That amounts to approximately 140 million tweets per day. Per day!

•    When Michael Jackson died back in June 2009, Twitter saw 456 tweets per second. Almost two years later, the record stands at6,939 tweets per second. (That occurred in Japan on New Year’s day.)

•    Twitter is seeing almost half a million accounts being created each day.

The most interesting thing about Twitter is that it’s simultaneously entertaining, informative, connective, distracting, and (potentially) … [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...]

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...]

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...]

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...]

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...]