How-Tos
How To: Get Linux Power on Your Windows PC with Cygwin
Posted 09/02/10 at 06:43:13 PM by Alex Castle

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 optional packages that let you use most of the tools and utilities that you would commonly use in Unix, in Windows. In this guide, we’ll show you how to get Cygwin set up, the basics of how to navigate a Unix file system, and how to find more information as you need it.
Continue reading after the jump.
How-To: Give Your Laptop a Cooling Overhaul
Posted 08/26/10 at 08:20:25 PM by Paul Escallier
Modern day laptops are loaded with powerful, heat producing components that can often lead to overheating, especially if you’re asking your laptop to do some heavy lifting. If your laptop ever feels particularly hot in certain spots, or sometimes randomly shuts off, there's a good chance that overheating is to blame.
And if your laptop is no longer covered under warranty, fear not. We’ve put together a step-by-step guide for both computer novices and hardware enthusiasts that’ll show you exactly how to deal with overheating problems on your own.

How To: Automatically Upload Pictures to the Internet As You Take Them
Posted 08/24/10 at 07:53:32 PM by Alan Fackler
When you're a tech journalist, you learn some tricks for getting the news out of meatspace and onto the Internet as fast as humanly possible. Pictures in particular have always been a challenge, and although technological advances have made uploading them easier over the years, it's still impossible to have pictures you take with your DSLR transmitted immediately and automatically to the internet. Or is it?
In this article, we'll share out top secret industry secret method, which lets you use two cool gadgets together to automatically upload your photos as you take them, no matter where you are.
Curious? Read on!

How To: Make Cheap Phone Calls with VOIP
Posted 08/18/10 at 08:00:27 PM by Alex Castle
One of the topics we get asked about most often is VoIP (short for Voice over Internet Protocol), or Internet telephony. VoIP refers to any service that lets you make “phone calls” online. A lot of people have heard that you can make calls for cheap or even for free using VoIP, but they’ve got questions about how it works.
There are three main forms of internet phone call--PC to PC, PC to Phone, and Phone to Phone. In this article, we’ll explain each type, how it works, and how much it’ll cost you.

How To Enable Jumbo Frames
Posted 08/17/10 at 01:30:06 PM by Michael Brown
Enabling jumbo frames can significantly increase your network’s throughput while consuming fewer CPU cycles (we’ll explain why in a moment). But before you configure your PCs to use jumbo frames, you should know that their value lies primarily in speeding up large file transfers within your network (versus to and from the Internet).
You should also be aware that enabling jumbo frames might cause problems with latency sensitive network applications, such as VoIP and online games. Lastly, jumbo frames are available only on gigabit networks, and every device in the path of the file transfer—all your switches (starting with the one in the router), your PC, server, and/or NAS—must all be equipped with gigabit Ethernet interfaces. What’s more, each of those devices must be capable of passing the same size jumbo frames. Okay, here’s another twist: There is no such thing as a standard-size jumbo frame.
Confused? Click the "Read More" button for an Ethernet primer.

How-To: Control Any Aspect of Your Computer With an Xbox 360 Controller
Posted 08/05/10 at 07:16:55 PM by Alan Fackler
A desktop is more than just a computer. It’s also your entertainment center, eager and willing to provide you with endless hours of gaming, movies and music. As time goes on, it has become more and more common to see PC’s synched to TVs as people are beginning to see the advantages of having easy, living room-wide entertainment powered by their computers. I don’t even own a monitor (or a desk for that matter)--my desk-less desktop computer is hooked up to a Panasonic HD TV hanging on my wall, and it’s most often controlled by a wireless keyboard and mouse from the nearest sofa or bed. If this sounds like a familiar (or ideal) set up, this article may be helpful to you.
The downside to utilizing this sort of a set-up lies strictly in loss of control. A wireless keyboard and mouse combo will work for basic computer tasking, but are slow and often unreliable - especially for tasks like watching movies or gaming where you truly need a quick response. And, if you’re sitting clear across the room like me, getting a wired keyboard and mouse with extra-long extensions seems a little excessive.
There is, however, a simple alternative. Have a wired console controller tucked away somewhere, gathering dust? I’ll bet you do. Using open source programs like Xpadder, you can configure that very controller to become a tool to help you with your day-to-day, distance computing needs.

Hit the jump for more!
How To Use Windows Virtual PC to Save Your Old Boot Drive
Posted 08/03/10 at 05:53:10 PM by Alex Castle
When you finally make the decision to start fresh with a new OS on a new hard drive, it can be nerve-wracking. If you’ve been following proper hard disk etiquette, most of your programs and data should be stored on different drives or partitions than your operating system, but somehow important data has a way of making its way onto your C: drive. And although you can do your best to make sure you back up all the data you want to keep (your My Documents folder, for instance), it’s hard not to feel like you’re forgetting something.
You don’t have to worry. Thanks to new tools from Microsoft in Windows 7, you can preserve your entire hard disk on another drive as a Virtual Hard Disk (VHD). So don’t worry that you’ll forget important data on your old drive—just freeze it solid, like Han Solo in a block of carbonite, and rest easy knowing that if you suddenly recall that you left something important on your drive, you can simply run it as a virtual PC, or mount it to your new system.
Continue reading after the jump.
How-To: Run a Ventrilo Server with a Static Hostname from DynDNS.com
Posted 07/08/10 at 05:55:04 PM by Alex Castle

We’re on a bit of an IP kick this month in the R&D section. In the Windows Tip we showed you how to locate your local IP, and in the DOSBox article we showed you how to play old games online, as long as you know your IP. We’ve got one more IP-related trick up our sleeves: How to set up a Ventrilo chat server for your gaming friends, using a static IP from DynDNS.com.
Continue reading after the jump.
How To Combine And Organize Multiple Music Libraries
Posted 06/22/10 at 07:21:13 PM by Alex Castle

In the decade or so since the rise and fall of Napster, it’s become very hard to find a single person who doesn’t keep a super-size collection of MP3s on their hard drive. That’s all well and good, but what happens when you get a new roommate or move in with a significant other, and want to merge two music collections into one? Windows 7 and most popular music library managers, like Windows Media Center, iTunes, and WinAmp offer solutions for sharing your music library over a home network, but a big decentralized library (likely with lots of duplicate files) spread out over a network is inefficient, hard to manage, and hard to keep backed up. In this article, we’ll show you how you can use a free program to merge multiple libraries into a single, organized music archive.
How-To: Run All Your Old Games Using DOSBox
Posted 06/17/10 at 06:57:20 PM by Alex Castle

Most PC gamers have, at one point or another, known what it feels like to have a computer that’s too slow to play the latest games on the market. It sucks, but it comes with the territory—you just save up some cash and upgrade. Unfortunately, there’s another, more insidious problem that can keep you from playing the games you want to: a PC that’s too fast.
If you’ve ever tried to run an old DOS game on a modern computer, you probably know what we’re talking about. If the game loads at all, it’s glitchy, or too fast, or the sound doesn’t work. It’s a symptom of software written at a time when gigahertz-scale processors and gigabytes of RAM were simply unthinkable. If you wanted to, you could try to fix the problem by building a PC out of vintage hardware and running DOS natively, but there’s a much easier solution, called DOSBox.
DOSBox is an emulator, similar to those that allow you to play classic console games on your PC, which simulates a DOS environment running on old hardware. In this article, we’ll show you how to get set up with DOSBox, so you can play all of the classics on even the most breakneck-fast modern rigs.
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