Computers and hardware

It's Cyber Monday, and while you're busy shopping online, chances are you'll see lots of user reviews on various products. While the majority of those reviews do come from real users like yourself, who are passionate enough to share their opinions on a product, many of them could be fake, left by the vendors themselves to either promote their product or, in some cases, smear competitors.

While it's exceedingly difficult to absolutely prove that a review is faked, here are a few tips on spotting those that aren't from real users. These will come in … Read more

We recently showed you how to pin your favorite Web sites to the Windows 8 Start screen. By default, the tile may use the site's favicon.ico file or just display the generic Internet Explorer icon. If you operate a Web site, that may not be good enough for you. Here's how to give your site visitors a high quality tile to pin on their Windows 8 Start screens:

Step 1: Go to the Microsoft site, http://www.buildmypinnedsite.com, then under the "See your site in Windows 8" section, enter the URL of your Web … Read more

To help you get in the spirit of the holidays this season, Microsoft has released some new holiday theme packs for Windows 7 and Windows 8 systems. To install them, just download the theme packs, then double-click them. Here are some samples of the new themes:

Decking the Halls There are a total of 12 wallpapers in this theme, consisting of mostly beautiful ornaments.

Get it HERE.

Holiday Lights This theme has 17 wallpapers of decorative lights.

Get it HERE.

Snowmen The snowmen theme has seven wallpapers of snowmen in various poses.

Get it HERE.

Decorating the Trees This theme … Read more

OS X's encryption service, FileVault, originally stored users' home folder contents in encrypted disk images. In OS X Lion, FileVault now uses Apple's new CoreStorage volume manager to encrypt the entire disk. With CoreStorage, the OS configures a small hidden partition with a preboot welcome screen that looks like the standard OS X log-in window and contains user accounts that are authorized to unlock the volume and cause the system to load and automatically log in to the account specified on the preboot screen.

Unfortunately, while more secure and while offering a relatively seamless experience when sitting at … Read more

The OS X character palette is a convenient option for accessing multiple unicode symbols that are part of modern font collections. Not only can you use fun items like emoticons, but you can also enhance writing with scientific and mathematical symbols, foreign script characters, symbols, and even Braille.

Having these characters in the character palette makes managing them far easier than prior approaches in which unique symbol and dingbat fonts had to be used.

If you would like to use the OS X character viewer, it can be accessed in a few different ways:

CoreStorage is Apple's volume manager that provides an interface between the OS and physical volumes on the drive. It was introduced in OS X Lion for its full-disk encryption options with FileVault 2, but in addition allows for volume spanning, where multiple drives in the system can be combined into one logical volume for the OS to use.

The CoreStorage volume-spanning feature not only increases a single volume's storage beyond the capacity of a single drive, it also prioritizes storage to the primary drive in its logical volume. This means that if you use an SSD as the … Read more

In OS X Mountain Lion, Apple included a few of its iOS applications, one of which is the Reminders app for setting up and organizing to-do lists. Reminders used to be part of Apple's iCal feature, but has migrated to a separate app that interfaces with the Calendar for all your Apple devices and with Apple's iCloud service. This unified setup not only makes sharing reminders among devices easy, but also offers a platform for sharing reminders among different iCloud users.

While a little redundant with standard calendar events, reminders are convenient alternatives since they are maintained in … Read more

Privacy online sounds a lot like an oxymoron these days, but it's still worth trying to protect it the best you can, right? So what kind of tracking is "Do Not Track" trying to protect against, and what will this option do to help stop it?

Tracking is basically the way that Webmasters and advertisers learn about your Web browsing habits. This is where "related ads" come from, despite them not being entirely accurate the majority of the time. Turning on this feature for Firefox will send a request to avoid tracking … Read more

On November 6, 2012, Microsoft announced that it would be discontinuing its Windows Live Messenger client. This news falls in line with Microsoft's acquisition of Skype -- making it the company's go-to instant-message client after the first quarter of 2013. Migrating to Skype will make video calling easier, allow you to share your screen, make group calls, integrate Facebook, and add better mobile compatibility.

Looking to get a head start on merging your contact lists so you don't risk missing anyone after Messenger is retired? Just follow these quick steps:

Before getting started, you'll need to … Read more