fixed

As freeware system cleaners go, Magix PC Check & Tuning Free offers a good balance. Some such tools are designed to be as easy to use as possible and give you few options and not enough information about what they're doing to your system. Others overwhelm beginners with options and detailed scan reports, and they often make it too easy to delete the wrong things. The freeware version of PC Check is designed to be easy to use yet useful to people with widely varying skills, yet it also lets you perform cleaning and tune-up operations separately as well … Read more

When some of the files in a zipped archive become corrupted, it often makes the entire archive inaccessible. ZIP2Ffix is a free tool that can recover many of the uncorrupted files in a corrupted ZIP or SFX archive. The program attempts to extract good files from a corrupted archive and save them to the same destination with the same file name, only with _ZFX.zip added. It's totally portable and small in size, so you can save it to a USB thumbdrive and run it on any Windows machine from Windows 2000 to Windows 7.

ZIP2Fix has a simple … Read more

When it comes to performing do-it-yourself fixes or upgrades on your Mac, one of the main resources to use is the online take-apart guides from iFixIt.

The company has detailed how to open and access internal components of many Mac models, and has gained a reputation for quickly tearing down newly released Apple hardware and outlining what's inside.

The manuals and high-quality detailed images offered by iFixIt can be invaluable, but if for some reason your Mac is not working and you need to use one of the manuals to replace a component, then you will need to access … Read more

When new Mac systems and devices come out, expect the do-it-yourself repair guide iFixIt to be one of the first to rip it apart and show you what's inside. When Thunderbolt was issued iFixIt disassembled the first MacBook systems to show the Thunderbolt controller chips, and also took apart the Thunderbolt cable to show the signal conditioning electronics in them. Only days after Apple released its Thunderbolt Display, iFixIt is at it again and has fully disassembled the monitor to show a surprising amount of circuitry.

Apple's Thunderbolt Display is in essence a Thunderbolt hub, and as iFixIt … Read more

The rap on AOL used to be that it was "the Internet on training wheels," yet many solid Netizens cut their i-teeth on its superfriendly apps. AOL Computer Checkup Lite continues AOL's tradition of making things as easy as possible for inexperienced users, with an ultrasimple interface asking simple questions about your PC experience. Not to worry; it doesn't actually do anything but make recommendations about your system's health. That's when you should start to worry.

AOL's interface consists of four check boxes and a Scan button. The boxes are associated with questions, … Read more

Apple and a group of book publishers were accused in a lawsuit today of illegally fixing e-book prices to "boost profits and force e-book rival Amazon to abandon its pro-consumer discount pricing."

The lawsuit (PDF), which was filed today in U.S. District Court in Northern California, alleges Apple, HarperCollins Publishers, Hachette Book Group, Macmillan Publishers, Penguin Group, and Simon & Schuster "colluded to increase prices" on popular books. (Simon & Schuster is owned by CBS. CNET News is published by CBS Interactive, a unit of CBS.)

The lawsuit alleges Apple and the book publishers employed … Read more

Apple rolled out a minor security update to iOS this morning that fixes a vulnerability with the software's PDF-reading capabilities.

iOS 4.3.4 (and 4.2.9 for those on Verizon) is available as a free update to iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad users. A description of the update says it "fixes (a) security vulnerability associated with viewing malicious PDF files." That's the same one used by JailbreakMe.com, a site that re-launched earlier this month to allow users to jailbreak their phones without using a computer or any special software, giving the owners a … Read more

Without any devices initially being available for it, Apple's Thunderbolt technology was relatively dormant in the public eye after its debut in the latest MacBook Pro and iMac systems. However, since the release of the Promise Pegasus RAID system, Apple's accompanying Thunderbolt cable, and some recent firmware updates for it, Thunderbolt appears to have caught a new wave of interest, particularly around the cable itself. People have wondered not only about its compatibility with Displayport (which has a similar connector as Thunderbolt), but also about its seemingly expensive $49 price tag.

iFixit today released a teardown of the cable to look at its components and in doing so revealed that the cable's unusually large connector jackets actually house a controller that is used to boost and condition the signal so it makes it from one end of the cable to another without any data loss.

Not only does the cable contain chips, but it contains a fair number of them. Each end of the cable contains six chips, with a large controller by gennum technologies, and a number of other smaller electrical components on printed circuit boards. Gennum technologies provides signal conditioning chips that allow for data transfer at high speeds. This technology appears to be the root of the cost for the cables.… Read more

Another ding for Ping.

When Apple rolled out iOS 4.3 a couple weeks ago, it quietly added a few features to the widely reviled Ping social-network service: push notifications for comments and follow requests, parental controls, and so on.

Soon after, many users started reporting a sizable drop in iPhone, iPod, and/or iPad battery life--and it wasn't long before Ping began to emerge as the culprit.

Fortunately, as reported at Pocket-lint and elsewhere, there's a simple fix for the problem: turn off Ping. Here's how: