replacement

Discerning desktop replacements: Our favorite 17-inch laptops

You're likely shopping for a 17-inch laptop because you really need a desktop to run intensive graphics apps or Crysis, but you want a somewhat portable system you can lug to the couch, the dining room table, or occasionally to the office. Compared with your standard 15-inch laptop, the added screen real estate gives you a larger pallet with which to work in Photoshop and makes games and movies more immersive. The larger chassis also allows for more powerful components, from quad-core CPUs to dual graphics cards and hard drives.

Of the 17-inch desktop replacements we're reviewed in … Read more

How I got my third iPhone: dropping it on its power switch hits a sweet spot

There comes a point where every early adopter realizes they are no longer really adopting anything unique any more. This happens when a product becomes saturated, more available and more universal. For me, as I've seen over the past few days, that point has come to pass - at least in San Francisco.

Walking around, eating out, and driving around San Francisco, all I see are iPhones. But it's not only the young yupppie/guppie types any more. Rather, there are kids, young professionals, middle-aged folks (not so many older folks though), men, women, white, Black, Latino, Asian, … Read more

UltraExplorer is nearly perfect

There are several good freeware file-browsing alternatives out there. In the past, we've written about both free and shareware alternatives such as 2xExplorer Z1, Xplorer2 Lite, and others. However, none of them come close to the voluminous feature set of UltraExplorer.

Quicknote reinvents the jot

While most Notepad replacements expand on features, very few rebuild the concept of a lightweight text editor. Quicknote introduces an entirely unusual interface and features that don't exist in its cousins, importing the traditional concept of notes--as a mix of text and doodles--but in a decidedly unpolished package.

Take note of these Notepad replacements

Loved for its simplicity, Notepad has long been a staple for serious coders. Fast to load and possessing a tiny footprint, it's a great way to handle chunks of text large or small. Beyond word wrapping, though, it's bereft of many basic and useful features. There are easily a dozen decent freeware applications vying to replace it. Here are three of them: NoteTab Light, Notepad ++, AkelPad.

Process versus Process

It's hard to like the Windows Task Manager. It's clunky, makes drilling into computer's processes nigh impossible, and offers little help into what's going on. Like most native Windows tasks, though, there are freeware replacements available. Today we're looking at three of them: Process Explorer, Security Process Explorer, and Process Manager 2 Lite, all of which have recently received updates.

Alienware's award-winning big rig arrives

You may be asking, "Whatever happened to that laptop that won CNET's Best of CES award in the Gaming category back in January?" Like you, we've been waiting for the Alienware Area 51 m9750 ever since. With high-end options including dual video cards, a Blu-ray drive, and even a TV tuner, this massive black box impressed with a starting price around $2,000 (minus all those cool extras, of course).

After bugging Alienware on a seemingly weekly basis for months, the Area 51 m9750 was finally released this week, and our favorite Dell subsidiary even managed … Read more