Hardware

Booths were crowded, taxi lines were annoyingly long, and it was near impossible to make a cell phone call in Las Vegas last week, all anecdotal evidence pointing to a well-attended CES 2011.

Today we have hard data that proves attendance at the world's largest gadget trade show is creeping back up. The Consumer Electronics Association released its initial figures on headcount for this year's show, and the numbers are indeed up: CES 2011 saw more than 140,000 attendees flooding the halls of the Las Vegas Convention Center.

There will be an official audit this spring, but … Read more

Our utilities update report is a list of updates for Mac utilities that have been released in the past week. Though a utility can be any tool that helps you perform a routine task (including image manipulation and synchronization), our focus in this column is to bring you those tools that help in troubleshooting Mac hardware and software problems. This week there are updates for maintenance utilities, file recovery and file system management utilities, and some temperature and hardware monitoring tools.

Maintenance

The popular "TinkerTool" utility is a useful option for finding hidden settings in OS X and … Read more

Computer hardware is hot among holiday buyers this season, according to data out yesterday from ComScore.

As online buyers scoop up iPads, e-readers, laptops, and other portable devices, computer hardware is ringing in the holidays as the product category showing the most growth for the season so far, a 25 percent increase compared with last year.

Lower prices on flat-panel TVs is spurring growth in consumer electronics, helping that category grow 22 percent among online buyers over the same period last year, says ComScore. Books and magazines are also proving to be a popular gift item, up 21 percent from … Read more

Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitiello thinks he knows what Nintendo needs to do to revive Wii console sales.

"I would say [Nintendo] did exceptionally well in 2007 and 2008, started tapering in 2009 and 2010, and...I think if they were to price [the Wii] down to $99, they would explode," Riccitiello told IndustryGamers in an interview posted yesterday.

Riccitiello told the gaming publication that Nintendo should also "promote third-party content better, as opposed to first-party content," in addition to reducing the console's price to give the Wii "new life."

As a top third-party publisher on the Nintendo Wii, Riccitiello is especially concerned about the popularity of games on the Mario creator's console. He told IndustryGamers that he's frustrated by Nintendo's penchant of doing "less to promote third-party content" than its own games.

"I can come up with a dozen titles in the last decade, but it's really tough to come up with a dozen great titles that have been platform-defining for them that weren't their own," Riccitiello told IndustryGamers. "I don't care whether it's 'Mario' or 'Twilight Princess' or 'GoldenEye,' it was their own content. I'm going back to [Nintendo 64], and I can go back to SNES if you want, but they've never really been a heavy third-party supporting system.

"It's not lack of trying," Riccitiello went on to say. "They start the morning thinking what's best for their own intellectual property."… Read more

An outage that took down some of Amazon's European Web sites yesterday was caused by hardware error and not hackers, according to the company.

The online retailer's shopping sites in the U.K, France, Spain, and Germany were down for about half an hour starting around 9:15 p.m. GMT, leading to initial speculation that Amazon had been hit by hackers associated with the pro-WikiLeaks group Anonymous.

But in a statement released to Reuters, Amazon attributed the cause to hardware problems.

"The brief interruption to our European retail sites earlier today was due to hardware failure … Read more

Few would question the impact that mergers and acquisitions have had on the IT landscape over the past year, and most people believe the acquisition trend will continue to heat up in 2011. Market consolidation is already happening with big companies getting bigger, and a host of start-ups are looking to carve out a niche.

One of the biggest consolidators via acquisition is IBM. Big Blue has acquired no less than 65 companies since 2003 and in an exclusive interview with CNET, IBM Senior VP and Group Executive Steve Mills told me the company will continue to look for acquisitions … Read more

If you choose to upgrade the hard drive on your system either for a faster drive or for one with more space, you may find Apple's new FaceTime videoconferencing application will no longer authenticate. When launched, the program will give an error stating "The server encountered an error processing registration. Please try again later."

This has been shown to happen when people have upgraded from magnetic hard drives to SSD drives, but may also happen with other hardware changes as well. The problem is because Apple uses a certificate system for authenticating your system with FaceTime, and … Read more

A few people on the Apple Discussion boards have described an issue that seems to have cropped up in OS X 10.6.5, where the system may force-quit the log-in session when attempting to play video.

This is not a widespread problem, but has affected a few people and seems to happen when they use certain media players that support hardware-accelerated video playback. When the crash occurs, the system may flash a blue or black screen and then present the log-in window, quitting all user applications and unsaved data. Not all video players spur this behavior, and the problem … Read more

Our utilities update report is a list of updates for Mac utilities that have been released in the past week. Though a utility can be any tool that helps you perform a routine task (including image manipulation and synchronization), our focus in this column is to bring you those tools that help in troubleshooting Mac hardware and software problems. This week there are updates for several maintenance utilities, and one hardware utility for managing custom display applications.

Maintenance

This week MacPilot was updated with new options to disable the spotlight menu in Snow Leopard, along with a few tweaks to … Read more