failure

Even if you happen to have a good backup solution, a hard-drive failure can be a major inconvenience. If you don't have a good backup solution, then a drive failure can be catastrophic. There are clues, however, that can help you predict problems with your hard drive.

DiskCheckup for Windows uses your drive's S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology) info to monitor its health and help you notice problems before you experience a complete failure.

In order to use DiskCheckup, you have to have at least one drive that supports S.M.A.R.… Read more

I can't say I've ever been a huge fan of all-in-one PCs, but a few years ago I was seduced into buying an iMac.

I'd like to blame it on an Apple ad campaign -- or the cumulative effects of multiple Apple ad campaigns -- but I think it had more to do with me briefly playing around with the review samples that made their way into our labs year in and and year out and rationalizing that the sleek, space-saving iMac would make a good hand-me-down computer for my kids when they were old enough to … Read more

PanteraSoft's HDD Health is a compact piece of freeware based on a good idea: monitoring your hard drives' S.M.A.R.T. data to alert you when temperatures get too high, disk space gets too low, or signs point to impending disk failure. HDD Health then issues pop-up, audible, or e-mail alerts in any combination you choose. But while the latest build claims compatibility with Windows 7, we found that HDD Health wouldn't display S.M.A.R.T. data in 64-bit Windows 7 installations, something other users have had issues with as well.

HDD Health is … Read more

Companies agonize over what to name a product, and we certainly recognize how difficult a process it is to come up with a good name.

Over the years, we've seen lots of good ones; the Palm Pilot, the Motorola Razr, TiVo, the Flip cam, are just a few.

But today we're not here to celebrate success. No, let us to rejoice in failure and admire some of the truly bad--and, in some cases, truly awful--names that have come along in the last 10 years or so, including the latest addition to the list: Motorola's Droid Xyboard. … Read more

Yesterday, we got some new numbers on the number of Vita hardware and software units sold, so I thought it would be a good time for a Vita launch recap, with a quick look at what's gone right and what's gone wrong.

First, the numbers Sony says it has sold more than 1.2 million Vita units worldwide since the portable launched in Japan on December 17. As CNET blogger Don Reisinger noted in his post, Sony didn't break down the sales figures by country, but acknowledged that this month's launch across the U.S. and … Read more

How do you throw away $4 billion? Buy spectrum you can't use. That seems to be what LightSquared did. The company bought access to a chunk of spectrum, and planned to create a new wholesale wireless network.

But the FCC this week said, sorry, your planned use of your spectrum intereferes with GPS. The FCC withdrew the waiver it had previously given LightSquared to allow it to operate, and now LightSquared is sitting on what appears to be a toxic asset: Not only can it not use the spectrum, but the FCC ruling means no one else can, either.

Or can they? What's happening here, and how will it affect you, the user of mobile devices who just wants more bandwidth?

We're discussing this today with two experts from CNET News:

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… Read more

This week's failure to communicate, from Path, was hardly a unique event. Companies--especially fast-moving startups--screw up all the time. The issue is how they react to their errors. Can Path recover, as Facebook and Google have from their privacy flaps, or will this flub hurt the company over the long term?

And how can you prepare for your own inevitable, and public, failures, if you're running your own company?

I have two guests today well-versed in the art of failure and graceful recovery:

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No, that's not a typo. Customers are reporting SIM card failures across all carriers, including CDMA-based Verizon and Sprint, which actually use the micro SIMs included in the iPhone 4S to roam on GSM networks as part of the "world phone" experience touted by Apple.

AT&T customer and Apple Support Communities member "robsdoghouse" experienced SIM card failure just after purchasing the iPhone 4S.

"I started experimenting with Siri and a couple minutes later the phone was hotter than usual and I get Sim Card failure, and Bad SIM messages."

Over 17 … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--One of my favorite tech conferences is the one focused, literally, on failure: FailCon, an annual event started in 2009.

The story of our industry's success is literally built on failure: flamed-out venture investments, bad ideas, and good ideas suffering under bad management or unfortunate timing. It's failure that creates the most important experience. It's the spoon that mixes together this experience into new combinations where people can, eventually, succeed. Or fail again.

I confess the conference did start off with a bummer of a keynote, from Anna Patterson, the co-founder of the disastrous search startup Cuil. … Read more