Like electronic identity theft, computer viruses, and the spread of other computer crimes, software piracy is on the rise. The problem with software piracy is that software costs make this illegal activity appealing to the end user. After all, who is it going to hurt? Rich software companies?? This article investigates software piracy as a whole and the… Read More »

If you haven’t heard of smartphones, we’d like to learn where you’ve been hiding all this time. Smartphones have been all over the news and chances are, you do know what they are – only you know them under a different name. Smartphones are mobile phones with computer like capabilities.

At some point, your needs are going to outgrow the capabilities of your computer. You may find yourself in need of more hard drive space for all those videos and mp3s that you download, for example. Or maybe that cool new programming language you’ve been dying to try requires more memory than what your computer currently has. Unless… Read More »

It’s an unfortunate fact of reality, but children are the most victimized computer users on the Internet today. The good news is that there are some practical steps you can take to protect your children from sexual predators, hackers, and other seedy individuals who want to cause harm. This article will describe a few of them.

If you’ve spent any lengthy amount of time on the Internet, you’ve probably heard of open-source software but might not have fully understood what it is and why it even exists.  This article will describe this recent phenomenon and describe some of its benefits for the software using community.

Have you ever thought about networking your computers at home? If you have a small collection of computers around the house (and a small collection of computer users), you can connect each one of those computers to one another and share data, software, and hardware including a single Internet connection. There are many creative uses for home networking,… Read More »

In a previous article, we introduced automating some tasks with MS-DOS batch files. In this article, we’re going to introduce programming and describe how it can be used to control the way your computer works. Normally, computer novices aren’t interested in controlling the computer. New computer users are typically interested in learning more about how the thing works.… Read More »

The Windows operating systems already comes with a useful collection of pre-installed programs and even some games. But one of the first things that people do is download a butt-load of new programs as soon as a brand-new system is plugged in the wall and connected to the Internet. This article looks at some of the programs that… Read More »

Between taking care of the household, the kids, the pets, and the district PTA, computer care is probably one of the last things that you think of doing on a regular basis.  Without a regular maintenance schedule however, you could find out (the hard way) that a neglected computer is an energy hog – one that works harder… Read More »

Although you did not design or build your computer, you can turn it into a device that responds to your way of using it as if you were its original engineer or programmer. This is because the computer is a mere platform – a blank canvas, if you will – waiting for you to direct its operation or… Read More »