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• 14 Great Things iPhones and BlackBerrys Can Do

  Smartphones are intelligent, but with the 14 tips and tricks in this story, they could approach genius territory. We'll show you how to run seven separate devices from your iPhone, how to play Internet radio (mostly for free) on your BlackBerry, how to make free phone calls from an iPod Touch, and how to revive a dead cell phone battery (if it's detachable) while you're in winter weather.

  Written by Zack Stern • 29 April 09 03:27

• Turn your iPhone into a remote mouse and keyboard

  When I give presentations, watch movies from the sofa in my office, or need to start a task away from my desk, I don't want to be within arm's length of my mouse. So I appreciate the freedom offered by Air Mouse Pro (US$6, buy-only), a full-featured remote control from R.P.A. Tech. The top half of the Air Mouse Pro Screen features a two-button trackpad, while the bottom half gives you a keyboard, along with controls for browsing the Web and playing movies and music.

  Written by Kate Dohe • 28 April 09 08:41

• The 10 biggest annoyances in Outlook

  Microsoft's highly capable email client Outlook is glitchy and has too many features for its own good.

  Written by Preston Gralla • 23 April 09 09:22
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  Turning off disk defragmenter may solve a sluggish PC (Part 2)

  When we last left our intrepid blogger (way back on Friday), he'd pointed the finger at Vista's Disk Defragmenter and cried, "J'accuse!"

  Written by Rick Broida • 14 April 09 05:29

• Turning off disk defragmenter may solve a sluggish PC

  For the last couple months I've been troubleshooting a vexing problem on my new quad-core HP desktop: Roughly once per week, the machine would start running as slow as molasses.

  Written by Rick Broida • 11 April 09 05:42

• 10 Twitter tips for the workplace

  Having trouble convincing your boss that Twitter isn't a waste of time? Then you might find it interesting to learn that social media evangelists across the U.S. federal government are blasting out Tweets several times a day to their constituents. Here are their suggestions for how to integrate new media tools such as Twitter, Facebook and Flickr into a large, old-fashioned bureaucracy:

  Written by Carolyn Duffy Marsan • 10 April 09 03:23

• Rev up the Search Engines

  Your web startup needs to cut through the clutter and reel in customers, and search engine optimization (SEO) can be just the ticket. SEO helps improve your search rankings so your website shows up higher on Google, Yahoo and other popular search engines. "SEO is really [fundamental]. It should be a line item when you're developing your website," says Greg Bozigian, founder and chief media officer of new media marketing company Visionary View.

  Written by Amanda C. Kooser • 14 March 09 11:11

• Find yourself on Google Latitude without GPS or a phone

  Google Latitude is a useful--if slightly creepy--way to track your location on a mobile phone or GPS laptop. But you can get roughly the same sense of fleeting privacy on any old Wi-Fi PC; Google Latitude automatically pegged me within about 100 feet of my ground-floor office on GPS-free laptop.

  Written by Zack Stern • 12 Feb. 09 07:10

• Get started with virtual machines

  It's great to have multiple computers. On the first of them, you can install a database or crunch spreadsheets. On another, you can simply browse the Web, listen to music, and check your e-mail. Yet another can have a supercharged configuration for playing games. Sure, you could have all of your programs on the same, single computer, but some applications -- such as games -- can't run concurrently with other programs.

  Written by Scott Spanbauer • 16 Sept. 08 08:50

• Ten fixes for Vista's worst features

  Just ask anyone who's seen Spiderman 3: good ideas seldom survive bad execution.

  Written by Lincoln Spector • 16 Sept. 08 08:40

• Ten cool Google Chrome tips and tweaks

  My guess is most people don't use Google's new Chrome Web browser as their primary browser yet. Google still has a long way to go with the browser adding features and fixing problems. Nevertheless, I've collected what I think are some of the most useful tips and the most interesting tweaks for the Chrome browser.

  Written by Tom Spring • 09 Sept. 08 15:20

• Ten tools to make Windows shine

  Are you worried about malware and spyware plaguing your system? I have a cool, free tool that gives you an extra layer of defense when you're Web surfing. I also have two free utilities that can lock up and hide your sensitive folders and keep them from prying eyes. Plus, for readers who didn't like my earlier tip for disabling the Insert key, I offer a nifty program to watch your Insert, Caps Lock, and Num Lock keys.

  Written by Steve Bass • 01 July 08 16:02

• How to partition internal Flash memory on Cisco routers

  On most class B Flash file systems, you can partition banks of Flash memory into separate, logical devices so that the router can hold and maintain two or more different software images.

  Written by Brad Reese • 05 May 08 12:17

• Kernel space: Ticket spinlocks

  Spinlocks are the lowest-level mutual exclusion mechanism in the Linux kernel. As such, they have a great deal of influence over the safety and performance of the kernel, so it is not surprising that a great deal of optimization effort has gone into the various (architecture-specific) spinlock implementations. That does not mean that all of the work has been done, though; a patch merged for 2.6.25 shows that there is always more which can be done.

  Written by Jonathan Corbet • 14 Feb. 08 10:06

• Born from Firefox

  They are four applications designed to serve different purposes: A web browser, a music player and organizer, another that does the same for video, and a word processor for screenwriters. Yet they share one thing in common: All were built with a Mozilla-based toolkit, either the Gecko Runtime Environment or its successor, XULRunner. Both toolkits use the same codebase which runs Firefox.

  Written by Howard Wen • 07 Feb. 08 09:30

• Consultant: How to deal with Oracle licensing

  A consultant offered advice Tuesday regarding how Oracle customers can get the best deal and protect themselves while licensing software from the enterprise software giant.

  Written by Chris Kanaracus • 06 Feb. 08 08:50

• Tutorial/How-to: Use Google apps to build your business

  Google is synonymous with searching the Web, but search isn't the company's sole focus. Google also provides top-notch services that other businesses can use to improve their Web presence, reach new customers, and make boatloads of money.

  Written by PC World Staff • 31 Jan. 08 10:01

• Kernel space: timerfd() and system call review

  One of the fundamental principles of Linux kernel development is that user-space interfaces are set in stone. Once an API has been made available to user space, it must, for all practical purposes, be supported (without breaking applications) indefinitely. There have been times when this rule has been broken, but, even in the areas known for trouble (sysfs, for example), the number of times that the user-space API has been broken has remained relatively small.

  Written by Jonathan Corbet • 23 Aug. 07 09:44

• Prepare your network for VOIP

  Companies wanting to get the most use of voice over IP (VOIP) need to know the steps involved in hardening their network and Internet infrastructure to get the best results out of their digital voice deployment projects.

  Written by David Strom • 31 May 07 08:49

• How to build a better Web site

  The Internet has brought a lot of business to My1Stop, a Kansas, U.S.-based printing company. About half of its $US20 million in annual revenue comes from Web traffic, says Michael Joseph, vice president of e-commerce.

  Written by Mary K. Pratt • 22 May 07 14:25