power

You know the old saying: you can never be too rich or too thin, or have too much battery power for your Android phone.

If you're forever running low on juice, you've probably thought about packing along a spare battery -- but that's a hassle. Not only do you need a way to keep it charged, you also need a convenient place to stow it.… Read more

Judging by the number of e-mails I get on this subject, a lot of folks don't understand the difference between computer and hi-fi speakers. For example, how is an Audioengine A5+ ($399 a pair) functionally different from a PSB Alpha B1 speaker ($300 a pair)?… Read more

PowerPoint Viewer 2007 is free software you can use to view your presentations from Microsoft PowerPoint 97 and beyond without opening the program. It's a quick and convenient way to view PowerPoint files on your computer.

There isn't much to be said about the interface, since there is almost nothing there: as soon as you open the program, it opens a window to select the file you want to view. It's just like viewing a presentation in Microsoft PowerPoint except you can't alter or edit anything. You can print the presentations, which is a bonus. PowerPoint … Read more

Zoom lenses sell cameras these days, so it's no surprise that manufacturers are doing everything they can to get longer lenses into increasingly smaller bodies.

A 3x or 5x zoom lens used to be the standard for ultracompact cameras -- those measuring 1 inch thick or slimmer -- but in 2012, you can easily find a skinny point-and-shoot with a 10x optical zoom.

The frontrunner here is the sub-$250 Sony Cyber-shot DSC-WX150 thanks to its excellent features, fast autofocus, and the quality of its pictures and video (though its color accuracy could be better). Most of the category consists of sub-$200 cameras, though, so there are options if you're just looking for a simple pocket camera with a long lens.… Read more

Apple ranked highest in J.D. Power and Associates' tablet satisfaction survey.

The survey, which J.D. Power plans to conduct yearly, relied on tablet users who had owned their devices for less than two years. The index was a composite of -- in descending order of importance -- a device's performance; ease of operation; styling and design; features; and price.

J.D. Power's survey points to a close battle between Apple and Amazon, which enjoyed a wide lead over the rest of the pack. The industry average was 832, according to the survey. Apple scored 848 of … Read more

System sleep in OS X systems is convenient to have for saving power without interrupting your workflow, especially for laptop systems. This is easy enough to set up in the OS X system preferences; however, there may be times when despite having sleep enabled you might have an important task running and wish to prevent the system from going to sleep.

In past versions of OS X, the system would not enter sleep if applications were running and writing files to disk or running lengthy computational tasks, but this has changed in the latest releases of OS X, where programs must invoke a power assertion … Read more

Now that you have learned about the basics of home networking in Part 1, and how to optimize your Wi-Fi in Part 2, in Part 3, it's time to get your hands dirty and learn how to take control of your network completely.

All home networks start with a network cable. Even if you plan on using all wireless clients, in most cases you will still need at least one cable to connect the wireless router and the broadband modem. A typical home network needs more than that because chances are you also want to connect a few Ethernet-ready … Read more

iPhone owners continue to be the most satisfied smartphone customers of all, at least according to new survey results from J.D. Power and Associates.

For the eighth time in a row, Apple's flagship phone took home top honors for customer satisfaction. Ranking 849 out of 1,000, the iPhone shined in all of the categories tallied by J.D. Power but scored especially well in physical design and overall ease of use.

Based on two separate studies, the results revealed consumer satisfaction with both feature phones and smartphones in performance, ease of operation, physical design, and features. Only … Read more

System sleep in OS X is a convenient feature that saves power while preserving your work flow. This option has been available in Macs and other PC systems for years, and is especially useful for laptops where you might wish to conserve battery power. While computer sleep is nothing new, there are some details of how it is implemented in OS X that may help you troubleshoot situations where sleep does not behave as it should.

For Mac systems sleep is governed by the system management controller (SMC), which has a number of variables it uses to manage when disks … Read more