Cade Metz

This past November, in PC Magazines regular “Security Watch” column, we alerted readers to the dangers of using Kazaa, Morpheus, Grokster and other Napster-like peer-to-peer file sharing services. In using such services, explained columnist Leon Erlanger, you “open up your system to a host of security and privacy threats, including viruses, worms, Trojan horses, snooping, […]

Think back to the earliest days of the World Wide Web. Before Amazon.com and E*Trade. Before CNN.COM and ABC online. Before CRM, ASPs, and B2B marketplaces. In the early nineties, when the Web first rose to prominence, few saw it as a business medium. Few saw it as a fresh outlet for major newspapers, radio […]

Early this month, MPC Computers took an unusual step. At a time when so many companies offer technical support through third-party, often off-shore, facilities, MPC is moving its entire technical support operation in-house. All support duties will be handled by MPC employees working at the companys Nampa, Idaho headquarters. “Thirty new employees will be on […]

Yesterday, Microsoft announced a new version of its MSN online service that will be available in early January. Today, the company unveiled a new version of Hotmail, its Web-based e-mail service. This update, already available to the general public, includes improved spam filters, calendar software, and a contact application for keeping track of names, addresses […]

On Tuesday, Microsoft Corp. announced its latest online service: MSN Premium. The new service, for use with broadband Internet connections, will be available to the general public on Jan. 8 and offer a wide range of online features including spam filters, anti-virus capability, a firewall, parental controls, photo management, exclusive multimedia content and multiple e-mail […]

Voice over IP services—products that use the Internet to mimic telephone calls—have been around for ages. Net2Phone launched the first widely-available VoIP service back in July of 1996. Such services were much cheaper than traditional telephone service—in the heyday of the dot.com, you could even use them for free—but they never really caught on with […]

Today, Yahoo! (www.yahoo.com), the popular Internet portal, introduced four new antispam tools for its Web-based e-mail service, Yahoo! Mail. Most notably, the service now lets you create disposable e-mail addresses—DEAs—which you can easily discard should they fall into the hands of spammers. Yahoo! Mail, launched six years ago this month, is available in a free […]

IBM had its latest tools and strategies for pervasive computing—technologies that give you access to computing power outside the home and office—on display this week at its Industry Solutions Lab in Hawthorne, New York, just north of Manhattan. The centerpiece of the companys presentation was its WebSphere Everyplace Access product, but the company also provided […]

In May, according to the NPD Group, a sales and marketing research firm based in Port Washington, New York, notebook computer sales finally surpassed sales of traditional PCs. Notebooks now account for 54 percent of the nearly $500 million retail computer market, the firm says, up from only 25 percent in January 2000. “Notebooks sales […]

Apple isnt the only one selling notebooks with 17-inch displays. Today, Toshiba announced its first notebook with a display measuring a full 17-inches across the diagonal: the Satellite P25-S507. Available starting at $2,099, the metallic-blue system also includes a 2.80GHz Pentium 4 processor with hyper-threading technology, 512MB of RAM (expandable to 2048MB), a 60GB hard […]