Utilities

UPDATE July 30, 2011: This offer has now ended.

If you are like me, you've fallen madly in love with the ease of use and the easy accessibility of some of the cloud storage solutions out there. At every chance I had, I would try to invite all the people I knew to increase my free storage space until one day, I was maxed out. I now had to choose between deleting some of my files and moving them off of the cloud, or paying an annual fee for a certain amount of storage space.

In the past, I … Read more

UPDATE July 26, 2011: This offer has now ended.

Got something to burn?

Ashampoo Burning Studio 10 is a must-have utility tool for all of your burning needs on CD, DVD, and Blu-ray disc in full HD. Rip, backup, restore, and easily create your own HD and full-HD Blu-ray videos. Most of all, save the hassle of installing multiple multimedia programs--burning has never been easier!

And four days only, Ashampoo and CNET have teamed up to bring you this special opportunity to save 84 percent and get Ashampoo Burning Studio 10 at its lowest price ever: $7.99 (originally $49.… Read more

Tackling RAM problems in computers is not the easiest of tasks. While RAM is a relatively easy concept and simple to replace in the system, identifying problems with it can sometimes be daunting.

RAM is basically a huge grid where the system and active programs store active work space information (things they are currently doing). If part of a RAM chip is bad, the chip may still work fine until a specific application runs into the bad areas, and then that process will not be able to store items properly and will either hang or crash.

Unfortunately it is not … Read more

Recently Stellar Phoenix released a new version of its Mac Photo Recovery software (version 4.0), which is a $39 file recovery utility tailored toward identifying deleted and lost media files on disks, including a number of image, video, and audio formats. The program supports recovering files from both local disks as well as from a variety of cameras. In the past I was unimpressed with the lackluster performance of Stellar Phoenix's "Data Recovery" suite for OS X, but found that after using Photo Recovery that despite a few limitations it, for the most part, appeared to … Read more

Our utilities update report is a column on updates for Mac utilities that have been released in the past week. Though a utility can be any tool that helps you perform a routine task (including image manipulation and synchronization), our focus in this column is on bringing you those tools that help in troubleshooting Mac hardware and software problems. This week there were updates for one maintenance tool, some file management tools, and a terminal emulator.

Maintenance

The maintenance utility Cocktail has been updated to add OS X 10.6.8 compatibility. The tool is used for running maintenance routines … Read more

UPDATE July 6, 2011: This offer has now ended.

Just in time for your 4th of July weekend, we bring you a special offer to turn those unforgettable memories into something you can easily share with friends and family. Starting now until 11:59pm PDT on Tuesday, July 5, 2011, Wondershare DVD Slideshow Builder Deluxe is yours for just $14.95. That's a savings of 75% off the regular price of $59.95 and is available exclusively on CNET.

I know that everyone's family is different, but in my family, we take a lot of photos and videos … Read more

UPDATE June 20, 2011: This offer has now ended.

It's Friday again and we have yet another offer for our CNET readers. Trend Micro is typically well-known for its antivirus and Internet security software, but with cloud backup services getting ever so popular, the company wants to get in on the cloud action too. There are several other solutions out there, but SafeSync has a strong security background of Trend Micro backing it up. Traveling? No problem. Access your music, movies, photos, or documents away from home and on your mobile devices. SafeSync keeps your files synchronized and up-to-date … Read more

Our utilities update report is a column on updates for Mac utilities that have been released in the past week. Though a utility can be any tool that helps you perform a routine task (including image manipulation and synchronization), our focus in this column is on bringing you those tools that help in troubleshooting Mac hardware and software problems. This week there were updates for a couple of data-recovery programs and a couple of popular maintenance utilities.

Data recovery Stellar Phoenix is a company that develops a number of recovery programs for OS X, including the standard Data Recovery program … Read more

The OS X terminal is a powerful interface with your computer that can be used to script tasks, run under-the-hood routines on your system, remotely control other systems, and perform a number of other detailed and specific actions. While getting familiar with the Terminal may seem like a daunting and unnecessary task, there are a few useful terminal commands for troubleshooting the system that can be run easily without needing to know much about the Terminal.

uptime

The uptime command shows the time that has elapsed since the system was last restarted. While not directly useful, it can provide you … Read more