Data Center

Shaw reviews HP's TouchSmart Desktop 610 Quad series.

When you set up a Wi-Fi network, whether using access points (base stations) from Apple or another vendor, you're usually playing a guessing game. Where should I put a base station to get the best coverage and performance? Or multiple base stations? Apple provides some tools to help, including the somewhat hidden Wi-Fi Diagnostics program (buried in /System/Library/CoreServices/), but using them requires some expertise, as well as keeping your eye on ever-changing signal-strength numbers. NetSpot bypasses the technical in favor of the visual. This free site-survey software is a remarkable aid in laying out even a small-home network, using a Mac laptop as your survey tool.

They say that a man’s home is his castle – we figure that if you’re going to have a castle, it needs to be filled up with some really cool, high-tech stuff. If you’re working at a home office or just want to boost that home network in order to get a better connected home entertainment system up and running, the following products are great gift ideas:

In our 12th year of presenting our Cool Yule Tools holiday gift guide, we’ve done our best to try to categorize the gift ideas into different groups – portable entertainment, travel gear, etc. While many of these ideas could, in theory, be placed there, sometimes we just feel that the device/gift idea should just be placed in “miscellaneous.” So that’s what we did with some of these. Enjoy!

Like smartphones and music players, the digital video and photography category has exploded with cameras over the past few years. Rather than focusing on every model and device with an X number of megapixels, we’ve focused our attention new ways and gadgets that incorporate photography or video in new or different ways. There are plenty of sites that cover each new camera (PC World comes to mind), rather, here are some cool gift ideas to enhance your existing camera or video device:

While last year may have been the year of the tablet (with the introduction/invasion of the iPad), this year certainly qualifies as the year of the tablet accessory. Whether it’s a case, a pillow, stand or speaker system, we’ve compiled a list of our favorite devices to go along with our favorite tablets:

Remember when cell phones were as big as a brick and required a separate shoulder pack to keep the battery up and running? Yeah, so do we. But we also remember the birth of the smartphone, and since then, they’ve gotten smarter and smarter. With dozens of choices out there now (several iPhone models and carriers, along with multitudes of Android devices), we figure that your gift recipient already has a smartphone. So we’re focusing on some products that can enhance their smartphone, whether it’s a nice case, charging device, Bluetooth headset or other cool accessory. Here’s what we liked this year:

Some people want a tablet but don't want to shell out big bucks for it. For those frugal shoppers, this week was special, as it marked the release of the $200 Amazon Kindle Fire and the $250 Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet.

New 16-core AMD Opteron 6200-series CPUs in the Dell R715 bring huge bang for the buck to wide virtualization workloads, but not until your OS supports it

Synology finally hits the midrange sweet spot in price, performance, and capacity with the 10-drive, rack-mount RS3411RPxs