Hasta La Gadget!

The Chumby One, much like the original, is an interesting beast. For all intents and purposes, it’s a mod-friendly box that sits on your nightstand and pushes out real-time information that it pulls down from the web. That said, the inbuilt display may be too small to be considered “glanceable” in some scenarios, and if you’re ferociously nodding your head up and down in agreement, we’ve a hack you should probably see. One xobs recently discovered that a composite video output could be added to the Chumby One, enabling it to output its information onto any display with such an input. Granted, the device can only support a single display at a time, but hey, who ever said you could have your cake and eat it too?

Chumby One gets composite video output via marginally difficult mod originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 28 Dec 2009 13:33:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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One of the most persistent myths about Windows is that you need to reinstall the operating system regularly to keep it running at top performance. Let’s take a look at the real problem and how to fix it.

Today we’re talking about the myth that Windows slows down over time, and how to solve the problem. The reality is that Windows doesn’t slow down if you just take care of your PC a little more. Follow these procedures, and you won’t have to wonder if spending hours backing up data, installing from disc, and re-installing your essential applications is really necessary.

What Does Slow Windows Down Over Time?

I’m not going to sit here and tell you that your Windows PC will never slow down—because for many people, they almost always do. What actually slows your PC down are too many poorly written applications that stay resident in memory and waste CPU cycles, having too many badly written low-level applications that hook into Windows, or running more than one antivirus application at a time. And of course, if you’ve run your PC’s hard drive out of space, you can hardly blame Windows for that.

If you aren’t getting the picture, the problem is usually the person behind the keyboard that installed too many junk applications in the first place. More gently put, it’s often that (very well-meaning) person’s gradual easing of their safeguards and cleaning regimens as time goes by.

Stop Installing Junk Applications

Installing software should be thought of like feeding your PC. If you constantly feed your PC garbage apps, it’s going to get sick and won’t be able to run fast anymore. These poorly written applications clutter your drive with unnecessary DLL files, add always-resident Windows services when they don’t need to, bloat up your registry, and add useless icons to your system tray that waste even more memory and CPU cycles. Usually you can get away with using a few terrible applications, but as you continue to install more and more of them, your PC will slow down to a crawl.

Be Smarter About What You Do Install

We feature and recommend a lot of software applications around here, but you should keep in mind that we aren’t trying to tell you to install every single one of them at the same time-just install the applications that you actually need and you’ll generally prevent the dreaded format and reinstall.

Here’s a few tips to help you know what applications you should be careful with:

• Apps that function as an Explorer plug-in, because they directly hook into the shell and any problem will make your entire PC slow or in the worst case, crash repeatedly.
• Antivirus applications are notorious for slowing your PC down, and you should never, ever, ever use more than one real-time antivirus application at a time. We recommend Microsoft Security Essentials as a free, fast, and awesome antivirus tool.
• Anything that says it will “Speed Up Your PC” or “Optimize Your RAM” will most likely slow it down, or best case, do nothing at all. Avoid these like the plague.
• Make sure to install official system drivers from the manufacturer website. Drivers have a huge impact on performance, and you want to have stable, updated drivers.
• Registry cleaners are a mixed bag, and really aren’t going to speed up your PC in most cases. The biggest problem, however, is that too many of the commercial registry cleaners set themselves to run at startup in the system tray, wasting your memory and CPU cycles.
• You should strongly consider the idea of using portable applications wherever possible, since their self-contained nature means they won’t clutter up the rest of your PC with things you don’t need.

Keep Your Computer Clean and Trim

Once you’ve rid yourself of your junk application habit and resolved to only use healthy, useful applications, you’ll want to make sure to keep your PC clean of any remaining clutter that doesn’t need to be there. You can set up a shortcut to manually run CCleaner silently with the push of a button, but your best bet is to set up CCleaner to run automatically on a schedule, so you don’t have to remember to do it.

Since CCleaner is only going to clean up temporary files, you’ll still need a good solution for keeping the rest of your PC clean-and Lifehacker’s own Belvedere can help you automate your self-cleaning PC or automatically clean up your download folder.

With all of this automated file deletion going on, your hard drive is likely to get a bit fragmented. If you’re already running Windows 7 or Vista, automatic defrag comes out of the box and probably shouldn’t be messed with, but Windows XP users will need to use Windows Tasks to setup a schedule and automatically defrag their drives.

Use a Virtual Machine or Sandbox to Test Software

If you still want to test out all of the latest software, including apps that look a bit rough around the edges, your best bet is to use a virtual machine to test out anything before putting it onto your primary operating system. You can install all of your software in an XP or Windows 7 VM just like it was a real PC, and with the latest VMWare player releases, you can even enable Windows Aero in a guest VM. If you are new to the idea and need some more help, you should check out our beginner’s guide to creating virtual machines in VirtualBox, or Windows 7 users can check out our guide to using XP Mode. If you don’t want to go the virtual machine route, Windows XP and Vista users can alternatively use Windows SteadyState to protect their PC and roll back all of the changes on a reboot.

So what about you? Do you always take the reinstall route, or have you devised your own best maintenance practices? Share your experience in the comments.

The How-To Geek reinstalls Windows only every few years and has no speed problems at all. His geeky articles can be found daily here on Lifehacker, How-To Geek, and Twitter.

Taiwanese company RoyalTek’s just announced the first of what will apparently be five pico projectors it releases in 2010. The RPJ-2000 boasts 3M’s second generation LCoS chipset, VGA and NTSC / PAL inputs, and 0.5 watt speakers. The projector can project a 65-inch image at 640 x 480 resolution with 14 lumens of brightness. Disappointingly, there is no onboard storage or media player on this little guy, but we’re betting one or more of those other models RoyalTec is set to unleash probably will have those glorious extras. If you want to use this baby with a Mac, you’ll need to purchase an adapter kit which runs around $43, in addition to the $315 pricetag of the projector itself. There’s no word on sale of the RPJ-2000 outside of Taiwan as of yet, but we’ll keep you posted.

RoyalTek outs RPJ-2000 pico projector originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 28 Dec 2009 12:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on December 18, 2007 by CyberNet.

About a month ago Ryan introduced me to Peggle, a game from PopCap Games.  He had been playing it and it looked like fun, so I decided I’d try it too.  Little did I know how addicting this game would turn out to be. MSNBC named Peggle as one of the “Top 5 most additive games of all time” this year, and I can understand why! Given this, you’ll understand why I was excited to hear today that Peggle is now available on the iPod… woo hoo! Along with Peggle, I can’t forget Sonic the Hedgehog which was also added to the list of games that you can purchase for $4.99. It’s just like you remember it from Sega Genesis which I’m sure will have a bunch of you excited.

Back to Peggle though, it’s perfect for the iPod. Those of you who have played it will understand why.  The object of most stages in the game is to clear all of the orange pegs by hitting them with a ball that you shoot from the very top of the screen. The click-wheel on the iPod suits Peggle perfectly because players will be able to use it to adjust where the ball will shoot from, and of course they can push the button to actually shoot the ball. That’s all that’s involved with Peggle which means it’ll be a fun and simple game to play on your iPod.

Sonic on the other hand may be a bit more difficult.  Joystiq points out how it doesn’t really suit the iPod well when the only controls you have are a click wheel and buttons.  The game really does require a bit more than just that, and you might find yourself frustrated while playing it, as fun and cool as it may be. Those of you that played Sonic the Hedgehog on Sega Genesis are probably having a hard time picturing how you’d even use an iPod to play the game (with no blast processing). Apparently it’s possible, but just expect a few hurdles along the way as you try to beat the game.

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Look, we don’t like having to constantly be skeptics who don’t believe in anything unless there’s absolute proof of its existence… oh, wait: yes we do. Especially in scenarios like this, where sources are unclear, a bit vague, and poorly translated. Regardless, we’re hearing that it’s possible that Lenovo is actively developing an e-reader and may already be in an internal testing phase according to “sources” cited by Tech 163. Such a move wouldn’t be wholly unexpected — the e-reader bandwagon is getting more crowded every day. Still, we can’t be sure yet, though Tech 163 apparently asked Lenovo for comment and they didn’t outright deny the plans. Make of that what you will. There’s a chance we’ll hear more about this at CES — and that’s in just about a week and a half.

Lenovo possibly developing e-book reader originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 28 Dec 2009 11:37:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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