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The old Dell Latitude e5500 appears to have reached the end of its useful life (Final report from tech due this afternoon) I am loooking for advice on a replacement. I use it for photo, video and audio editing for YouTube, web sites and my radio program. It would have to be very mobile but have a big enough screen for video editing. The Dell Alienware 14 has been suggested, but spec'd out, it runs $1.5K. That seems a little steep to me. Advice?

Scarlett Johansson left nude photos of herself on her computer. A hacker grabbed them and sent them to gossip websites. A Pennsylvania high school issued laptop computers to students and then remotely activated the laptops' cameras to watch the students when they were away from school. On my computer, a program called Disconnect reveals that my favorite websites spy on me and track what I like to read, what I browse, what I buy. Privacy is almost a thing of the past. As I explain on my show this week, I follow the advice of "experts." I buy anti-virus software...

Researchers at Princeton and Northwestern universities have pored over 1,800 US policies and concluded that America is an oligarchy. Instead of looking out for the majority of the country’s citizens, the US government is ruled by the interests of the rich and the powerful, they found. No great surprises there, then. But the government is not the only American power whose motivations need to be rigourously examined. Some 2,400 miles away from Washington, in Silicon Valley, Google is aggressively gaining power with little to keep it in check. It has cosied up to governments around the world so effectively that...

Summary: A future computer might be a lot slimier than the solid silicon devices we have today. Researchers have revealed details of logic units built using living slime molds, which might act as the building blocks for computing devices and sensors.

The Los Angeles Times was the first newspaper to publish a story about an earthquake on Monday - thanks to a robot writer. Journalist and programmer Ken Schwencke created an algorithm that automatically generates a short article when an earthquake occurs. Mr Schwencke told Slate magazine that it took around three minutes for the story to appear online. "Robo-journalism" is increasingly being used in newsrooms worldwide. The LA Times is a pioneer in the technology which draws on trusted sources - such as the US Geological Survey - and places data into a pre-written template. As well as the earthquake...

THE FUTURE OF GLASS - "AMAZING"! If you wonder why HP, Dell and other leading computer manufacturers believe the end of the computer as we know it is near, here’s why. It's not the iPad that has them concerned about the future. It is developments like the ones Corning is working on that are game-changers:

Need advice on upgrading from Windows XP to Windows 7

I upgraded to Windows 8 about 4 months ago, and about a month ago, I started having issues with windowsupdate where the windowsupdate screen would open but everything in the screen was white, where there it normally tells you what patches you need. I tried several routes, including the Windows Update Troubleshooter found at the link above. The Windows Update Troubleshooter seems to be running, but it never comes to an end.....the blue bar just keeps rolling.....for hours if I let it. It says "Resolving problems" but nothing gets resolved. Nothing I tried worked, and so I rolled back the...

<p>Traditional hard drive manufacturers are currently going through a paradigm shift—one where new solid-state hard drives, known as SSD, are taking market share and slowly eliminating traditional hard drives. SSD hard drives of one terabyte or more are slowly becoming affordable to the masses.</p>

The growth rate of high-tech investments has slowed dramatically over the past 10 years, especially since the Great Recession. Everyone has a pet theory explaining why the economic recovery has been so weak, but here’s one overlooked factor: The productivity revolution driven by computers, software and the Internet is fading, and nothing has yet emerged to take its place as an engine of growth. For all of the incessant buzz in the markets about the latest tech start-up, few businesses are investing much in high-tech equipment or software. Investments in information processing equipment and software are growing at the slowest...

SNIPPET: "Security concerns ahead of this summer's Brazilian World Cup have increased after a football fan was beaten to death in host city Sao Paulo." SNIPPET: "There are serious concerns about the safety of travelling supporters at this summer's World Cup after more than 30 people were killed in 2013 as a result of football-related violence. One of Brazil’s biggest criminal gangs last year promised a ‘Tournament of Terror’. The threat was issued by Sau Paulo's 'First Capital of the Command', who in 2012 was a group behind the murder of more than a hundred of the city’s police officers."

In case you haven’t heard, an Alaskan Malamute killed a 6 day old baby in Wales this week. The dad had brought the dog home from the pub several months earlier because someone said they were going to get rid of it. This news makes me incredibly sad. It also makes me painfully aware that the breed may soon be as demonized as the Pit Bull. But humans also carry some responsibility for this tragedy. What with your fanciful ideas about dogs and such. So at the risk of upsetting some of my readers, let me state what should be...

TECHNOLOGY 7887 kHz, Your Home for Classic Cuban Espionage Radio The shortwave radio signals that the alleged Russian spies were using are still surprisingly effective. By Brett Sokol Posted Tuesday, July 6, 2010, at 1:53 PM ET The FBI documents that accompanied last week's arrest of 10 alleged Russian spies are alternately creepy—who knew the Tribeca Barnes & Noble was a hotbed of espionage?—and comical—turns out even foreign spies wanted to cash in on suburban New Jersey's real estate boom. With a nod to Boris and Natasha, the accused are also said to have used short-wave radio, a 1920s-era technology...

Dubai: At a conference in Dubai this week, an American futurist painted an intriguing, at times unsettling, picture of the coming world. As Dr Peter Diamandis went over his presentation slides at The Government Summit on Tuesday, there were plenty of raised eyebrows. In the future, the slides suggested, privacy will be a thing of the past, robots will take over our jobs, 3D printers will pop out everything from human organs to houses, and man will mine asteroids in deep space for unfathomable mineral wealth. The 58-year-old said hyper-tech breakthroughs are already hurtling us towards that future, today. “The...

Using precision lasers, a Nanoscribe 3D printer can print models of the Empire State building in a space the width of a human hair. Watching the machine build through the “lens” of an electron microscope is otherworldly—but the printer’s potential runs beyond microscale model making. Researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, led by Jens Bauer, believe such 3D printers may help craft a new generation of materials lighter than water and strong as steel. Today, the sturdiest materials tend to be the densest (like metals), and the least dense materials tend to be the weakest (like foams). Ideally, materials...

Features Explore some of the most popular features of Google Voice by watching these videos: Overview Voicemail transcription One number Personalized greetings International calling SMS to email Share voicemails Block callers Screen callers Mobile app Conference calls Number Porting

I want to replace my old, very gunked up Dell, and would like to have W7, if possible

The Windows XP death clock is ticking away. While Microsoft has extended support for malware protection, do not be fooled -- XP will be officially unsupported on April 8. If Microsoft has its druthers, these XP users will upgrade to Windows 8 and maybe even buy a new computer. However, there is a problem with this -- the Windows 8 UI is radically different from XP and people do not like change (especially people clinging to an operating system from 2001). Also, they may not need to buy a new computer, because their existing is probably fast enough... for...

Apple has managed to leave everyone behind with the world’s first 64-bit ARM architecture system-on-chip. However, if the rumours about Qualcomm’s forthcoming application processor is correct, then the world’s largest supplier of chips for mobile devices may be preparing something that will blow away not only Apple’s A7, but even Nvidia’s Tegra K1. Qualcomm is reportedly working on Snapdragon 810 system-on-chip that boasts up to eight 64-bit custom cores with up to 4MB of cache and up to 2.50GHz frequency. The app processor also packs Adreno 430 graphics core with up to 500MHz clock-rate, LPDDR3/LPDDR4 memory controller and various...

Cody Wilson holds the Liberator, a fully-functional firearm that can be created using a 3D-printer. After setting the Internet abuzz with a blueprint for a functional 3D-printable firearm, Cody Wilson recently signed a book deal to chronicle his journey, and in his spare time the “dark web” aficionado is placing the finishing touches on a Bitcoin anonymizer project. Wilson, 25, has been busy to say the least. Last spring he uploaded the blueprint for his 3D-printable gun dubbed the Liberator, and within two days the file was downloaded over 100,000 times. He pitched his story as a non-fiction book and...