Tech News Archives - Page 76 of 134

AOL Instant Messenger to shut down in December

Posted on October 6, 2017

AOL Instant Messenger (aka AIM) is probably the oldest Internet instant messaging service still in existence today, but that will soon change.

If you’re one of the millions of people worldwide who still use AIM to chat with friends and relatives you’ll need to migrate to something else before the end of the year.

I’ve had a feeling this day was coming for some time now since so many AIM users have switched to Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and SnapChat in recent years.

For what it’s worth, AIM outlasted both the once hugely-popular Yahoo Messenger and MSN Messenger services, but now AOL has succumbed to the Facebook/WhatsApp/ShapChat steamroller as well.

AOL released a new help article this morning with the details of the impending shutdown. Here are the five most important takeaways from that article: [Read more…]

Review: Acer Predator 21 X Gaming Laptop

Posted on September 21, 2017

Serious “gamers” are always thirsting for the latest, greatest and fastest gaming PC money can buy. Well, I just found it.

Acer has released the fastest, most powerful and (possibly) the largest gaming laptop ever built.

Simply put, the Acer Predator 21 X Gaming Laptop is almost beyond belief.

This thing packs a punch that would knock out all but the most powerful desktop gaming computers, and the price tag reflects it: roughly 9 grand at the time of this writing!

But check out everything you’ll get for that 9 grand: [Read more…]

Scam alert: CCleaner has been hacked. If you use it you need to download the latest version, ASAP!

Posted on September 18, 2017

CCleaner has been one of my favorite Windows cleanup tools for years, and I’ve recommended it to countless other folks during that time.

Unfortunately, CCleaner’s maker Piriform has just announced that hackers have somehow managed to break into one of their servers and add malicious code to a recent build of the CCleaner software.

That means if you recently downloaded CCleaner to your PC or installed a recent update, your computer could well have malware on it. [Read more…]

Just for fun: How close are we to the planet Mars?

Posted on September 17, 2017

Most everyone knows that our universe is an amazingly vast place that the human mind will likely never be able to truly comprehend, but relatively few realize just how far it is even to our closest planetary neighbors.

Take for instance the distance to that favorite fodder for countless science fiction books, the planet Mars.

Many of us have been fascinated by the “Red Planet” for our entire lives, but actually going there would take a lot longer than a typical vacation would allow. [Read more…]

Scam alert: Equifax hack leaves almost half of all Americans subject to identity theft

Posted on September 8, 2017

As you’ve probably heard by now, credit reporting giant Equifax has been hacked in what is being described as the largest security breach in history.

According to the company, the breach may have affected up to 143 million Americans. That’s almost half of the entire U.S. population.

And when you consider that millions of our fellow citizens are children who aren’t even in Equifax’s system, you can see that the odds are quite high that you and I are among those affected. [Read more…]