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The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) says it's time to update America's outdated landline telephone network. Chairman Tom Wheeler is calling for an all-digital system that works much like the Internet. At the moment, all landline phones in ... the United States connect to a single analog network made up of old copper wire and switches. Many of the key components are in such short supply that they are extremely expensive to replace, or simply aren't made any more. That not only makes it difficult for phone companies to maintain the network, but it means adding new lines or dealing with ... (view more)

Update: Save up to 60%. Offer ends on January 14th. Proceeds support our website and staff of writers. You can click here to go straight to the offer . Otherwise, continue reading below. With every new edition of Microsoft Windows comes new tweaks, ... new menus, and oftentimes no one seems to know where the old features went, which makes optimizing the operating system for a particular PC very difficult. Let's take Windows 7, for example. It's vastly different than Windows XP and offers new visualization features and background tasks (services) that literally rob a PC of its processing power, ... (view more)

A tandem of researchers in Singapore claim to have discovered a way to use table salt as a means to increase the density at which bits of data can be stored on a hard disk drive platter. Early projections indicate that this 'salty' method is ... actually 5 times more efficient than current hard disk densities. The method was first introduced by Joel Yang, a scientist at the Institute of Materials Research and Engineering (IMRE) at Singapore's Agency for Science, Technology and Research. Yang was able to hone his method using an extremely high-resolution e-beam lithography -- the same process by ... (view more)

Explorer2 Free Edition: the lightweight version of xplorer2 sports dual panes and folder tabs and allows you to browse anc copy files using an Explorer-like interface (with many improvements). http://www.zabkat.com Single App Want to maximize the ... efficiency of your PC? Sometimes your system can get really bogged down if you've got several bulky processes running all at once. Limit that with Single App, which allows just one process to run at a time. http://www.donationcoder.com Today's fresh software picks were provided courtesy of Bob Helmer at Shell Extension City, in partnership with ... (view more)

Infopackets Reader 'Fran' writes: " Dear Dennis, I have 2 Dell Inspiron laptops. One has a DVD drive and the other does not. I want to move a program that came on a DVD to the laptop that can't read DVDs. Can this be done, and if so, what is the ... easiest way? I have thought of copying the DVD to a stick and installing it that way. Would it work? " My Response: DVDs can be single or dual layer -- the difference being the single layer can store 4.7GB and the double layer twice that (at 9.4GB). That said, the majority of DVDs I've come across for the PC are single layer. To answer your question, ... (view more)

A lot of legal secretaries have written to me asking for ways to quickly change the line spacing in a document as they are frequently moving from single line spacing for block quotes and double line spacing for text and then back to single line ... spacing for signature blocks in pleadings. It really isn't all that difficult. If you find that you are frequently changing the line spacing in MS Word to double or you are making the switch more often than not, it's time to take measures so that this happens seamlessly and without lots of time and keystrokes. After speaking with more than a few of ... (view more)

As I was sitting here at my desk, a few things came to mind that I feel should be passed on to you. I have spent the past few months reading about firewalls on web sites and industry publications. Taken together, the subject is complex and ... confusing. Yet, only one point is clear in all the noise: you need a firewall if you ever decide to connect to the Internet. Period. The arguments start when the topic of what kind of firewall is best. Therefore, I figured the thing to do is try and clear away the confusion as best I can. First off, there are three different camps when it comes down to ... (view more)

Infopackets Reader Alfredo "Mexican55" writes: " Dear Dennis, I just finished reading yesterday's newsletter regarding DVD-R and DVD+R media. My question is related and pertains to file backup. In your opinion, what approach should I use to backing ... up my files, programs, etc? And do you recommend saving to CD or DVD media? My hard drive is less than 10 gigabytes in size. " My response: Deciding which media type is suitable for backup depends on how much information you want to archive, and the type of backup solution you choose. Having said that, I'd like to provide a ... (view more)

Infopackets Reader Bill G. writes: " Dear Dennis, I just finished reading the latest issue of the Gazette, and have two questions to ask you concerning transferring video files to CD recordable. Similar to reader Samuel C., I own a video recorder ... and have transferred a number of VHS videos to the computer. The problem is, however, that a number of the files are too large to copy onto a single CD recordable disc. I read somewhere that I can compress my video files into another format, and therefore, make them fit onto a single CD. Can you explain how this works? And secondly, I have ... (view more)

Have you ever had a RAID before? RAID is a technology used to increase hard drive performance and fault-tolerance. What is fault-tolerance? The hard drive inside your computer is responsible for storing programs and user data. RAID performance ... refers to the time that it takes the hard drive to read and write information; fault-tolerance deals with the means to protect data stored on the hard drive. RAID is an acronym which stands for Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive (or Independent) Disks. Generally speaking, the word 'Array' is a techy-term which represents related information formed in a ... (view more)