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In its battle against the growing trend of cutting the cord, Comcast instead wants TV viewers to ditch the DVR.

The cable TV giant on Tuesday took the wraps off X2, an upgrade to its X1 entertainment platform, which includes a new compact set-top box that will store recorded programs in the cloud. The box doesn't even have a hard drive for local storage, resulting in a form factor three times smaller than conventional boxes, and 50 percent less power consumption.

Expected to be available to consumers later this year, the new set-top box also includes voice-activated control, allowing … Read more

A rather basic tool, SeekFast lets you quickly find keywords or phrases in a file. It can save you hours of combing through files looking for a quote, a passage, or a piece of code. It's probably worth the $14 charge if you have lots of files you need to search at once, but most users will do just fine with the free trial, as well.

This program's 100-file limit in the free version was rarely restrictive during testing, which is really nice. It has a layout that is almost entirely focused on giving you previews of the … Read more

It may look the same outside, but the MacBook Air got overhauled on the inside.

In the case of the solid-state drive (SSD) and graphics, it's a major overhaul.

SSD: Apple appears to be one of the first to stick a PCI Express (PCIe) SSD in a thin laptop. And that makes a huge difference, according to Anand Shimpi of Anandtech.

"This is a huge deal, totally the future. And pretty much all other notebooks announced at Computex still use [Serial ATA]. Apple did the right thing here," Anand said in response to an e-mail query.

Running … Read more

Interior Designer offers a solid project management solution for businesses involved in interior design that also looks great. It lets you color code different employees and contractors and connect with your customers. However, it doesn't completely outdo other popular calendars in regards to general features.

This download sports a very modern layout that lets you manage multiple employees and tasks at once. The only way to organize them is with color-coding; you can't overlay multiple calendars over each other. Only one person can manage the calendar, which is nice for oversight but makes multitasking hard. Luckily, anyone can … Read more

Free YouTube Downloader offers a powerful solution for downloading videos with more resolutions than you'd ever need, but tries to give you some nasty junk programs along with the install, too. Once you wade through that minefield, the program, itself, is one of the premier YouTube downloaders you can find.

During the Free YouTube Downloader's installation process, it tried to attach six different add-ons for third-party programs. Each one had a different way to opt-out, making it almost impossible to not walk away from the install with some sort of bloatware. Once you're finally in the program, … Read more

Data Converter converts numbers and hexadecimal values such as Word, Dword, and QWord to other formats such as date and time. This program will save some time and calculations for programmers, but it's not easy to figure out. If you're already used to the measurements it converts, you probably won't have a problem making it work after a couple tries. However, if you're new to coding, don't expect this program to nudge you in the right direction.

There is no need to install Data Converter as it comes as an executable file, ready to use. … Read more

Though it has one or two interesting features, Create A Diary doesn't offer the most appealing way to record your thoughts. It sports a woefully bad layout, questionable install, and is missing some much-needed features.

Since the program comes in an executable file, you should expect your antivirus software to flag it as suspicious. It was flagged twice during our testing. The program tries to create a shortcut in Microsoft Word, as well. Though this is just a 20-day trial version of the software, it has all of the features of the unlocked, $29.50 version. It easily creates … Read more

WinPDFEditor is shareware that stands above the masses of freeware and just beneath the do-it-all, big-box (and big-bucks) "solutions" for editing and converting PDFs. Since software costing three bills is no "solution" for most users' needs, WinPDFEditor's far more modest price makes it a serious alternative for home users, small businesses, and others who need something they can't find in freeware. WinPDFEditor Version 2 works in Windows versions 2000 to 8. WinPDFEditor is free to try, though the trial version places a watermark on output files, and file conversions are limited.

WinPDFEditor started with … Read more

URLNotifier is a different sort of search tool, but one with lots of potential uses. It searches Web sites en masse for words, phrases, links, and code excerpts--just about anything you can specify--and logs the results in an easy-to-use interface. It can match text, regular expressions, or whole sentences and check sites individually or in batches using site-by-site or global search terms and criteria. Andrey Shchukin's URLNotifier is portable freeware.

URLNotifier's user interface opened with a new Project ready for us to add URLs using a pop-up wizard. We could add as many URLs as we needed and … Read more