volume

Sometimes programs come loaded with all sorts of sound notifications and little to no way of adjusting the volumes. Even worse is when some of the sounds are, for one reason or another, ignored by the volume control the program offers. Using these simple steps you can adjust the overall volumes of certain programs without having to mess with the master volume of your system.

Step 1: Locate and right click on the volume control icon in your Windows system tray (the collection of icons to the right side of the taskbar).

Step 2: Select Open Volume Mixer from the … Read more

Apple's Disk Utility program is a useful tool for managing hard drives and volumes; however, in Snow Leopard, Leopard, and other past versions of OS X, when you would run a drive verification routine it would only access the format structures of the volumes on a drive and check them. For instance, if you have a drive that is partitioned into two volumes, then if you select one of those volumes in Disk Utility and run a Verify Disk routine the program will check the volume's formatting in a routine similar to the following:

If on the other … Read more

Apple's iPad hit a big benchmark this week, surpassing 100,000 applications made specifically for it.

To put that in perspective, the platform has been out for 453 days, with developers getting access to its software development kit in January 2010, on the day the product was first announced.

The iPad hit stores that April with the promise of supporting "almost all" of the 150,000 plus apps on the company's App Store. Since then, developers have created a healthy supply of apps that have been tailored to the larger screen real estate.

In terms of … Read more

Apple's App Store has crossed an important benchmark, jumping past 500,000 apps in the App Store when combining apps for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad. That's according to Chomp, 148apps and Chillingo, which have put together an infographic of some of the milestones and trends on the way to that number.

The infographic pulls out some interesting data points about the progression of the App Store, particularly the price and makeup of the store's volume. Paid apps, for instance, account for 63 percent of the App Store's overall library, and average out at $3.… Read more

It is not uncommon to see computer terms getting mixed up in everyday discussions. For instance, I regularly hear people referring to a flash drive as simply a "USB," or a full computer system as a "CPU." For some purposes the cross-use of these terms seems to work out, but at other times it can lead to confusion, especially when troubleshooting storage media, when terms like disk (or "disc"), memory, media, filesystem, volume, partition, and mount point can be a headache if used interchangeably.

Ultimately all of these terms refer to some sort of … Read more

There are a couple of reasons--besides replacing a broken drive--why you might consider swapping out your Mac's hard drive. One is to increase your available storage capacity, and another is to better the performance of your drive. While most Macs ship with 500GB to 1TB drives that should be adequate for most home purposes, you can now get up to 3TB of data on a single drive, and the standard 7,200rpm mechanical drive crawls in comparison to the performance of some SSD drives these days.

Generally if you are just looking to increase the storage capacity of your … Read more

When setting up a hard drive or even after using one for a while, sometimes it is useful to partition it so sections of its space can be used for different purposes. These purposes can be to set up a multiboot environment, separating system files from user files, or for segmenting used data from scratch and backup disks. For instance, if you use a drive to back files up, it may be beneficial to create one large partition for Time Machine, and have a second partition be used for manual backups since Time Machine will eventually use most of the … Read more

Users in a growing Apple Support Discussions forum thread are expressing their concerns over what appears to be a hardware-related sound issue with Apple's 27-inch Cinema Displays. The main issue seems to be that sound will randomly cut out, ceasing to work until a system restart is applied.

Jerky video presentation with no or distorted sound is another symptom these users have noted, along with a delay when pressing the volume keys up or down to when the volume graphic is displayed onscreen.

Though a definitive solution does not appear to be available from Apple or users on the … Read more

WinCatalog Light is a free disk cataloging tool that scans and catalogs your system's disks or files. You can use the listings it creates to quickly find specific files in your disk collection without having to insert a bunch of removable disks and search them one by one. It also extracts file descriptions and automatically fetches MP3 song names online. It can scan any storage device that Windows can access.

WinCatalog Light's interface is a slightly smaller version of the familiar Windows app style: File menu, icon-based toolbar, left-hand navigation panel, and main window. With a pretty good … Read more