Latest Technology News

While the standard Windows partitioning tools have improved a little in recent years, they’re still on the basic side. To put it politely. If you really want to take control of your hard drive layout then you’ll need a little help, and Paragon’s Partition Manager 11 SE Personal is a great place to start.

The program doesn’t simply allow you to create, format and resize partitions, for instance. You also get options to move or merge them, redistribute free space between existing partitions, undelete or recover a lost partition, and more.

The US Justice Department accuses AT&T of defrauding the government, alleging the carrier improperly billed for services intended for the hard of hearing. The system has become a method through which scammers, many from Nigeria, make purchases using stolen credit cards and fraudulent checks.

Called IP Relay, the service allows the hard of hearing to place phone calls to a hearing individual relayed by messages sent over the Internet. A call center operator then relays the message to the called person. A former worker in one of AT&T's call centers had already filed a whistleblower suit over the matter.

Has less than one week passed since new iPad starting selling in 10 countries and one US territory? It seems like longer. Tomorrow, Apple's tablet will be available in 25 more. With more people set to buy new iPad, which sold 3 million units over the three-day launch weekend, time is right to discuss things you should know before plunking down your hard-earned cash.

There is suddenly lots of confusion about new iPad, with all these conflicting media reports -- blogs and news sites running praising reviews alongside stories about yet another fatal design flaw. You just don't know who to believe. Perhaps these five things will help you find clarity.

Graphics company Nvidia on Thursday launched its new GeForce GTX 680 and 600m GPUs, which were built using the next-generation Kepler architecture and the 28nm process, replacing the two-year old Fermi architecture.

With the new Kepler GPUs, Nvidia focused on creating faster, smoother, and overall better graphics that were much more energy efficient.

As if Anonymous didn't have enough to boast about. While cybercriminals accounted for the most breaches, "activist groups created their fair share of misery and mayhem last year as well -- and they stole more data than any other group", according to a report Verizon released today in cooperation with Australian, Dutch, English, Irish and US officials. The study attributes 58 percent of data thefts to hacktivists.

"The most significant change we saw in 2011 was the rise of 'hacktivism' against larger organizations worldwide", Verizon reports. "The frequency and regularity of cases tied to activist groups that came through our doors in 2011 exceeded the number worked in all previous years combined".

If you ever tried one of the old Microsoft Flight Simulator series then you’ll know that learning just the basics took time, effort and real commitment. Which, of course, was why some people liked it: there was a real challenge involved.

If you were more intimidated by the program’s complexity, though, Microsoft Flight, the free successor to Flight Simulator, may appeal as it’s far more accessible.

Compressed files are not always used for the space savings reasons they were initially created for, but they are still very important. The widespread availability of high-speed Internet connections means that the size of downloads is far less important than used to be the case, but many downloads are still supplied in one of the many compressed formats that are available. OS X includes integrated support for a number of formats but if you want to be able to extract the contents of more archives The Unarchiver has been updated to version 3.0 with support for more compressed files types than ever before.

As you’ve probably guessed from the name of the app, this is a piece of software that is concerned solely with the decompression of archives, so if you’re looking to compress files you’re going to need to look elsewhere. In the software world there is a general trend towards jack-of-all-trades utilities, so it is slightly unusual to come across an app that does just one thing -- thankfully, The Archiver does it well, so it can be let off the hook somewhat.

If you’re looking for a video-editing suite that combines a powerful feature set with user-friendly features while taking full advantage of your computer’s hardware to deliver blistering performance, then Cyberlink PowerDirector 9 Ultra64 fits the bill perfectly. While it’s been superseded to some extent by version 10, it’s still an excellent video-editing tool in its own right.

If you’re looking for a fast, powerful and reliable video editor for a price that won’t break the bank, you’ve come to the right place. You can pick up a full version of Cyberlink PowerDirector9 Ultra64 for just $29.95 -- that’s less than a third of its MSRP! But hurry the offer ends at 23:59 Central European Time tonight. That's 6:59 pm EDT, Americans.

Adobe has released a free public beta of Adobe Photoshop CS6.

And while these are relatively early days -- we don’t have information on pricing, yet, or a firm date for the final release -- it’s already clear that this is going to be a significant upgrade.

What's the saying about the rock that caused the avalanche? That might be the best analogy for iPad since its launch nearly two years ago. ABI Research says there are now 220 different tablets available globally -- the majority came after iPad. Judging by early new iPad sales, 3 million over the three-day launch weekend, many of you want just one.

But ABI says that will change, particularly as buyers in emerging markets scoop up smaller tablets. Surely that has to be good for Android and perhaps even Windows 8 someday.

There are pageviews to be had when it's time to criticize Apple: probably as much if not more than writing about the latest iGadget. It is the same pattern over and over. First, Apple debuts its latest creation, and the press fawns. Next, a blogger or journo with an ax to grind finds some obscure problem affecting a small segment of users and makes it into a showstopping defect.

Without much thought, the rest of the media jumps on this report, and hundreds if not thousands of stories tell us how Apple's at the beginning of the end, lost its edge, blah blah blah. Same story every time -- from Antennagate, to Batterygate, and now Heatgate.

Microsoft and Taiwanese smartphone maker HTC announced on Wednesday that the first Windows Phones have finally begun selling in China. The first device for sale in the country is the 4.7" HTC Eternity, which will be available to the Chinese market unlocked.

Microsoft was expected to launch Windows Phone in China some time in the first half of the year, and this is the first major platform announcement the company has made for the market.

There are countless websites that provide streaming content, either in an episodic or less structure form. Add to this the media files you already have stored on your hard drive and you have a lot of audio and video to contend with. Miro is a powerful media player that can be used to play local files, but is also geared up to playing online content from the likes of YouTube and Hulu. The application itself is nothing new, but the release candidate of version 5 of the program gives a tantalizing taste of what’s to come.

While there is a leaning towards video in Miro, the release candidate helps to highlight that it can be used for other media as well. If you have a hefty MP3 collection on your hard drive, Miro can be used to listen to your favorite albums and while you’re doing so, you can take advantage of the application’s ability to go online and retrieve the correct album art and information for any track or albums that are incorrectly labelled.

Less than three weeks after launching jAlbum 10.4, an update that "perhaps should have been labelled jAlbum 11", according to its makers, the Swedish web album creation tool has been updated again with a number of improvements and feature tweaks.

jAlbum 10.5 claims to improve album downloading by up to eight times, plus adds the ability to import albums created in the desktop application as well as online. It also promises that album projects can now be moved and copied without breaking. jAlbum 10.5 is in fact the fourth update of the program since version 10.4 was released on March 2, with three minor updates appearing in a 48-hour period from March 7-9.

Since last year, leading systems vendor Hewlett-Packard has been assessing the future of its PC division, known as the Personal Systems Group. Today, HP announced its PSG will merge with its Imaging and Printing Group (IPG) in a combined business group known as the Printing and Personal Systems Group.

At the end of last year, HP examined a potential spin-off of the PSG, but ultimately decided against the idea, since the division was so tightly integrated into HP's overall structure.