Observing Registry activity on your PC can be very useful when you’re troubleshooting odd problems. There are some great tools around to help. Sysinternals Process Monitor is probably the best: set it running and it’ll record exactly which Registry keys your processes are reading and writing (amongst other details), and browsing the report later will usually give you a much better idea of what’s going on.

Of course this approach really only works when you have some specific event you’d like to monitor, such as the launch of an application. If you’re experiencing some intermittent problem then what might be more useful is a program that tells you which Registry keys have changed in the last 5 minutes, say. And that’s where NirSoft’s RegScanner comes in.

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Seagate has officially taken the wraps off of its third generation hybrid HDD/SSD drive, the Momentus XT, a drive which the company has tailored to the demands of tech savvy users and "prosumers."

In its third generation, Seagate's XT line finally looks to be mature and ready for widespread use.

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From a technology perspective, Thanksgiving 2011 ranks as one of my most insightful and frustrating holidays ever. I'm an enthusiast who wants to see Microsoft make a strong comeback among consumers. Unfortunately, three Turkey Day incidents left me disheartened.

Microsoft has got a big perception problem.

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Verizon kicked off helluva holday sale for XOOM LTE on Black Friday -- and you can still get it today online: $199.99 with new two-year activation. But hurry, if interested. Surely pricing like this can't last. That's $529.99 less than the closest comparable iPad 2, and you won't get an LTE radio from Apple.

Is that price low enough for you to buy? In February, when XOOM pricing first leaked, I asked: "Would you pay 800 bucks for the Motorola XOOM?" Eh, no, you wouldn't. You didn't like $600, when I asked about it later on. But now the price is way less, so I'm asking again. Would you pay $200 for Motorola XOOM LTE? Please answer in comments.

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Department of Justice officials on Monday seized 150 domain names for selling counterfeit goods such as professional sports jerseys, golf equipment, DVD sets, footwear, handbags and sunglasses.

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) announced the seizures today, as a continuation of "Operation Save our Sites," a federal initiative to crack down on counterfeiting and piracy on the Internet.

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It brings new meaning to Black Friday.

Three days ago, airline Regional Express dropped a press release about a passenger's cell phone "emitting a significant amount of dense smoke, accompanied by a red glow". That must be air industry lingo for fire. That's a word you don't want to hear aboard jetliners in flight. Running for the exits could be worse. Of course, no airline wants to admit to flaming anything inside one of its cabins. The smoker was an iPhone, by the way. Can you tell from the photo whether it's the 4 or 4S? The incident occurred on a flight from Lismore to Sydney, Australia -- yes, on Black Friday.

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The tech gods blessed those who worshiped at the Black Friday altar, or so claim industry analysts releasing numbers yesterday and today. I confess to taking my daughter to an outlet mall, where the checkout line at the Sony store snaked from register to door. But I bought nothing. What about you? Did you do the Black Friday diddy? Please tell your story in comments.

Doorbuster sales -- those with really low prices for people willing to wait in line -- started as early as 10 pm local time Thursday night. Many tech retailers, Best Buy and Microsoft Store among them, opened Midnight Friday. "More than one-in-three (36 percent) Black Friday tech purchasers bought a doorbuster item -- an increase of four percentage points compared to 2010", says Ben Arnold, NPD's director of industry analysis. By NPD estimates, more broadly, American consumers completed one-quarter of their holiday shopping on Black Friday. However, tech buyers finished significantly more -- one-third.

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RPost provides a service for serious emailers that turns e-mails from any origin into official registered documents that can be encrypted, tracked, and verified for legal purposes or "e-signed" for contractual reasons.

This week, RPost is officially launching its registered email service for BlackBerry with the RPost app for BlackBerry. This application integrates into BlackBerry's native email client, and lets users choose to "Send Registered" emails from their mobile devices, which are the same trackable, encrypted, time-stamped messages that are sent from RPost's other platforms.

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Trim Enabler 2.0 Beta 2 has been released for Apple Mac owners running OS X Lion on non-Apple SSDs. By default, OS X only supports the TRIM command -- a technology designed to keep SSDs running at optimum performance over a prolonged period of data writes and deletes -- on Apple SSD drives. Trim Enabler is designed to extend this support to cheaper SSDs manufactured by third parties too.

Version 2.0 is a major rewrite of the original code, which was optimized for Snow Leopard users. Although marketed as Lion-compatible, the free app’s author (Cindori), has since admitted that the older version wasn’t optimized for use with the newer OS.

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German developer JAM Software has released the latest version of its speedy MFT-based file search tool, UltraSearch 1.60.

The program makes use of the NTFS Master File Table to enable very fast searches, without having to spend valuable time and system resources in building any indexes. So you can just launch UltraSearch, type a keyword, and any matching files or folders will appear almost immediately.

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The number of tools that can be used to tweak and customize Windows does nothing but increase, and the claims made by many of these utilities can be difficult to believe. So a program that claims to be the Ultimate Windows Customizer gives itself a lot to live up to. But the title is well-deserved, as the tool perfectly balances the tweaks that make a difference to system performance with those that allow you to stamp your mark on the operating system.

Tasks such as editing the context menu or tweaking the shortcuts that appear in the navigation pane of Explorer have long been possible by editing the registry, but this is not something that everyone is comfortable with. Ultimate Windows Customizer eliminates the need to delve into the darker recesses of your OS if you are uncomfortable in doing so, but this does not mean that you must compromise on features and options.

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I sat eating lunch with coworkers when we saw the news over the wire. Dell announced the end of retail sales, taking its business direct to customers -- that was 1994. We laughed about the craziness. Compaq dominated the PC market, leveraging a huge partner network of dealers, resellers and retailers. Cutting out the middleman meant more margin for Dell, and presumably lower costs for businesses and consumers, but how would the brand maintain visibility without shelf space? Dell direct seemed destined to failure.

Succeed it did, making Dell the No.1 PC maker, based on shipments, by decade's end. Dell didn't just go direct but redefined PC distribution, manufacturing and marketing. The Austin, Texas-based company later adopted real-time manufacturing logistics that made competing operations from Compaq, HP and IBM look antiquated. While their managers guessed how many PCs to produce and ship to the channel, Dell provided component suppliers access to orders in real time, which kept the company from over-ordering, dramatically cut component costs and let customers configure exactly what they wanted. More than a decade after Dell's high (and today's subsequent low), Apple distribution, manufacturing and marketing is the envy of competitors. Both companies achieved similar supply-chain dominance, but theirs is a fascinating study of similarities and contrasts.

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If you live in the United States,  a four-day holiday weekend of feasting and shopping soon ends. Thanksgiving didn't stop developers from pumping out new wares this week. We pick 25 worth your attention, if not some warm thanks.

For many people, the Start menu is one of the most visited aspects of Windows, but if you’re looking for an alternative program launcher, Winstep Nexus 11.10 is a great option. This free tool is not only a great time-saving dock style launcher that can be used to access your programs, it is also an extremely attractive widget manager that can be used to monitor everything from CPU usage to the weather.

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Today marks the official beginning of the holiday gift shopping season in the United States; a time when commerce shifts into high gear and product sales spike for the year.

And with each passing holiday, retailers seem to focus even more closely on consumer electronics.

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By measure of discounts, tech retailers are running scared this holiday -- well, all perhaps other than Apple, which discounts range from puny 7 percent to 16 percent. Elsewhere big discounts mean retailer state of fear and expected Grinch-like consumer demand.

"Overall we have seen nothing, either in the first couple of hours of Black Friday shopping or in the pricing and product tactics of the industry, to make us change our viewpoint to expect a very weak holiday season", Stephen Baker, NPD's vice president of industry analysis, says. How grim will be the Holiday reaper? "NPD has been predicting that this would be the worst holiday since 2008, on a revenue basis, and the early season [discount] aggressiveness from the industry confirms this level of concern".

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