Personal Computers

Just when PCs looked to be dying a slow, painful death, they became interesting again. As expected, this week's news coming from Computex in Taiwan is flush with new PCs and PC technologies, but is it enough to reinvigorate a market that has faced declining sales since 2011? The market peaked at jus...

Microsoft on Tuesday announced a refresh of its Surface Pro tablet-laptop computer. Although Microsoft said the fifth generation of the unit has been redesigned from the inside out with more than 800 new custom parts, the Surface Pro looks similar to its predecessor. "If you were looking for a major...

Microsoft on Tuesday launched a major effort to bulldoze its way into the educational computing space carved out by Google, with the introduction of a streamlined operating system called "Windows 10 S," a range of new collaborative programs for K-12 schools, and two new Surface laptops aimed at the ...

"What can it do that Windows can't?" That is the first question many people ask when considering Linux for their desktop. To a degree, that depends on whether you choose a desktop environment or a window manager. If you want a desktop experience that is lightning fast and uncompromisingly efficient,...

Who's afraid of the Linux terminal? Not you, if you've learned the basics of navigating your system. But how will these newly acquired skills help improve your computing life? To give you a sense of the terminal's everyday usefulness, here are some examples of tasks the terminal is well-disposed to ...

What I think is amazing about all of the massive data breaches we hear about is that we know most are not reported. In other words, for every email, customer record, or financial theft in the news, there likely are hundreds that remain in the shadows. This problem is huge and yet another incident c...

WikiLeaks has released more Vault 7 documentation online, including details about several CIA projects to infect Apple's Mac computer firmware and operating system. The site unloaded its first batch of stolen Vault 7 data earlier this month. The CIA's Embedded Development Branch developed malware t...

If you've begun to tinker with your desktop Linux terminal, you may be ready to take a deeper dive. You're no longer put off by references to "terminal," "command line" or "shell," and you have a grasp of how files are organized. You can distinguish between a command, an option and an argument. You'...

Once you have a sense of the vast potential of Linux, you may be eager to experience it for yourself. Considering the complexity of modern operating systems, though, it can be hard to know where to start. As with many things, computers can be better understood through a breakdown of their evolution ...