PCTips Box

How would you like to have two iPhones in one? NerveGas of iPhone Dev Team reveals that the team has been using dual-booting to jailbreak the iPhone for months. The team has decided to release the hack enabling iPhone users to boot multiple versions of the iPhone software/OS “from” the handset.

This should present iPhone users with quite an advantage once the 2.0 firmware is out, meaning they’ll be able to have a bootable jailbroken software version, as well as a non-jailbroken software version available at the same time on their device. Partition-making is involved: (more…)

No one ever bought a car or a computer because it could go slower. If your hard-disk drive seems to take forever to go about its business, or if it’s having trouble keeping up with your CD-R burning software, chances are it’s time for a tune-up and defragmentation.

Step 1: Close any open applications. Disable antivirus utilities, screen savers and other background programs. Make sure you’ve quit all programs in Windows by pressing Ctrl+Alt+Delete once (don’t press it twice or you’ll restart the computer).

Step 2: Windows will show you a list of applications running. Highlight each application (one at a time) and click on End Task to close each one. (more…)

The iPhone, that extremely popular gadget built by the Cupertino company Apple, is one of the latest devices threatened by some malicious packages, as Orla Cox of Symantec today warned. What’s interesting is that this threat, if we can name it so, is not as dangerous as it may sound, because the only thing it does is to harm some of the applications deployed on the affected iPhone. The malicious file comes as a firmware update and is named “iPhone firmware 1.1.3 prep”. Its creators described the package “an important system update; install this before updating to the new 1.1.3 firmware”, according to the Symantec official. (more…)

Apple’s move to Intel architecture opened up a whole new world of possibilities, and it was not long before software, such as Parallels, VMWare and Boot Camp, came and made lots of those possibilities reality. Now, with Leopard released, new information about how the Mac OS reacts to Windows executable has come to light.

The abundance of speculation has been spurred by two independent reports. The first, a thread on the Wine mailing labeled ‘Interesting Behavior of OS X’, has Steven Edward’s describing that Leopard has an undocumented loader for Portable Executables, which are used in 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows. (more…)

Download and install went smooth, but for now it looks like this really is just a “bug fix” update with no noticeable added features…Anyone out there try it??

UPDATE: A list of big fixes can be found on Apple’s site here. It looks like Apple just patched security vulnerabilities in Safari for the most part…so sad.

UPDATE 2: Check out some other changes we’ve all found below. (more…)

Steve Jobs, the Apple CEO, announced a long time ago that iPhone, the next generation handheld device, will be also compatible with Google’s products. The long awaited gadget was finally released on June 29 and some of the users are asking themselves how they can sync the device with Google Calendar. If you’re a Google Calendar user then you should know that it’s a product powered by the Mountain View company that allows you to organize and track your events. If you’re not a fan, now you know.

However, some of the users are looking for help and, since the product was recently released, the Internet is quite useless as no trick is posted yet. (more…)

You’re an early adopter. You braved long lines for an Apple iPhone.

Now you want to synch it with a PC running the most powerful version of Microsoft’s latest operating system. Not so fast.

The iPhone software that connects and synchronizes the device to a personal computer won’t run on 64-bit editions of Windows Vista, according to a posting on Apple’s Web site.

The post indicates that the iPhone software will, aside from the Mac OS, operate only on PCs running 32-bit versions of Windows Vista or Windows XP. It notes that “64-bit versions of Windows are not supported. (more…)

1. UI built for the era of video and digital photography
It’s not actually Microsoft’s key selling point, but the thing that everyone will probably find the most useful about Vista is that photos, videos and music are not treated the same as Word documents any more. When you open a folder of photos, they come up as they’d appear in Google Picasa or Apple iPhoto. There’s inbuilt basic photo editing. Music folders come up in columns of ID3 tags, a bit like iTunes. Finally, you don’t have to rely so much on third party apps to work with your files.

2. Image-based install
PC enthusiasts spend a lot of time installing and reinstalling Windows for their own and other people’s PCs. The Vista DVD is actually a pre-installed version of the OS in a compressed form, making it substantially quicker to install. It’s also much easier to customise for unprompted installation with the correct defaults, and you can even install your own software automatically at the time Vista is installed - like slipstreaming service packs but on steroids. (more…)

Just days after the launch of the sacred Apple iPhone in the US, and amidst an unexpectedly mixed set of reviews, CNET News reports that owners of the highly desirable shiny black squarkbox will have to stump up $79 for replacement battery packs, plus another $7.00 for shipping back to Apple. That’s bad enough but the real problem is that all data on the phone will be lost and it will be up to users to back it up first. (more…)

At WWDC 2007 Steve Jobs previewed Mac OS X Leopard with a new background image that looked very similar to backgrounds used in the Windows Vista beta. This lead many testers to wonder why Apple picked a background almost identical to what Microsoft used in Windows Vista just years after the famous, “Redmond, start your photocopiers” campaign? The move has prompted others to start their own “Cupertino, start your copiers” slogans. (more…)