guide

The motherboard on my HP laptop fried 18 months after I bought it—and six months after its warranty expired. Even though it uses the same overheating NVidia chip that convinced HP and several other notebook vendors to extend the warranty for machines using the faulty GPU, my make and model isn't covered.

When I asked the HP case manager to confirm or deny that my dead notebook shipped with the faulty part—the documentation that shipped with the machine indicates that it does—he said I had "no right" to that information because it was an &… Read more

Apple has posted a short, 14-minute guided video tour of the iPhone 3G S for those interested in a detailed demonstration of the phone's new features. In it, an Apple employee demonstrates new iPhone tricks one by one.

After a ton of hype and much deliberation, we finally get the official Palm Pre review from CNET Editor Bonnie Cha. She lays out all the pros and cons of the device, including the keyboard, app switching, battery life, and much, much more. Also, Jeff finally decides whether or not to buy one; tune in to hear the verdict!

We've been talking about the Palm Pre smartphone for a few weeks now, building up hype and getting excited about the release like everyone else, so we're especially excited to have Bonnie Cha come on today's show to give us her final review. If you have the time, be sure to check out her written review as well. So it turns out that she really likes the software. The multitouch is responsive (albeit with a slight lag), app-switching and push e-mail worked flawlessly, and the contact integration with Facebook, Outlook, etc. all impressed Bonnie, but don't rush out to buy it without hearing the negatives.

She also has a few complaints: as expected, the keyboard is pretty tiny and requires a rather long learning curve depending on the size of your fingers. In fact, Bonnie's got pretty small hands and even she had problems typing on it, so be sure to check one out before you buy. Next, the battery life pooped out after only one day of usage, which can be attributed partly to a faulty AIM client, but it's still something to keep in mind.

Overall, Bonnie fully recommends the phone to Sprint customers, including Jeff, who's been calling her at home to get insider's secrets since the phone was first announced. In the end, Jeff finally decides to at least go check it out on opening day, Saturday, but with no guarantees that he'll buy. No matter what phone he gets, we'll still have a great time with a live smashing of his old HTC Mogul on next week's show, so make sure to look out for that as well. Leave a comment below, though, and let us know what you think about the Palm Pre. Are you going to buy it? Is it worth the money to upgrade? Do you hate the phrase "iPhone killer" as much as the Bonch? Let's hear it.

… Read more

Jasmine: "June has always been an action-packed month for me. I can't remember the last time I didn't know someone who was graduating from somewhere, and I have always spent the third Sunday of the month hanging out with my dad. As such, I have plenty of experience picking out apt gifts for the occasions, no matter what my budget at the time. In that spirit, I've rounded up a handful of gadgets that range from uberaffordable to ultralux."

Check out Jasmine's picks for dads and grads.

Donald: "College is a time when … Read more

Last week's guide to becoming an expert at YouTube was quite popular, so we decided to do a follow-up in video form.

Included are some of our tips from the guide that could have used a little help from on-screen examples. We think you'll find they're quite a bit easier to understand once you see the before and after; especially in the case of YouTube's machine tags, which can change the way other people see your videos.

In just a few minutes we cover: • How to make YouTube always play the high quality stream • Focus on … Read more

These days I don't have much time for reading. More accurately, I don't make much time for reading as XBL and P90X take up any extra time I may have. This year, however, I vowed to read two books per month. Having only completed three so far, I'm a bit behind.

So imagine my disappointment surprise when Crave Senior Editor Leslie Katz barges steps lightly into my office and forces politely suggests that I write a blog on a couple of books she'd just received. Seriously, how could I say no to that?

So, yes. I didn't seek out the "The Manga Guide to Electricity" and "The Manga Guide to Statistics" myself, but I'm thankful they were forced down my throat came across my desk.

So far, I've only read through the first few pages of "Electricity" and the first chapter of "Statistics." Based on my limited exposure, I'm impressed by the $19.95 books' ability to inspire me to want to want learn more about two subjects I previously had little to no interest in. Kinda like having the hots for a Trekker in high school inspired me to learn Klingon. Or at least try.

The books are part of a series of manga guides by No Starch Press, a publisher of geek entertainment. Each book tells a story in the manga (Japanese comic book) style of a young girl being educated about the book's subject. If you've ever seen anime or manga you'll know what to expect here: huge eyes, gaping mouths, and of course, young girls in schoolgirl outfits. The art, however, never gets what I would call racy.

The real strength of the art is in its simple, clean lines that assist in the very pragmatic approach to teaching. … Read more

In the past, we've done Newbie's Guides for certain services, but we wanted to switch things up and really dig into a product's advanced features.

Video-sharing site YouTube is the perfect service to start with because it's massively popular and incredibly simple to use, but also has a few powerful features that are tucked away. This guide is to help you learn how to use some of these advanced features and to serve as a simple reference page.

For the sake of simplicity, we're only covering searching, viewing, and sharing. We've skipped uploading since it's pretty straightforward and made simple with the service's recently launched multifile uploader. We're also not including any third-party downloading tools because that is against YouTube's terms of use and is already an official first-party feature on some content.

Using YouTube's search tool: YouTube's search engine works a lot like Google's. In fact, it uses the same search operators to let you tweak your results. Here are some worth remembering the next time you're looking for a video:

• Limit to words in the title. Putting "allintitle:" in front of your search keeps YouTube's results limited to those videos with the matching words in the title. This is great if you want to keep it from searching through descriptions or tags. Not so useful if the video you're looking for has a misspelled or misleading title.

• Exclude a term. Add a "-" then the word you want to exclude will keep it out of the results. So if you're searching for explosions but don't want to see videos with diet Coke or Mentos, you'd type in "Explosion -diet -coke -mentos." Be sure to add the "-" in front of every word you don't want.

• Play the wildcard. If you're too lazy to type a word, or think that YouTube will figure out the words you're leaving out, you can just put in an asterisk in place of that word. In practice, this means that searching for something like "Fallout: Broken Steel" you could just type "Fallout * Steel" and have it guess the word in the middle.

If you can't remember these off the top of your head you can find them in YouTube's advanced search box, which shows up as an option in the results of any completed search. It's also worth going there if you want to filter how long the videos in the results should be. This is a great way to find long-form content that's 20 minutes or more.

Search and browse with your eyes. If titles and thumbnails are not enough, you can explore additional, related video clusters by using YouTube's warp feature. This is a feature that can still be found on some videos, but YouTube has since relegated it to its TestTube section. That doesn't mean you can't use it on any old video though. Simply inserting "warp.swf" in the URL instead of the word "watch" will send you into full-screen "warp speed" mode. To read more about how to use this feature check out our coverage of it.

Third-party search tools There are a handful of third-party YouTube search engines and tools that add a little bit of utility on top of YouTube's search. Here are some of our favorites:… Read more

Setting a world record a gasoline fueled midsized sedan, the 2010 Ford Fusion Hybrid traveled 1,445.7 miles on a single tank of gas on Tuesday, April 28, 2009.

Traveling between 20 and 45 mph depending on traffic to take advantage of the car's capability to operate in electric-only mode up to 47 mph and foregoing cruise control to maximize fuel economy, a team of seven eco-drivers set out from Mount Vernon, Va. on Saturday at 8:15 a.m. ET with a goal of reaching 1,000 miles on their 17-gallon tank.

The team included Nascar driver Carl Edwards, high mileage trailblazer Wayne Gerdes and several Ford Motor Company engineers who took turns at the wheel, twittering their progress along the way.

The 1,000 mile target was easily reached at 9:07 a.m. EDT on April 27. Edwards reportedly took them past this milestone with an average fuel economy of 76.3 mpg, according to a post on Twitter.

With fuel still in the tank, the team continued driving into the night to see just how far the Fusion Hybrid could go. … Read more