usage

Nobody wants to pay the $30 monthly fee for the unlimited data plan. Brian Tong shows us a few tips to conserve your data usage.

Mail's memory footprint will depend on how you use it, but on average it should take up between around 50MB and 200MB of memory. For instance, I currently have 3746 messages in my in-box from 5 e-mail accounts (two Gmail accounts and three from other providers), as well as a few RSS feeds. With this setup on two machines Mail uses 104MB of RAM on my Snow Leopard machine, and 62MB on my Leopard machine. Some people, however, seem to run into problems where Mail will spike in RAM usage, resulting in system slowdowns.… Read more

Nobody wants to be the jerk boss who gives employees a hard time over occasional personal use of office supplies, but every now and then, things get a little out of hand. If your employees are taking advantage of their workplace printing privileges, Printer Activity Monitor can help you keep an eye on the situation.

The program's interface is plain and fairly intuitive, with its features arranged in a tree structure, but getting Printer Activity Monitor up and running definitely takes some effort. One computer must be designated as the data center--this is where document images will be stored--while … Read more

Larry Magid speaks with Kaiser Family Foundation Vice President Victoria Rideout, who is director of a new study that shows a "dramatic" rise in the amount of time children and teens spend using entertainment media, "especially among minority youth." The study, "Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-year-olds," only focused on recreational use of media, not homework, school-related online research, or reading books for school. The full report on how kids are using media on computers, phones, game consoles TVs, and other devices study can be read here.

Verizon Wireless, the nation's largest wireless provider, is reportedly revamping its existing wireless data prices and is considering implementing a usage-based billing model for its upcoming 4G wireless services as it tries to squeeze out more revenue from wireless data services.

Starting January 18, Verizon is expected to tweak its wireless data plan for what it considers its "3G multimedia" phones so that subscribers will pay the same price as customers using a smartphone. The news of the new pricing rates was reported Wednesday by the blog Broadband Reports, which obtained internal documents about the changes from … Read more

Managing hard disk clutter mostly means figuring out which files eat up all the space. Utilities like SizeExplorer Free help by pinpointing the folders and files holding you back from downloading season three of "West Wing." It's an easy-to-use disk analyzer with some valuable features.

The interface is pleasant and mostly intuitive, and there's a Help file if needed. SizeExplorer is fast: it ran through more than 170,000 files in around two minutes. The resulting Windows Explorer-like view lists each item's overall disk usage with colored bars and percentages. You can sort the list … Read more

After 19 months of consulting--in Silicon Valley, we prefer that term to "unemployment"--I've accepted a job.

Once I start, I'll have to stop blogging. But while I'm still independent, I'd like to wrap up here by offering a short series of articles addressing several key topics in the area of personal computing.

Today, the topic is energy efficiency.

Energy efficiency has become a major selling point of today's personal computers, especially laptops, because power consumption determines battery life.

Unfortunately, laptops are being optimized for energy efficiency in a way that isn't … Read more

Although technology and the Internet have taken a beating in the past for potentially limiting people's social interaction, a new study from the Pew Research Center has found that the opposite might be true.

According to a Pew Internet Personal Networks and Community survey, which polled 2,512 adults, the dawn of new technology and the Internet has not caused people to withdraw from society. In fact, the study found that "the extent of social isolation has hardly changed since 1985, contrary to concerns that the prevalence of severe isolation has tripled since then." Pew said that … Read more

This was originally posted at ZDNet's Between the Lines.

It used to be that an IT administrator could warn employees about opening attachments from unknown sources or clicking on links from unknown e-mail senders as the first line of defense against spam, malware, and other bad stuff on the Internet.

Today, the seedy side of the Internet comes in many different forms and from many different sources. Stop for a moment and think about the new places where malware might be buried, hidden, released, and shared--a legitimate site that's been hacked, a bit.ly link on Twitter, or … Read more