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Canary is a developer and beta version of Google Chrome's newest features. By allowing both versions of Chrome to run side-by-side, you can test out the newest features without sacrificing your stable version.

If you're using the most recent version of Canary, there's a new experimental feature that lets you view the offline cached versions of Web pages. Not sure if you have the most recent build? Easy fix. Just click the Settings icon in the top-right-hand corner, then choose About Google Chrome. Your browser will check for updates and apply any available.

So let's get … Read more

Ever use Google to search for an answer and when you find it in the search results and click on the page, it's gone? How annoying. Another bothersome occurrence appears when a Web page layout has changed, and the information you usually find in a certain place is now moved somewhere else. For times like this, Google's page cache is amazingly useful. The results are not 100 percent guaranteed to show you exactly what you're looking for, but hey, there's not a whole lot of 100 percent anythings left in the world.

Before Google went through … Read more

Most people know that computers require regular maintenance, even if they're not quite sure what that should consist of. Windows Doctor provides a suite of utilities that can keep your machine running at its best by addressing a wide range of performance and security issues. If you're in the market for something that will take care of problems without asking too much of you in the way of decision-making, Windows Doctor is a good choice.

The program's interface is sleek and intuitive, with its features arranged in tabs labeled System Booster, System Security, Registry Cleaner, Privacy Cleaner, … Read more

The Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical network that resolves text-based URLs such as "www.cnet.com" to the servers' IP addresses that your computer uses for communication. While loading a single Web page or other Web-based resource, your computer may contact numerous URLs to load different components (a Web page, images on it, an application hosted on it, scripts, etc.), so a robust DNS service is a vital part of having a smooth Internet connection.

Even though a fast DNS service will optimize a connection, redundant queries to it will take time to complete. Therefore, based … Read more

NEW ORLEANS--Paying for goods or services at the checkout counter with your phone is the holy grail of mobile payments, something Google, the credit card companies, and the wireless providers are all trying to figure out.

But until that goes mainstream, startup iCache has a pretty novel approach for people who want to leave their wallet at home. The company's Geode product acts as both an iPhone cover and digital wallet, while packing a single programmable smart card.

It works like this: a user enters in their debit and credit card information through an included mag stripe reader, which … Read more

Tidy Up is tool that can help you reduce hard-drive clutter by identifying duplicate files on any mounted disk. This utility's multipane interface has a bit of a learning curve, despite its new "Basic Mode," and the app's comprehensive search criteria and system of smart and manual "baskets" may not be immediately intuitive to casual users.

Anyone who spends time getting familiar with Tidy Up and its three- step approach, however, will find that it's a powerful tool for identifying and dealing with duplicate files, whether you want to delete them, move them, … Read more

It's always exciting when you bring home a new computer. It feels so powerful and fast; you can't imagine ever needing to buy another one again. Unfortunately, neither your excitement nor your PC's performance lasts.

Whether your hard drive is running out of space or your system takes forever to run simple tasks, it might be worth your time to try and revive it before replacing it. Here are some spring cleaning tips to revive your Windows PC:

Free up disk space The enormous size of modern multimedia files can eat up your hard-drive storage quickly. What … Read more

Safer downloads and a cautious expansion of site pre-caching land in Chrome 17 today, continuing Google's two-tiered approach to browser speed and user safety.

Google Chrome 17 stable for Windows (download), Mac (download), Linux (download), and Chrome Frame includes a number of new extension APIs and security fixes.

As revealed in the Chrome 17 beta version, Chrome's safe browsing technology will now scan downloads as well as Web sites. It looks for known malware files, and it analyzes installation files starting with Windows-based EXE and MSI. Google hasn't clarified if the scan will later include other Windows-based … Read more

The memory in your system, commonly referred to as RAM, is the work space the system uses to store executable code and loaded data. If your system is slowing down then you may be low on RAM. Although you can install more or free some up by quitting some running programs, first it may help to analyze how much RAM your programs actually are using.

If you open up the Activity Monitor utility on your system and go to the Memory section, you can see a pie chart of the system's physical memory usage, where generally the larger the … Read more