restart

The Chevy Volt will restart production "earlier than previously planned" due to an uptick in demand, General Motors announced earlier this week, but will this help to quiet critics?

The plug-in hybrid electric vehicle had been slated for a five-week production suspension, but that will be cut to four weeks, according to a report in the Detroit Free Press.

This is "due to increased Volt sales since January and the need to meet demand in our strong markets, including California," GM said in a statement, according to the Free Press.

The Volt came under withering criticism from some in the media … Read more

Even though your computer is still working, you might not want, or need, to be there while it finishes up the job at hand. PC Sleep is a simple tool that lets you shut down your computer at a specific time or within a specific time frame, so you can set it and walk away.

Installing PC Sleep requires a Dot Net Framework, but the process is simple. While it offers eye-friendly and mouse-friendly features, the small interface is designed to do the job as quickly and efficiently as possible in two basic steps: choosing the action you want to … Read more

iOS isn't perfect. There, I said it. This will become evident to anyone who's ever tried to figure out Notification Center or organize contacts into groups.

And I guarantee that at some point or another, you've installed a shiny new app, only to have it crash on you, either the moment you ran it or maybe a few minutes in.

Indeed, the App Store is packed to the gills with user reviews like these:

"Crashes about a minute into the game."

"App wouldn't load. Zero stars!"

"Won't run on my iPad 2--crashes right after I tap the icon."

So what's going on here? Bad programming? In some cases, yes. Some apps are just plain buggy. But if you install a new one and immediately have problems getting it to run, there's an easy fix:… Read more

When stars need to wean their bodies off an excess of alcohol or drugs, they waft off to the Betty Ford Center or the Priory in London.

Now those who have allowed gaming or the Web to take over their lives have their own place of salvation in the United States.

Heavensfield Retreat Center in the kindly named Fall City, near Seattle, claims to have the first Internet addiction detox program in the States. Called ReStart, it essentially offers a 45-day detox from the need to socially network and game until your mind and fingers are more numb than a … Read more

The flagship particle accelerator at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research is to be restarted in October, as opposed to September.

The Large Hadron Collider has been offline since an incident on September 19, when an equipment failure caused extensive damage. James Gillies, CERN's head of communications, said on Monday that an internal schedule set in February to restart the experiment has been pushed back by two or three weeks, but that the restart would still commence in the fall.

"The situation is a retreat from February," Gillies told ZDNet UK. "We had aimed for the … Read more

Natali Del Conte makes her triumphant return from E3 and joins us on today's show. After suffering through two years with an HTC Mogul, Jeff finally upgraded to the Palm Pre this weekend. Tune in for Jeff's personal review as well as some unfortunate news that has us all reeling...with laughter.

All right, first thing's first: NATALI DEL CONTE. That should be enough to get you guys to listen to today's show. She's finally back from her Tour de California. She was actually at E3 this past week and she gives us the scoop on her first impressions of the event. Actually, it turns out that Natali's been taking some gulps of Jeff's unique brand of Haterade! It's always a pleasure to welcome Natali back to the show, even though she's crossed over the dark side. Welcome home, girl!

We've been talking about the Palm Pre ad nauseam for weeks now leading up to Saturday's release, and Jeff actually woke himself up before the crack of dawn and picked one up. Be sure to listen to the whole episode to hear about the fiasco that happened in line, it's unbelievable, and kind of funny. Pix or it didn't happen, Bakalar! After all that happened, Jeff successfully picked up a Palm Pre, and he loves it! All his contacts from Facebook, Gmail, etc...are now consolidated; music transfers are easy thanks to iTunes (fingers crossed that Apple shows mercy); and the keyboard is surprisingly easy for Jeff's ham shank fingers. Sadly, though, there's one very significant, deal-breaking, horrendous manufacturer's error that needs to be correctly immediately before Jeff turns back into a pumpkin and we lose him forever. Tune in to hear more about this awful glitch and how you can fix the problem!

Our first impression of Turn Off Monitor was not a good one. We had to use our Task Manager to stop the program because it caused problems from the get-go.

Immediately after installing the program, our monitor went haywire, turning itself off and on without us clicking a single button. After stopping the program, we were able to get a better idea of how it worked, or better yet, how it didn't work. Turn Off Monitor installs not one, not two, but three icons on your desktop. There's an icon to immediately turn off your monitor, an icon … Read more

VGAutoS is a free utility that lets you shut down, restart, and log off of your computer according to a timer set by you. While it may not be much to look at, it performed its simple job without any problems.

VGAutoS installs easily, but we were a little miffed that it installed a desktop shortcut without our permission. The user interface was plain, but straightforward enough for us to quickly understand. A good thing, since the Help feature was unavailable. The four prominent buttons for shutting down, logging off, restarting, and hibernating our PC worked as expected, but didn'… Read more

It claims to speed up your PC's shutdown process, but this program did no such thing when we put it to the test.

SpeedShut places four shortcut icons on your desktop--one for logging off your computer, one for shutting down, one for restarting, and one for aborting an initiated process. According to the publisher's description, the program includes some sort of shutdown configuration for a shutdown and restart delay, but it could not be found. Each shortcut icon that we clicked performed its function, but did not ask us for any kind of configuration. We also noticed that … Read more