If your computer has clogged vents and fans choked by dust, your computer can overheat. These parts are vital just like the coolant in your car that keeps it from overheating. The vents and fans keep moving air in and out of your computer, but they both collect dust over time.

Many people use canned air to blow dust off a computer’s internal parts which is good and will not cause any damage or risk to your computer. Some computers (desktops) you may need to remove the computer case in order to effectively clean all fans and vents from dust.

Your computer should never be too close to the wall as this will prevent air flow and could cause the computer to overheat. If your PC stopped working, it could be that it’s overheating. If a computer overheats, you could damage the CPU and other internal parts permanently which can cost a lot to repair.

I recommend cleaning vents and fans annually, but if you live in a dusty environment, more frequent cleanings are necessary.

Your computer especially needs to stay cool during the hot summer months just like you do. Keep your computer in the coolest part of your home if you can, if not, make sure to shut your computer down when you’re done using it.

A little home PC maintenance or professional computer hookup will keep your computer running longer and continue to keep you more productive.

Keep cool my friends!

Circuit City is born again, but its return policy for some PCs may leave a bitter taste for its customers.

Port Washington, N.Y.-based Systemax Monday finalized its purchase of the defunct retailer’s trade names, domains including www.circuitcity.com, customer lists and information, certain trademarks and other intangible assets of Circuit City’s e-commerce business.

While the retailer’s rebirth is welcome news to consumers looking for competitive prices, the company’s harsh return policy could turn shoppers away.

“Some manufacturers have implemented returns restrictions that prevent CircuitCity.com from being able to accept returns or offer exchanges, replacements or credits on their products,” the company said on its Web site.

“Products from manufacturers such as Compaq, IBM, Hewlett Packard, Toshiba, Epson and others are not returnable to CircuitCity.com FOR ANY REASON,”" according to the site. Circuit City said that all support and exchanges or replacements for defective merchandise, including those within the first 30 days of ownership, have to be handled directly with the product manufacturer.

In addition, software and consumables such as toner cartridges, ink cartridges and digital media are not returnable, period.

Circuit City did not offer an explanation as to why vendors require customers to bypass the retailer and deal directly with the vendors.

Systemax this month paid $14 million in cash for Circuit City’s assets, and offered the retailer a share of future revenue generated using those assets over a 30-month period, Systemax said in a statement.

Source: The Channel Wire

Did you forget your BIOS password? In most cases you would have to format your drive and re-load your XP OS. But that would take so much time to get your computer back to your liking.

There’s an easier way to avoid reloading and installing all your programs! There’s no software required to remove the BIOS password.

On to the Procedure:

1. Power off the computer and unplug it from the wall outlet.
2. Open your computer case. You can find instructions by searching online for your model or go to the manufactures website for help.
3. Look for a silver circular object located on your motherboard. This is the CMOS battery.
4. Remove the battery from the socket (You may need a small screwdriver, but be careful doing this).
5. Keep the battery out for at least a couple of minutes so that the CMOS memory will flush itself thus removing the password.
6. Place the battery back into the slot you removed it from and close up your computer case.
7. Plug in your computer and power it up. You will get a prompt that the CMOS configuration could not be found. At this point restore to default settings and you should be good to go.

Your BIOS password has been removed and now you can boot without it. If you want to set a password go into your BIOS configuration and set a new User Password in the Supervisor Password controls access to the BIOS.

Remember to write your password down and store it somewhere in case you forget it again.

Most of us may have been to a Lan party, playing games all night, eating junk food and drinking. We call them a Geekfest. Hostng a Lan party is a completely different animal. There are a lot of things you have to think about. Here are some things you have to do to have a great party with minimal issues.

1. Power – running all those computers takes a lot of power. Homes are not designed to support 20 computers running at the same time. If you run all the computers off of one circuit you will surely blow a breaker. Split the power up, run extension cords from different circuits of the house. Put about 3 computers on each circuit, that should balance the power distribution.
2. Get more food and beverages than you think you will need. Nothing is worse then running out of food or drinks. Ask your friends to bring something. Stick to finger food or sandwiches, and set the food up buffet style. You don’t want people to think that you are going to bring anything to them. Plan some breaks to get a way from the keyboards and eat. Have lots of caffeine on hand if you plan to go into the early morning hours.
3. Have 2 sessions. Plan a afternoon session so some younger gamers can join in. Then after dinner it can be all adults. It is good to show the kids how a good Lan party is planned.
4. Have everyone on the hardwire Lan, avoid wireless. Wireless networks can generate more work for you to setup and can add lag to the game.
5. I try to avoid alcohol. When alcohol is involved, we always seem to get more spills, spills and computer equipment do not mix.
6. Pick games that everyone owns. Try to keep a couple of copies on hand to install on other players computers that don’t own that game. Some of my favorite games are Starcraft, AOE2 and Battlefield. Startcraft is cheap and runs on almost anything.
7. Although you shouldn’t need to provide network patch cables and power strips for each gamer, some one always forgets theirs. Always have spares on hand.
8. If you are planning to run a local game server (ie. Halflife), make sure all the bugs are worked out ahead of time. Test, Test, and Test.
9. Keep the cables neat and out of the way. Otherwise, someone is bound to trip on them. Consider taping cables down. Bunch groups of them running in the same area together really tight, and put all the slack at either end. Someone tripping on a wire and pulling a monitor off of the table can put a damper on the night.
10. Have fun! Enjoy yourself.

These tips can make for a great Lan party. I think that tip number 1 is the most important, of course. Blowing a breaker ever 5 minutes kills a Lan party, Trust me.

Enjoy!

In 1984, Apple Computer began selling its Macintosh PC. This day marks the 25th anniversary for the Mac.

The Macintosh initially sold well, but follow-up sales were not strong. The machine’s fortunes changed with the introduction of the LaserWriter, the first PostScript laser printer to be offered at a reasonable price point, and PageMaker, an early desktop publishing package. The Mac was particularly powerful in this market due to its advanced graphics capabilities, which were already necessarily built-in to create the intuitive Macintosh GUI.

Delivering his keynote at the Macworld Expo on January 9, 2007, Steve Jobs announced that Apple Computer, Inc. would from that point on be known as Apple Inc. The event also saw the announcement of the iPhone and the Apple TV.

Microsoft’s (MSFT) Windows, while still dominant with a 90.23% share, has been slowly losing ground. Apple’s (AAPL) operating systems, by contrast, have been gaining share at a fairly brisk pace 8.28% as of October 2008.

The Mac has gained popularity over the last couple of years, but it’s still far behind the PC/Windows.

Are you a Mac or PC?

We started out in May 2008, but have blogged since mid 2007. Since May 2008 we have posted over 500 blogs with over 4100 comments. What will 2009 bring? We will work even harder to bring our fans and visitors the best in Technology news and more. Listed below are the top 10 blog posts that had the greatest feeding frenzy.

How to Crack Windows XP and Vista Login Passwords – 11,563 Pageviews
Joe Satriani Files Suit Against Coldplay
Vista Vulnerability Found
Watch New Movies Online Free!
Linux to Xbox Media Share
Led Zeppelin Says No to Guitar Hero and Rock Band
Dell’s New Studio Hybrid Good or Bad?
Network Protection without Network Hardware
Firefox 2.0 Users Beware of Phishing
Google Chrome to add WOT extension

Google ushered in the New Year with a Pagerank (PR) update. Some of us will wake up with either good news or bad news, but which ever direction your pagerank went, never let it get you down. Bloggers work hard in achieving recognition, fans and if you are lucky revenue. TechJaws has doubled its backlinks since the last update and we went from a PR4 to a PR3. Be happy and stay positive.

We hope you have enjoyed our blogs as much as we did writing them. We would like to wish all of you a Happy and Healthy New Year.

A former naval radar technician, Doug Englebart, directed the invention of the first computer mouse in the mid 60s at Stanford Research International (SRI). Englebart and Bill English worked together comparing various pointing devices for speed and accuracy. Bill English built the original mouse from Englebart’s conceptions. So, “It is safe to say Bill English is the first person to ever use a mouse.

Since then, a handful of companies (namely Xerox, Apple, Microsoft, and Logitech) have poured millions into refining the form and function of the mouse: they’ve changed its number of buttons, changed the interfaces by which mice connect to computers, and tinkered with new methods of tracking movement. But despite four decades of commercial evolution, computer users today handle the mouse in much the same way Englebart did 40 years ago: as an ingeniously efficient and easy-to-use pointing device.

The first marketed integrated mouse – shipped as a part of a computer and intended for personal computer navigation – came with the Xerox 8010 Star Information System in 1981.

The mouse has come along way since 1981 with many variations. Today the mouse is 40 years old, and we owe thanks to Doug Englebart for this invention.

Don’t wait for Cyber Monday when you can get deals right now on Home Electronics! Yes, major deals, and you can get them right now with a few clicks of your mouse.

There are many sites that sell gadgets, computers and more, but only a few can claim that they’re the cheapest. You can go and bid on eBay and save big, or you can check out these online stores for more deals.

Newegg.com: (AMD Quad Core HP Pavilion loaded with all the power you need for gaming and more for under $650). More details here.

Overstock.com: (Philips 42PF9630A 42-inch Plasma HDTV for only $699). More details here.

Sears.com: (Element 26 in. (Diagonal) Class LCD Integrated HDTV (720p) for only $299! offer good until 11/26). More details here.

TigerDirect.com: (Lenovo H210 Intel Desktop PC – Intel Pentium Dual Core E2200 2.2GHz, 2GB DDR2, 500GB SATA II HDD, DVDRW, 16-in-1 Card Reader, Vista Home Premium for only $399). More details here.

There will be plenty of deals offered on Cyber Monday, but you need to compare pricing when shopping online.

Nearly 84 percent of online retailers plan to have a Cyber Monday promotion, according to a survey by online shopping site Shopzilla for Shop.org, the Internet division of the National Retail Federation. That was well above the 72 percent who planned to promote Cyber Monday deals last year.

Nearly a quarter of retailers plan to offer free shipping on all purchases in what they hope will be a further incentive to buy.

Last year, Internet research firm comScore Inc said U.S. buyers spent $733 million on Cyber Monday, up 21 percent from the prior year.

What’s the primary cause of slow/unstable PC performance? It’s disk fragmentation. Smart Defrag helps defragment your hard drives more efficiently than the default one that comes with Windows XP and Vista. In fact, it blows the doors off of any other product on the market and it’s 100% free!

Smart Defrag removes the guess work by providing you a complete diagnosis of your current hard drives, and it defrags and speeds up disk performance in minutes.

Defragmentation is a very important process in keeping your hard drive’s at peak performance. Smart Defrag will diagnose and optimize your machine’s hard drive while running quietly in the background. As a prevention, this defrag app will pause itself down if the CPU raises over 40%.

This powerful, award-winning free defragmenter is 100% safe and clean with no adware, spyware, or viruses.

It’s hard to stand out in the crowded field of defraggers, but Smart Defrag is able to do so with an unexpected twist.” – 5 stars, CNET Download.com, Sep 2008

TechJaws gives this freeware a big thumbs up!

Download and learn more about Smart Defrag here.

First it was CompUSA and now Circuit City who is filing bankruptcy. This is bad news for every consumer as our choices for electronic retailers has vanished. The only big player left is BestBuy, but TigerDirect is still an option.

Circuit City Stores, the nation’s second-biggest electronics retailer, filed for bankruptcy protection Monday but will stay open for business as the holidays approach.

It filed under Chapter 11 of the bankruptcy code, which will allow it to hold off creditors and continue operations while it develops a financial reorganization plan.

The Richmond, Va.-based retailer has been struggling as nervous consumers spend less and credit has become tighter. The announcement came a week after it said it would close 20 percent of its stores and lay off thousands of workers.

The company said it decided to file because it was facing pressure from vendors who threatened to withhold products during the busy holiday shopping season.

Circuit City said it had secured $1.1 billion in loans to provide working capital while it is in bankruptcy.

It had $3.4 billion in assets and $2.32 billion in liabilities, as of Aug. 31.

Circuit City Stores Inc. announced a week ago it planned to close 155 of its more than 700 U.S. stores by Dec. 31. The stores are spread throughout 28 states, including multiple locations in areas like Phoenix and Atlanta. It is laying off about 17 percent of its domestic work force, which could affect up to 7,300 people.