TechTales

It is possible to make sound work on Safe Mode. Press Windows + R, type devmgmt.msc, press Enter and look for your sound device. (e.g. Reatlek High Definition Audio) Double-click it. Go to the tab 'Details' and click the drop-down list. Select 'Driver key' and copy the text from 'Value' Copy the text into a word processor (e.g. Notepad) Replace all lower-case letters with capital letters and remove the \0000. Open Registry Editor (Windows + R > regedit) and locate HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\SafeBoot\Network. Create a new key (Rightclick > New > Key) Copy the text from your word processor and paste it into the key name. Edit the '(Default)' key and type 'Sound, video and game controllers'. Create a new key called 'AudioEndpointBuilder', 'MMCSS' and 'Audiosrv' Edit all their '(Default)' keys and type 'Service'. Restart your computer Go to Services (Windows + ...

Facebook Inc on Friday unveiled plans for a massive new campus annex in Menlo Park to be designed by Frank Gehry, the renowned architect who has won plaudits for metal-sheathed works like the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. Plans for the site, which Facebook will submit to local city officials for approval on Monday, depict Gehry's vision of a single-story, hangar-like building covering 420,000 square feet, or roughly the area of eight football fields combined under one roof. The project will likely amount to a significant expense for a newly public company that's been closely scrutinised by investors since its disappointing May debut. Facebook shares have hovered at nearly half its $38 IPO price in recent weeks on concerns about whether it can sustain revenue growth. Facebook declined to reveal the development's projected cost, saying only that it would fall in line with other Silicon Valley office b...

Faced with a shrinking budget, NASA will in many ways need to reinvent itself if the agency hopes to continue leading the charge in space exploration. There's perhaps no better example of that "do more with less" mantra than the PhoneSat project, the goal of which is to build the lowest-cost and easiest to assemble satellites ever placed into orbit. To create such a thing, engineers have turned to off-the-shelf consumer gadgets for parts, harnessing the internals of Google's Nexus hardware as the brains of the operation. They're starting small, however: the mission of PhoneSat 1.0 — powered by a Nexus One — is merely to stay alive for a short period of time and beam pictures of space back to ground control. All the while, the nanosatellite will be monitoring its own health and keeping NASA scientists informed of any mal-effects space has on its hardware. PhoneSat 2.0 expands on those capabilities thanks to faster hardware. A Nexus S will serve as ...

Microsoft Corp. unveiled the customer preview of the new Microsoft Office that features an intuitive design that works with touch, stylus, mouse or keyboard across new Windows devices, including tablets. "We are taking bold steps at Microsoft," Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft said at the press conference in San Francisco. "The new, modern Office will deliver unparalleled productivity and flexibility for both consumers and business customers. It is a cloud service and will fully light-up when paired with Windows 8." Here's our list of top 10 features that the new Office has to offer. 1) Touch everywhere - The new Office responds to touch as naturally as it does to keyboard and mouse. One can swipe their finger across the screen or pinch and zoom to read documents and presentations. 2) Inking - Use a stylus to create content, take notes and access features. Handwrite email responses and convert them automatically to text. Stylus can also be u...

Defeat in a bitter patent wrangle with Apple Inc, its smartphone rival and biggest customer, will dent Samsung Electronics Co's $21 billion cash-pile, but could actually help cement its leadership in the global smartphone market. A U.S. court has ordered Samsung - which sold around 50 million phones in April-June, almost twice the number of iPhones - to pay $1.05 billion damages, after ruling that the South Korean firm infringed on some Apple patents. While the verdict was a big win for Apple, the damages are less than half the $2.5 billion compensation it sought - although that could yet be increased by the judge - and are just 1.5 percent of annual revenues from Samsung's telecoms business. That phone and tablet business is the powerhouse behind Samsung's growth, earning around 70 percent of total profit. The group had net profit of $4.5 billion in April-June. Samsung could also see its popular Galaxy smartphone banned from sale in the United States. ...

Just few months back Facebook was testing a new form of search ads called Sponsored Results whereby advertisers can show ads in the Facebook search typehead to users looking for a particular Page, app, or Place. Now, the social networking site is making the feature available to marketers that will let businesses divert traffic from each other, as TechCrunch reports. The latest advertising offering includes paid advertisements related to search queries at the top of results. The Sponsored Results appear like any other results in the search box present on top of each page, but with the word ''Sponsored'' written clearly. Upon clicking, users will be redirected to a company's Facebook page, a move intended to keep users within the site. The search results cannot be based on generic keywords like mobiles, cameras or games. These will have to be brand or company specific like FarmVille or Canon camera. Users have the option of dismissing the ad by cli...

What's the worst insult you can throw at a fast-moving company like Facebook? Call its iPhone app slow and poky. On Thursday, Facebook Inc. addressed users who had gripes with its app for iPhones and iPads with the launch of a faster version. Rather than add a slew of new features, the company said it rebuilt the application from scratch to make it speedier and less clunky. In a recent demonstration at the company's Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters, the new iPhone app opened about twice as fast as the older version. Photos and comments also load faster. Users can now "like" comments on photos, which wasn't possible with the previous mobile app. Mick Johnson, mobile product manager at Facebook, said programmers removed some lesser-used features, such as a way to view the app horizontally, to help speed it up. The mobile arena presents Facebook with its biggest challenge and its biggest opportunity. That's where its user base is growing the ...