Another way to get some more free storage

Yesterday, Google unified the storage limits for Gmail and Google Drive, giving users 15GB of free storage across both products.

Now instead of having a 10GB limit on Gmail and 5GB on Google Drive and Google+ Photos, users get 15GB overall.

"With this new combined storage space, you won't have to worry about how much you're storing and where," Google wrote in a blog post. "For example, maybe you're a heavy Gmail user but light on photos, or perhaps you were bumping up against your Drive storage limit but were only using 2GB in Gmail. Now it doesn't matter, because you can use your storage the way you want."

To keep track of how much you're using, Google will update its Google Drive storage page, which will let you hover over a pie chart to see how much storage you're using across Google's products (above).

The change will be rolling out over the next few weeks, Google said. The move also applies to Google Apps users, who get 30GB of unified storage.

If you still need more space, you can buy an extra 25GB for $2.49 per month or 100GB for $4.99 per month to start - and go all the way up to 16TB for $799.99 per month.

In other cloud news, Microsoft today unveiled an update to SkyDrive that improves the layout of photos added to the service. Uploaded photos will display in a timeline view and will be organized into groups by time and event.

"Take 20 pictures at a birthday party with your phone, and then a photo of your parking spot at the airport a few hours later? Now they'll appear as two different groups in the timeline," Microsoft said in a blog post.

Redmond also said it has improved its server and app code to allow for photo uploads that are 2-3x faster.

Google Drive desktop app now lets you share files from PC and Mac

Sharing is getting a bit easier on Google Drive today. Google has just announced that users on a PC or Mac can now share files simply by right clicking and choosing "share" from a Google Drive submenu. The file(s) in question will need to be in your Google Drive folder, of course. It's a small addition (we're sure power users appreciate the move), but it brings Drive's desktop app even closer in functionality to Dropbox. Google says the new quick sharing functionality will roll out to its Google Drive app for PC and Mac over the next few days, so if you're not seeing anything upon a right click of your mouse or trackpad, don't despair.

Goodbye Hotmail, nice knowing ya!

  Microsoft has been busy the past six weeks. It has moved 150 petabytes of email data and 300 million Hotmail email accounts to a completely new platform -- Outlook.com.

To show just what that means, Microsoft released a fun infographic. If all that data was all in the MP3 music file format, it'd take you 300,000 years to bop your way through what would be quite a hefty playlist. If it remained in email form, it would take you 120 million years to get through it all -- at a rate of a mere 50 a day, it has to be said.

The IT giant's Outlook group program manager Dick Craddock wrote in a blog that the new email system has some 300 million accounts moved over from Hotmail and 100 million fresh ones, making this a 400 million address system now.

That's a nice stat, though Microsoft's main rival Google is still ahead, though not by much, with 425 million accounts as of June. Microsoft says one of the program goals with Outlook is get to a billion active users.

In addition to switching customers to new email handles and domains, Microsoft added new features, including a new calendar, Android app (since 125 of the 400 million access their Outlook email, calendar and contacts on a mobile device using Exchange ActiveSync) and support for two-factor authentication. Next up: SMTP send, "so it's easier to send mail from different email addresses," and "deeper integration" with the cloud data facility SkyDrive, Craddock said.

"Hotmail was still one of the most widely used services, with over 300 million active accounts," he wrote. "This made the magnitude of the process incredible, maybe even unprecedented. This meant communicating with hundreds of millions of people, upgrading all their mailboxes and making sure that every person's mail, calendar, contacts, folders, and personal preferences were preserved in the upgrade. Of course, this had to be done with a live site experience that was handling billions of transactions a day."

So, farewell Hotmail, which almost certainly had users active on it since its 1996 debut.

An annoying Netbook legacy...that good computers are cheap

When the netbook craze hit, I was on the side that believed that it would be short lived.  For one, the computers were truly crap, very limited in ability and...truly crap.  Well a couple of years have past and netbooks have indeed lived out it's 15 minutes of fame, but they did leave us a legacy that I truly hate.  We (we being the public in general), now have the idea that you can buy a really good computer for cheap.  After years of $200 netbooks, the public has come to the false realization that you can buy a new computer for very little money.  If you want something to do light work, ie. surfing the internet, typing the occasional letter, then go cheap.  If you want a laptop or desktop that will be doing important work for you, then spend the extra money for a legitimate good machine.  After all, there is a reason that computer is cheap.

Want the best tech support? Buy a Mac

Apple today again captured top honors in Consumer Reports' tech support ratings survey, besting other computer makers by a wide margin.

According to the consumer advocacy magazine, Apple turned in a score of 86 -- out of a possible 100 -- based on ratings provided by over 6,313 owners of some 7,571 desktop and notebook personal computers who contacted technical support in the 12 months following January 2012.

The nearest OEM (original equipment manufacturer) rival was Chinese PC maker Lenovo, which scored 63, or 23 points lower than Apple. Other prominent OEMs that showed in the survey included Asus (which scored 62), Dell (60), Toshiba (59), Hewlett-Packard (58) and Acer (51).

Local computer shops which assemble build-to-order PCs for customers -- so-called "white box" shops -- took second place overall in technical support with an aggregate score of 78

Read more from Computerworld.

Added! - Computer Glossary Section

But not just a computer glossary.  Also a glossary of file extensions, chat room slang and emoticons.  Keeping up with all this stuff is work!  Enjoy and hope you learn something!