Believe it or not, Google engineers were thoughtful enough to include an easy way to tether your Android-based SmartPhone to a computer and share the Internet through your data plan. Most folks think you need a special app for that, but this free feature already resides on your Andoid phone. In this tutorial guide, Benchmark Reviews walks you through a few simple steps to use an Android SmartPhone to tether with a computer for shared Internet access using the USB cable.

In our previous guide: Root Hacking the HP Touchpad Tablet PC, Benchmark Reviews showed you how to enable Developer Mode on the HP Touchpad, and, with the new capabilities this mode enables, to download and install the Preware applications manager. In this installment, we'll show you how to dramatically improve the performance of your Touchpad by disabling excessive logging functions and overclocking its dual-core processor.

After HP discontinued the Touchpad and its other WebOS devices, they decided to sell out their remaining inventory at fire sale prices: $99 for the 16GB model and $149 for the 32GB model. The available units sold out within days; in fact, response was so strong that HP says they'll make one last production run of the Touchpad in October. If you were lucky enough to get a Touchpad, there are some simple things you can do to dramatically improve its performance, and Benchmark Reviews will explore them in this guide.

Benchmark Reviews has previously detailed our experience in creating an Apple Macintosh into Hackintosh: a computer built of PC components, running Apple's OS X operating system and applications. Apple doesn't make this easy to do, since they'd prefer you to buy a real Macintosh, but years of work by the enthusiast community has resulted in a support system of software, guides, and online forums that provide enough information for the dedicated Hackintosher to succeed. In this article I'll describe my experience moving my Hackintosh from its X58 hardware to a new Intel Sandy Bridge platform.

Rules change and we need to be at the top of the technology to understand how new architectures work with our new components. Overclocking is a "sport" which has passed lots of different generations (people and platforms) and from time to time, the way you do it changes a lot. At Benchmark Reviews we put all our effort to bring you reviews and articles covering most of the new products as they arrive to the market, but we also focus a lot on enthusiasts who want to get the best out of their hardware without paying extra money; obviously by overclocking their PC components. With the launch of the new Sandy Bridge processors we feel the necessity to prepare an Overclocking analysis mainly because Intel completely changed the rules. Overclocking is now 99% limited to unlocked processors, and to mid-high platforms, while low-mid platforms and non-unlocked processors can't simply be overclocked more than some extra MHz. Follow us while we put into test both the Core i5 2500K and the Core i7 2600K paired with the P67 Express platform and discover how they work against voltage, heat and power consumption.

Recently, I wrote an op-ed piece here titled "The Fast Enough Computer". I argued that for gamers, low- to mid-range components provided the most bang for the buck and could readily play most modern games. The metric I used was "30 frames per second at 1680x1050". In this follow-up, I build a system based on the components I thought would be adequate and test the result with several modern games.

A "Hackintosh" is a computer that runs Apple's OS X operating system on non-Apple hardware. This has been possible since Apple's switch from IBM's PowerPC processors to Intel processors a few years ago. Until recently, building a PC-based Mac was something done only by hard-core hackers and technophiles, but in the last few months, building a Hackintosh PC has become much easier. Benchmark Reviews looks at what it's possible to do with PC hardware and the Mac Snow Leopard OS today, and the pros and cons of the building a Hackintosh computer system over purchasing a supported Apple Mac Pro.

While the path towards widespread 3D acceptance has been long and difficult, we've arrived at a market rich with 3D innovation. Cinema 3D movies are showing in theaters across America, major sporting events are broadcast in 3D, and now 3D-HDTVs are a sought-after item. Many would credit NVIDIA's 3D-Vision technology for being the catalyst that launched a new era of visual entertainment, and in this article Benchmark Reviews presents our NVIDIA 3D-Vision Multimedia Resource Guide. Video games are a primary part of this article, and we'll share tips on optimizing convergence settings to produce eye-popping out-of-screen 3D effects. NVIDIA's 3D-Vision kit is capable of much more than video games, which is why we also offer sections on 3D video multimedia, 3D Blu-ray Disc movies, 3D photos, and Sony's PlayStation 3.