Tezzo's Technology Blog

It won't cost you a penny to add voice calls and texting to Apple's tablet with these five apps. The Apple iPad performs several functions with aplomb—it's a wonderful media player, Web surfing device, and, thanks to a deep apps catalog, it can become an e-book reader, gaming system, or a myriad other devices much like the iPhone 4. There's one task that the iPad can't do out of the box that the iPhone 4 can: place calls and send texts. But even those functionalities are within reach if you download the right apps, some of which are designed with iPad in mind and others of which were originally designed for the iPhone. More at PC Mag

Are you upgrading from Windows XP to Windows 7 or buying a new PC? In both cases, you face the same tedious chore: reinstalling all your apps. That means digging out a bunch of CDs and/or downloading programs from various sites, then installing them one at a time. I don't know about you, but I can think of better ways to spend several hours. Ninite creates a custom software installer with all the freeware and open-source apps you want. Just choose from the dozens of available programs--everything from AVG Free Anti-Virus and Dropbox to OpenOffice and uTorrent--and the service builds an installer that will download and load them all. More at PC World

A few months back I explained how Windows 7 users can use built-in tools to create a system-repair disc--an important step to take given that few PCs these days come with one. A reader who uses Vista wrote to ask how he can accomplish the same thing. (Stop snickering. Plenty of people use Vista, and a few of them even like it.) The answer to your question, Dom, is another question: Have you been good about installing Windows updates? Because when Microsoft released Vista Service Pack 1 back in 2008, it included a recovery-disc builder very similar to the one bundled with Windows 7. To see if you have it, select Start, All Programs, Maintenance, Create a Recovery Disc. Then just follow the instructions. If for some reason you don't have SP1 or can't find the tool, try NeoSmart's Windows Vista Recovery Disc, which is available in both 32- and 64-bit versions. And what about XP users? Your best bet is UBCD4Win, a free boot-CD creator that provides a wide variety of tools for r