Search results

You're doing it wrong. Retail stores just don't stock the kind of value proposition you're seeking. My recommendation is to look for refurbished Lenovo in Oz. My youngest daughter's Thinkpad has been amazing and the Lenovo-backed warranty is now proven.

I think that Pitch Black is one of the most underrated Sci-Fi movies ever. I'd go so far as to say it's an original classic. Whether this sequel can recapture the essence is debatable, but I'd be prepared to check it out if it's not a stinker.

In the photo, you have lights. Where there's lights, there's power cables. I know you had a bad experience with Powerline gear, but that seems like an obvious retrofit to me.

Unfortunately, Vizio isn't sold here. There are lesser brands but they're usually crappy and service is questionable. We're pretty much limited to LG, Samsung, Sharp, Sony, Panasonic and Toshiba. When I called the largest electrical goods retailer, the cheapest they had was $2000 (including 10%...

Can't get Timwhit's Samsung for love or money (discontinued). Currently, the only reasonably priced 55" I can find is Sony KDL55EX630. I just ordered two of them for AU$910 each + tax. Before I pay, does anyone have an opinion?

I'm looking at US mail order clothing firms, initially to buy wool trousers - which are proving problematic to source here in my somewhat stout sizing. ;) International shipping is a must. So far, I've found L.L.Bean and J.Crew. But I don't know anything at all about the quality of their...

Firstly, Ra 80 means a CRI of 80 or better, not exactly 80. Secondly, every CFL I've seen has been labeled Ra 80, yet there are serious color rendition differences. It's an unreliable metric. Thirdly, I can tell the difference between an MP3 and a CD track, but that doesn't mean the MP3 isn't...

Finally, I'm starting to see 4000K LED lights here. Just bought some GU10: Brand: Osram Socket: GU10 Power: 9W Output: 470 lumens Beam angle: 35° Intensity: 1040 candela CRI: 80 Life: 30000 hrs Cost: AU$12 At a distance of 1.5m (8ft ceiling over 3ft bench), I measure over 400 lux directly...

Split screen was already available on the S3. It appeared either in Jelly Bean or the 4.1.1 update from Samsung. Look under Settings - Display - Multi window; it may need to be toggled to make it visible. Kaiten email client is another app that supports it.

There's no need to run Trim at all under normal usage, especially if you keep a reasonable amount of free space. See, if you believe Anandtech's benhmarking, we're fools for even using the 840 (as opposed to the 840 Pro). But in real life, no-one notices or cares. It's much the same with Trim...

I needed to share this (click for link):

If you actually want to compress your data, the zip formats are fairly useless with most file types. Of the listed alternatives, only 7-Zip is worth considering (using its native 7z format). Of course, it is always a waste of time compressing already-compressed data. Am immediately obvious...

No chance - it only made sense when disk I/O was slow compared to CPU power. Don't forget that most lossless algorithms don't see significant speed benefits beyond 2 CPU cores.

Congratulations! That's probably the first one here. My cousin has the Note 2 in an Otterbox; it's an awesome combo, but not really something you'd slip into a pants pocket.

I imagine it's got something to do with the possible Korean war. I'm surprised there hasn't been more commentary on the possible devastation of the world economy that would follow.

I'm seriously allergic to Corsair SSD. It's been 3 out of 3 failures for me, with a replacement also failing. I stopped making warranty claims and just replaced them with other brands. I would rather use OCZ rather than another Corsair, but prefer Crucial, Intel and Samsung.

While I very much prefer an i5 to an i3, that's a secondary issue after ensuring a gamer has a decent graphics card. The 7750 could only be considered a gamer's card if they were running a resolution of 1024x768. Back in the real world of 1920x1080, the 7850 is AMD's entry-level gaming card, and...

The advantages of the SSD far, far outweigh a percentage difference in CPU performance, especially with a turbo frequency of 2.9GHz. However, the NewEgg reviews indicate that some of these units are in fact seriously second hand - not just refurbished - so I would not touch them.

$600 for nearly 1 terabyte, and from one of the top 3 SSD manufacturers. Friggin' awesome (channeling Ddrueding). I want one ... no, make it two ... wait, three/four/whatever! I just have to dream up a cost/benefit justification.

Paste it into Paint. As Ddrueding says, should be perfect - at the original resolution, course.

IMO: It feels more lightweight, yet matches or exceeds the functionality. And the interface is more intuitive. So yes, I think so.

+1 for FastStone Image Viewer. A truly excellent product that should be in our Toolbox section. I've rarely seen a software tool that had so much thought put into usability. My daughter is a long-time Photoshop user, but really likes this for browsing/previewing. The fact that's it's free is a...

I disagree. The PC I'm typing this response on has no spinning disk. However, my preferred home PC configuration includes a 2TB HDD to complement (and backup) the 250GB SSD. Rather than switch the entire user tree to the spinning disk, I just move the user libraries (Documents, Pictures, Music...

Met a guy planning to buy a $500 LSI controller so he could get decent write performance out of ZFS running on RAID 5 under Free BSD. Looks like he has space for 6 drives but currently only 3 or 4. WTF? I thought ZFS already enabled error correction on a random collection of disks, but I admit...

Packet storm? Do your routers block broadcasts? What's the topology between the sites? I know this sounds basic, but what's the longest segment cable length and how many segments are switched end-to-end? Do you have the same switches and routers on every site?

Called Lenovo on Tuesday. Box arrived Wednesday. Missed a day getting stuff off the laptop. Shipped the laptop Thursday (courier pickup). Service Center is interstate, so they would have received it Friday. Repaired laptop arrived back Monday morning. There are no weekend pickups here, so...

What you forgot to mention is that it breaks rather easily on Thinkpads (google it), and that replacing it requires pretty much complete disassembly of the laptop.

Everything is better than Dia - it's bug-infested crapware. You could try yEd; still not a patch on a commercial product but at least you can produce something with it.

The G-550 (modular) reviewed at Johnny Guru is $126 plus tax here. The equivalent Antec Earthwatts Platinum 550W is only $98, but reviews suggest it's not as good. As it happens, a couple of OEM Seasonic 80Plus Gold units popped onto my pricelist after you suggested the retail Gold: SS-350GT...

It sounds like a Sandforce drive. My experiences with Corsair Sandforce have been much the same as your symptoms and unfortunately there were no SMART errors.

Chewy, it sounds like you have 8 lives to go ... Now that you have a job again, might you be better off with a cheap car? I know they use tons more fuel, but the driver can withstand quite a lot more excitement than a rider.

A client has a Lenovo X300, which comes with a 60GB SSD as standard. Unfortunately, that storage capacity is just too small these days. I seem to recall that there are pitfalls in upgrading a Lenovo laptop, in that the BIOS will only recognize certain drives. What is the best choice of SSD to...

Drop it from the ceiling in some sort of feature to suit the room, eg. chrome pole, hollowed out turned timber, etc. Or you could paint it white and call it an iPole.

Went with the the H77M-D3H again because it includes an audio chip from Via that appears to be superior to the common Realtek offerings.

Final configuration was: Silverstone TJ08-E case Seasonic S12II-430Bronze PSU Gigabyte H77M-D3H motherboard Intel i5-3470 CPU Kingston 2x 4GB DDR1600 RAM Leadtek GTX660Ti graphics Intel 335 240GB SSD Seagate 2TB 7200rpm HDD Samsung DVD-RW Cost was under AU$1000 plus tax. At the wall, it pulls...

For the record, I wasn't happy with Classic Shell and ended up uninstalling it. Based on Ddrueding's recommendation, I tried Start-8 (from Stardock) and it's much better. In fact, it's perfect. Excellent software and well worth $5.

Guys, I hate to tell you this, but teeth don't grow back ... not in humans anyway. There's something about 'serious' cycling that brings out your inner nutter.

For what? He didn't abuse Handy or criticize him.

Internode here as well, Chewy. They don't have any DSLAMs in my exchange, so the host has been first Telstra, and now Optus. I'm not happy with this aspect - whenever there's a fault, I have no problem talking to Internode (highest customer satisfaction among Australian ISPs), but the hosting...

Linksys USB over PowerLine - this one is only USB 1.1. devolo USB over PowerLine - this one is USB 2.0 and good enough to stream HD Video, but I can't see any actual numbers. My original idea was as Mark described: 2x 500Mb/s PowerLine-to-Ethernet adapters coupled with USB-to-Ethernet...

You can't use Powerline?

[Smacks head] I'm a fool - the AMD RAIDXpert utility clearly lists the serial number (readable) against each drive. Thereby continuing to confirm my feeling that it was a more robust faux RAID solution than Intel's effort. All academic now - Intel well and truly won the war. :(

Are you certain this will work? Because it's obviously vastly preferable. There's no additional M$ crapola on this box. So after lifting the data on it, a complete reinstall seems like the best option - particularly if we can move the AD database to the boot volume.

Actually, that's pretty damn cool - is it real?

There's no other server per se, just a Windows 7 workstation doing double duty. Unfortunately, Microsoft insists that you store "FSMO roles" on a separate drive to the boot drive. So they had to be stored on the array. If anyone has a good strategy for this, I'd be pretty happy to hear it...

It had an image backup on a removable drive, but booting from that that made no difference to Windows sulking. Is there an extra clue in there somewhere?

Getting this on a Windows Server 2008 R2 box set up to be a PDC. It has a separate boot drive and the domain files are stored on a 4-drive RAID-5. The RAID-5 dropped a drive and apparently went to critical status after the drives were removed for testing. On boot it throws BSOD C00002E2...

Is it just me, or has it become harder to find some earlier discussions? Anyway, what with Intel leaving the market, I'm wondering what we're supposed to use as a microATX motherboard. To my eye, there is almost no difference between B75 (single 6Gbps SATA + parallel port), H77 (dual 6Gbps...

Since my opening post, I've read a lot more tests. In particular, driver improvements from both AMD and NVidia have been dramatic. I need to change my summary, particularly if I exclude Powercolor (and some MSI models). If price is critical, go for the AMD HD7850. It's significantly better than...

Thanks Bozo, but neither of those options are available. Merc, what sort of arguments does the net stop command need here? The examples I see pertain to services. The last loaded message on the screen before the BSOD is "ClassPNP" I think (can't get at the PC right now).