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I'm going to put my A7N8X-E and power supply in another case for exactly that reason. I'd still like to be able to do almost everything on my new machine. I don't care much if I can't read floppies-I only need to a few times a year. The programmer however I might use every day in a busy week.

I don't really have that kind of money right now. I can get USB programmers on eBay for under $50 which can program only a subset of the chips this one does. To get something comparable, it would be $500 at least, plus the learning curve associated with new hardware (which I don't have time for...

Serial port headers seem to still be on many motherboards these days. My new MB has one also. It seems parallel port headers, if they're available at all, are only on micro ATX motherboards.

Just to update things I bought the StarTech card and the programmer still doesn't work. I set the I/O address to 0378 via DIP switches on the card, and then followed the instructions. I had to manually set the I/O range in device manager. 0378-037F apparently caused a conflict when I first set...

I'm happy for you also. Maybe I should lose 160 pounds too. :D (just kidding of course-I wouldn't weigh much more than my three cats put together if I lost that much weight).

What you describe is really more a software issue than anything else. A proper factory reset on a phone would overwrite all user data stored in flash memory. Apparently that doesn't happen, perhaps because it would take too long for the average user. Don't some phones store everything on a...

Erase should be sufficient. If you look here, one of the comments mentions the following: Actually, after a proper overwrite, there should be NO recoverable information in any modern hard drive. The thing about using atomic force microscopy only applies to a subset of PRML drives, which were...

If the drive failed, it's highly unlikely anyone except the NSA would be able to get information off of it. Certainly HP isn't going to bother. Most likely they will send you a new drive, and recycle the old one. Or even if they refurbish it, they'll probably need to low-level format the...

I agree here. That would put SSDs at roughly ten times the price per GB of mechanical drives. Even better, it puts ~200GB SSDs right around the $100 price point. This is about the most your average buyer is willing to pay for a hard drive. 200GB is a large enough size for many people to use as...

More on FIPEL lighting: http://www.electronicsweekly.com/Articles/04/12/2012/55131/fipel-more-on-the-oled-alternative-light-source.htm http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1566119912004831 The second link has actual spectra, and they are indeed continuous, without the humps and...

I modded one of those fiber optic things with LED. You need to keep the original AC supply because most of them use an AC motor to turn the color wheel. To drive the LED I rectified the AC with a full-wave bridge and added a filter capacitor. I then used one of my automotive constant current...

DOS apps won't work on Win 7 64, either. I can however get them to work using either DOSBox or a DOS VM. DOSBox is actually better. DOS VMs under VMPlayer won't run full-screen, and won't run any higher than VGA.

This is starting to sound like an epic storm along the lines of Sandy. I might suggest to make whatever preparations you can should the power go out. I hope everyone gets through this OK.

Greg: You're 100% right about the "premium" cat foods. The problem with commercial cat foods is they use questionable things like meat by-products, and also contain grains. A cat isn't designed to eat grains, period. In fact, humans should have a lot less grains than the food pyramids say. I...

The color changing bulbs use red, green, and blue LEDs as far as I know in order to get all the colors of the rainbow. RGB isn't particularly good at CRI. Even the best carefully chosen wavelengths will only give a CRI in the mid 80s. You need 4 colors to get into the low 90s, and 5 colors to...

I'll admit that it's kind of embarrassing how a snow storm in NYC merits national coverage while events in other places which cause more harm are scarcely mentioned. I think SD hit the nail on the head-the media is largely centered in NYC, and therefore act like it's the center of the universe...

You have to climb that? I'm getting dizzy just looking up at it. :drunk:

Yep, variable color lamps are one of the big reasons to switch to LED. I think in the future we'll probably see low-cost general lighting LED lamps which produce varying shades of white. This is actually fairly easy to do compared to products which produce every shade of the rainbow. You just...

Here's some pictures: Leno at the dinner table: Jeannie warming herself next to the electric heater: Jeannie looking at the squirrels and birds:

Thanks for the condolences, Greg. The cat who died was named Leno. He originally belonged to our neighbors who constantly let him run around outside, and frankly didn't seem all that interested in his well-being. At first we thought he was a feral cat. We have had quite a few around here over...

I remember doing that from my high school and college days. Monday through Thursday nights usually ended up being a few hours sleep but I caught up on sleep over the weekend. Nowadays I find I need at least 9 or 10 hours to feel relatively normal, although some of that might be depression...

Most UPSes don't stabilize the line voltage so it's not surprising the voltages are the same. Usually UPSes will condition the line, meaning filter out surges and spikes, but won't reduce overvoltages. The fact the two electric water heaters died points to an overvoltage problem. Resistance...

Thanks for the detailed step-by-step procedure, mubs. I have an old Windows 98 PC which I very occasionally boot into just to see what software is on it which might be useful. I'll turn it into another VM on my new PC to add to the growing collection (my current XP stall, DOS 6.22, XP clean...

Someone apparently did get an EPROM programmer to work in Windows 7 by remapping port addresses. Unfortunately, his solution doesn't really seem applicable to my programmer but it is an interesting read. Now on to search (most likely in vain) to see if someone hit upon a similar solution for the...

It's hard to see how your meter reading could differ so much from the electrician's. Even very cheap meters usually read AC volts to 1% or so accuracy. The only way the reading could be that far off is if the voltage differs significantly from a sine wave. If that's the case then you have even...

Yep, that's the problem in a nutshell. From my reading, lots of other devices have this issue. It's a shame that modern motherboards without parallel ports won't let add-on cards use the legacy addresses. They took something which was working fine and broke it. Amazon has it for $43.24 with...

From what I've read, a PCI-E parallel port card (yes, such a thing exists) would have the same issues as a PCI parallel port card. Basically, it would end up with whatever address the BIOS or O/S assigned to it, with no way to manually change it. A USB->parallel port converter is just about...

This problem is related to my new pc but I wanted to start a new thread in case others are experiencing the same issues, rather than burying this deep in the new pc thread. Here's the issue in a nutshell-I can't get my microcontroller programmer to work on my new machine. I more or less solved...

You could try booting from the old boot drive in your new machine and convert that way. You would probably need to do a repair install of XP for that but I don't see why it wouldn't work. In a bit of irony, I had planned to convert my existing install of XP to a VM after my new system was in the...

Polar alert here. Heavy wet snow on all the tree branches here. It wouldn't surprise me if we see more outages. Totally weird weather. Hurricanes to blizzards in less than 10 days.

Basically, this election was a referendum for the GOP to dump the Tea Party nut cases, as well as embrace things like clean energy, public transit, sustainable development, and economic issues which matter to the middle class (hint-that doesn't mean cutting taxes on the rich). If they don't do...

Thanks for the condolences guys. If anything, at least Sandy took our minds off the cat for a while. If you don't hear from me for a while after the next storm, it means either power went out again, or I'm cleaning a flooded basement. BTW, if you want to check on whether or not I have power...

While on the subject of vision, the big problem with lasik is that what you'll gain for distance vision you'll sacrifice for close-up vision. It's much more important for me to be able to do fine work without magnifiers or reading glasses than it is for me to be able to read street signs. In...

I just want to report that I got through the storm OK. The major problem was a power outage which lasted from about 10 PM on the 30th until 1:39 AM EST today. That's 124+ hours without power-the longest I've been without power by far. The four major issues I found having no power are (in order...

Part of the reason the military is such a large part of our budget is that those in charge are still acting as if the Cold War never finished. The military needs to reinvent itself to deal with the primary threats of our era-terrorism and rogue states like North Korea or Iran. I wonder why we...

A nice goody box arrived today containing a PCI parallel port card and a brand new Intel 330 240GB SSD (thanks Dave :D)! I'll start playing around with this stuff tomorrow because I've been feeling a bit under the weather last few days (although all the nice stuff certainly brightened things...

I know there wouldn't be much of an air density gradient from the body to the chute. I'm thinking more along the lines of the chute not inflating much due to very little air pressure. Felix would probably still reach close to supersonic speeds by the time he hit maybe 100,000 feet. And the air...

For what it's worth if Intel had a better integrated GPU I may well have went in that direction. That said, this looks like it'll be a great system which should serve my needs for quite some time. Once the hardware is fully set up, the fun will begin installing Windows 7, and then making a VM...

The motherboard and CPU arrived yesterday. Everything seems to work OK, including the RAM I bought last year. I'll install everything in my case once the remainder of the parts arrive. Incidentally, those PATA to SATA converters I ordered work well. No problems plugging one of my PATA optical...

He's Austrian. And I'm pretty sure if he jumped with the parachute open he would have died. There is little air resistance at 128,000. He probably still would have gone supersonic or close to it with an open chute. Then when he hit thicker air the chute would be ripped to shreds. Or if it...

Thanks again everyone! :D I'll be looking for the package on Monday. I'll post pictures and also give my impressions once I've set up the system.

:) Thanks Merc! And a big thanks to the membership! I'll let you know when the package arrives. I already have the power supply. I also have four of these on the way. They seem like a better idea than using a PATA card, assuming of course that they work as described.

I'm also sorry to hear about this. Whenever I read about people who lived their lives like that, then die suddenly, I think what might have been had they lived long enough to finally realized the error of their ways and make amends with their family. At least he didn't leave behind any young...

Ugh, should have typed SF instead of SR. Just noticed it now.

What about sending money, having someone from SR buy the parts you need from Newegg or Amazon, testing them, and then shipping them to you? Or would that be prohibitively expensive or just problematic? It really sounds like your options are terribly limited buying locally.

I'm definitely not an expert on SSDs, but reading a lot of Newegg reviews pretty much confirms what Dave said. Intel is tops for reliability, and when they have shell shocker deals they're not much more than Samsung or Corsair. I agree about not splitting hairs over performance. All of the name...

Thanks! :) I think I'll go with this power supply. Not fanless, but based on the numbers the fan will probably hardly be turning.

No, it's definitely not for a high-powered PC. That setup will only work if the CPU's TDP is maybe 70 watts, perhaps 100 watts at the most.

Thank you all for doing this, and thank you Merc for organizing everything. It's really appreciated. Based on that total, it looks like the MB and CPU are covered, and Dave already took care of the SSD. :D I'll be buying the remaining bits and pieces on Newegg today-basically the power supply...

I think this is a better approach to passively cooling the CPU. If you use an SSD and fanless power supply, you have a virtually silent system. There might be a slight 60Hz buzz in the power supply which you'll hear in a very quiet room, but that will be about it.