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A refrigerator is perfect for LEDs. LEDs love cold, and aren't affected by the on-off cycling like CFLs.

Happy Birthday, Mark! :b-day: Happy Anniversary paugie! I'm glad those were 36 mostly happy years for you. My parents were less than 3 months short of 45 years when my dad passed away, but those were 45 mostly miserable years for both of them. Needless to say it's colored my views on marriage.

The tooth was sound until the filling came out about a year ago. I still have two wisdom teeth (and all my other teeth except one molar-#31 for those familiar with how teeth are numbered). One was crowned 16 years ago, and the other is on one end of a three-tooth bridge. No reason to have your...

Worked for me with my recent dental work. I got 10% off, although it still cost me $3445 (2 crowns, 1 root canal, 2 cavities, cleaning). Still waiting for the dentist's finger to heal so he can do a wisdom tooth extraction. I think the reason some doctors might be reluctant to take cash has...

Do you still have cats? If so, the litter box, food dishes, or even the cats themselves, could be reinfecting you. Also, did you clean everything you're in contact with at work? These types of staph infections are really scary in that we have fewer and fewer antibiotics which work on them...

The rates are higher for newer houses for whatever reason. This house was built in 1952. And I think a big part of the reason are the pre-K and afterschool programs (both basically taxpayer-subsidized daycare as far as I'm concerned) here which many residents demanded. Even though they only...

Well in NYC, transportation is better. :D (You did predict I'd say that, didn't you?). Seriously though, road, rail, whatever, there are going to be days when getting around sucks big time. From what I hear, traffic in LA is no picnic, either. I know in NYC anyone driving into Manhattan...

My mom gets a few hundred off her real estate taxes due to being a senior citizen but her annual taxes are still something like $3700, and this on a house which is now worth only about $525K. In fact, the taxes have still been rising even though the appraised value has been dropping (it peaked...

I watched an episode of Kramer where he essentially said the same thing. The market right now is insane. In my opinion the only thing an average investor should touch are mutual funds. Individual stocks are too risky, especially considering that prices for many stocks are easily manipulated by...

I don't doubt that the batteries are capable of 10 minute recharge. However, a 110V outlet cannot supply the amount of power needed to recharge a ~30 kWh-hr battery in that amount of time. You would need roughly 200kW, or about 8 times what your typical 100 amp, 240V electrical service can...

First off, I agree with most here about using Excel. I use Excel spreadsheets to track the expenditures in my business. Much simpler than any accounting software, and I can customize it to my needs. Most accounting software, especially the ones aimed at businesses, have a lot of complex...

My average came at the expense of a lot of sleep. No free time to work or do anything else but study. Most of my friends were the same. My social life mostly consisted of the hour train ride home from school with my friends. Believe it or not I still miss those days. Something about working...

I don't get why. I scored 1320/1600 on the SAT (570 verbal, 750 math), made Princeton and Yale (chose the former), and was wait-listed at MIT (ultimately didn't get in). No GPA at my high school. We used numerical marks with 100% being the highest. IIRC my average was about 96.1. Regarding...

I'd say I was at the top of my game cycling in my mid-thirties, 5'9", 170 lbs of mostly muscle. Right now I'm about where I was in college except I'm carrying 30 more pounds. If I could manage to ride 100-150 hard miles a week I've little doubt I could get close to my peak again. Problem is...

Sad to say but reading further I think the guy is serious. And yes, I've come in contact with people dumb enough to actually do stuff like that. The thread gets funnier and funnier as it goes on. No time now to read it through, but just the first ten or so pages and my sides are hurting...

This thread is destined to be a classic of all time. Just read the first few pages to see what's going on. I was laughing my ass off by about the third page. :diablo:

I'm talking about car exhaust here, not the cars themselves. That's what's primarily degrading the quality of life, and what we now have the ability to get rid of. Large numbers of autos in one place can also cause problems regardless of whether or not they pollute, but that's a lesser issue...

Look, I really don't think CAFE standards are the best way to go about this but that's what the government chose. Had I been in charge, I might have went with a fuel tax instead. Even Clocker was on board for that. Or perhaps simply emissions regulations. But the end result would be the...

Having a car isn't a birthright. I'd like to live in a penthouse on Park Avenue but guess what? I can't afford it, so I don't. I can't afford a car, either, so I do without (wouldn't want one in their current incarnation anyway but that's another story). That's what good old capitalism is all...

First off, read this. You're going on the incorrect assumption that car buying habits are going to remain the same as they were in the period from the early 1990s through about 2006. You're wrong. Trends come and go in any industry. The SUV was by and large a silly fad which is thankfully on...

If there's any one constant in business it's that you generally have to more heavily advertise things people don't want as opposed to things they do. The automotive market is no different. In the absence of any advertising, the majority of car buyers would just care about getting from point A...

I think at this point the "hydrogen highway" concept is as dead as a door nail. It offers no advantage whatsoever over today's much better batteries, and has lots of drawbacks (extra complexity, cost, the need to carry a very dangerous fuel). Sure, electrics need charging stations. If enough...

Sorry to hear the bad news. :( As for your brother, I also don't understand why people don't save. I've heard of former brokers who are now desperately looking for any work. Seems strange to me. If I made half a million a year for five or ten years like lots of these guys did I'd be set for...

Reading through some other links, there has been some success making sure the registry key HKLM/SOFTWARE/Microsoft/WindowsNT/CurrentVersion/Drivers32/aux = wdmaud.drv. Mine had some junk file name in there. I fixed it via Regalyzer since Regedit wasn't working. Everything is back to normal...

Update: System is still doing the same thing. No malware whatsoever found with Spybot S&D, Malwarebyte's Antimalware, Avast Antivirus, AdAware, or HijackThis. All that was found was tracking cookies and a little other relatively harmless stuff. Forgot to mention that Google searches have...

Well, it turns out that 32-bit Vista already has the tools to use RAM over 4GB. They just aren't enabled by default. But doing so might be violating your license agreement. (very interesting article discussing a lot about how Windows accesses memory)

If figured it might be something along those lines. So far though I haven't encountered any problems with no pagefile. I guess in the cases you must have a pagefile for Windows to work properly, putting it on a RAMdisk makes a lot of sense.

Maybe I'm missing something here, but why does one need a pagefile at all these days? I've disabled mine in XP ever since I went from 1 GB to 2 GB. At 2 GB it didn't appear to be needed. Now that I have 3 GB I almost never come close to using all my physical memory, let alone needing a...

I've been experiencing the same thing for a long time but ironically today everything appears fast. :scratch:

Congrats as well! :beer: We may disagree on a lot of stuff, but it makes the forums more interesting, and keeps all of us honest.

There are a lot of factors which determine whether or not trains can successfully replace cars for local transit. Population density is one. The higher the population density the more cost effective it becomes to build a comprehensive mass transit network. And the more comprehensive the...

Yep, that's the hard truth of it. Left to their own devices, corporations would plunder natural resources, pollute the planet, and in general transfer most of the wealth to those few on top in the interests of profit. Overall this is obviously not a good thing. We're ending an era where...

Are you sure it's not reverting to something like 256-color (8-bit) mode rather just changing gamma levels? 8-bit color will look just as craptastic as a poor gamma setting. especially on an LCD. Anyway, if this is the case a friend of mine recently had the same problem. He went nuts trying...

Honestly, I didn't even know who Colbert was until yesterday. Shows how little I care about pop culture.

I wonder exactly how it malfunctioned? I hope not in the way I'm thinking. :erm: In order to reduce the deficit NASA's budget will be cut considerably. Last I heard this is what they will be using:

Those radio buttons are grayed out on my machine. I think it's because my processor (Athlon XP 3200) doesn't support DEP.

Actually, 38 days. I just was doing this out of morbid curiosity to see how long the system would remain stable. I remember max with Windows '98 was about 10 days, and usually it started getting flaky after about 5. System was actually pretty stable with XP although the commit charge kept...

Chkdsk shows no problems. In fact, Dtemp shows no reallocated sectors at all, meaning the drive hasn't even needed to use any of its spares thus far. I think I'll install SP3 (original install was SP2) and hope that'll fix the problem. BTW, the update manager has had SP3 among the hotfixes...

Event viewer shows winlogon as the source of the problem. Interestingly, now regedit comes up for about 5 seconds, and then disappears. I'm trying the procedure Merc linked to. Will post if I find anything.

Forget it then. Not worth it just to be able to get a few programs working. I can run Windows Commander from my other machine and sync backups through my network if need be. And I've already downloaded an alternate registry editor. I was hoping maybe someone else here had seen this problem...

I just finished an online virus scan (Kaspersky). No malware found. I think you're right at this point, Dave. It's probably something OS related. Now how can I do a reinstall without losing my already installed programs and settings? That's really what's motivating me to fix this problem...

That's exactly what is happening. The start menu also disappears, and explorer.exe momentarily disappears from the list of processes in the task manager. Fushigi, Same thing when trying to run cmd from the task manager except the shortcuts and start menu don't disappear (but cmd doesn't...

No AV on my system. I don't have it because I don't really go to sites or do anything where I'm likely to pickup viruses. Besides, if it's malware of some sort, why didn't Spybot pick it up? I don't think this is a virus or trojan. Some of the things I found regarding viruses causing this...

All of a sudden my machine refuses to run regedit and cmd. All that happens when I try to run them is that all the shortcuts on my desktop disappear for a few seconds, and then reappear. Same thing when I try to run Windows Commander (a Windows management program similar to the old DOS-based...

It's a good idea to put in low voltage DC circuits regardless. If you ever go with solar panels then you can use the panel output directly for things like lighting, without using an inverter to convert to 120VAC. I think the standard for compatibility with solar panels would be 48VDC but I'll...

I know for a fact some parts of NYC have streetlights over 100 years old. And those cobra-style lights which are just about everywhere date from the late 1940s/early 1950s (except the ones destroyed by drivers). Most still have decades of life left in them. 200 years is a long time but not...

Those all use 5mm indicator-type LEDs which at best dim to 50% brightness after a few thousand hours (really bad ones can dim in a few weeks). Power LEDs like Crees or Luxeons use silicon encapsulant and really do last 50,000 hours or more. I have a Luxeon which has been running since January...

Believe me, a small minority here have been doing exactly that but unfortunately the powers that be for the last 8 years don't want to hear it. Maybe the new guy will do things differently, or at least we can hope. It looks like Australia is getting the brunt of this unfortunately but be aware...

I couldn't agree more. Also, to add to what Fushigi said, I agree that illegal drugs present a huge problem if they're made legal and people drive or operate machinery under their influence. However, we already have this problem with legal prescription drugs, many of which similarly impair...

I wouldn't say we're on the verge of making LEDs much cheaper, but this is a step in the right direction. Let's not forget that the die isn't the most expensive part of an LED. The package is what costs the most. Power LED packages are coming down in price but still high relative to the die...