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Sony it is. Surprisingly it shipping with a minimum amount of true crapware. Norton was replaced. I uninstalled the MS Office trial before installing Office Enterprise. A couple of other things were removed. The Sony & 3rd party apps that actually provide some functionality are staying so...

I went from serial (1985) to PS/2 (mid-90s) to USB (not sure when; maybe 2003). For my main mouse I don't think I've bought any wired USB mice. I have for secondary stuff but now I wouldn't bother, especially with mice that can go 6+ months off a single battery.

I can't recall the last time I bought a wired mouse. I've yet to get a wireless keyboard, though. That just doesn't seem to offer a benefit given the way I have things set up. Regular WiFi works pretty well for me. Sure, not really as reliable a wired but the flexibility is there and it...

We've always gotten them from Dell as far as work is concerned. But CDW, Tiger, Amazon, etc. all carry them as well.

I stopped by MicroCenter on the way home from work. Didn't see anything too impressive for my wife, especially now that we're wanting a BD drive. Probably 1/2 to 2/3rd of the models had the shiny surface (fingerprint magnet) around the keyboard/wrist-rest area. Sorry, PC makers, those models...

The RTL8187B is the wireless. Also, since you're putting XP on it, be sure to get SP3 and any other updates. In fact, Windows Update might catch the odd hardware driver for the machine. I just Googled "Gateway p-6301" and saw a link to Gateway's site. Clicking Drivers from there I get this...

For the RTL8187B, the driver from Realtek is here (bottom of the page). I don't know if Gateway messes with it or not, but the one from Realtek will probably work.

Regarding the software, I'd definitely do a wipe/reload with the "free" Win7 upgrade come late October so unless the goofiness is in the drivers I think that part can be minimized. She has a desktop machine .. Q6600, 2GB, yada yada .. but I'm going to guess once she gets used to the notebook...

We've been talking about getting my wife a notebook of her own. She's been using my old work machine (2Ghz, 1GB, 8ish pound Latitude D800) but it's slow and heavy. And technically it's not ours and I should return it to work, although they aren't asking for it back and will likely recycle it...

Our smoke detectors are wired to the house for power but have 9V battery backups. I like this setup as normally your supposed to replace the 9V batteries twice a year, but these units give a battery alarm when the 9V is low. They're lasting at least 7 years. The same is true for our alarm...

I'm reasonably sure the anticipated usage model does not include RAIH (Redundant Array of Independent Hotspots).

Actually, Hyundai's have great AC. My wife's Elantra feels like it could make ice cubes in 90 degree heat. According to Wunderground, the weather should be good (mid 80s) when we go to Maui in October.

Or Firewire if your laptop is so equipped. Anyway, some time ago I picked up one of these to allow me to load up old IDE drives and new SATA drives as needed. I've only used it with a SATA drive (1.5TB Seagate) so far. I got mine at Fry's B&M for the same price. Takes 3.5" drives and...

IIRC real estate taxes are a federal deduction so the hit is at least partially mitigated. And like JTR mentions, there are frequently programs for seniors to reduce their tax burden. Here it works like an adjustment to your assessed value. $5K off, I think. My property tax bill for 2008...

One nice thing is you're less likely to have a catastrophic failure of an SSD. Sectors may go bad but the likelihood of an entire chip suffering a meltdown is quite low. Compare to the HD failure model which not only includes failed sectors but head crashes and failed motors. For both...

No wonder your state is bankrupt. My home is rather average and my tax bill is over 10x that.

My property taxes have gone up by about 50% since we bought our home in early 2002. They tend to go up some each year but have gone down once or twice. It's not just the appraised value that sets your taxes. There's also the tax rate. Adjusting one, the other, or both will impact what you...

I'd suggest a powered USB hub so there's only 1 wall plug consumed. I have one of these, for instance.

Then you need a better controller. There's nothing wrong with the various RAID flavors. How they are implemented, however, can vary greatly.

When we were pre-approved for a mortgage, I took 20% off what we were approved for and said that was our price ceiling. The home we bought was cheaper than the ceiling by about another 6%. Since 2002 our property taxes have risen by around 50% and home owners insurance by around the same...

Excel. I have about 2-1/2 years of running budget that fits on a single screen (1200x1600) w/room to spare. Columns for balance, incomes, "out-goes", savings, extras. Project budgets and other major exceptions get their own sheet within the file. I place indicators at the bottom of columns...

Regarding the wear on the drive, the MTBF is estimated to be 1,500,000 hours. That's 62,500 days, which is 8,928 weeks, which is 171 years. Even if the engineering (or marketing...) estimate was off by an order of magnitude that would still peg the average failure as occurring after 17 years...

Merc went to this nudist event once.

For a different off-beat holiday, try this one (NSFW). We should encourage half the population to participate in this event on August 23. :o The other half will observe the participants.

AMD has had that success with yields before as well. A few years back you could get an Athlon XP 1700 that had passed QC as a 2600 or 2800. Yields were so good they had to stamp higher-speed chips as lower to satisfy market demand for entry systems. The 1700 was a $50ish CPU; the others were...

I Googled "linux image backup" and the top result was the OSS Partimage.

Rather than removing your ad blocker, try just telling it to trust the site. Also, I don't know of an alternative player but you could try downloading the Flash to play outside of FF. Flash-related Add-ons.

I haven't tried it, but in Firefox, do Tool - Options - Applications tab and wait a moment for the tab to populate. Scroll the the appropriate media type & change it to use WMP Classic.

It's been OK but I agree not great. Not the best SF around but far from the worst. And between the ending of the last season and Children of Earth, they're replacing all of the cast except Gwen & Captain Jack. And the Hub (TW's HQ) has been blown up so that set's gone. I've got one more ep...

When a TV season costs something like $60+, yes, it is overpriced. But when you can get them cheap it's not bad. We got season 2 of Chuck on BD for $33, for instance.

Some of those ladies are pretty attractive, but I was thinking more along the lines of this (possibly NSFW).

"militartphotos.net" brought images of ladies doing suggestive poses in "modified" uniforms to mind. :)

I'd add the DVD release, let alone Bluray, typically offers far superior video and audio fidelity than the original OTA/cable/satellite broadcast. Try watching Star Trek: Next Gen on TV and then watch the same episode on DVD. It's like a handful of blur filters were suddenly removed. And...

IBM did. The white paper is about SSDs v. 15K v. 7.2K disks RAIDed in a SAN. Another example with more detail is Performance Impacts of Flash SSDs Upon IBM Power Systems (PDF). IO/s is stressed more heavily than MB/s, as it should be in a server environment. IBM specs the Power system's...

I'd wonder if there were some nVidia driver turds that weren't flushed when it was uninstalled prior to the ATI install. Personally, I've not had significant issue with either brand. But my sample size is insignificant compared to most on this forum. Right now I'm using ATI and see no reason...

Here are a few ATI branded cards.

They'd be poor for swap/scratch space from a longevity standpoint if the swap space used was a truly significant portion ofthe disk. But if it's just a few GB then I don't see it as much of an issue. The wear leveling helps in this regard. Besides, aren't these drives rated for continuous...

Would TRIM eliminate the ability to un-delete a file once the Recycle Bin has been emptied? Sounds like it. Not really a problem for me but I'm curious.

I think I might hold off for the next wave of Atoms.

Maybe in time she''ss come from the dark side but I'm not honestly worried about it. She hits mainstream sites almost exclusively and the machines are otherwise protected with AV/AS/firewall etc.

PCs aren't everything there is to life. Funny, though, between the forums she hits and facebook etc. some evening she spends more time online than I do. Of course I'm on all day for work so there's balance, but it is an odd dynamic at times. FWIW the Flash update went on the XP machines just...

For me, I have some work sites (SharePoint and others) that aren't quite as functional with non-IE browsers. Also, my wife uses IE. I tried to get her to use FF a long time ago but she wouldn't switch. She's only recently started getting into tabbed browsing instead of launching separate windows.

Thanks for the update. I've updated my main Vista SP2 PCs (32 bit laptop, 64 bit desktop) for both FF & IE8. Both have DEP enabled; neither had any problems. I'll update the other PCs in the house later. They're a mix of XP SP3 & Win7. Come to think of it, I don't think I've gotten around...

Wipe & reload is not an option. It's the corporate image. Sorry, I should have mentioned that before.

Given Stereodude's comment, I'll drop the Transcend. I just wish there were better ATA SSD options out there. So, WD or wait & get a new machine ..

My old Dell Latitude D800 has a Hitachi IDE 60GB 7200 RPM drive from around 2004 or 2005. Only about 15GB are in use. The laptop is a 2GHz CPU with 1GB RAM and is running XP SP3. Of late the whole machine has been getting slower and slower. I've run CCleaner, uninstalled anything extra, and...

The kid uses slight of hand & optical illusions in the video. For the early "straight" nails getting bent, the nail is already bent but he shows it "flat" to the camera so you can't see the bend. For the bent nails getting straightened there are 2 nails involved: the bent nail that stays bent...

I upgraded to the latest ATI Catalyst drivers a few days ago and an oddness has appeared. I have 2 monitors and both are in portrait orientation. Whenever I reboot, it remembers the orientation and remember "extend desktop" but forgets which monitor is defined to the left/right/above/below the...

I'd rather pay more to buy from a reputable merchant than take my chances with a service that doesn't give a flying f**k about the integrity of the transactions they broker.

My solution is easy: avoid eBay altogether.