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Ah, I see. But technically the D in JD does qualify you as a "Dr." last I heard, though I suppose it's rarely used. Dr. A, BAMPHMD

I'll third Ubuntu. It's my no-brainer go to linux distro. Hey Greg - unless I am totally misunderstanding things (very possible, was in the CCU for the past few days), you realize you're using both the "Dr" title and the doctorate degree initials (JD) after your name? I was under the...

Good idea. My wife's Athlon XP 2500 with 0.5 GB of RAM is getting slow.

Field Crickets. Yup, that's what I've got. All males from what I can tell - the ones that make noise. I just went down stairs and killed two more. Interestingly, one of them was sitting about a foot away from bits of exoskeleton bits of another one, making me think that perhaps this cricket...

GO GOPHERS! Props to you for linking to my alma mater! Did you specifically search for crickets in Minnesota?

Oddly enough, they usually don't make noise inside the house. There is at least one in the laundry room that I can't find that was chirping away last night. We have crickets outside the house as well that I can hear inside. Maybe I can hear the one in the basement, but I can't tell if what I...

So, I've now lived in my new (well, built in 1987) for ~3 months now. In general I really like it. Deck out back, now complete with some simple deck furniture and a second-hand but functional grill, is great. I love reading outside near sunset. I also really like having the space to move...

CDex is easy enough that I set my father-in-law up with it, and he's been able to use it without problems.

3 MBps down, 256k up. Usually comes in at 2.8 MBps down. $20/month for the first 6 months, then jumps to $53/month. At that point I'll probably spend the extra $3/month for the 5 MBps service.

Lighter, too.

So that's at least 9 TB?!

Thanks, Pradeep. Since I just put in a new 500 GB SATA drive, it should be simple to copy the current boot drive to the new one, along with the data. Then I could dump the old 8 GB drive that holds the MBR. But of course, it's not: WinXP does not have drivers for the SATA controller, and I...

Hmmm...interesting theory. I poked around in the disk management section of administrative tools, and can't actually figure out how to tell if it's a primary or extended partition. I should have made it a primary, but maybe I screwed that up. The partition style is listed as MBR. It's also a...

Interesting theory. Hmmm...interesting theory. I poked around in the disk management section of administrative tools, and can't actually figure out how to tell if it's a primary or extended partition. I should have made it a primary, but maybe I screwed that up. The partition style is...

Both drives are PATA and have always been detected by WinXP correctly, so I'm pretty sure I don't.

My wife's old computer has an old PATA HD in it that contains the boot record, and a newer HD that contains Windows XP on it. I tried removing the old HD, booting off the XP disk to a recovery console, and doing "fixmbr", but it fails to detect the OS (though the MB can see the HD). When I put...

Last I looked, which was years ago, the IBM's were a lot more expensive than the Dells. But after playing with a few friend's machines, I have a vague understanding of why that is.

After using an Inspiron that I bought and Latitude that my work/school provided, side-by-side for 2 years, I'm convinced of exactly what you say. Not that there aren't some good Inspirons at good prices. But the construction and engineering on the Latitudes seem a big step up. Next time I'm...

can somebody explain to me why we have bluetooth mice and keyboards. Wasn't regular old RF stuff good enough? What exactly does bluetooth add?

I think my Intellimouse explorer that I'm using now is at least 9 years old. I think I bought it when I built my first computer, back in the fall of my second year of college, 1998. I simply haven't seen a reason to get another. Around 1999 I bought my wife a wireless mouse (the basic MS...

The MX400 is what my wife got. She likes it well enough, as do I. I'm starting to think that wired is the way to go for mice for most set ups.

Sounds like some people are thinking about a more rational drive reliability survey.

I very much wanted my new home to be within 10 minutes of work, 15 minutes at the most. According to Google Maps I'm about 5 miles/9 minutes away. Once I start I'll see how it really is. Luckily I've got both highway and non-highway options, and perhaps I'll find that weather affects one...

I got two Seagate drives shipped to me from Newegg this week. The box was filled with peanuts, and in approximately the center of the box were the two HDs, wrapped in bubble tape and with a single layer of bubble tape between the two drives. After hearing the sorries here I was a little...

My Intellimouse Explorer 1.0A is also in the last stages of it's life. I had a rodent chew through the cord once, but I just soldered it back - it's much shorter now, but since I just plug it into the keyboard it's actually an improvement. My wife got a logitech something or other for around...

I was waiting for a great deal at Newegg or another place I trust, but time started to run short and I decided to go with two 500GB Seagate 7200.10's, one for my computer, and one for my wife's. When I ordered them they were a bit cheaper than the Samsung drives since I'd have to pay ~$6 per...

I'm confused...why the lack of SATA?

Didn't Merc have some rule about not running any PC software written by Apple? I wish regular old Konc was available for PC.

Merc - how much do they charge the students? And they get to keep the PC afterwards, I'm guessing? Is this an extension class thingy, community college thing? Neat idea.

And did the girls have fewer computer problems in college?

I had the same problem a year or two ago with SAS (the statistical package) and Server 2003.

Dell dude busted for buying pot...big surprise. http://www.mugshots.com/Celebrity/Benjamin+Curtis.htm

better, Coug?

Now that Ubuntu can read and write to NTFS somewhat safely I can access all the data on my main machine no matter what OS I'm in, so my old desktop is becoming less important. Perhaps I'll do exactly as your saying, as that seems to be the cheapest and easiest solution for me. Perhaps if I...

Good points. My thinking seems in line with yours, but so I supposed I mis-spoke when I talked about a fairly "robust" system. I should have known better than to use that term around here, where people take "robust" seriously! I want something that's very simple and will provide me with...

Yup, that's who I was considering until I realized that it would take me a month to transfer the data over. The price looks pretty good at $50/year unlimited. I may still go with in addition to whatever else I figure out just the really important stuff.

For 6 months I'm going with cable internet that gives me ~250kpbs upstream, and then after the 6 month promotion I'll jump to the service that gives ~500kpbs. So I figure 400 GB will take me ... 400 GB * 1024 MB/GB * 1024 MB/KB * 1/~200kpbs * 1 min/60 seconds * 1 hour/60 min = ~583 hours =...

Any reason I can't spend $40 or whatever for two external enclosures and $230 for two 500 GB drives, and leave one plugged in and turned on all the time and have the second one periodically turn on and back up the first?

2 SATA Port 3ware cards start are $115 or so - ouch. Is there any problem these days with getting a $40 PCI SATA2 card and setting up Linux (or WinXP) do run software RAID? The laundry room contains the laundry stuff, heater, AC, etc, and a large storage area, and I haven't noticed any...

Hey gang, My wife and I are settling into our new house, and we need to setup some sort of robust backup system. With my job starting soon, I won't have much time to think about it for the next year. It will need to backup and/or serve data from two computers mostly. Between my wife and I...

Naw, I'm doing Internal Medicine, at least for the next 3 years. After that it's likely cardiology, or maybe pulmonary/critical care. And anesthesiologists are crazy before they begin training, and in fact, it's a prerequisite. Especially if you're talking about the more European-style...

Screw just killing the computer, I want to see some major tissue destruction and a humorous admission. Man, I'm getting antsy here in the countdown.

Please stop telling people about laptop coolers! I really want to admit somebody in the next few years with partial-thickness burns on the thighs and have to explain this to my attending/consultant. And I'm still waiting to see an electrocution after a Peltier cooled-overclock goes horribly wrong.

A while ago I got a CompUSA gift card, which I've used once. Since then CompUSA has closed all my local stores, the next nearest once is about 600 miles away, and they don't honor the gift card online. There is currently $42.59 on the card. I'd love to sell it to somebody who's near a...

Looks like the cheapest G routers are about $45, whereas the cheapest N routers are $87. N USB adaptors start at $70 whereas G adaptors start at $35. I rarely use wireless for anything but syncing data to/from my Dell Axim, but I have thought about networking my new home with 802.11N. I...

Do your drives have a jumper to delay spin-up? Probably harder to move the jumper than just hit the reset button.

I thought Silent PC Review has some info up that showed that most systems require far less power than the max. I seem to remember them ignoring the whole "start up power suck" thing - you know, the reason the lights dim when large machines turn on. What is that, reverse current or something...

And what if your admin doesn't want to install TrueCrypt? The problem with TrueCrypt from a USB drive is that you need to find computers that aren't too restricted by the admin. If you're using TrueCrypt on PCs you run, no problem; but if you're trying to use TrueCrypt on rather public...

TrueCrypt requires that you run their application, with administrator privileges, to decrypt the volume. So if you don't have admin privileges, it won't work. I've been thinking about just using 7-zip's encryption to just created a compressed folder with all my personal stuff in it. And with...

My wife set up a Yahoo group, but that was at least 6 years ago. She's been happy enough with it. I'm not sure how's she's using it or if it will do what you want. I set up something through ProBoards (I think) 4 years ago, and it was so-so. It worked for the low-volume we had. The ads were...