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Do you have a Windows Server with WSUS 3.0 installed? You can make it a crapload more useful with Local Update Publisher.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2025926/intel-exits-the-desktop-motherboard-business-to-focus-on-new-form-factors.html Not any time soon, but that's still a pretty huge issue for those of who build and maintain systems.

First of all, I do have a preference for personal music players, the Sandisk Clip+, which supports .flac, has a simple UI, long battery life and a microSD slot. BUT: I want to manage music players for other people. Remotely. Over the weekend one of my customers paid me in part to put a bunch...

This was absolutely fascinating to me.

I don't know how many people this applies to, but I am actually so blessed as to have multiple computer systems that I can (if I so choose) use every day. What I'm thinking about right now is the ways that all this stuff has changed how and what I do. I still prefer to use a desktop when I have...

Microcenter apparently sells weirdo off-brand large-format computer screens. Like this one. That's a 27" IPS screen with a 2560x1440 resolution and 1000:1 contrast. There are also 32" models, though the one I go to doesn't have any right now. Apparently they're B stock that were made for sale...

Found this on Boing Boing. A few of these I had never seen before.

A couple months ago, I saw a news post somewhere or other that introduced me to the Grippy Pad. It's a little mat of just-sticky-enough stuff that you can more or less slap on anything and will more or less hold anything that's placed on it. It's meant to do things like hold cell phones and...

I have four i7/9x0s sitting around. Two of them even have nice, expensive motherboards (1366 boards are STILL ridiculous) that have barely been used, to the tune of perhaps 50 power-on hours. Another board I have had a lot of power-on time before I retired it a few months ago. I have a nice...

I have for sale one Thinkpad T520 model 4239-46U. It's a pretty bare-bones model as far as T-series Thinkpads go, 2.5GHz i5-2520. 320GB hard drive, 4GB RAM, Windows 7 Professional. I figure if one of you guys buy it, you'll probably wind up sticking in a different hard drive and adding more RAM...

Putting aside the issue of drive capacity for a moment, what do you all think is a reasonable configuration of drives for a basic file server? One drive, OS + data? One drive for OS and data + a backup target? One drive, cold spare + backup target? One drive for OS, one drive for data, backup...

CompTIA, the people who bring us the vendor-neutral A+, Network+, Server+ and Security+ certs, launched a Storage+ certification this week for storage professionals. I'm vaguely intrigued, though I suspect the emphasis will be on SANs or other technologies that I've only barely gotten a chance...

Starting around the beginning of this year, I've seen a lot of press suggesting that US retail electronics giant Best Buy is in serious trouble. It's fairly obvious to anyone who buys any sort of electronics that online is a better option for almost everything anyway, but once I start to see...

Does anyone here do anything with x10 stuff? I've never really looked in to it, but controlling appliances and lights and crap from a PC is possible and kind of interesting.

Found on Slashdot, reposting here. I don't know if I care about long-term limitations of technology because engineers are great at improving stuff, but it seems that we're going to run into them headfirst.

Handruin, At this time we, the members of StorageForum would like to take a minute to express our ongoing gratitude for the considerable time and effort that you have undertaken on our behalf. You have provided us with friendship and community for more than a decade now, and to express our...

Does anyone have any server monitoring tools they prefer to use over others? In particular, one of my customers really wants something he can look at on his desktop to see what's going on with his three server systems. Unfortunately, he doesn't seem to like simple Performance monitor graphs.

This deserves its own thread. The idea is that each of the topics leads to an instructional video link tailored to the needs of the recipient.

I'm about to make a proposal for changing the way my company works from having a large suite of offices and classrooms to a single storefront containing one large classroom and one much smaller one. I figure we can maintain a space for printers, perhaps a corporate fax line and as a mail drop...

I just ran across an interesting application for somebody who lives and dies for "push to talk." It's called Heytell and it's an Android/iPhone thing. It's not quite the same thing as Nextel's deal, more like voice text messages, but it's free and looks really easy to use.

For the last couple weeks, some of the most active threads on SF have been about phones and tablets. Those threads are currently in the Pub. We know where they are, but for purposes of organization I was thinking it might make a little more sense to either move that stuff to something under the...

My favorite webcomic, Achewood, offers us this extended lesson on the nature of badassery and manliness. I'm not going to go posting eight relatively large images in-line in a thread that probably gets more page views than anything else on the site, but I'd like to present the sequence in its...

I have a Server 2003 system where I just upgraded the CPU from a dual core Xeon 5000 to a quad core one. Ordinarily, I'd be replacing the whole machine, but my customer can't really afford a whole system and I already had the CPU. The machine has been using the ACPI multiprocessor HAL since...

... and I just thought it was amusing to print out pages of solid color. There's a white paper there, but the short version is that the author was able to make a network printer copy documents sent to print to a remote server, or to just a compromised printer to scan a LAN, find and break in to...

Granted, it's fixable, but most people won't know to change or know how to change ABP's settings to turn ads off, which is of course the proper and expected behavior of an ad blocker.

If you have $8,000 handy, you can now be the proud owner of a Samsung SUR40, aka "that cool thing pong game in front of the Kinetic demo at your local Microsoft Store." But anyway, yeah, MS Surface. 40", Eight grand. Whatevs.

See subject. Newegg's daily email shows a Zyxel Homeplug kit that they claim does 500Mbit. That's pretty damned reasonable for AV applications if it's a real-world number, unlike 802.11n.

Someone brought me a WD "My Passport" 500GB 2.5" USB hard drive today. It's not working, or at least not well enough to take any data off of it, and its owner says there's important stuff on the drive. OK fine. SOP for something like this is to pull the drive out of the enclosure and plug it...

A couple good deals on things I noticed things from today's Newegg email: 1. 4-bay eSATA enclosure for $90. 2. S*ny DLNA client. Looks just like the LG Smart TV guy that I like. $50.

SACDs, for those who don't know, are two, four or six channel high definition recordings with a normal CD layer and a second DVD-like layer that typically contains 96 or 192kbps audio. The HD Audio doesn't play in anything but devices specifically made to handle SACDs. There is no...

I got a bunch of Mac stuff for our classrooms, including some iMacs, a couple Airport Extremes and some Macbook Pros and Macbook Airs. OK fine. I have appropriated one of the 17" Macbooks for whatever I want a Macbook for, which honestly isn't a whole hell of a lot. This is my first real...

New i7s, including an i7-2700k and a couple six core versions, were released this morning. They are of course completely ridiculous. That might go without saying.

Anyone ever bought or used an Opti-UPS TS2250B? That's a huge battery for the price, but I haven't used or run across an Opti-UPS in at least a decade.

This morning I found myself writing up a guide to putting together a new computer, specifically for the tasks that needed to happen post-Windows install. It strikes me that this is a conversation we've never had, so let me ask you all what you guys do before you consider a build finished. The...

I've managed to obtain a half dozen Hitachi 3TB drives. I have exactly two machines where I can fully use a 3TB drive, and even at that it appears that I only have a total of four usable ports. So I need a nice disk controller with large drive support, and perhaps someone else will find this...

Pretty good deal on Ebay: 12 bay Supermicro chassis with motherboard, 800 watt PSU and 8-port SATA controller for $215 shipped. The guy has six of them.

Anyone done anything with these? I need to generate a quote for a number of laptops and while I'm familiar with similar Thinkpads and Latitudes, I don't have any experience with current HP products.

Refurb Nook Colors are $180 on Deals.woot.com today. The NC has a particularly retarded Android build, but who leaves stock firmware on an Android device to begin with?

My standard business system build for years and years has been an LGA775 G31 motherboard (preferably one with IDE and a parallel port) with a mid-range CPU and 2GB RAM in a decent case with a quality PSU. I usually target $350 - $400 or so for hardware on these boxes. There are so many...

Now, to lighten our day ever so slightly, here's a nice long thread from Reddit about all the ways that the universe has conspired to build a better idiot. It makes for some rather amusing reading.

I have three Windows Vista Home Premium x32 OEM licenses and one Vista Ultimate x32 OEM license. The product keys are unused. Anyone have a use for them? I'm willing to consider any reasonable offer from SF members. Cash, trades, free to less fortunate but inferior-OS desiring members are all...

I typically don't do motherboard RMAs all that often. Maybe once every four or six months I'll gather up what's sitting around and take care of them in one batch. I've been trying to RMA motherboards to Gigabyte since the second week in March. I have six boards, including two LGA1366 boards...

Goddammitsofuckingmuch

I'm about to start the process of updating my file server systems. My current rigs are older Core 2 Duo machines of one sort or other, each on full ATX motherboards. Most of them use a combination of onboard SATA and IDE port and 8 or 16 port SATA/SAS controllers. They mostly have power supplies...

In one of those weird cases of synchronicity, I've been asked by two different people in the last couple days about the possibility of getting a computer in a color other than black or beige. One of them wants a neon green case, the other wants pink. Yes, pink. Yes, it's for a girl. I'm not...

This is the chick Greg is always talking about, Diana Lee. This is sorta safe for work, or at least not any worse than stuff on MTV. It's 17MB. This is the whole long video, which is tame even by Playboy Standards but still not safe for work. 120MB. Source is VHS cassette captured at 320x240...

I have one Exchange Server left in my life. It belongs to one of my least favorite human beings, a man who hates Google Apps Premier and enjoys making my life miserable. His public facing IP recently changed, and when it did, Exchange OMA (the thingy that does ActiveSync, the whole reason he...

New browsers. IE9, which is supposed to suck less than other IEs, and Firefox 4, which isn't quite out yet but is coming Real Soon Now. I've been using FF4 for about a month on at least a few machines. The UI has been changed to more closely resemble Chrome's. To my annoyance, that means...

I was speaking with my father this morning, and one of the subjects that came up was the situation in Japan regarding the nuclear plants there. My father's work as an engineer did at times involve working with nuclear plants and he had some insights that were somewhat interesting. But one of...

My laptop's 80GB X25-M is full. There isn't that much stuff on that laptop. Office. VMware Player (the VMs are on another drive). Windows 7. This is the one without SP1, for what it's worth. But for some reason, I have 65GB winsxs folder. Linux doesn't do this shit to people.