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I built a Sandy Bridge PC (Gigabyte H67 motherboard) with a Corsair Force (Sandforce SSD). After 3 weeks, it's close to death. Because of the preponderance of newly available components, I'm having trouble isolating the actual cause. After a lot of experimentation, what I think is happening is...

Newegg doesn't. Lots that come up in an Amazon search don't. FuturePowerPC does. Are they any good? What's inspired this is the grinding futility in trying to find components in Australia, let alone New Zealand. Or finding them, but having to pay 2 times as much as in the US. I was...

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Although the story has been inspired by Apple, the principle applies to all bricks and mortar retail outlets: $1 million bet that Apple will abandon 3rd party retail Original letter the story is based on Of course this is a publicity stunt, but for years I have questioned the future of much...

We're finally starting to see cases with USB 3.0 connectors on the front panel. Here are some really interesting microATX ones. Lian-Li PC-V352 31 liter Shoebox. 280mm depth when turned sideways as designed, 3x 3.5" HDD, slide out m/b tray. Like all Lian-Li it's expensive. Silverstone ML03...

This is a serious question for thinking minds. :) We've all been raised on the principle that servers need error-checked RAM but client PCs don't. I've seen papers that point to a PC with 8GB RAM experiencing a soft error (due to cosmic rays at sea level) about once a day (some claim much more...

Movie Studios lose case against Australian ISP. Two courts down, one to go. I see that the studios went for straight entrapment while 'gathering evidence' against ISP customers. That is, they wanted action against people who took the 'stolen' stuff that the studio employees offered them.

We frequently want to watch video at higher than native resolution, for example DVD at 1680x1050/1920x1080/1920x1200. Compared to an actual HD TV, I'm not satisfied with the results we're seeing. My first choice of player is VLC, mainly because it's far less irritating to use than many others...

I can't seem to find a thread (in the last couple of years at least) that surveys our current likes / dislikes in desktop keyboards. I really resent spending more than $100 for a halfway decent keyboard - $20 should be enough in these days of Chinese manufacture, surely? Why aren't all...

I don't know how many here realize, but a fair percentage of my State (Queensland) is/was/will be under water. More than 20 people have died - not many compared to an earthquake, but a surprising number to drown in rising water. We have had the worst weather I can remember in my lifetime, even...

I want to try replacing the controller card on a suddenly dead Samsung 320GB drive. It's an F1_1D, Rev. A. Anyone have one?

"Unexpected Kernel Mode Trap" trying to run a Windows 2000 image. Last line in SafeMode is crdisk.sys. Works fine in vmWare. Looks like I'm not alone with this, but no solutions that I can find. Has anyone here experienced something similar?

I had a warm, fuzzy moment and bought an Asus 8-port gigabit switch. The fuzziness disappeared when I brushed my fingers against the ports and the bloody thing bit me. Not hard, mind, but a nip nonetheless. There's a metal shield surrounding the ports. I found that touching it lightly was...

This thread was going to be something along the lines of how much Linksys sucked. Instead, I'm posting a link to a solution! At some stage in the last few years, Cisco/Linksys decided it would be really cool to remove the option to remotely restart their products. Cause they always work...

US tries to find charges to lay against Wikileaks founder I'm still not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand I had serious reservations about releasing information that could compromise international relations etc, but on the other hand I'm kind of happy that the veil is being lifted on...

One of our PCs suddenly behaves strangely when pressing either 'F' or 'T'. It's as if the Windows key is being held down, but it's not, because other standard Winkeys (eg. 'E', 'R', etc) don't do anything unless the Windows key is also depressed. So 'F' launches the Search window and 'T'...

I think this is a category that deserves its own thread. To kick it off, here's a wonderful story about a mechanic in a customer's Lamborghini. The police confiscated the Lambo a couple of months back when they reckoned he was doing 160km/h (100mph) in a 90km/h (55mph) zone.

Open Mondays & Tuesdays 11 to 5; lunch 1:30 to 2:30

Has anyone worked out a way to identify installed M$ products that came from an MSDN license? A tech has billed my client for Win 7 Ultimate and Office 2010 Pro, but I don't believe they're OEM or retail. Particularly Office, which is 20% below the best result in a price search engine. I do...

Threads seeking laptop recommendations usually end up focusing on Lenovo Thinkpads. So here's a general purpose thread to help anyone who is interested. I've tried to keep an open mind, with the idea that company stars wax and wane over time. Nevertheless, it's hard to ignore the evidence that...

How essential is VT-x? I would have said that every CPU should support it - just in case - but now I'm confronted with the bitter reality of Intel's bastardry. Specifically, my daughter has a limited budget for a laptop. She can save US$160 by getting a 1.86GHz Pentium rather than a 2.4GHz i3...

We all know there's not a lot of difference between an i3 and most i5 CPUs - just clock speed and a (slightly) faster graphics core. I've just been looking at laptop CPUs and surely Intel deserves some sort of obfuscation award with their efforts over the years? What's the difference between a...

I'm thinking that with the advent of SSD, small servers or desktops don't always need real-time drive mirroring, i.e. RAID 1. Mercutio uses shadow copying in his desktops, and I feel that's an acceptable risk for small servers as well. I'm also unconvinced that striping to improve transfer...

How about a thread dedicated to the Leonardo da Vincis of this world, the geniuses that ignored 'conventional wisdom' and just got on with it? Here's my first contribution: the 3D fast bus. This turns no fewer than two conventions inside out: railway tracks need to be separate from roads or at...

F*cking malware, IMO. There are a few posts around about how it slows things down, but according to some it can also leave a trail of garbage behind it when it's uninstalled. That's IF you can uninstall it. For me, it went through the motions and removed itself from the uninstall list, but...

Google has released a DIY IDE (App Inventor) for Android devices. Check out the one-minute demo video.

As a consequence of my misery with Microsoft's blighted Offline Files, I've greatly accelerated my research into online storage and using 'The Cloud' to synchronize geographically divergent devices, eg. laptops and phones. Purist cloud is, IMO, stupid and impractical. It all comes down to using...

It looks like OEM pricing is dead, at least for people like us. What's the story with the media-less PKC (Product Key Card)? Where do you get the 'trial' version that is unlocked with the PKC? I see there's also a version that includes a DVD - at a significantly higher cost - that apparently...

So WTF has happened to LCD technology, that here we are, in 2010, with much the same number of f**king display lines as we had in 2004, or even earlier? What's the point in hex-core CPUs if we can't even buy a reasonable display? FFS, we've actually gone backwards, 1920x1200 used to be an...

In Oz, our current government is attempting to rollout FTTP/FTTH (fiber to the premises/home) to 90-93% of premises. It is expected to be scalable for the next 40 years. It will replace telephony, cable TV and, of course, Internet access. Video on demand is expected to be just one service that...

Or remote backup, whatever. So I want to backup at least 50GB of files over the net, but there are two problems: 1. Lousy upload speed, probably only about 1.5Mbps 2. ISP that charges for uploads, with an included quota of no more than 60GB. If we pay the ISP vast sums of money the first...

Does anyone else use this POS? Perhaps it's just me, but the search function is absolute shit in version 3. I really have no idea in what way this product has improved since version 1. Does anyone use it with Gmail, or do you just rely on the web interface?

Thought there were probably enough geeks here to start a separate thread for this. I was inspired by the amazing MicroKopter RC helicopters, which really qualify as UAV. There are other consumer-UAVs out there, but these just blew me away. HexaKopter Enhancements Aerobatics The active-servo...

Can't seem to find any recommendations here to recover a USB flash drive. Already tried GetDataBack, does anyone have another favorite?

The quote embodies the conclusion I had come to regarding the management of the Joint Strike Fighter program. In the spirit of following the money, I'd like to ask if there are vested interests who will benefit from retaining the JSF program. The program will be up for congressional review next...

Best not to ask why, but I need to configure a WAG-160N to pass everything through to a separate router behind it. According to Linksys, I need to change encapsulation to BridgeMode. What I'm wondering is, will the modem still do the authentication, or will I have to mess about with the router...

Contemporary overview: Exposure to luxury can alter decision making Harvard press release: The Devil Wears Prada? Effects of Exposure to Luxury Goods on Cognition and Decision Making

For the past few hours, I've been attempting to download drivers from Asus. I average maybe 1.5kB/s and tend to give up. I've also tried their "P2P" option, which went as low as 250 bytes per second (!) before ultimately timing out. I must have experienced even shittier service from other...

Tried to install XP on a separate partition on a 1TB drive that was already dual-booting DOS ( W98 ) and Win2k. On reboot, I get: A Disk Read Error Occurred. Press Ctrl-Alt-Del to restart Tried it in a different PC, same error. The error comes up straight after POST. BUT, when I boot off a...

iPhone fans linked to Stockholm syndrome

I want to provide local copies of two or more directory trees for offline use on a laptop. Previously, I used a 3rd party product for this, but the vendor is long gone and I can't find the license. I can see how to redirect a system folder such as My Documents to a single folder (and...

I'm definitely out of practice with this stuff. :( PC runs like molasses, more specifically it appears to be the hard drive running slow. Evidence includes: the SMART diagnosis of SpeedFan yields a single bar for performance, and ATTO is so slow I gave up before any results were displayed. Same...

Customer wanted to replace Norton's 'security' sh*t on their PC. No problem, I carefully uninstalled "Norton 360" first, accepting the prompt to restore the Windows Firewall. Naturally, the Norton uninstall f**ked up Vista, so now there's no firewall at all. The firewall service can't start...

A thread with a title like this could be populated exclusively by ddrueding. Most of us don't have his budget, so I'm going to try coming at it from a lower angle. I propose to shoehorn one of these: into one of these: To give you an idea of scale, the case is less than a foot square...

Can't find any useful graphics cards threads from the last year, so here's a new one. My take on the status as at July 2009 is that AMD/ATI has the low-end/mid-range range sewn up, but nVidia is still a force to be reckoned with in the high-end. The solitary exception to that would be nVidia's...

I realize that most people here have already given up on AMD CPUs, but up to now I was still prepared to consider them - specifically, the lower-power models. 'Cause when it comes to the CPU speed religion, I'm no longer a believer (I don't fold etc). It follows that I don't believe in...

Looking for a laptop for someone. Must be able to display text for fading eyes, have decent battery runtime and be not too heavy. The task seems to be incredibly difficult. She currently has a 13" 1024x768 Asus with claimed battery life of up to 5 hours from a 6-cell battery. Weighs about...

I'm trying to auto-mount Windows shares on this Fedora-based (Linpus) laptop, but the info on the web is a bit inconsistent. It's highly desirable because the laptop can't see the shares at boot time - it has to wait until the WiFi is up and running. I've installed AutoFS, added a /SMB entry to...

Anyone used Google Talk? I'm finding huge delays in messages being sent (at least between Australia and India), sometimes up to 5 minutes or so.

Has anyone experienced or seen a database server running on a Virtual Machine, i.e. VMWare or Virtual Server? Google tends to confirm my instincts - that disk I/O will be crap and therefore server performance will be crap. What do you guys think?