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I was very gloomy when Samsung folded, and did not look forward at all to returning, after many years, to Seagate. The practical result, however, has surprised me a little: I have not had a single Seagate drive fail on me. I don't sell all that many these days, nevertheless, that's a great...

It seems that individual responses to painkillers vary greatly. I have never experienced even the mildest relief from paracetamol, aspirin works a bit, codeine + aspirin is generally very effective. I am wary of using it often, typically just a handful of times in a year, though when I was very...

^ In the hands of - or rather in the guts of - young men in the 15-30ish range, the combination leads to no brain. And various acts of senseless violence leading to ernormous pain to bystanders, family, friends, and anyone else unfortunate enough to be near these anti-social d*ckheads, so...

^ Brilliant!

My various Thinkpads are either too old or too new for this, it cropped up between my upgrade cycles. The oldest one, in any case, has already had a battery replacement from a third-party manufacturer.

^ Nahh. They are on an island. There is proof.

^ Yp. Cost about $10

All other reasons aside, $A250 per licence. At that price for the OS alone, you might as well buy a whole new machine. Note that it's the Pro version we need for this, which is not far off double the price of the standard version.

How on earth did I forget that last one? Sheesh! It's the most obvious one of the lot! (Well, apart from Internet Exploder, of course.)

Someone crafts a malformed image file (JPEG or etc.) which looks like a picture and acts like a picture except that when you open it in anything that uses the Microsoft image-rendering DLLs, it attacks bugs in them (typically via buffer overflows) to start executing it as code and - Hey Presto...

I'd be setting down two or three cast-in-stone, never-ever-break rules: 1: No IE. Absolutely forbidden. 2: No Outlook Express. 3: No Windows Picture and fax viewer Get rid of those three (are there any other big ones I've missed?) and you have got rid of the major attack vectors. My guess is...

Cheers lads, this is all good stuff to consider. But first things first: before anything else, my customer has to convince his management (and himself!) that replacing their current overnight batch processing routine (~12 hours for a typical job on their current machine which is apparently some...

Excellent! Thanks Doug for a concise and comprehensive answer. That's given me a good basic grasp of the landscape; I'll sit back and see what my customer's company wants to do before going any further with this.

I have a customer who might be looking at a system to do some serious number-crunching (merging hundreds of photographic images for mapping purposes). This is not the time to spec it out in any great detail as he has to talk to his higher-ups first and see if they are happy for him to spend...

A very interesting thread, gentlemen. I've had an MH-C9000 for quite a while - 5 or 6 years maybe? - and I've nearly always just used the default charge values. The only batteries I've run the refresh/discharge cycles on is the motely collection of ancient high-self-discharge (I forget what you...

^ Just make it up and hope nobody notices. That's what I do.

You might try someone mechanical. Not a computer repair tech - we computer guys are nothing more than board jockeys these days - but someone who actually makes and/or repairs things with his hands. General electronic repair guys (the ones who used to fix TV sets) tend to be pretty good at...

Sounds like a nice one.

Performance and usability tweaks (like those mentioned above) aside, skinning is pretty pointless for me as I only ever see the desktop once or twice a week if I happen to reboot. I always find skins a bit frustrating - you see al this neat-looking different stuff but it turns out to be the same...

Cheers Handy. I expressed myself poorly. What I meant wasn't that end-users are stupid (though we all know a few that are), I was referring to the people who go to university doing some kind of IT course and wind up developing websites, or else develop the framework/design software that people...

Also, I hate Chrome. It is the ultimate airline chicken of browsers. The only thing I use Chrome for is Google and/or Bing (Nokia) maps. The Google Maps software is much better (Nokia/Bing Maps is buggy), but Google's actual maps lack a great deal of essential geographic detail, which I need. On...

My usage of IE has more than doubled recently. Already this year I have used it on as many as three occasions for as long as it took to download a proper browser.

Quite so. My view is that coders, and in particular people who develop automated coding systems and frameworks, are terminally infected with featuritis, with the result that we get vast, bulky, buggy code that, in reality, probably isn't much easier to implement than a more focused, simpler...

You could gain a heluvalot more performance - and not just n bRand X telephones - if the industry learned to code HTML properly in the first place. It isn't hard! Rule One is get rid of all the crappy Javascript! Sure, there are somethings for which JS is the only sensible answer, but the...

Err .. you mean .. sort of like a properly designed web page that loads quickly? Gosh! What an interesting idea! (No disrespect to WebfuMeister Handruin here, just to the reams of useless, bloated, crappified code that nearly all web-content software generates.)

Excuse dumb person here. WTF is this caper with specialised "apps" for every damn thing? It's a web page. Use a web browser FFS! If your web browser is too slow, get a better browser. If that is too hard 'coz you have to break out of your locked-down phone/tablet/other POS, get a better...

Yes. Well, yes provided you don't use any idiot RAID system. (That's 98% of the RAID systems installed in non-enterprise applications. The other 2% have been done for an actual sensible reason, and installed by someone who honestly has a few clues. You can usually tell who these people are - for...

Good for you mate! Just be sure you don't retire from Storage Forum - we would all miss you.

I had two or three Z-80s, then an XT clone

I am reading Merc's long post with interest and will come back later to respond to it (and to thank him for taking the time to write it). Just one little nit-pick: Actually, no. Only the OEM licence is tied to the hardware. (There may be some weird corporate restrictions too on big site...

I would expect Win 7 would load all needed driver on that board Mark, straight out of the box, except possibly for the audio driver, and there is a Windows 7 64-bit audio driver for it on the Gigabyte website. (First hit when you google "GA-K8N51PVM".) I lose track of individual board models...

Merc, assume that all the IE shortcuts are deleted and the user is either smart enough to know not to go hunting for the .EXE or dumb enough not to know how to. Remember that Windows Update no nonger runs 'coz there are no more updates. Now, where is the IE risk? (I'm not arguing with you, at...

You will get the best performance with Windows 8 - but MS update support only until 2015. You can't use Windows 8.1 'coz they screwed the compatibility pooch. Windows 7 will be fine, not as fast as 8 but at least it has update support to 2020. XP is perfect provided you are prepared to live...

^ me too. I actually have a first-gen Atom netbook. :)

BTW, most wiki software packages run just fine under Windows, you don't need to go LAMP

Coug, MediaWiki is by far the most powerful wiki software around, but it is designed and optimised for a single big, professionally managed project. The design and especially the documentation is spotty - just fine in some cases, even excellent here and there, and absobloodylutely awful in...

Everyone who owns an Athlon 64 X2 just for starters. By far the best-selling AMD processor. Not to mention Operons. And I haven't even started listing all those Intel Core 2 parts ... we are not talking weird and obscure or oddball hardware, we are talking huge numbers of people, ordinary...

As if. For starters, you can't access more than 3GB of RAM on 32-bit Windows. And why buy a new Windows version if not 'coz you will want to add more RA, either now or in the future?

We are not talking ancient hardware here, we are talking modern, powerful dual core CPUs including very capable AMD Athlon 64 X2s and Intel Core 2 units. It is beyond stupid to do this on a point release (which is in any case utterly useless for anyone running Windows on a real computer instead...

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2058683/new-windows-8-1-requirements-strand-some-users-on-windows-8.html

Oh but it is. All those poor sods that Microsoft tricked into upgrading to Windows 8 who CAN'T upgrade to 8.1 'coz Microsoft stealth-introduced a secret new hardware compatibility restriction. Their support cuts out in 2015.

Tax things that are unhealthy and bad for the economy? You mean like Apple computers?

Microsoft just shot themselves in the head. They made a secretive change to Windows 8.1 and 8.1 will not install or run on a whole swag of powerful modern CPUs manufactured one a few years ago. (Windows 8.0 was fine on them.) These include the very capable Athlon X2 series, and Intel chips of...

Just think of it as stupid tax. No-one with any clue has to pay it. Sadly, the money goes to Apple shareholders where if it was a real tax it would go to running hospitals and building schools and financing tax breaks for ultra-wealthy big shareholders in companies like Apple ..... ...um ...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/25/scroogled_leak_video/ Enjoy

Hmmm ... basically, if it's any good and the bits are worth having, it's not a vomit box. You may consider this a canonical answer insofar as I invented the term vomit box, quite possibly on or about your birthday. However, not all vomit boxen are real ones! There are also fake vomit boxen...

What Chewy said. Well, most of it. On Windows, there are two different identical Flash players. (Yes, yes, I said "different identical" which sounds like an oxymoron. In this case it isn't.) One Flash player is for Internet Explorer, the other one is for Opera, Firefox, and pretty much...

everythinglinux.com.au will post you any Linux disto you like on DVD for $10. Doubtless somewhere close to you offers the same service.

Agree entirely, Chewy. I first started making that point more than a decade ago, and it's probably almost as true now as it was then.

Chrome: the airline chicken of browsers - utterly bland, completely lacking in any noticable virtue Firefox: fast becoming another pointless Chrome clone. Opera: by far the best browser ever made until a few short months ago, now a very poor quality clone of Chrome Seamonkey: the last island of...