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It was a truly beautiful post, Merc, and rather wasted in this seldom-visited mega-thread. I've half a mind to repost it in a thread of its own.

Left it on my desk.

I wrote it down on the back of an envelope.

I did take a GPS reading, Tea.

Yup: 24 x 7 is the best for hard drives, I have no doubt of it. But these days I'm much more conservative with power usage, so I tend to hope my backups are good and switch machines off most of the time. I now only have 2 machines that run more-or-less 24 X 7, one of them this Thinkpad. The...

Thanks Merc. You are making sense to me. Not for this job - it's a lot easier to copy a few files and waste some space for 10 minutes every three years than it is to set up a VM, and I wind up with my Win 3.1 app running native with zero overhead - but I can see here it might become useful down...

About the same, Mubs. It remains a great rarity for us to see a failed drive (one of our own, I mean, and our drives have been all Samsungs for a long time now. The last non-Samsung drives we sold new would have been a handful of Seagate 80GB units. Or were those trade-ins? Yes, so it was...

Ahh .... but is it a pefectly good hard drive? My more recent experience with Western Digital drives suggests that it's just as likely to be a data-security timebomb waiting for the worst possible moment to fail. I'd be happy enough to use it for unimportant data that I didn't really care about...

A Thinkpad would do Lunar just fine ..... if it had about nine 1TB external drives .......

Spacehog. I know that name! It must have been the one I used last time I needed to do this job, Mubs ..... which come to think of it, wouldn't have been ~3 years ago when I bought the R52, it would have been ~1 year before that when I bought the previous Thinkpad. But no drama, I had some...

First impressions: it doesn't seem as physically robust as the old R52, probably because of the silly long and narrow shape as much as any other factor, but still miles in advance of the flimsy carp that you get from Toshiba, HP, & etc. Performance is .... hmmm .... OK. Faster, but as someone...

Good question, Merc. Answer: simply because I don't know what benefit there would be in having a VM. Apart from the install routine's problem with too much disc space - which afflicts me once every three years when I buy a new laptop - I can't think what benefit it would provide that I don't...

Thanks Dave. In the end, I just went the make-a-zillion-copies-of-something-big route. It should be finished in a little while.

For reasons that I won't bother going into in any detail right now, I need to temporaily reduce the amount of free space on my C: drive. Yes reduce the free space, but only for a short while. Obviously, I could just do a massive great copy of some big folders to a temporary folder, and then...

Clocker, I just couldn't see the value for money in going with a T Series - almost double the price, at least on paper the same performance. Size just doesn't matter to me - I'd have a much bigger laptop (let's say a 20 inch non-shallow screen) if Lenovo made one. As long as I can lift it with...

My thanks again to all who responded, in particular to Merc - a most welcome return, my friend. Well, events seem to have overtaken me. After much thought, I decided to upgrade the hard drive in the old R52 and go till the end of the year with that, perhaps it would be enough to take me into...

sigh ... Can't take her anywhere these days.

Dave, Tea was just being obtuse.

OK, I Googled it. It seems that MS included bits of 2003 Server in XP SP3. There is a fix: In Internet Options / security-tab, go to local intranet/sites Untick "Automatically detect intranet network" Tick "Include all local (intranet) sites not listed in other zones" Tick "Include all...

Hmmmm ... Quickbooks failing to install isn't a bug, it's a feature. Pity they didn't introduce that one 10 years ago. Err .. sorry Gilbo, you were only trying to help, and here I am being Mr Grumpy again.

Not quite, Tea, but probably close enough for practical purposes.

What's an iphone?

Houston, we have a problem. What's the go with networked folders under SP3? The bloody thing has morphed into a Vista clone! Whenever I try to copy or move files over the network using drag & drop, it pops up a really anoying "Internet Explorer: do you want to copy ormove files from this zone?"...

I don't own any audio gear that could do better than FM radio qualty. Or AM radio quality if we ignore the stero/mono thing. So, chances of me changing my handle to "AnotherSterodude" are basically none.

Lunar, as ever, your posts are models of brevity. I admire concise language, and from that point of view your last two posts were particularly impressive. Jolly well done, old chap! :)

And here in south-east Australia, the "abnormal" pattern of recent years continues: significantly hotter and less settled, slightly less dry than usual summer weather with a distinct hint of the monsoons that are supposed to cut out ~2000 kilometres north of here, followed by a mild, warmish...

It's actually rather odd that there are no pre-written utilities to do this sort of thing. Not this exact task, of course, but the general scheme of it, what you might call reverse synchronisation. There is a zillion apps out there that find and offer to delete duplicate files, and there is...

You mean like having ... oh, I don't know ... a couple of hundred tabs going for two or three days without restarting the browsers or rebooting, and also running a couple of dozen instances of a picture viewer, Photoslug, text editor, Thunderbird, and a few assorted random things? Who would do a...

Wow! You did that by trial and error? No wonder your head hurts! But you'd never have managed it without Fushigi giving you something to get you started. You had better thank him. No, wait, you are in no condition to do anything. I'll thank him. Thankyou Fushigi! Oh, and thankyou Tea!

So what did you do? Figure the whole thing out by trial and error?

So where did you find the magic instructions?

And you couldn't figure it out? I'm not surprised. Microsoft batch file syntax is truly terrible. Lacking in any sort of logic that I can fathom, and as for documentation .. what documentation? It is simply amazing how little batch file documentation there is on the web. I spent some time on...

You have been trying to sort out my batch file problem for me, haven't you. Bit hard, was it?

Have you been programming again?

Bahhhh .... now everything is sluggish, even Opera. Tea seemsto be getting somewhere with Firefox, but very, very slowly.

Tea and I are surfing after a hard day's work - of which more in another thread. Among other places, we are (of course) visiting StorageForum. Everything is pretty normal for me. SF and various other sites load exactly as expected. SP is maybe a little sluggish tonight, but OK. Nothing unusual...

Well?

What's the matter, little one?

A used MP-E 65 Lunar? Good idea. I'll keep my eyes open. I expect it to be difficult. Hell, I haven't gone anywhere near mastering the TS-E 24 yet. In reality, I will rarely find the time to use either of those lenses - bird work takes up so much time that anything else is difficult to fit in...

Oh ... and I'm just tossing up whether or not to buy an MP-E 65. I have so much gear that I don't get the time to use already, never mind the time to learn to master, why not add some more?

Wow! Good for you, E_Dawg! That should be quite a camera. On the wide/narrow angle theme, I don't think that there is any real rule about what works and what doesn't, what is artistic and what is snapshotish. Is music better in the key of D or the key of F? What works is what works. But when...

Yup. That's why I use to like the EF-S 60mm macro so much. It was the longest lens I owned (not counting the birding lenses) and a bit "uncomfortable", being quite a bit longer than I'd mostly use on the 18-55 or the 10-22. Made me see stuff a different way. I still like the 60 macro, of course...

You could have looked right here! I don't fancy the idea of a superzoom myself, too many compromises, but I can certainly see why people love them. And, come to that, I really shouldn't turn my nose up at them: after all, who am I kidding if I say that a superzoom doesn't come up to my lofty...

Beware of the sensor size conversion factor! A 14-150 on a four-thirds camera gives you the field of view that you'd get from a 28-300mm lens on a full frame SLR, or from a 18-190mm lens on a 450D. It turns out that there are actually quite a few lenses on the market you could use to do the...

"My Menu", and indeed the whole new menu system, was copied from the 40D, which copied it from the 1D III, which in turn was based on that of the 400D. Don't get me wrong, you will take many an excellent image with the 450D, and in combination with your new 18-55 IS you have a very small...

Oh no! Big mistake! You will find that the 450D controls really bug you after a while. After owning a proper 2-wheel Canon camera, using a 1-wheel jobbie is a right PITA the moment you need to do anything quickly and accurately. Why didn't you ask me? The 18-55 IS duplicates what you already...

I think what Tea means is that the Nikon 200-400 f/4 VR would be a damn good reason to buy any camera. As I may or may not have written somewhere earlier in this stupidly over-long and thus essentially unreadable thread, I was looking quite seriously at buying a 200-400/4 to replace my Canon...

Maybe I'm just a bit slow, but I don't get it. What makes hte D300 worth close to twice the price of a 40D? Identical image quality, similar speed and major features ..... where do Nikon get off? There must be some reason why someone would want to pay almost double for the same thing, and pay...

Of course, one option that might really suit you well as a single-lens system would be a 24-105 and Lunar's IDs II. :)

Beware of that gap, David. You may be different, but I find the 20-30mm area very, very important, and going from an 18-55 to a 24-105 was a big hurdle: despite having a 10-22 I found I was constantly having to mess around changing lenses - most of my shots, it seemed, were in the 20-30mm area...