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Clearly there are some broken systems out there on the web right now. OK, you get outages now and then, and sometimes (not very often) you get a whole big area down - typically, the United States is out, presumably because of a problem with the trans-pacific links. But this present one is a...

A few tips about tents: Ease of erection is vital! Count how many pegs you need, figure out what procedure you have to follow to get the damn thing up. Imagine doing it in the dark, after a very long day, with the wind making the pouring rain blow sideways. My tent is pretty good: I have to...

Yes, in vast numbers, but they are only small things over here. Never seen one yet that was any bigger than a canary.

Unless it's p*ing down, I don't use one anymore. I just throw a tarp down, a bit of rolled-up, canvas-wrapped foam on top of that, then an old sheet and some blankets. If it looks like dew or frost, throw a tarp over the top. Much more pleasant once you get used to it. And you see a lot more...

At my place, the dumpster is full, so I just have to keep using the old stuff!

You certainly have the job in front of you. A huge task!

Do companies actually make money from larger drives? I know the raw margin is vastly better, but when you set the R&D costs against the number actually sold (tiny) .... does it stack up?

There are no decently large, usefully shaped monitors because the entie bloody industry is obsessed with chasing the subset if the market which consists of brain-dead twerps who can't think of anything to do with a monitor except watch DVD movies on it. The product planners are probably...

Dell have been screwing their suppliers for cheaper, cheaper, cheaper prices for so long, it's a wonder they haven't had big-time disasters before. No company that wants everything for nothing gets any respect or sympathy from me.

Yeah, well, what I do is apply sensible general rules of thumb on a case by case basis. Errr .... or something like that. Also, there is the psychological aspect to consider. I regularly meet people who won't actually come out and say so, and may not even realise it themselves, but who have...

Huh?

It always depends: on the machine and on the customer. Often, Merc's approach is the right one. Equally often, it isn't. For example: you have a customer with a Duron 800, 40GB, 256MB of SDRAM, some crappy 8MB video card. Six months ago they put in a new optical drive. Last month, the kids put...

(sinks head in hands, threatens to cry)

There is a question there, but I ain't asking it.

What Bozo said.

Either, I think. Both will be well-priced, and both will perform. I'd think less about which CPU to put in it, or how much RAM to use than about the really important things: * Quality case that doesn't let things wobble around, easy to work on if needed, no stupid blue leds, plenty of room...

The thing with an outgoing firewall is, there are essentially only three possible circumstances to consider: Scenario a: the user has some clues and actually knows what it means when the firewall pops up an "application atomic.exe is tring to access the internet" message, and has a rough chance...

And that about sums it up. I also agree with Merc re firewalls - can someone explain to me what benefit (if any) you can get from Zone Alarm or any other add-on firewall as compared to the XPSP2 one? I can't think of any reason to favour anything else except a real (i.e. hardware) firewall, or...

Delightful list there, Sechs. RAised a chuckle. Like Merc, I've been to one or two of those and never twigged.

Well, you certainly killed that thread, little one.

Um, Tea, I don't think you are supposed to drink fine vintage port out of a gumboot.

Look, don't bother me now, OK? I'm busy. (Stupid ape.)

Mmmm. Yes.

Errr ... Tea? Are you quite sure you're OK?

Is there any such thing as a modem that does not do faxes made in ... oh ... the last 5 years? I'm not saying they are any good mind you - internal modems in particular are a byword for all that is cheap and crappy in computing - but they are cheap, like around $15 to $20 US, less if you hunt...

Processing power increase = zip. (Or close enough.) For CPU intensive stuff, why bother? I agree. Desktop responsiveness - i.e., "feels fast", AKA "nice to use"" = substantial. That big Barton cache is, in my book, an essential. I don't own a machine that isn't a Barton. (Except for the...

Now I want to say something else about GM cars. GM's attention to detail and to the finer touches of design is outstanding. I'm driving a Subaru now: excellent vehicle, nothing matches it as a refined, comfortable, roomy, relatively economical 4WD that eats the terrible outback roads I travel...

I can't comment on American cars (obviously) but I can reflect on my experience with the products of at least one American car maker, in its Australian guise. (The actual manufacturing, in the case of the car I've bought two of, is, I think, done in Spain; the engine is made in Australia and...

PS: try for 800.

I disagree: the Barton core Athlons are so much more pleasant to use than any of the small cache chips that it's always worth swapping to one. Don't care if it's a 2500, a 2600, or a 3000. The thing is .... do you trust the vendor? Is it a good chip? Oh, and make quite sure that it is a Barton -...

Usually on the front page of the BIOS, actually. 386 boards used to do this. Outside of crap from the vomit box makers, I think everything does.

Our Asrock Socket A boards were utterly terrible. Very high failure rate and terrible RMA response. I'll never but Asrock again.

I agree with Paugie: AVG is very good for a free product, and not half bad by paid-for standards.

Sounds like a nightmare to me. HTF am I supposed to believe that the current standout best combination for performance and reliability (AMD CPU & Nvidia graphics) won't get crippled "by accident". Serious conflict of interest there, AMD, please don't do it!

That's only part of the answer, Max. The other part of the answer is that the virus-ridden products (NAV & Windows) are both designed by companies which are obsessed with appearance and flashy gimmicks to the exclusion of genuine technical achievement. It saddens me to observe that this...

I can attest to the non-effectiveness of Norton. Yes, we see infected machines running other AV programs, including Mcafee and Trend, but Norton is by far the least useful.

Is that in order?

Merc, can you ship one of yours to Nirvana?

Reminder to self: must try VMWare one day. Never even looked at it.

And a nicer set of eight blokes you couldn't find

You might be surprised, David - there are quite a few out there still, check the mailing lists. My reason for wanting another one is simple: no other OS can run the apps that run my business as effectively or as conveniently. Oh, and of course, it is not subject to the numerous Windows security...

PS: Bozo, thanks for the heads-up. I'll have to deal with this mess on customer machines before too long. Not looking forward to it.

Might be a long, long time before I run Vista, by the sound of things. My current OS lineup is: Win 2000 - 4 machines (all Athlon XP 2500s) Linux - 3 machines (Smoothwalls, nothing over 200MHz) OS/2 - 1 machine (Athlon XP 2500) XP Pro - 1 machine (Pentium M 1800) No real plans to change at...

In general, I agree with Mark, but I suspect that raw conversion is one of the exceptions. Have to test it to be sure either way.

Pradeep, quick answer. I am a price-performance junkie. If they really do deliver a better product at a lower price, absolutely. Three things have to happen though: Reliable supply in volume. That's reliable supply: if the chips are subject to frequent out-of-stocks, that's a downcheck...

You need some of the plastic clamshells that Seagate and Samsung hard drives ship in. Any shop that sells a reasonable number of either brand of drive will have dozens of them lying around, will probably give them to you - especially if you buy some drives from them now and again.

How does that differ from ordinary business practice of many years standing?

Sorry. Didn't realise it was a laptop. I was thinking a Celeron 1.4 or (much worse) one of those terrible 1st-gen Pentium 4s. OK, ther is a Canon unit that sells for about $AU 400 or so. It's good. I have details at work if you want them. PS: it doesn't do fax. Nothing that actually works in an...

I have yet to meet an all-in-one that wouldn't bring an HP 1.4GHz system to its knees. Some of the more recent ones are acceptable on a decent system - let's say Sempron 2800, Athlon XP 2500, 512MB RAM and a reasonably crap-free Windows install (i.e., not something you ever see on HP units), but...