Search results

Time has always been an on-and-off sort of poster. He drifts in, gets involved, posts quite a bit for a while, wanders off when other things distract him (or, more likely, when pressure of work and family deny him time to visit), then pops back in again a while later. As ever, I'll look forward...

Classsic Dell. They must spend a lot of money training people specially so that they can design stuff with that distinctive Dell touch. Or possibly they just hire them away from HP/Compaq and/or Packard Bell.

Hmmm ... looks like AMD CPU availability varies quite a bit between our different markets, Coug. For us: Sempron 2500: end of life, no longer available. Sempron 2800: entry level, cheapest chip available. Sempron 3100: fastest Sempron available. (When it is available, we can often only get...

XP 2500s are speedy. You need to compare with a "normal" AMD processor, not one that fights outside its weight class. E.g., XP 2400, 2700; Sempron 2300, 2800. The XP 2500 was an outstanding performer and it takes some very serious grunt to make it look "normal". Greg: you are comparing apples...

Maybe I should try a Celeron again because, frankly, I just don't believe that it would cut the mustard. The Intel P4-based chips do OK on a pristine-clean install with no other software running and performing a single task. But the moment you ask them to do two things at once, they turn into...

1) have you tried starting the laptop with a different AC adaptor plugged in? Yes, three different ones, both plugged in diectly and via docking station. Never powers up except on battery. 2) have you tried starting the laptop on AC but with the battery completely removed? No. Thankyou. I'll...

Is it reasonable to expect a PC to meet some basic standard of cleanliness prior to service? Yes. Entirely reasonable. Who is responsible for meeting that standard? You are. You are the technician. They are schoolteachers or housewives or cost accountats. They don't know what's inside the...

Where is Will when you need him?

Nope. I had thought that too - flash the BIOS would either kill it dead or fix it, but I upgraded the BIOS a couple of days ago and it's still the same. Lucky I didn't kill it.

Yike! Can you imagine it? I don't give a damn what happens to Western Digital, outside of not wanting to see yet another maker disappear to contract the market and reduce competition, but what might this do to Samsung? It's scary stuff!

Nope. The difference is you can turn the bastard off - not like Norton, which bugs you all the time with stupidities, and doesn't even catch viruses very often. No, there is no comparison between the two ..... but I view Trend Micro's ongoing slow march towards Norton-style stupidities with...

Yeah ... I was afraid of that. It's out of warranty. Guess I'll just live with it and hope it doesn't get worse. Damn it, if Lenovo would get of its collective arse and make a new laptop that I actually thought was signficantly improved on this one, I'd buy one.

Yes: Q&A, which was actually pretty good. Mind you, we are talking CP/M and DOS 3.X days here.

Nope. That just creates an ordinary shortcut. (Tried in on a XP machine too - it's the same.) Damn it, I know this is easy, and I can't remember how you do it! Powertoys maybe?

That will be the new-for-2006 version that has the intrusive, stupid, pop-up-all-the-time Symantec-style firewall setings. In the system security setting menu, switch the security level back to "medium" - i.e., sensible and sane. Just a couple of clicks and it's much nicer.

Ask at the http://www.offroadsubarus.com forum. Some of those guys really know their stuff.

I've done this before and can't remember how to do it 'cause it's been a while. How do you get a "special" icon up onto the system tray? For example, My Computer. You can drag and drop a shortcut to My Computer anywhere you like (such as to the system tray) and all you get is an ordinary...

No biggie this one, but it bugs me a little. My IBM Thinkpad refused to switch itself on if it's plugged into the power. If I disconnect the AC power adaptor, it powers up no worries off the battery, and you can re-plug the power right away. But with power supplied, it flashes a few lights, the...

I used to use Drive Image too, starting back in the days when it was an OS/2 product, which is quite a few years ago now. Stayed with it through several versions. Was sad when Slimeantics gobbled it up. Merc, I hear you. But it's very difficult for me to beleve - really believe - that a product...

That would be bloody right. The very same day that I buy a 120GB drive (because that is the largest available short of slumming it in the Seagate world) there is a 200 announced. Well, no matter. My laptop drive is the most important one of them all (backed up but most inconvenient to restore...

An excellent choice, David. I bought a Forester (essentially an Outback with higher ground clearance and shorter front and rear overhangs - same engine, floor plan and so on) around 18 months ago and it's been damn-near flawless for the 60,000km I've done in it since then. Those boxer fours...

http://www.centos.org/modules/news/article.php?storyid=127 Read it and laugh Read it and weep Do not read it if you are eating, drinking, or have weak bladder. Don't say I didn't warn you. (Perfectly work-safe link. Enjoy.)

We sold one model of Asrock board. One. Those boards, all the same, were an on-board video, VIA chipset Socket A thing. (A KM266? A bit newer than that I think, maybe a KM333.) They were f&%^^%#$@#@ing terrible! The worst, the absolute worst motherboards we have seen since .... hmmm ...

Good question, Sechs. Isn't there a number-of-writes limit on flash RAM?

I've almost decided to upgrade my laptop drive again, this time from 80GB to 120GB. (Don't trust Seagate, so a Samsung 120GB is the biggest available.) I'm wondering whether to just do a clean install on it (Windows 2000, obviously) or if I should transfer my existing, still pretty functional...

Yup: for most practical tasks, a modest system is all you need these days. My OS/2 box is an Athlon XP 2500 with 512MB (or is it 1GB? 512 I think), and Matrox G400 32MB AGP. Oh, plus an 18GB X15 and Adaptec controller for it, which is hardly "modest" but is quite old now. No real plans to...

Only one OS/2 machine these days, Mubs (I used to have three) but it is my second-most used system (after the laptop), runs 24/7 and takes care of the really important stuff because I'd never trust those jobs to Windows, and also becuse it is just so much nicer to use for actual work (I'm...

Samsung intros solid state notebook drive: http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=30435

Hmmm ..... Typhoon: location of natural phenomenon: SE Asia. Location of famous old aircraft: UK. Hurricane: location of natural phenomenon: North America & etc. Location of famous old aircraft: UK. Tornado: location of natural phenomenon: North America. Location of not very famous old and...

I'll pay that one. Hell, I've been paid for that one. You are the only home-user customer I have that buys hard drives by the carton and RAM by the kilogram.

Damn it Sol, now you've dragged the thread on-topic. But seeing as you've set the trend, David, I can see where you are coming from. When I build a smoothie I usually explain to the client that the $200 bill is $1 for the box and $199 for knowing how to install it. They accept that quite...

Tea! Stop that right now!

Well ... it is Dave. I mean who else do you know that trims his fingernails with a chainsaw?

Why so much RAM?

You are in front of me, mate. I have never installed it on any of my own systems. I have tried keeping it as preinstalled on the last two laptops, but those installs lasted 10 minutes (the Toshie) and 20 minutes (the IBM) before I cracked the sads and reached for the W2K CD.

So, what's the difference between a lock-up and a lock-down?

That's a corker, Clocker. (Didn't see it till just now.)

OK, two questions: a: why do I get RGB values of 156, 217, 133? b: why is it that when I reduce the green (using an image viewer/editor) nothing at all changes, but when I increase it, it looks comlpletely different? Are we in different colour spaces or something?

I gather that it was a cat 5 cyclone - i.e., about as strong as they get. The famous Cyclone Tracy that razed Darwin in 1975 was "only" a cat 4. (Wasn't the recent Florida/Texas hurricane a cat 5?) Amazing that no-one was killed. The destruction of property is supposed to be pretty bad...

Purple, but I'd probably accept mauve. Violet and indigo (to my mind) don't have so much green in them.

Are they all illiterate, or just the ones that work for the gaming division? Note also the illiterate copy editing on the part of some apprentice moron at Cnet. When you are speaking of a particular person with a particular title, that title is and must be capitalised. When speaking in the...

Most favourite forum? Nahh ... SF doesn't count. I have favourite forums where I hang out, sometimes posting a lot, sometimes just lurking, sometimes (as is my habit) writing one half of a great long post and then not bothering to press "send". Which one is my favourite? All depends, it varies...

You got it in one, Coug. I figured around 2000 of Merc's otherwise uniformly excellent posts were mere ill-informed Nvidia bashing .... but that reminds me .... Congratulations on your other two thousand posts Merc. (Though it would actually have saved you quite a bit of time to simply post...

Congratulations Mercutio on your 6001 excellent, thoughtful, well-informed posts!

It's not the false positives that make Mcafee a problem, it's the viruses it fails to clean up. For example: 5: Apple Quicktime 4: Limewire 3: Kodak camera software 2: Norton productss 1: Mcafee products If Mcafee could remove the items listed above, I'd buy a copy!

Nonsense. I spoke the plain truth mate. If the truth hurts, then perhaps there is a lesson in there. There is no point in pondering issues of this nature if one or more of the parties to the discussion doesn't even understand what the topic is about. Anyone with even a vague knowledge of the...

The main thing we can learn from anyone who thinks that the guiding idea behind socialism is taking money away from the people who actually earn it is that this particular person hasn't got the faintest idea of what he is talking about and can, for the remainder of this particular conversation...

You mean they support users with hardware older than 6 months? News to me. (I don't try to follow what happens with Macs, but I thought they just threw you to the wolves and told you to buy another new Mac whenever they changed platforms.)

Mark's daughter?

OK, fair enough. But riddle me this (as the thread wanders off into complete irrelevance to Sterodude's original question) - why the hell do Adobe products (and virtually no others, thank god) take forever to shut down? I mean, this is seriously crap programming. You have saved and closed the...