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Of course, you can get a machine that will do 90% of that for 1/3 the money, but going all the way is really damned sweet.

The funny/good news is that my auto insurance has had the same coverage level since I got the damned thing (which, yes, means I've probably been massively overpaying for insurance on it. It was auto-billed and I never bothered to change it). So I have ridiculously good coverage. The phone rep...

Hardware activation consists of 10 hashed hardware ID#s. Six of them are typically motherboard components, though you can game that a little by using an add-on rather than integrated NIC for your primary network connection and/or an add-on graphics card at build time. A system needs to be...

Driving home from having my Honda airbag recall done, a bee or something flew in my window and landed on my cheek, inside of my glasses. This caused me to freak right the fuck out and drive in to the only streetlight within a solid quarter mile. Both of my half-hour-old airbags immediately did...

If you read about that guy, he has some pretty extreme philosophies in a lot of other respects. He strikes me as having a lot of similarly polarized viewpoints.

The way I understand it, if the same activation code is generated on a machine where Windows 10 has previously been installed, Microsoft activates that code automatically without need for a key. You can still retrieve the official key if you want it but since the overwhelming majority of Windows...

The Republican debate was on at the gym. From the way the crowd sounded, the party establishment is going to have a hell of a time changing the rules to make sure Trump can't get the nomination. From the way the rest of the debate sounded, I think it's safe to say that the republican party as a...

The Republican debate was on at the gym. From the way the crowd sounded, the party establishment is going to have a hell of a time changing the rules to make sure Trump can't get the nomination. From the way the rest of the debate sounded, I think it's safe to say that the republican party as a...

Given the emphasis currently being given to Javascript as a software development platform, I don't think we're in any danger of seeing an end to software bloat.

I have 72 Windows 10 machines now instead of 72 Windows 8.1 machines. One note I have about my deployment is that it's a good idea to pin Control Panel to the Start Menu. Half the crap in Settings will just open Control Panel and my users still prefer it to opening and searching the Settings...

I've heard that it's vile, but you get used to it. It's nutritionally complete and you CAN flavor it if you'd like, so I'm mildly tempted to try it out. I eat a lot of protein bars now because I'm too lazy to actually prepare food for myself.

Never-ish. We've been in the ~4GHz holding pattern for more than a decade. Maybe a different architecture and/or changes in chipmaking materials can more fully address that, but the CPUs that can actually operate in a stable fashion at close to 5GHz across all 4 or 8 cores are apparently extreme...

I bet that would be amazing if they could actually get a die shrink to reach par with Intel.

Shotcut is a fully featured, cross platform, FOSS video editor. I don't have a use for it right now but it seems pretty nifty.

Looking at the reviews, I think I'm good with Haswell-E. Does it seem amazing to anyone else that Sandy Bridge was four years ago and we're just now 25% faster for single thread performance?

My new favorite upgrade bug: The Shell Experience Service eating about 90% of an i7's CPU time. The fix: Go in to Settings, Personalization, Color and disable the option to automatically change the tint of Windows to match your wallpaper.

I retired all my Acer H340s a couple months ago, then decided to get them back out to play with because I have tons of 1.5 and 2TB drives sitting around. Funny thing: if they're loaded with WHS 2011 or any newer version of Windows Server, they can use larger than 2TB drives just fine. I always...

Windows hasn't had a significant change to its driver model since Vista was released. There certainly are cases where arbitrary support limits keeping older software from working on newer OSes and Adobe is often right on the forefront of that, but the only applications of which I am aware that...

dd, I don't really understand the point of that machine except to be ugly and waste electricity. And that ugly-ass chassis doesn't even have places to put proper amounts of storage. I know of a survivor. Are you worried about yourself or about some other person?

It's principle. Yes, these are machines with 16, 32 and 48GB RAM, but 18 months ago the same workload of 100 tabs definitely wasn't high enough to necessitate a 64-bit process. A lot of it is tied up in the ad blocking arms race but forward progress should be happening in that space just as it...

Waterfox 39 seems to be incredibly crashy for me, freezing after about 20 minutes of activity. It also seems to have grossly inflated RAM demands. It's fairly common for me to have a 3GB+ process for only 100 open tabs. I switched to Palemoon. Palemoon is another 64 bit Firefox build, but it...

Something I've run in to now are machines that appear to activate and then lose activation status on a restart. I don't know what the issue is. These are random home machines that were updated from 7 or 8.1.

Root for that G4 now available. I get to dd=if the system partition and never get an OTA update again if I want to use it though. I'm probably going to do it anyway.

I remember being stuck at the bottom of the well in the first King's Quest. I had every single other part figured out but I could never get out of the well after I killed the dragon. I did finish King's Quest 2, Space quest, Police Quest, both Leisure Suit Larry titles and the Black Cauldron...

And in the "WTF Microsoft?" category, my Thinkpad, which didn't have any issues prior on the Technical Preview up to the RTM, now doesn't play sound at all and shuts down when told to restart. I'm also missing some drivers, most importantly for my USB 3 card. I was able to upgrade directly to a...

Office 2007. The ISO file size is 3GB or 6GB depending whether you want one or both the 32 and/or 64 bit editions.

I buy Seagates and HGST drives. Most of my bulk data is on Seagate drives but every once in a while I'll get lucky and score an HGST drive at a comparable price. I'm also fully willing to de-shell an external drive and lose out on the crappy warranty. The 5TB Seagates perform like ass but I can...

On the other hand, I moved the largest DB server that I deal with from running on a RAID1 of 2TB drives to a dedicated SSD for each of OS, DB and DB logs (with the RAID1 drives as local backup) and I was told by the product support guys for that system that it was almost eight times faster by...

I've done four upgrades so far and I really haven't had any issues at all with Windows. The only real problem I've run in to is that Office 2003 doesn't install, but I don't think that's even remotely unexpected. The Media Creation tool works really well and yes, Lunar, you can just download...

The biggest problem I had with MWO was the community. I understand that it's a game with a PVP focus but I couldn't find anybody that was familiar with or interested in the backstory of what was happening in the game. You HAVE to group and you HAVE to use to voice comms to play and if you don't...

Some things that would be helpful to know are how large your organization is, what desktop and server platforms might be present (do you have Windows Domains? A single sign-on system? Are there Apple or Unix machines? Do VIPs expect to use iPads instead of things that are actually useful?) and...

The Geforce 750 can be found as a low-profile card that doesn't need PCIe power. It's in about the same performance niche the 4770 occupied during its day. It pains me to recommend one but they're the easy choice for modest gaming needs.

Using an i7 in an ITX rig seems like a brave choice. How are you keeping it cool? Windows 10 is just fine. The hassles and bugs are fairly minimal even if some of the UI components probably still aren't in the best state.

Nope. They're the right length but don't align to the attachment points the HSF would otherwise use. I wonder if I just got the wrong set.

Not quite three weeks later, I finally get the mounting kit for the NH-D9L and it doesn't have any instructions and I don't see any way to make the brackets they sent me securely fasten to the motherboard that I actually have. There's $5300 worth of computer in pieces around my office for want...

Since Windows 7, there has been an application called Problem Steps Recorder that makes a JPG every time time there's a user-generated change to a window on-screen. It's amazingly useful for writing documentation, but I'm sure bad guys could also use THAT to spy on users. Creating a stupidly...

IIRC, XP Mode is a VHD that's packaged in a ~700MB .MSU file or something. If you can find the .VMX and .VHD, you can copy them to another machine and either re-import them to Hyper-V or migrate them in to Virtualbox if you'd rather.

Ant-Man is very much in the same vein as Guardians of the Galaxy. It's consistently funny, albeit in a different way from GotG. It's self-aware of how ridiculous its premise is but it runs with it anyway. Ant-Man is fun. It's funny and works in part because of the physical comedy and in part...

OK. It turns out that the very difficult to diagnose occasional instant-spikes-to-100% usage-of-all-cores hard locks on my SQL Server development machine were being caused by a deeply terrible interaction between it and Forticlient. No more Forticlient on things that are kind of important.

Porn sites are EXTREMELY forward looking and tend to have good techs working for them. There's a strong impetus for moving porn to HTML5 anyway since it's marginally harder to block HTML5-based ads. Unfortunately, HTML5 is still a bit of a mess since AFAIK no two major browsers will handle all...

Also, it's pretty hard but not impossible to get a legal, single desktop Windows Enterprise Edition product key. Anybody who has Technet/MSDN probably has some for older Windows editions. They're also frequently sold in campus bookstores. Since older editions of Windows Enterprise aren't...

Here's the deal with updates: Updates for non-Enterprise customers are not optional. If you have Windows 10 Enterprise Edition, you (or someone with admin rights on Active Directory) can choose when to update. Consumers and unmanaged Windows Pro systems are effectively managed by Microsoft. You...

Considering the number of actual, legal adults I know who can't manage to keep $20 to their name, you're doing fine, sed.

I'm not going to complain. Tiny dots suck. Tinier dots suck less. If they're building these things and they're practical, it's only going to filter down to the tech we are actually interested in. We can buy a 50" 4k screen right now at a Walmart for $600. Three years ago that would've been...

On the other hand, I'd hate to have to support a one-off $4k desktop that isn't my personal machine.

Turns out the 10m cables I have are about 24" too short to use without putting holes in more walls.

Knowing Samsung, probably soon. It's definitely not a company I associate with paper launches. Affordable 1TB SSDs would make the collection of servers I manage vastly better.

PRTG is genuinely pretty sweet if you want more or less real time monitoring and notifications on a server. It looks at SNMP and WMI info and it will collect data from pretty much everything that comes to my mind when I think of server stuff. I really like how it ties in to a mobile app as...

I'm more worried about the orbiting death lasers.

Sell them to me.