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There's not very much subjective difference between a C2D Celeron and a Haswell i7 if both have the same amount of RAM and a decent SSD. At least not until you want to play a game or watch some HD video.

I had a CCNA a zillion years ago (seriously, like 2001-ish), but I never got anywhere with it. The feel I got from employers was that I still didn't have the knowledge to be trusted to actually work with their network hardware. Since it never really did anything positive for my career and it was...

Windows 8.1 has some really weird upgrade mechanics associated with it and it's really picky about what kind of product key it will take. If you find yourself in the position of needing to install Windows 8.1 but only have a Windows 8 product key, as might have happened for PCs sold at retail...

Depends on the movie. Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, the Marvel Cinematic movies? I want to watch those in the highest quality available because those are movies that I know I'll watch repeatedly. Something I'm only going to watch one time? Probably doesn't matter but I'd still rather have...

It's certainly another detection option, but it's a file-based scanner that does about the same thing as Malwarebytes. I primarily recommend Spybot because of its immunization function, but it's also a signature-based scanner that updates regularly, so there's some distinction from the feature...

ZFS doesn't deal with size changes in array members very well as it is. These would exacerbate that problem.

Android Apps for ChromeOS are now available, sorta.

Amazon's Cold Storage option? Backblaze? Facebook? Are they actually going to pay extra for the possibility that those drives will have more storage in the future? Or are they just going to buy 8TB drives that they KNOW will have more storage?

Is one of those actually better than the other?

Putting aside my opinion of WD for a moment, who the hell is going to bother with a drive that might have 3% extra capacity after some kind of nebulous upgrade process?

The RAM is a couple 2GB DIMMs I had from upgrading a laptop to 8 or 16GB in the past and the 802.11/BT card was fished out of a dead laptop. The mSATA card was an otherwise too small for anything useful 80GB model, though I'll admit most people don't have spare mSATA cards sitting around. I can...

This was on Imgur, which means it was probably also on reddit, but some of y'all probably haven't seen it yet.

It's probably a 5-platter design. That's kind of Hitachi's thing.

10TB drive announced from WD/HGST.

I may have mentioned this, but if you own a Windows or Android tablet, the XBMC/Plex remote apps available for them are super, super sexy. My mom can't work a TV either, but does pretty well once she's in Plex. I still think the FireTV is pretty nice. The Chromecast is way, way better than it...

Apple invented smart watches, NFC payment systems and phones larger than 4.5" today. Clearly, the world will never be the same.

The worst mistake I ever made was adding the word "dint" to my Swype autocorrect.

There are people uploading raw .ISOs of blu rays to the usual places. I usually Netflix special effects spectacle movies that I don't buy just so that I can convert them myself, but even with a Netflix distribution center just 50 miles from my apartment, they don't mail them faster than I can...

Spywareblaster basically prevents some bothersome toolbar and ActiveX control installations, and stops some cookies from being written. It's like a cherry on top of Spybot's immunizations, but the program is tiny and has zero impact on system resources, so I still install and use it. Spybot...

I agreed to go computer shopping with a few ladies I know of the "working their way through college"-variety this afternoon. We kind of had a pre-meeting about who wants what and some interesting themes came up: * No one was remotely interested in a 17" laptop. Even without my prompting. * No...

Be glad you don't deal with much Classical music, where the "authoritative" sources might list an album's artist by the composer, soloist, conductor or ensemble; albums are frequently untitled and will almost never have anything in the Composer or album artist fields; non-English characters in...

Handy, do you find the wrist rest on your MBP uncomfortable? My generic advice for people who want Macs is to look long and hard at the Mac Mini or Air or to consider some sort of mobile device instead. Most of the time, people who want OSX machines are doing so because "It just works"...

Maybe the audio tool stuff should be in the Toolbox section? Here's a random and pretty interesting look at what it takes to manage the porta-johns for the Burning Man festival.

A desktop. From my laptop. Which is safe for work. I contemplated uploading my main desktop at home complete with plausible-deniability pixel blurring.

I need to do more editing but here's a link to the current file that's sitting on my Google Drive. I'll throw it back on my web site after I get it in better shape. Feedback appreciated.

I'm not a fan. The screens are nice and OSX in and of itself is fine as a marvelously consistent *nix. I like OS X just fine. Spotlight is fantastic and I wish search on Windows worked half so well. But I don't like the touchpad, keyboard or uncomfortable metal finish of the Macbook Pro. I think...

Some of the Metro-ified XBMC remotes for Windows 8 are pretty drool-worthy as well. For the all one of other SF members who will admit to having a WinRT device. ;)

The least reliable drives for me have been 2TB eco drives, but 2TB in general seems to have been a weird spot in terms of reliability. The 3TB Barracudas aren't stellar by any stretch of the imagination, but I bought a LOT of 2TB drives to use for backup systems and I think I've replaced...

Regarding the hosts file: Windows 8 and 8.1 ignore the contents of the hosts file if Windows Defender is running. I have a script that grabs the MVPS.org hosts file and puts it where it goes, but I've observed that Windows Defender will re-enable itself occasionally after Windows Updates. I...

I have a 3770k on my main desktop. I've had it for a couple years now. I haven't kept the same main desktop for more than a year since I was sedrosken's age. I have a perfect excuse to buy a ridiculous new setup next month and I'm still trying to decide if I actually want to bother. If there's...

I actually update that document periodically, though the last few revisions have lived on my Google Drive instead of the web. FWIW, both Firefox and Chrome read PDF files without any additional software now. This is fine for probably 95% of web users. The NTFS permission or GPO settings that...

Here's my list of proactive steps: 1. Adblock Plus in every browser. Also the Easylist TPL in IE and the High Security level for the Internet Zone (this will make IE annoying to use so it won't get used). Make sure Easylist, Fanboy's Annoyance Removal, Malware Domains, Social Blocking and Spam...

I don't need OSX, except to have a machine running it someplace so that I maintain familiarity with it.

We've had picture heavy threads before and SF has been fine. Most of my desktops are utterly not safe for work and not for the impressionable eyes of youngsters such as yourself. :D I had to spend 40 minutes today explaining to someone why he has to use a password to access his web mail. He...

I spent about half a day mucking around with my NUC to make it properly work as a Hackintosh. I was thinking that the combination of Launchpad + XBMC would be a pretty decent alternative to the Server 2012R2 (read that as Windows 8, for all intents and purposes) install it has on it now. ...

Allcast is pretty spiffy. Basically, you gain the ability to screencast your Android to anything that can act as a DLNA receiver. It's not free, but it does specifically work with the Xbox86, PS3, Roku and FireTV.

Dude. Evernote. Or OneNote. Whatever. Get that crap synchronized with Gdrive or Skydrive or something. Your notes are more important than an OS install or a single device, man. There's no reason in 2014 to tie any of that to a single software install or piece of hardware.

You know as well as I do that ain't happening. My goal here is to look for extra, helpful steps to include in a process that I can document and pass along to others so that I don't have to clean up every machine someone tells me has a problem. Right now, I have two versions of such a document...

It's a trade off between capacity, durability and portability. The disk drive will be cheap, but it's also likely to break and you may have issues powering it, depending what you're plugging it in to. I used to carry and use three or four 2.5" drives in external enclosures, but since I have 64...

The Sidebar was removed from Vista and 7 because it was found to have horrific security problems.

The most typical thumb drive failure for me seems to start with a "This drive needs to be formatted" message followed by a failure to format. That's also a fairly common indicator that an SSD has crapped out.

It's back to school time, which for me means getting to look at or hear about the malware that's been on high school and college students' computers since May, the last time they actually looked at a device other than their phone. I have a standard procedure that works pretty well (install...

Mine definitely get loved to death. I suspect I get 12 - 18 months out of the high capacity drives I carry around for system images and data transfers. I have a small pile of dead soldiers I need to send back to Sandisk or Lexar right now.

Every time I look in to it, Dell seems to be the only affordable/appealing option as far as name brands go, with the HP, Apple and Viewsonic products all being in the "Oh wait, you're serious. Let me laugh harder." range of pricing. I have a weirdo Korean off-brand 27" monitor I got from Fry's...

Looks like Toshiba offers Recovery Media for sale here.

I'm thinking sedrosken would have a hard time coming up with a ~20GB flash drive or the like to back up on to.

You can just hit pause. The space bar. I do that all the time.

Most modern laptops have their product key stickers inside the battery compartment. Also, since legality probably isn't a concern for you, it's relatively easy to get a KMS Activator to use with a copy of Windows Enterprise editions. I'm not a huge fan of using UEFI either. I can't seem to...

Known as one of the best restaurants on Earth, the $295 per person Chef's Tasting Menu at The French Laundry, as reviewed by a four year old. as told in many, many photos.