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Greetings sedrosken. Thank you for stopping by.

I'd donate a motherboard if anything. I have a small stack of LGA775 boards in particular for machines that I've decommissioned over the last year. But in this case my thinking is that moving the RAM has no impact on the operation of the power supply or overall electrical load, so if there were...

Here's how I break it down for my students: Firefox + Rich ability to customize, particularly for things outside what mainstream sites want you to be able to do (e.g. Ad blocking on mobile, Streaming video downloading) + Easier to secure because of Noscript/Ghostery + Uses fewer resources for...

As I suspected, the first thing I was told was "too tall." But I bought a dozen of them anyway and I'm going to fight to keep them. My students are 60ish men who refuse to wear their reading glasses. The largest monitors possible are the only ones that make any damned sense.

Your motherboard should actually have a "PC Health" category in the BIOS which will give you some idea of whether the PSU is behaving. You can also spot check it with a voltmeter. Yellow lines should be 12V and red lines should be 5V, with plus or minus 10%. A more thorough examination requires...

There's a reason most of humanity lives within 50 miles of a coastline.

Why does Taco Bell need to be open at 9AM? Don't drunken benders usually end around dawn?

Essentially a phone call is a demand for immediate attention. I'm very attentive, but at this point there are people who expect the phone to be answered instantly at all hours of the day or night. I won't answer while I'm driving for example and lately that's caused problems for me. Using...

I refuse to hand out business cards. I spent a fortune on them up to about 10 years ago, then realized that the fewer people who have my contact info the happier I am. The worst part about the "helpless"-type people is that I know I would give them five or ten cards over a couple years and...

Windows has had Internet Connection Sharing built in since Windows 98 and the ability to form ad hoc WLANs since XP. Is this doing anything extra above and beyond those things?

The correct answer is that it depends if the PC was meant to be sold with a Window 7 COA or Windows 8. You have to have a Pro version of Windows to downgrade at all, but assuming the machine has a Win 8 sticker on it, you can just do an upgrade install using the Windows 8 license number...

That's an Ideapad. It's explicitly not a Thinkpad. Not all GMs are Cadillacs.

Crucial, Kingston or Corsair for me.

Here in the US, replacement parts are probably a fairly substantial chunk of the total cost of the printer. Sounds like you got a bum unit (and it might not be the drum - the fuser could be just a touch under recommended temperature and smearing stuff just a bit). You could try to sell it and...

I'm generally willing to discount RAM as cause of problems in the first place. RAM is pretty damned reliable these days, but nothing in that laundry list tells me you've done a full hard disk diagnostic. Honestly, no, I don't think that's what's going on, but you really should use WDdiag or the...

Print online. Kodak (out of business) was king of low cost consumables and Canon is generally said to be next cheapest. HP OfficeJets are Lexmarkian in their reliability. OJ6000s are the #1 reason I'm so familiar with Brother 2270DWs.

One word review of Chromecast: Meh.

I only beat the ones that say Western Digital on them. But to be fair, they deserve it.

There's a file server in my back bedroom with 36 high capacity 7200rpm drives attached to it. It's shoved in a closet with the door closed and there's not really any moving air. The machine itself is relatively cool (4U case, giant Scythe HSFs on both CPUs), but there's no active cooling at all...

I've gotten Brother HL2270DWs for $75. They're monochrome, duplexing networked printers that support 802.11. They usually sell for $110, but they go on sale pretty regularly. They're relatively small and quiet for laser printers, so they're actually my first choice for personal printers at this...

I do believe we have an extended set of exercises for demonstrating the concepts, but some people are too dense to work with the abstraction and/or decide it's just too damned much work. As an aside, I do quite like the balance struck by Android, in that users can choose to use folders and...

Weird.

It's not labelled, but since it's on the bottom of the monitor next to the VGA, DVI and HDMI ports, it's more logical to think it's a line-in and given that configuration of ports if it WERE a headphone jack it would only be for HDMI users. The bezel design also suggests that there are speakers...

Basically, a lot of people think of files and folders as things that magically happen outside their control. Cameras make files, users don't. They assume their web browser or music player or whatever puts things where they're supposed to go so that they don't have to know anything about it.

We've tried explaining files and folders for years, but it's foreign to too many people. Even people who work in offices and spend their whole day in Word and Excel don't really understand that they can be more organized than just saving things in the place Word and Excel want to save things by...

It's a purposefully open-ended question but it's something I'm thinking about as I talk to co-workers about what we're teaching, especially to people who are new to technology. For example, I think it's a big deal to be able to switch wireless networks or to pick a non-default printer, and to...

It has a speaker jack. Why have the port if there aren't any actual speakers?

Cyanogen has a lot more hooks to hang customizations from, where stock Android is pretty barren. It's a bit like the difference between the Bios of a name brand machine vs. a white box. They're both very speedy but if you want say six rows of smaller icons on your home screen, Cyanogen is more...

Here's a fun, simple question for everybody: What do you think constitutes basic computer knowledge in 2014? A few thoughts: Windows presently has at least three radically different interfaces. XP, Vista/7 and 8 all behave differently, meaning that instruction using rote memorization is...

It's at least debatable, depending on your appreciation or tolerance for hardware-provider bloat/features and Google data collection practices. I haven't felt like I need to root my current phone because Adblock works in Firefox, solving my biggest single mobile annoyance, and because I really...

The Asus screen is pretty nice. It's brighter and sharper than new Acer and HP cheapo screens I have here. The unit I have doesn't appear to have working speakers, which is kind of a drag since I don't really want to box it back up and ship it back for that, but the panel itself is very...

CyanogenMod has a one-click installer on the Play Store now. Basically you install a piece on your desktop and run the app on your mobile device and magic happens. Which seems like a lot less of a hassle than getting the Android SDK and futzing around with unlocking bootloaders and such.

I'd just like it if Microsoft were consistent in how backup operates between Windows versions. Home and Pro versions of Windows have different capabilities and backups created on older versions of Windows can't be read on newer ones.

Just to be clear, Windows 7-style backup is still present in Windows 8. It's called "Windows 7 File Recovery" and it's exactly the same as the backup tool that was in Windows 7 but getting to it in Windows 8 is a little bit obtuse unless you know the exact name or where to look for it. You're...

Were you surrounding the entire file path with quotations, like so: "G:\foo\barVirtual Hard Disks\" Windows 2008 and 2012 do command completion a la *nix, so if you start typing a uniquely path, Windows will actually fill in as much as can be identified from the keys you've pressed by hitting...

I don't care if that's what they're doing. Trolls will continue to make throw-away troll accounts. They're actively preventing formerly valid and useful communication by creating a two-tiered system for users who choose to use some Google products but not others.

Another hilarious artifact of a Windows 8.1 upgrade: My non-default libraries and non-default subdirectories disappeared. When I went to add them back I was told the folders in question were already part of the relevant library and that those library names already exist. I had to re-set my...

A few months ago, Google started requiring a G+ login to leave feedback for apps on the Play Store. Now Google requires a G+ login to comment on Youtube videos. I have a strong negative reaction to social networking generally, but moreover I cannot see the benefit to enforcing a connection...

Rationally, he's probably fine but I'd like to hear his account of things once he pops up again. Seems like there are no end of natural disasters there though.

I don't really understand the problem but I'm kind of intrigued. Maybe there's some kind of misbegotten issue between having a local G: drive and also a mapped drive that also points to G:?

Something I'm seeing with 8.1 is weirdly long latency in wireless networking. I'm not sure why and at first I thought it was confined to Intel wireless adapters, but I've since observed it on Realtek as well. Basically every third or fourth ping request even to my local router jumps from less...

I don't think Search has ever worked properly on Windows. 8's insistence on context is annoying and 8.1's is better in that respect, but it's something Microsoft has yet to legitimately get right in any edition of Windows.

Windows 8 uses very hardware dependent version of Hyper-V and does not have the "free" XP Mode VM that 7 Pro, Enterprise and Ultimate were able to use. You're extremely lucky if you happen to have found a laptop with a mobile-class CPU that supports full hardware virtualization as required for...

No. I've just never successfully convinced Asus to actually honor a warranty. I'm kind of OK with that for monitors because they're functionally disposable anyway; less expensive models typically only have one year warranties.

Can you connect to that drive letter as on its Administrative share on another machine? Have you tried SUBSTing the relevant path to a drive letter of its own?

e: cd\path\to\folder\full\of\vhds del oldmachinevhdname.*

I'm going to start with one of those Asus displays. The price is certainly right.

One of my boss's kids is pestering me about getting a sub-3lb. notebook with discrete, gaming graphics, a desktop-class CPU and "decent battery life." Money is not an object but of course that notebook does not exist in actual reality. I actually thought about pointing him at an MBP but it turns...

Is the volume in question mounted without having an assigned drive letter or something?

The trick for Java and Flash is using either the corporate updaters for those products or digging up an appropriate third party updater like Ninite that takes care of it.