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I don't bother with it on any of my systems but my main laptop and Surface Pro. I use Avast, but specifically the free version. The paid version is dildos.

I've been buying Seagate drives of late, though very few 2TB units. I'm not super-thrilled with them, but they're definitely the inexpensive 7200rpm option. Out of all the Samsung HD103UJs I had, five dozen or so, I believe only one failed, and that was after five and a half years of operation...

To return to the original question, time has, within the realm of human understanding, a start point (The Big Bang) and can be thought to have an end point as well; the heat death of the universe, when all all energy has been evenly distributed between all existing particles, at which point all...

Yes, and that hardware will be like Old Yeller needing a bullet to be put down BUT ANYWAY this thread is about Xeon E5s; they generally don't hand those out with a free cold cathode lamp and subscription to Maximum PC. :)

Sure. Either way. About the time a pair of 16GB DIMMs starts to sound like a good idea, you should probably stop and re-consider the life choices that go along with a $400 motherboard that has $.80 worth of extra heat sinks and a dragon screen-printed on the PCB to distinguish it from the $250...

Maybe. But honest, if you have a working set big enough to need more than 100GB RAM, you're not going to be working on flaky enthusiast hardware.

It's difficult to wrap your head fully around most theoretical physics because you very quickly wind up dealing with units with deeply unintuitive and possibly absolute properties. Also, if anyone who is NOT a physicist is talking to you about quantum mechanics, it's a safe bet that you can...

Eric Whitacre's Virtual Choir: 1. Lux Aurumque - 185 voices http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7o7BrlbaDs 2. Sleep - 1752 voices http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WhWDCw3Mng 3. Water Night - 2945 voices http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3rRaL-Czxw 4. Bliss (Fly to Paradise) - 5905 voices (Note...

Let's be honest: unless running 3DMark or Cinebench gives you an erection, the real-world difference between having the extra features of Z87 over X79 probably amounts to a couple extra native USB3 ports.

I know you're joking but that works if you have a bluetooth keyboard, or at least it does on my little Android STB. It sounds occasionally useful. iOS does a lot of weird gesture-y things ("If you tap with four fingers and slide each of them in a different cardinal direction, you'll go...

It's device specific. No device I have access to supports it. On Android devices that do have that feature, it's the literal top edge of the device, not a part of the screen, that gets tapped.

In theory, you'd need to create a Google ID that matches the email address. Or you could PM me your proper address. Either way. :)

I believe this is apropos on this holiest of days.

I was just showing off Google Drive's collaborative features to a few people. As an example, I just shared a big collection of wallpapers with a few SF members. Feel free to ignore the message. If you didn't get in on the share and would like access to a nice repository of cool wallpapers, it's...

Is there any way to interpret BB firing almost half its employees as anything other than a suicide note?

It took me about 40 minutes of dremel, but after adding a couple 120mm fans to the left-hand side of the case, it's no longer crashy while the GPU is running. Of course, now the stupid thing actually makes noise, but then so do Xboxes.

As long as you're using native SATA ports, there's actually not TONS of variability in modern builds. If you have a driver base that includes Realtek, Intel, Marvel, Broadcom and Atheros Ethernet and Intel, Realtek, Broadcom, Atheros and RALink 802.11, plus maybe four USB3 drivers and up to date...

It's not vastly faster once applications and drivers are added in. Now, I have a custom install Image for Windows 7 that includes a crap ton of extra driver and the 100-odd post SP1 Windows Updates, but that's because I know how to make one. But the difference between installing from THAT and...

Looks like. Ayup

Dude. PLEX MEDIA SERVER. Fuck reencoding. That Q6600 can handle at least two simultaneous real-time 1.5Mbit streams or deliver the original file to local, capable clients.

Either your images aren't Sysprepped or the person making them is not adding any drivers at all to the standard install, which defeats the purpose of making sysprep images in the first place.

For around $125, you could switch to a Pentium G2120 and an H61 motherboard. Performance would probably roughly double from that X2 215 and you'd have a reasonably modern platform if you ever felt like upgrading again.

Whomever is building your images isn't doing it right.

Maybe... $60 for my X4? The motherboard it was on is suspect and since I don't normally deal with AMD CPUs my plan was just to to buy the cheapest AM3 board I could find and make it in to a charity case desktop.

I have a 955 X4 sitting around. That's a step in the right direction.

They do. They can triangulate to a fairly accurate point based on the cell towers your phone is using; for smart devices there's probably a decent map of 802.11 networks nation wide that can correlate to a location as well. There are also traffic information systems and the regular habits of...

The maps-addresses link is kind of awesome. Maybe four times in the last couple months, I've gotten in my car and driven somewhere with no clue where I was going. I just tapped a button on my phone and drove clear across one or more states.

As long as you're using at least Server 2012, the native Windows backup tool allows backing up individual VMs without any special software or preparation. In Server 2008, you have to go through a bunch of extra crap to enable VSS through Hyper-V, but 2012 just says "Hey, which VMs did you want...

Not that it's anyone's favorite product, but Windows Defender is an OS component. So you'll have something to use until the AV vendors get around to validating on Windows 8.1.

How I know I live in Derpistan: I drove by a restaurant today with a sign up that said "Never Forget 9-11-12" after seeing several that said some variation of the normal sort of 9/11 memorial. I really didn't get it until, on the way home from work, there was a brief mention on NPR that the...

My Norco 24 bay chassis use 12 5V molex connectors. My big boxes have splitters no matter how big the PSU is.

I've noticed that brand name desktop systems have dropped precipitously in terms of overall build quality, particularly with motherboards and power supplies. This seems to be true even for business product lines (Thinkcenter, Optiplex) let alone vomit boxes.

In an industrial setting, a little electrical tape would probably go a long way toward keeping the connections covered.

I've never had a problem with a contact failing on a modular PSU failing. In fact, I've never had a super-premium PSU of any sort fail. Amazingly enough, when I buy a $100+ PSU, it's probably going to last long enough that the connectors get outmoded before the power supply craps out. That...

Happy birthday to you Mark. Rather than a hawk on my balcony, this morning I had a raccoon on my balcony. He was just hanging out, being a raccoon, and I'm not sure how or why he got up there in the first place, but I keep a dish of cat food and some water out there, which I suspect is what...

Avast, even with all its shields running, plus all the extra crap it does (webrep, software update checker et al) is a lighter-weight product than MSE, which is what I've been saying for about a year now.

There's nothing wrong with Windows 8. It has some interface weirdness that Classic Start largely fixes but on the whole it's not any bigger deal than the random shifting between default GUIs in your random Linux distro of choice.

I'm just glad that Technet provided an entirely different set of product keys for it; they only gave me 15 activations of Windows 8 on my sub (compared to 30 for any Windows 7 SKU) and I legitimately burned through all of them except the one that resides on my personal laptop with actual test...

The thing I can say along those lines is that it's very typical for new motherboards and video cards to run fans at full speed until OS installation is completed and drivers have been loaded. There could have been a power management feature or something you couldn't directly interact with that...

Kind of. It's a remote view application, but given the choice between having a remote interface using somebody's special tool (pretty sure it's just a VNC implementation anyway) and having a full blown private network that can support anything you damned well please... I'll take the latter.

Last I heard PCAnywhere was security risk central.

I've tried to do pilot setups of Forticlient a few times but something-or-other always pulls me away from it. I know Forticlient has had a free AV option for at least four or five years now. Last time I tried to configure it at a client site, the system where I installed it was hosed in less...

Good thing Intel is out of the motherboard business. We wouldn't want any uniformly high quality suppliers cluttering up the place!

I primarily use Seasonic and Corsair power supplies. My big file server has a PCP&C 1kW power supply in it, but that has more to do with the fact that I had that power supply sitting around than because I had a specific intention to use it. I also buy a lot of Antec Earthwatts and Corsair Bulder...

1. Make a Hamachi account on the web. 2. Create a Private Network for your purposes. 3. Deploy Hamachi on relevant computers. 4. Go in to Services.msc to configure the service (LogMeIn Hamachi) to restart every time it stops. 5. Use the Hamachi web interface to make sure every computer is...

I promise that was not the case for my Z8NC, Bozo.

I'm shocked that Asus went so far as to actually issue an RMA number, Tannin. I've never gotten so much as a single response from them at any point in the last 15 years. My assumption when I deal with Asus is that the boards have absolutely zero support. Oh, and my other favorite hilarious...

This might be helpful if you're doing this just to get something usable in Word.

People who type things in plaintext and want to print them out? Notepad is one of those things that's ridiculously hard to remove from a functioning Windows computer since it's something that the system file checker will put back if the binary in your Windows directory is different from the...

This is fascinating and actually kind of apropos: Why does notepad.exe need to connect to the internet?