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This board was given to me along with $1200 worth of CPUs and RAM so I can't entirely complain. For the most part, I buy Intel or Gigabyte. I really only look at Asus when the Gigabyte equivalent is clearly unsuitable (usually because of unfortunate heat sink placement) or when I have a need so...

Four days and still no RMA approval from Asus. I don't think I've EVER gotten an RMA approval from Asus. Way to service, assholes.

Man a G620 is nothing for most people to complain about. I think the big gulfs for day-to-day usage right now are between people who still have single core machines and people who have deliberately crippled stuff like Atom and Celeron processors. Everybody else is in roughly the same boat. The...

The US is overwhelmingly Christian, and to a degree that's unthinkable in the rest of the northern hemisphere. Moreover, we're still extremely puritan in our values. It doesn't surprise me at all that someone outside this country would be willing to assume an Americans are bible thumpers because...

We've had this discussion before, but Security Essentials is easily the WORST of the free options. AVG is a total pig, but at least I've observed that machines that have it installed typically aren't infected by things. They spend two hours a day doing scans, but they aren't infected. Avast...

I found a this thing today while stuck at a Walmart waiting for someone to put tires on my car. It seems like a great idea to me.

Front audio should have one pin filled in for identification purposes.

Homeplug isn't the cheapest thing in the world, but it fixes crappy 802..11 pretty well.

No. Do it faster.

Everyone needs to be block ads all the time. This is not optional. In Firefox and Chrome, use Adblock Plus. Make Sure you subscribe to both Easylist and Fanboy's list. IE should be updated to at LEAST version 9 but version 10 is out as well. IE uses tracking protection lists. You need both...

Uninstall Java. Uninstall Norton whatever using their Removal Tool. Use ninite.com to install Avast, Spybot and Malwarebytes. Hit Filehippo.com to grab Hijack This, Ccleaner and Spywareblaster. Run MBAM to update it to current. Right click on Spybot, go to properties, compatibility. Tell it to...

Yup. Probaby not worth putzing around with, but you'll pay about the same amount to get a USB 3 hub of any sort.

It's the "cheap out" one. My offices only have the APs that I've set up and authorized in range. In 2.4GHz that means that there is ALWAYS strong signal everywhere in the building (well, unless I close the door to the bank vault, but that would be silly). Regardless, my Boxee and Roku and the...

The CPUs and RAM were freebies that came with the dead motherboard, but video transcoding has been a primary function for fast machines for me for a long time. For a long time, I had linux machines that I fed DVDs and stored .avi or more recently .mkv files. Transcoding BDs is definitely less of...

I think so. It seems to be legitimately better for file service needs and it will be nice to run all my media tools natively instead of having to putz around with WINE. Yes, 24 3TB drives once I get them all. I've been buying one or two every time I see the price dip down to something I feel is...

My new storage machine: Norco 4224 2x Xeon 5645 (12 threads per CPU, 80W) 24GB DDR3 Asus Z8NA-D6 (if they actually let me RMA it) X25e 64GB (for OS) IBM M1015 + HP SAS expander Presently I'm short 4x Barracuda 7200.14s and I'm still waiting to see if the board can be RMA'd, so I'm not quite...

I have yet to find any consumer electronics that offer legitimately good experience over 802.11. I think in part that might be because we ask those devices to stream video, which is pretty much the worst case scenario for 802.11 in the first place, but also that the devices are seldom in a place...

It's not a bad back burner project. Speaking of, do you actually have your network documented and diagrammed, or is it all in your head? Do you have anything that vendors can refer to for future reference? I've done that for all my customers but it occurred to me after I read this post that I...

Do you have a way to get smart TV-like features in your living room? Samsung Smart TVs actually have built in Plex support, but I've found myself showing people stuff on Youtube/Flickr/Picasa stuff in their living rooms all the time. I don't know if that's something that's in your life, but if...

In theory, this is where having managed, locked down switches would've been super helpful. You could've required 802.1x port authentication and defaulted their crap to a null VLAN or something and then at least they'd have to involve you at the point when they're plugging crap in to your ports.

Be glad you've never dealt with the horrors of a Acer BIOS.

You can't always turn it off.

That assembly breaks rather easily on seemingly every laptop, but I've learned my lesson from countless HP Pavilion and Acer/Emachines/Gateway notebooks that if they break once, they're generally not worth fixing. Maybe jtr could do an awesome soldering job that holds better than the factory's...

Floppy drives will need to exist at least until Windows XP and Server 2003 are retired, particularly since part of the PITA of getting it working on newer hardware is dealing with the joys of storage controllers for which those OSes do not have drivers. I keep a USB floppy drive in my car and...

Unfortunately, there's no earthly way to make a 1U system quiet enough to use in a normal home setting. They could be nice little LAMP servers or maybe they could serve as a testbed for VMs, but I suspect the power bill and noise annoyance would make them unappealing. But they are probably...

They do break down their results and discuss their methodology, but it's a PC Magazine test and I strongly suspect they're biased in favor of their biggest advertiser.

The choices for budget AMD A75 motherboards are kind of ugly. MSI boards have never been good to me but I'm not sure I'd want the Asrock equivalent. My typical choice for a decent-looking budget case is Compucase.

I flatly refuse to believe that Norton Internet security rates above everything else on offer. The rest of the list is roughly on par with my experiences , but I see far too many houses machines with Norton AV on them to think it does anything but suck and die.

My new storage server is going to be a Server 2012 machine. FreeNAS is nice and I love ZFS to death, but I know I'll appreciate the versatility and performance of having a non-appliance server.

I have a few things I'm not really using. Maybe someone will be interested, maybe not. I'll probably Craigslist this stuff next week if there aren't any takers. * SuperMicro 5 3.5" to 3 5.25" hotswap SATA 1.5Gbps bay enclosure. Beige. Loud as hell with stock fan. * Off-brand (Vantec or Norco...

Windows 98 will install on modern hardware. Leave SATA ports in IDE mode, make sure the drives aren't too big. You only need 512MB RAM since that's the most it will use, and you'd have to do some hunting to find a compatible graphics card. My "retro gaming" rig is a Core 2 Duo E6300 on LGA775...

As an alternative, you could install Windows 98 as a VM on a more powerful Android/ARM-based system, to give your daughter the benefit of a platform modern enough to be useful for internet access while maintaining her ability to use whatever old software you need. Also, congratulations to your...

Well the whole point of Hiren's Boot CD (Proteus Restored Edition) is that it has pretty much all of them. I do believe the current release has TrueImage 2012 on it, along with current releases of Ghost, DriveImage and HDClone.

Every tech should have a copy of Hiren's BootCD. Not that I am in any way advocating searching for such a thing in the monstrous and illegal Proteus version that includes a crap-ton of clearly illegal licensed software on Piratebay.se. Did I mention that it would be illegal and wrong? Because it...

Try Gliffy. The free version doesn't really let you save much, but you can screenshot them into images.

As I recall from the original SimCity, one of the easiest ways to make a happy populace was to build a city with no roads at all but pervasive railways, simulating widely-available mass transit.

Not that I know of. Plex DOES have a plug-in architecture, but tuning and DVR functions are more in line with the stuff that Windows Media Center, MythTV and BeyondTV do. The nifty thing about Plex is that it will scan the folders that it's aware of several times an hour looking for updated...

From everything I've read about it, SimCity sounds more like an MMO than the sandbox game it used to be. I mentioned it in the Media Players thread, but I'm curious as to what the Ouya can do. Most of my tablets can handle Dungeon Defenders just fine on modest ARM CPUs, and that uses a fairly...

I'm not complaining about Plex on Roku. I'm complaining because the Roku has no native support for viewing content that's shared on a local file server without an intermediary like Plex.

The biggest pain on the Roku is lack of support for local content. People have established various hacks to kinda-sorta enable some access, but there's nothing remotely standards-conforming like DLNA or simple remote filesystem (SMB/NFS/AFS) access. They're wonderful if all your content is...

I'd be absolutely shocked to run across a configured-for-shared-hosting web server that didn't have PHP enabled.

I think the WD/Seagate/Maxtor editions of TrueImage are pretty old, like maybe the 2008 versions? It's definitely my buddy for that, but CloneZilla is freeware and will definitely clone a drive for you. You could also use a Linux boot CD and just run dd on the drives. If that's a PITA, let me...

I'm guessing you're using their web page builder and trying to apply all of this to a template they created for you? You probably CAN add PHP if you know what you're doing, but most of the time you're going to wind up creating more work for yourself by customizing a template than if you were...

I've seen a few 500GB SSDs at $250 - $260 with rebates. Prices are moving for the higher capacity drives now. Surely that's a good sign.

Oh, please. You people don't know from deliberately ignorance in politicians until you've seen the breathtaking stupidity of men who believe that the Earth is no more than 6,000 years old and/or are willing to argue about things like Germ theory being made responsible for Congressional science...

The biggest difference between 5400 and 7200rpm drive is whether or not we can get the damned things to work properly in disk arrays. :cursin:

Roku supports Plex, but apparently not all that well. All the solutions I found for making Roku devices play local content were hacks that relied on private channels; "Put it on a thumb drive if you really want to play it on your Roku" is a really common thing to read when researching what they...

I found this on Imgur. There may in fact be some truth to it. I got a few 830s and 840s and a lady followed shortly thereafter.

Does it reappear after a warm boot? What if you do "rescan disks" in Disk Management?