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Thanks again, all. I've made the purchase, and it's supposed to be delivered Monday. So I'll be doing some calisthenics next week, crawling under and around my desk, unplugging the old KVM from the 4 PCS, and plugging in the new one. 🤞

Thanks, fellows. IIRC (and that's always a big If), CDW used to stand for Computer Discount Warehouse.

Taking some measurements, that Tripp-Lite B032-VUA4 model I mentioned above has (handy) built-in cables, but they're only 4 feet, and I need 6 feet to reach all 4 PCs in my office. OTOH, they have one, B006-VU4-1, for which I must purchase 6-foot cables separately, but it can handle either PS/2...

Thanks very much, DD and Merc, for your responses. But Level1 is above my budget level. ;) I had to crawl under my desk to check, but confirmed that another limitation I have is that one of my PCs, a bargain-basement Dell PowerEdge T20 "mini-server" with an Intel Xeon E3-1225 v3 CPU, can...

Greetings from the dark ages! I have a Zonet 4-way KVM switch that worked fine for many years, but has started to get a bit flaky. (It sometimes misses keystrokes or mouse movements.) The other limitation it has is that it uses a PS/2 keyboard and mouse, which are getting moderately rare, in...

Hey, David D, I hope you're not drafted to fight against Trump's threatened invasion of Greenland. 😜

Speaking of Something Random, DD in DK, thanks to the Danish Storyville Records for their archival of classic jazz. E. g., I'm but a happy serf in the Dukedom of Ellington, and Storyville was kind/generous enough to provide an online compilation of Duke's classic amateur-live-recorded 1940...

After decades of talk, Seagate seems ready to actually drop the HAMR hard drives

NY Times: Elon Musk spent more than A QUARTER OF A BILLION DOLLARS in the final months of the presidential election to help Donald Trump win. <insert political cartoon of Trump as a marionette controlled by Musk> In other news today, Donald Trump announced the replacement for all federal...

Breaking news: Trump nominates the CEO of Boeing as head of the FAA. 😜

Maybe the new Director of the U. S. 🇺🇲 FBI, Kash Patel: active promoter of Qanon conspiracy theory whose core belief is that a cabal of Satanic, cannibalistic child molesters is operating a global child sex trafficking ring that conspired against Trump. promoted use of pills that, he said...

Notes from Underground (the bargain basement): this past Wednesday, I tried to log on to my home-built 17⅜-year-old PC to check for security updates, but there was a problem - the screen was only showing on the bottom half, in a real big font. It turned out that it couldn't support my...

A friend sent me one of many cases in the new regime o_O: Our new ambassador to France … Charles Kushner “…convicted of illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion, & witness tampering, & was sentenced to two years' imprisonment…As convicted felon, was disbarred in three states. He received...

And now, for something completely random (): Desi Lydic Says Trump is ‘Picking Mascots,’ Not Leaders “The Daily Show” host said Trump could do worse than an “actual doctor” like Dr. Oz to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services: “I’m impressed he didn’t pick Dr Pepper.”

That DCP-L2640DW printer does support duplex printing. It's a very handy feature, if the driver supports it.

Eating pizza with your hands makes you a New Yorker:

Dios de Los Muertos: Days of the Dead. Nov 1-2. To celebrate, I went out to a favorite Mexican restaurant for my favorite Mexican dish, carnitas. 😋 I told the guy "If you'll pardon my French, Feliz Dios de Los Muertos." He took my money.

Happy Dios de Los Muertos! (To me, it's a much cooler holiday than halloween.)

Danke schön. Du auch. It's a royal pain to hear about our members' health-care-coverage issues, in this Great Nation. Other countries have national plans for their citizens' medical needs. But, of course, that's "socialist medicine", so it has to be bad/evil. (For the bottom line$, anyway.)...

I like to say that I'm a fan of classical music: bebop, doo-wop, and hip-hop. But as I've gotten (much) older, I've gotten to appreciate the older classics, like the 3-album Duke Ellington set "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Never_No_Lament:_The_Blanton-Webster_Band". And I'm a sucker for...

But seriously, we have already contributed to disaster relief for Hurricane Helene, and I'm anticipating another contribution in the aftermath of Hurricane Milton. I hope some of you can consider a donation.

Oh yeah, well , , and

Does your job have opportunities for travel to conferences/workshops/etc.? That can be a good and low-cost way to do some traveling and see something completely different.

Referring to his Donaldshitp, from https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/31/us/politics/trump-nabj-fact-check.html: Former President Donald J. Trump, in a combative appearance before the National Association of Black Journalists, repeatedly disparaged Vice President Kamala Harris and the Black women...

How Long Is It? 😉

Yes, two 160 GB Seagate Barracudas. I had the idea to have a separate /home disk, thinking that might cut down on overall seek time.

Note from the amateur/"cheap seats" ;): My oldest build is still going strong after 17 years. Or at least, still going (from my World Community Grid result summary): Pentium e5200, overclocked 28%, from 2.5 GHz to ≈3.2 GHz; (which I had to lower from 3.5 GHz late in 2012). I'm guessing...

It wasn't MicroSoft's fault (this time); it was due to CrowdStrike, the cyber"security" company, and their buggy software update.

Within a day of the assassination attempt, "Republicans accuse Biden of inciting Trump shooting"; from NBC News: Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio (and vice-president candidate): “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all...

This past Patch Tuesday, my original Win Up problem, above, had gone away: Finally, after about 5 months! I've retried Check for Updates over the past few days, and it's still working okay.

Would it be feasible to contact the serviceman directly and see if he'd "cut you a deal" on recharging the AC?

Thanks, guys. I'll have to verify, but I also assume his current drive is an SATA 2½" drive, and that there isn't an NVMe interface on his laptop. I assume, too, that he doesn't need ≥1 TB; I don't think he has a lot of videos or other space-hogging files. Intel is an interesting option; I...

My friend wants (me) to upgrade his old Win 7 laptop to Linux. My thought was to replace the hard drive with a new SSD, so he'd have the old Win drive as a backup. I think he just needs a ½ TB drive. What recommendations do any of you have for reliable brands/models for this relatively small...

Thanks, Lunar and Merc, for your responses. I did remove the recovery partition(s!). That was from the first link I included. When I went in to look at the partitioning, there were 3 "recovery partitions", including a tiny one that I first removed. Then after that and the other link didn't...

It does appear that I get other updates installed, such as Windows Defender definition-files.

A few weeks ago, I started having a problem with Windows Update on my one Win PC. The periodic check says: But on "patch Tuesdays", when I click "Check for updates", it gives an error: Retry or rebooting doesn't help. I tried the Troubleshoot "advanced Windows Update" tool to fix it, but...

The Magic of Accents - YouTube

Confirming that LibreOffice can save as HTML.

No, Google Docs seems to support only word-processing docs. But this link shows that Google Drive can share PDFs, and, I presume, most other file types. Free (0 $) space usage is limited to 15 GB, though.

Google? I think I have this little album shared with everyone, if you can open it. Oops, I just tried to add a PDF, and that didn't work. But I think you can also share files in Google Docs.

I sometimes used to use the PC Decrapifier software to get rid of junkware on Windows PCs. However, that isn't supported any more. But I just saw, in the comments in this Ars article, about a similar option, O&O AppBuster. Has anyone in this forum had any experience with this "O&O" software...

Sorry for the hijack from the "peanut gallery"/"cheap seats", but I've been considering the consumer-grade ASUS Prime B450M-A II mobo, and one of the features I was interested in is "BIOS FlashBack™", so if it isn't compatible with the CPU I get, I could upgrade the BIOS without having to...

Alarming report from https://arstechnica.com/security/2023/06/millions-of-pc-motherboards-were-sold-with-a-firmware-backdoor: Millions of PC motherboards were sold with a firmware backdoor Hidden code in many Gigabyte motherboards invisibly and insecurely downloads programs. I built my...

I vaguely recall the NEC V20 and v30 chips, plug-compatible with Intel 8088 and 8086, resp., but supposedly 20-30% faster. In a previous millennium, I worked in data analysis for a mid-sized biotech firm, and convinced them to let me replace all their PCs' CPUs with the NECs. Could you imagine...

He got rhythm, too: From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatum_(music): "A tatum is a feature of music that has been variously defined as: 'the smallest time interval between successive notes in a rhythmic phrase', . . ." Brilliant ¾-blind dude had a musical term named after him. The...

Because it's Something Random. 🥚 🌮 😜

Missing Route 1? Mendocino, Pt Reyes, Stinson Beach, Mt Tam, SF, Santa Cruz, Monterey, Big Sur, SLO town, Santa Barbara, Ventura, Malibu, Santa Monica, ... Is that the world's most incredible Coastal Highway?

I'm considering a new "cheapo" build with a Ryzen 5700g. I can get DDR-3600 for just a few bucks more than DDR-3200. Would that be significantly faster, for "compute-bound" workloads? Or would the 3600 MHz RAM speed be limited by synchronization issues with the CPU's "System Memory...

Whoa, DD, you narrowly missed Cali falling into the ocean. Good move!

Second mention I've seen about one aspect of the current SouthWest disaster, from the NY Times: Southwest, which is particularly vulnerable because of its point-to-point routing — Dallas to Denver, then Denver to Seattle, say. (The other major airlines take a hub-and-spoke approach, funneling...