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Virtual PC actually does wind up being a better deal for my usage scenario. It shares the Documents library with the host PC and inherits its printers as well, which means less crap to manage and a smaller image file. For people who think a 60GB SSD is too small for Windows 7, my classroom Win7...

A Promise controller may not properly support optical drives. I seem to recall problems with them and I know I made it my practice to avoid putting an optical drive on one. As I recall, I specifically had problems with bad burns on CD-Rs that were solved by moves to native controllers. USB...

Corsair Force GTs and Samsung 830s are kind of my personal go-to options for SSDs right now. I just paid for several Intel 330s, but that's a fleet purchase where I expect the two-day turnaround on RMAs to be more important than anything else. OCZ Agility (not-super-fast) series SSDs are very...

There is little to nothing here, but I have absolutely no evidence that moving anywhere else would improve my fortunes. I'd also like to say that sex work is a job, not a personal indictment. People can be manipulative pieces of crap whether or not they take off their clothes for money. Most...

While I was looking in to MSVPC on Windows 7, I found this nifty little tool: XP-More, which allows users to quickly duplicate and manage Virtual PC VMs. Interestingly, it's hosted on Microsoft's Codeplex site, which means that Microsoft is at least theoretically aware that one of its uses is to...

It might be noted that I'm actually a pretty wholesome guy. Not religious or simple minded, but other than my enjoyment of naked ladies I really don't have any vices to speak of.

180GB is not a ton of room once VMs and a backup image are included. I've not tested a restore using TrueImage; the version I have licenses for is 2010, and that doesn't work with Windows 8. I'm a little worried that it won't restore properly, and because of the dual boot setup I can't use...

Here is the problem with looking for functionally weird: The women who are geeky/weird tend to be a lot younger than me - think like 20 year old anime and xbox fiends - and they tend to live in places where they already have craploads of options for finding guys like Chicago or Urbana or...

I'm open to suggestions but remember that my options are ridiculously limited here.

Wow. That is the complete opposite of hilarious.

I just had a weird phone call. Over the weekend, the strip club where my friend works had its 20th anniversary. They were doing giveaways for customers who got dances. My friend apparently used my name and phone number to enter, because I won an ipad. Which is obviously hilarious, because it's...

My impression of relatively recent Lenovo business (Thinkcenter/Thinkstation) desktop products is that they're relatively solid and similar to what I would've built anyway. I don't know if that's true of consumer desktops but I doubt that there's as much difference between desktop products as...

I've noticed that MTP-based sync fails A LOT when there are non-US-but-still-Western-Alphabet special characters. I'm not sure what the problem is, but I had the issue syncing playlists with every application I tried. It might be a limitation of MTP on the device, since all the syncs failed in...

Both Newegg and Amazon are doing weird things with shipping now. What they're actually trying to do is get shipping that is as fast and as local as possible. About a third of my Amazon deliveries now come from one of two companies that literally just hires "some guy in a car" to drive to a...

As I said, the thin client thing is not happening. I have a proof of concept machine dual booting Win7 and Win8 (haven't decided how I'm going to handle the VMs) right now that I need to show to other instructors.

There is actually a standardized all in one form factor now. It's called Thin Mini-ITX and here is a brochure listing OEMs who are building them.

One of my iphone people just started using it since he moved to a Galaxy S3 instead of an iphone 5. I'm sure I'll hear about it if it does anything other than "just work."

I'm all set in that department.

<.< >.> One of Newegg's email specials this morning is $10 off on a Hitachi Magic Wand, with offer code EMCNAHB65.

Why are you bothering with KVM in the first place? Why not RDP or VNC? The phone/tablet situation really bugs me. I see a lot of people who have both devices out, smartphone and tablet. I can only assume it's because they're using SMS on their phone. Why isn't there a worthwhile...

Dirty Jenny sounds awesome though so maybe that's less of a problem.

It helps if you turn it off or at least remove audible notifications for most things. My least favorite thing in the world is explaining to people that I. Do. Not. Do. SMS. Ever. (OK that's no 100% true, but the three people who can send me them are white listed and only allowed because they...

One of my customers still has a Netware 3 machine that runs some portion of his POS system. Another one has some CNC systems that demand to talk to x86 computers running something called ROX (Copyright 1989) that's installed from 720k floppies. I've never been able to find anything out about it...

I don't know how many people this applies to, but I am actually so blessed as to have multiple computer systems that I can (if I so choose) use every day. What I'm thinking about right now is the ways that all this stuff has changed how and what I do. I still prefer to use a desktop when I have...

A lot of those "Android Head Units" are like the one I was describing, where they have an app to interface with the head unit, not a head unit that can control stuff on the device. A few of the expensive ones essentially have a $50 tablet for an interface, but looking at the specs on those...

No, it would go to 10.9 on everything except one category where you would inexplicably be a 10.7. RAID10 of PCIe SSDs? Too bad. Your disk subsystem is a 10.7.

You might want to check laws in your state to make sure that you can in fact mount a computer screen in your car in the driver's field of view. I really, really wish someone made a head unit that had functional controls for Android. I played with something with an Android logo on the box but it...

Oh never mind. The Nexus PHONE is Samsung.

That's what the Nexus is. Including the made by Samsung bit.

CEOs can't really say things like that, but they have no realistic chance of topping either Google or Apple and to think otherwise would be at least as dangerous a break with reality.

Windows 8 has Hyper-V, just like Server 2008 and Server 2012. The problem is, XP Mode was a de-facto free Windows XP license and that's what is missing. Virtual PC also used some aspects of Remote Desktop to make it appear that installed apps were running natively on the desktop where Windows...

Windows 8 does not have XP Mode. Weak.

The people I work with have a very different perspective on this stuff. They want the facilities to most closely resemble what people are going to use at home and/or at work. I'm having to expend all my efforts at the moment justifying the use of VMs for older versions of Windows so that I don't...

Stardock is now offering Start8 for Windows 8. It appears to be free.

I use it so that I can use my larger tablets as GPSes without needing a full-time data connection. It works very well for that purpose. Just like reviews on Amazon or Newegg, people will give bad reviews for stupid shit, so I'd take those reviews with a very large grain of salt.

I'm not really arguing with anyone. I'd far rather have flash drives. The problem is that I know full well the other people in my office won't change what they're doing or willing to do in classes if they think it might somehow create a different environment than what a typical home or office...

I use Go Launcher on my Fire.

Your DOS-based software may yet run properly. 16-bit Windows apps and programs that depend on a 98/2000/XP driver are the only things that I can absolutely assure you will not work. Also, I had problems setting up dual boot configurations with 32 and 64 bit versions of Windows, where the boot...

Have you not heard of CoPilot?

I don't know about the Fire HD, but I had a different launcher running on my Fire about 90 seconds after I took it out of the box.

Yes. This is the huge drawback that kept me from fully recommending the Fire as well. It doesn't include Google's apps and in fact the Fire has to be rooted to install anything from the Play Store and certain .APKs even if you do take the time to collect them and try to sideload them. I hate the...

As far as I know, they were made by Lenovo since at least the mid-90s. It's just that up until 2005 or so, they still said IBM on them.

Upgrading old Windows installs is a tremendously bad idea. I know it's a pain to reinstall applications, but I've noted that XP -> Vista was a particularly buggy change. Upgrade installs are not well tested by Microsoft and because of the sheer number of variables, there's no telling where or...

CD-Rs are $.15.

jtr, OS installs are not a thing you need to be worried about.

Apparently it's SOP when teaching rooms full of secretaries and mid-level managers Microsoft Office to save the files they make in class on CDs that they can take with them when they leave. I already suggested putting that crap on the web instead, but it's one of those things where we can't...

In the end, it doesn't matter, because any setup that does not work EXACTLY LIKE an dedicated individual workstation is going to be rejected, no matter how well it works.

There's a further budgetary allocation for spare parts. I'll probably wind up with about 50 grand all told, pending approval of the customers for which we maintain off-site classrooms. Considering the amount of shit I got for wanting to have clients without CD burners, I'm not even going to try...

I'm assuming this is for Windows so... many vendor-provided wireless clients have decent monitor features as well. My standard practice is to uninstall Lenovo's because it annoys me, but if you're looking the Wireless Zero Config Client instead of the one from Toshiba/Dell/Lenovo/Intel/Linksys...

If we're taking up a collection to hook jtr with some decent hardware, I'm more than willing to contribute. And no, normal people do not need 400W PSUs, let alone 500W. Monster PSUs are the reserved domain of people who buy $150+ graphics cards or actually manage fill a mid-tower with hard drives.