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I've never had a drink. I had a sip of non-alcoholic beer when I was about 12 and that was enough to put me off. I drink water and tea, mostly.

Avast is perfectly fine antivirus protection. It works better than most paid applications in my experience.

Unfortunately, Dreamspark licenses can't be used for commercial applications. Which makes those extra Windows licenses rather less exciting.

3x the RAM vs. a 980 with roughly 50% more compute power at slightly lower clock frequency and memory timing. I'm not sure how impressive that really is given the price.

The 4k Vizio and LG sets would be right at the top of my list if my current TV were something less than 18 months old. I'm not sure it's worth doubling the price to look at an 85" above and beyond the cost of a 70" one. They all seem relatively affordable for someone who is plugged in enough to...

It's a 12-thread 4GHz Haswell-E with 32GB RAM and an M.2 boot drive. It's all kinds of responsive. At one time it was starting in under 10 seconds, too. I've been using Windows Server machines as desktops for ages, in part to have "server" machines to screw around on, in part because I have more...

On a kind of related note, my big desktop runs 2012r2 and for some reason it now needs 21 minutes to boot. It has Hyper-V and all the desktop experience stuff installed plus bog standard desktop apps and two VMs on manual startup, but at some point in the last month, something changed and now it...

I notice that I have problems with HDMI audio needing around 1 second before it picks up and plays on my 970 that I never noticed on ATI or Intel HDMI connections. I wonder if it's just a characteristic of nVidia hardware.

RDP all on its own is really efficient. It's usable over a 28.8kbps dialup connection. On a 100Mbit+ connection, it's usable for HD video playback. More efficiency is better, but I don't know if that's someplace I'd devote engineering effort.

I figured that would be too much of a time investment for dd. I spent a couple weekends screwing around to get an Rpi working right with an NFC sensor to toggle bluetooth inputs on my phone and that was mostly following a recipe.

You might be able to do something with Pushbullet + If This Then That. There are definitely bluetooth speakers that include a mic, but mic + aux out seems to be a tall order.

It hasn't launched yet, but the EFF Let's Encrypt project aims to make SSL certificates freely available. That's something very exciting, especially for small projects. It's supposed to go live in mid-2015.

There's a new Unreal Tournament out. It is blissfully free, in that is no-cost software and in being unencumbered by a requirement for Steam/Origin/DRM malware. It looks pretty sweet, too.

The Nexus 6 doesn't have a card reader. I don't leave much free space on my phone's card, so for days when I expect to need the camera functions (comic cons etc), I swap in a fresh one and keep another in my bag in case the first gets full. This is a lot better than having to clear space off to...

Avast isn't capable of email that has been secured by stand-alone email applications like Thunderbird or Outlook. Virtually every modern email client and ISP/webmail provided SMTP server expects to talk to clients using secure E-mail, so Avast's mail shield is fairly pointless. And yes, your...

Go in to Programs and Features, select Avast, choose Change. Remove the Mail Shield. You can also just disable the mail shield, but then you'll occasionally get messages that it's not turned on. My normal Avast install is just the Virus and Web Shields and just Browser Cleanup and the Repair...

Six of one, half a dozen of the other, but for the last 9 months or so, I've removed more crap from infested Chrome installations than from IE11 while at the same time finding that Chrome is increasingly disrespectful of system resources. It wasn't that long ago that Chrome was the "light"...

The keys are OEM, edition and product-specific. For modern machines, there's Windows 8.x, 8.x "with Bing" and 8.x Pro, with only one of the above aforementioned and available for activation in firmware. Even if you fish the key out, you can't active an OEM key on a retail media installation...

Not unless you have OEM-specific media or a prepared universal OEM disc. That's why sed lost the legal Windows 8 install on his laptop.

Massdrop sounds really interesting Handy. I'd never heard of it. Thanks!

If he's on a read-only profile, if he ever gets lost, he can close and re-open the browser. Which is what old people usually do when they get lost in an application anyway. If Xmarks and Lastpass are present, everything that might need to be dynamic about that profile would still be available...

The G4 will be out in May. I don't feel the need to replace the phone I have, but I suspect that if the big OEMs are taking their cues from the Nexus 6 and GS6 and the G4 is as disappointing, I'll be keeping what I have for quite a long time.

The bigger annoyance in that case is usually recovering the OEM-assigned Windows key. There's actually software available for regenerating the recovery image and I do have tools that can make a universal OEM install, but unless you've done the work that's a huge hassle.

Probably start with Spybot's Immunizations and combine with Adblock Plus with as many optional subs as their computer will bear. You can also set his user rights to Standard User and give him a mandatory Windows profile, but that's probably overkill. Clocker, what you might want to do is set up...

I've never in my life as a tech managed to complete an Asus RMA. Usually, I'll submit a ticket and just never get a response. If I send something in, I've never gotten it back. To put that in perspective, I've sent RMAs to ECS and Shuttle and gotten product back. I will say that I haven't had...

It'll be a sub-$100 option for carriers that offer contract discounts. Dropping uSD AND the battery really throws the S6 into the unacceptable category. Maybe LG or HTC will pony up with something decent.

I buy Crucial mSATA drives. I know they're not the fastest but they're also not subjectively slower that the Samsung or Intel drives I've tried.

While we're nit-picking, an awful lot of things show up in finder that want to scroll horizontally. I realize that Apple's pointing devices support that via gestures, but not everyone uses Apple's pointing devices or gestures more generally.

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-31604026

Not functionality but in the matter of public perception. I like 8 a lot and I wind up defending it frequently among people who have probably never had an opinion about software before in their life. Playing up Windows 8.x among home and small business users is like asking them to do body shots...

You're going to make me go back to quote the idiocy. "Quite a few of the free products are cleanup-only tools, rather than full antivirus solutions. They're intended for use in an emergency, when malware prevents installation of a full solution... Malwarebytes Anti-Malware 2.0 remains PCMag's...

The author of the article conflates anti-malware cleanup tools with antivirus packages and further goes on to express uncertainty for the need of malware cleanup tools. I had to stop reading.

One of the things that really bothers me about OSX is the frequency with which a designer makes a small button with an icon on it rather than a verbal cue. A perfect example is the Printers window in System Preferences. There's a "+" icon on the left-hand side. It's not even obvious that it's a...

I honestly think that the Windows 10 launch and aftermath is going to be very similar to Windows 7's. After it's been out for a short amount of time, it'll be as if Windows 8 never existed.

I think that it's fair to say at this point that all the niceties of UNIX are present on your Linux machine. Apple has nicer fonts but its GUIs will have roughly the same amount of bothersome inconsistency.

I'd be willing to agree that the MBP has solid specs. The nice screen and moderately not-sucky GPU sort of make up for the keyboard, trackpad, lack of service and upgrade options (max of 16GB RAM? Really?) and uncomfortable palm rest. I'll accept the value proposition there, even if I wouldn't...

So, how 'bout that Comodo-affiliated tool that completely breaks SSL?

There are tools for building MSI and MSTs from pre- and post-snapshot images, but they're very time consuming to use if you don't deal with those things all the time.

I went through something similar with a customer about a month ago. They upgraded to a new version of their turnkey application, which previously hadn't even been certified to run on Windows 7. The directions, once I read them, essentially involved turning off every single one of Windows 7's...

I work from system images. Since my normal practice is to buy the cheapest hard disk on any laptop I buy, I don't think I've even used the original hard disk on anything I've deployed I the last three years.

Why doesn't the vendor have a script to use? Christ.

Does it need anything besides IIS and MSSQL? MSSQL is a PITA to install, even interactively. You have to assign rights for various features to user accounts and crap. IIS is just a Windows Feature that gets added. It's easy either way. That said, for 40 machines and somebody who doesn't script...

I've never had a problem with it before.

The Asus MX279H. I bought a couple of them for a customer and I was fairly impressed given the cost.

IIRC, that thing takes eight ink cartridges and prints maybe 10 photo pages or about 40 text pages before it runs out of ink.

My fleet of Intel 946 and G31 boards all seem to work fine. I've found that some but not all 915s work. I've never bothered with anything older than that.

I really only buy Brother printers. I support one Canon MFC that I want to murder and my boss won't allow anything but Xerox solid ink, but almost all of what I support are 9970CDWs or HL 4570s and those have really been more hassle free than I could ever expect. The 4570 goes through toner a...

I have already made these points. I think Tannin's mad 'cause he built a lot of AthlonX2 machines and his customers gave him an ear full. ;)

Just to add a somewhat different perspective: one of my labs got used for a crafts class last year that made heavy use of photo printing. I bought three each of Epson, HP (1200Ds, supposedly "workgroup" inkjets), Canon and Lexmark photo printers. After the six week class where each printer...

I watched the US version first. There are actually multiple European versions. Apparently, the series has been produced everywhere one might find a bridge that crosses international borders.