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I paid $900 for an APC Netshelter, but it was fairly decked out with extras. I got another with a broken hinge on the door for $125 (including the freight shipping) from Ebay. It took my a while but eventually I fixed that myself. I put them in my living room and use them as coffee tables.

I don't own one. I've had customers buy a couple and I've been impressed with them, but I have two recent model T-series Thinkpads now that more than meet my needs.

I buy Optiarc drives about 95% pf the time. In the last two years, other than a few LG BD drives and maybe a half-dozen Samsungs, it's all been Optiarc. I'm not sure about media. Does Taiyo Yuden make DVD-DLs? As far as I can tell, bit rot is a valid issue for all writable optical media. I...

I just got a Sandisk Sansa Clip+. $50 for an 8GB player that can be upgraded with a microSD card, that plays .ogg and .flac files, supports audiobook formats, has a minimal monochrome screen, a voice recorder, FM tuner, and needs no special program for access. On top of that, it's tiny, maybe 2"...

They have to protect their trademark. I'm actually pretty sure that the Pork Board lawyer who drew up the C&D in the first place got a chuckle over having to write it. Our legal system is more than a little ridiculous.

You know, I don't think we hit kids enough these days. Especially the ones that mess up computers. I developed this philosophy during my kid classes but it seems to apply just fine to your situation too, Paugie.

Netgear's baseline N router (WNR834B? I think) has anemic range, maybe 50 feet indoors, but good transfer speeds. I bought several of them for $20 apiece and that's about what they're worth. The only recent DLink routers I've dealt with were DIR-615s. I've never been a fan of DLink's firmware...

I'm thoroughly unimpressed with the Linksys E3000, which is the current "expensive" model.

I am having a shitty month.

I just found a torrent of the various LucasArts SCUMM-engine games. Apparently they've been modified to support more modern graphics settings so for example Loom can be played with a full VGA palette now. I'm looking forward to playing Grim Fandango. Absolutely every modern PC game that isn't...

Why does your office not have effective antispam, Lunar?

I've used Lenovo's warranty. I always just do depot. Most repairs I do myself, but screens and board swaps I let them handle. I can only think of one time I didn't get a system back in five business days.

I hate everything.

Doesn't look like it. If you're itching to test a commercial product out, you could always give Forticlient a go.

There are options for the various options that you can set. It shouldn't be THAT bad. I use Format Factory more for video files though. It's very handy for that.

These days I use xrecode, but only the 1.0 product that is freeware. Version 2.0 is nagware and pisses me off. Nice thing about xrecode is that it'll process .cue files. FormatFactory is also very nice for batch processing, albeit for a shorter list of formats.

Kind of seems like a grasp at remaining relevant on the part of Garmin. But that's a pretty decent array of specifications and the price is downright reasonable compared to most smartphone plans here.

They were $99 two weeks ago. I bought a couple at that price.

I wouldn't call a computer that has to have HDMI output a basic computer, for one thing. I don't build "linux computers" very often any more. If I did, I'd probably use the same parts I use for any other PC. The only place where hardware is any kind of a big deal with Linux is 802.11 chipsets...

Those cards are almost all much newer than the ones I played with. Nitsirk has suggested that I try Munchkin sometime. It's a card game, but it comes with all the card you need to play.

My favorite play deck was Black Vises, The Racks, Millstones, Hypnotic Specters and some assorted low-cost black cards. I also had a hilarious deck designed to discard high-value summons so I could use Resurrection and Timetwister to get those cards in play. I was always surprised how well that...

I mostly build budget systems for small businesses or basic consumer PCs, Lunar.

These two sentences make up the majority of my complaint (with the singular exception of Soundstorm on the A7N8X, which did make me happy), but I've gone entire years without having to replace an Intel-branded motherboard that I installed, which reminds me of something Tannin said about Intel...

I had at least two of each of the Moxes and five Black Lotuses. And a complete set (four each) of the dual land cards. I was collecting Magic cards in high school because I liked the artwork but didn't really play much until college. Even then I caught a lot of flak for having "expensive" cards...

I really think Intel-based motherboards are more robust. If there's no price difference, or minimal price difference, I'll go in the direction of higher reliability. The multimedia features that make AMD appealing for budget desktops aren't that interesting for a WHS system, either.

It was 65F and stupidly humid all weekend, but it didn't rain much.

I had to throw out about 95% of my Magic cards. They were in my car when it got crushed by tree, and they were soaked and eventually covered in mold. Kind of a shame, since most of my collection were the oldest cards. Sometimes-lurker Nitsirk is a big board game fan.

Other than ripping media, none of those things require much in the way of CPU horsepower.

That amount of CPU power seems exceedingly excessive, ddrueding. A C2D celeron like an E2200 on a G31-based motherboard would probably work just fine though, and the whole rig would only run $100 - $130 for MB, CPU and RAM, or about what that motherboard probably costs by itself. Does WHS...

I'm not given the authority to do that. Or any disciplinary authority at all. Which is part of the reason I hate teaching kids. They're bribed to be in these classes. They're given a computer. I'm asked to present complex information; taking their laptop apart, using a backup program and...

I'm a trainer, not a teacher. "Teacher" implies some sort of background in education and all the things that go with that, like developmental psychology and not wanting to murder the deliberately obnoxious.

Yeah. I brought a customer an SL510 last month to replace a Thinkpad R40 only to find that they wanted the R40 back because it had a 1024x768 screen.

The router/access point for my apartment is built on a high-end ARM CPU, 512MB RAM, some Mini-PCI slots, a 2GB Compact Flash card and Linux. It does all those low-power server tasks pretty well. I suspect it would be acceptable for mail duties for a small number of users as well. I spent more...

I taught what will probably be my last-ever kid class today. I hate teaching 18 year olds. I hate kids. I don't relate to them. Today I had one who was trying to talk over me all morning. Eventually I told him "Shut up, and by shut up I mean that I want to smell your burning flesh before I hear...

I really do wish the SL-series Thinkpads came with 16x10 screens.

I've not read the entire document. I remember looking at it when it was released and I found their methodology and reporting flawed (as Stereodude said, they don't even break down product lines between ODMs). Unless their methodology and that document have been substantially revised and more...

I like the Lenovo T410. That's what I'd buy for myself. That study suggests that Toshiba notebooks are reliable. This is contradicted by reality and all of my experience. In fact, this roughly sums up my opinion of that study:

The Squaretrade study is based on machines that are sold on Ebay. So we're talking about lease-returned business machines that are probably a few years old being compared to brand new systems, without any weighting or identification between business and consumer models, new or used or weighting...

I'm not sure. I've only ever done it on iphones, crackberries and WinMo. Reviews I have read say it doesn't, but as far as I know it's not available yet for anyone to buy yet. I usually get parts from cellphoneshop.net. They do a good job of having cheap phone accessories.

No. Not locally on any of my systems nor remotely on either Gmail (where I believe the messages originated) or Yahoo. Does that mean whatever attacked was smart enough to delete the sent items, or does it mean that the thing that attacked just harvested my contacts list along with my email...

There's supposed to be an extended capacity battery. It doesn't seem to be available yet. Also, it's a good idea to turn off crap you aren't using. If you're being served by 4G, you don't need the 3G radio or 802.11. You can probably turn off Bluetooth, too. You should also set your phone to...

I'm not exactly sure. Google has had some site-level vulnerabilities. Maybe I got zapped in some cross-site scripting attack.

It appears that my gmail account was hacked. I had a strong password and there's no evidence of malware on any of my systems but everyone on my gmail contact list was sent a message containing a random link to a viagra spam site using my default address for sending mail (which is actualy a yahoo...

It'll probably lead to another decent bump in clock speeds if nothing else. More than anything else I suspect these new unlocked chips are a counter to AMD's $200 - $300 six (physical) core Phenom IIs.

It can still be activated. You can obtain it through downgrade rights on Open License purchases of Windows 7 Professional and there are still OEM copies floating around the retail channels. Until the beginning of the month it was possible to exercise downgrade rights on OEM and Retail copies of...

Maybe they're waiting to roll out 32nm because they don't have yields yet? Or maybe the refresh somehow offers enough of a performance increase that they're holding it off while they sell out 45nm stuff?

I was in New Albany, immediately across the river from Louisville, for a month. It was crappy there. And I could stream video from home when I was in the office where I was working, but not in my hotel room with the sucky wireless connection and no active ethernet ports.

If you just want to play games, get Dosbox and be done.

I think he has 1336 stuff. I just bought four i7/860s. These weren't available last week and I needed to get those machines built, but I'm really curious what I could do with one of those.

I don't keep an optical drive in my notebooks. I keep an extra battery. And I want capacity. I already have one notebook with an 80GB X-25M. I really prefer to store a decent collection of my personal data on a machine, rather than having to connect to a file server for everything. And yes, I...