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BluRay playback happens in a virtual machine that needs control over both audio and video on your PC. Everything that's obnoxious about BluRay (slow load times, disabling Aero) really stems from that. Anyway PowerDVD 9 Ultra works fine for me, though I'm still a little pissed off that it only...

This stuff is probably where it would be beneficial to pay attention to all the Intel Channel Partner training BS they email out...

Inexpensive rack density.

How loud are these? I turned my spare on my back bedroom, went in my bathroom and turned on the faucet, shower, radio and flushed my toilet, and my Tyan GT20 was still by far the loudest thing I could hear.

Fry's had that drive for $50 in June or July. That's where I got the ones I have. I had another but it died, possibly because that was the one that I used to rip all my HDDVDs with.

Greg, the advantage of SCSI in terms of performance on a desktop system is about 99% due to the lowered access times available to 10k and 15k spindles. Once again, as I have attempted to stress to you repeatedly, improvement in access time = subjective improvement in performance. Data transfer...

The difference is where the costs are. The commodity board will have extra data lanes for PCIe. The workstation board will have support for buffered or registered DIMMs. The commodity board will support far out of spec RAM and FSB timings and voltages, while the workstation board is set up to...

Try it anyway. Win7 will do a startup repair if it doesn't start right, and if it works OK without AHCI then it may very well be that the drive is not the issue.

It was sold for about two and a half years and I think they dropped that model last summer.

Those things are really, really, loud. I'm tempted but I already have a spare dual Xeon sitting in my wiring closet for the day I need to swap out a customer system, but Tyan GT20s are my standard servers anyway. Are the X2s socket 939 or AM2?

One of the many, many ways that trackballs are superior to mice.

Does the behavior stop if you run the drive out of AHCI mode?

I figured something like that happened when I didn't get a PM from you, RW.

Brightness can be turned down. Picture can be adjusted generally. There's a bit of a down side if you're right up close, which is that the pixel pitch on TVs is higher than true monitors, but I don't think most people would notice that, and the screen size can more than make up for it. I'm...

Because it is an awesome name, that's why.

I do the media server thing. I have a pair of LG BD/HDDVD drives and I rip BDs I want to keep. Loading time with PowerDVD is far lower on those drives than it is on any standalone player I've seen, but I have a distaste for physical media regardless.

The model I'm thinking of is maybe $25.

The movie theater I go to, there's only maybe 10 - 20 people there. I hate being in a restaurant by myself, but in a theater it's dark and no one is paying attention to anything but what's on the stage or screen.

I've bought Belkin two port KVMs in the past. They're inexpensive and they do the job.

My four file servers have 16 - 20 SATA ports apiece. Sunday I saw Tosca at Lyric Opera in Chicago. It was the B-cast and the B conductor, but I was on the main floor, 10 rows back and directly behind the conductor. My seat cost about half what my monthly rent does. It was exquisite regardless...

Congratulations, Chewy! I am disappointed that you did not name her Zoltan, but I guess Gabriel is also a name that can be chosen.

I've tried Motorola, Trendnet and a couple generic Broadcom models. The thing is, the Broadcom chip is supported in Win7 64-bit on a whole bunch of notebooks, but it doesn't install on Server 2008. I'm guessing it's something in the .INF but as much as I've screwed with it, I haven't gotten it...

Even 10 years ago, you could have purchased a $200 SCSI contoller and moved it from $100 motherboard to $100 motherboard and had a series of systems that were cheaper and faster than what you bought. Over time that 10 year old board has brought about a high opportunity cost, since you've been...

I can't find a bluetooth adapter that works with Server 2008 64-bit. I've tried four now. It's pissing me off.

Nah. 1TB and 1.5TB models.

There's a guy I do work for whose Primavera consulting business means he needs access to five different versions of the program. I used VMware P2V to move all the different systems he was using to in to Guests on a single box with VMware Server and for him I became an IT god. It didn't even...

I don't take a home office deduction because I don't have a home office. For that matter, I don't think it's a moral imperative to reduce my tax bill, because I understand the value of the services I get from my governments and I am willing to pay for them. I don't want to deal with the...

They're just a bunch of desktop drives in inexpensive rackmount cases connected to some mix of desktop board SATA ports or semi-fancy RAID card SATA ports. I did make an effort to minimize noise and vibration, but the only thing fancy about those systems is the number and capacity of the drives...

Herpes will do that to a fellow. Seriously, I just want to be at home. There are people I wish I could spend time with, but there are not places I wish I could be. I'm not wired for travel.

As we keep trying to tell you, the enterprise-grade stuff isn't worth the money for what you're doing. You're far better off buying three generations of commodity hardware than trying to hold on to decrepit workstation-grade equipment, which is what you seem to want to do.

Some of my customers see me that way. Some of them do stupid shit because they asked their brother in law who knows a lot about computers first. Whatever. I don't want to be in charge so I just suck it up.

That would require their whole org to upgrade to the commercial version of Apps. They also don't want to pay $15 a month for two people to have hosted Exchange accounts someplace and (sigh) they already bought the Exchange license. At least I talked them out of BES...

There's not a subjective difference for me from one X25 to two in RAID0 for anything I'd do on a desktop. It's nice for playing with a local copy of a .vmdk or a .tib or a .vhd, but those things tend to be network-limited anyway, at least in how I normally interact with them.

Why do we keep talking about read/write speeds when Greg keeps harping on access times?

Samsung drives have a 3 year warranty. That'd be a pretty old 1TB drive to be out of warranty already.

Exchange 2007 takes too goddamned long to install. Exchange 2003, which I also hate but which is vastly easier to install, will not run on 64-bit Server 2003. So I've been watching Exchange 2007 install for 40 minutes just so I can turn on calendar sharing for two fucking people. I think...

Newegg says there's a $40 MIR on 60GB OCZ Vertex MLC drives. I can never keep straight which of their models are the good ones, but $180 is better than $220.

Onslaught

I like bots. They're better than people. This is an overarching philosophy in my life, actually. I get a decent challenge in UT2004 on the 4th difficulty setting, meaning that I might not win the match. If I go up one more notch I'm pretty much instant chum on most maps. I don't know why, but...

I printed that and put it on my door at work. The rest of the stuff on the Oatmeal is also pretty damned funny.

Coug, I build machines that I usually SELL for $350 - $400. I buy Antec cases when I can get them on sale from Amazon (no shipping), but generally I stick with Compucase + HEC PSUs. I try to go with two HDDs as a standard sort of up-sell and that's about it.

I read and listen to music, and those are things I can do just fine where I am.

I've never taken a vacation. I drove to Windsor a few years back for a job interview.

UT2004 bot matches = no fuckwads.

Yes they are. They really are. If you think Access Time is important, you want SSDs. There is no other game in town. Every time we tell you this, you come back with anecdotes about the data transfer rate of your SCSI shit, which has nothing to do with access time.

Download the updates for your BD playing software.

18 year olds LIVE on their cell phones. No. Really. LIVE. Screw TV. Screw the computer. They want texting (but hate Email) and internet access that doesn't tie them down, either to the location of a desktop or to the need for wireless network access. And that's worth $400+ to them, even when...

I'd be a lot happier to find a solid $25 power supply. I can buy something really nice at $75; I'm not even worried about that, but bread and butter stuff is just getting POS Dell or HP up and running after a storm.

My father has some anger issues.

The media license type needs to match the media that was used to install. So if you have a volume license CD and it was installed with OEM media, it won't present the option to repair. Or at least that has been my experience.