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You get XP in whatever way you already have XP. There's a phone number you can call and they provide you with a valid key (OEM for OEM etc). I think the presumption is that a Microsoft shop will already have discs floating around someplace.

I won't buy anything with SecuROM unless I can kill it somehow, and I won't buy anything on Steam. If I could uninstall Steam and still run a game I purchased, I might feel differently about it, but I'd rather give up gaming than accept the BS that these companies want to force on PC gamers.

The day I can download a game and utterly divorce it from Steam once I have it, I'll reconsider their offerings. As it stands, it's only about a half step above malware in my opinion.

Not if it comes with Steam, it's not.

The only boards I've RMA'd recently have been Intel's. Intel's RMA process is a PITA, but the turn-around on getting product back is only about four business days.

My first SCSI hard drive was a 1760MB Micropolis SCSI-2 drive. It $1200. I believe it was 3600rpm. It was full height and could (but probably didn't) transfer data at 10MB/sec. Three years later I could buy a 2GB IDE drive for $100. My first 17" Monitor was around $1000. Three years later that...

Reconfigure the array. Reload from backup.

I have a more general hatred of printers. It's not like I specifically hate HP. That's Tannin's job.

Be lucky they took it at all. I've never successfully RMA'd anything through Asus.

Speaking of screen savers, I did just find that if I stick the 3Dpipes.scr file in my system32 folder, it runs just fine, even on versions of Windows that don't come with 3dpipes. This made me happy.

Then you're learning.

Has there ever been a pile of demand for super large drives?

Early adopter's premium. That would've been 72 pin Fast Page RAM. By 1996, the market had moved on to EDO, though 1996 was also a year when RAM prices dipped in a big way, anyway. We've been through those cycles before, but the dawn of the age of the internet was something that sold a LOT of...

That's not your fault. It's the fault of the manufacturers for not being willing to make a worthwhile product. Even when you buy a $400 printer or $800 DVD player (coughSonyEScough), you may not be getting anything that would qualify as non-disposable.

The year before that we went from 250GB drives to 500GB drives. I'm sure they'll get even bigger in the near future, but magnetic disks have kind of stagnated generally. We only went from 1.5TB to 2TB in the desktop world this year, too.

Craigslist, Freecycle, Ebay etc. Look for an HP Laserjet that's old enough to drive. Either that, or buy the cheapest POS you can find and just replace it when you've used all the ink.

My Server 2008 R2 machines both have screensavers and were updated this week.

HP OfficeJet 6000: "IT Professional" Drivers: 11MB. "Full" Drivers: 204MB. And the total time to install (from a local file) on a 2.2GHz C2D is about 20 minutes. For a fucking Printer.

If you could get a decent ITX board in there you could probably resell that setup as a Windows Home Server or NAS.

Tannin hates all things HP. Or Santillia and Maxtor. Or me and Western Digital. Or me and S*ny. Or me and nVidia.

Software RAID requires only a functional operating system and normal disk controllers. You need those things regardless. It's very useful to be able to build an array of arbitrary size from the collection of controllers on a modern system. At times I've had a single array spanned from Intel...

Thinking about what my customers have, all the HP printers are either more than 10 years old (lots of 4500Ns and Laserjet 3s and 4s), or they were bought, used and scrapped. I've been advising my customers to look at workcenter-type copy machines from Canon or Kyocera or Minolta if they have...

Either they're portable or they're not. If the disk controller doesn't recognize an array made by a different controller made by the same company, I'd call that non-portable. The difference between a P35-DS4 and an EX58-UD3R is small enough that a normal drive with Windows on it can go back and...

OK: My source drives are a pair of Samsung SP1614C 160GB SATA drives on a RAID0 created on a Gigabyte GA-P35-DS4 with an ICH9R southbridge. The drives work fine in RAID0 with that board, as verified by the fact that I had to shut down Windows to take the drives out of that chassis and move them...

I have a lifetime of bad experiences with Western Digital drives. They weren't any good in the mid 90s. They weren't any good in the early part of this decade. They don't get another chance. Given the choice between being able to recover my data from a failed RAID controller and having to...

I happen to have a pair of Gigabyte i7 boards here. I'll run my test again with both of them.

The one thing in HP's favor is ease of getting supplies.

80 hours is not abnormal for me, though it comes and goes. Breaks for forum posting and finding new naked women on the internet do wonders for my acuity.

Forticlient

The duplexer sells it and the high capacity toner seals the deal. I've had less problems with Brother 2940s than some of the other departmental printers I have to put up with.

No, they aren't. I tested with a pair of 160GB Samsung drives in RAID0 against multiple Gigabyte, Tyan and Intel boards and chipsets from ICH7 to ICH10. I had to recreate the array in every circumstance; the controller BIOS would not recognize the drives' existing configuration.

I'm not a fan of hardware RAID, because you're taking the chance of losing your data to some kind of controller failure. In my experience, even the quasi-hardware RAID available with Intel south bridges isn't necessarily portable to newer iterations of their chips (ICH9 RAID0 to ICH10 reports...

I haven't played with Solaris in years. I keep thinking I should, if for no other reason than ZFS, but it's a pretty low priority right now. I do have a USB missile launcher, though.

You have a windows application that can't print to something accessible from an SMB share?

I saw 2GB DDR2 SODIMMs drop to as little as $18 this spring. I haven't found Atom CPUs to be slow for browsing, either. And I *do* keep tons of tabs open and use Adblock et al. The only issue I typically have is the abysmal startup time associated with opening 60 or so tabs. Performance is...

Have you given any thought to a return to CRT?

I have two Perc5s in machines at home. I bought them off Ebay, where they pretty consistently sell for $75 - $100. I use them as straight up non-RAID eight port SATA controllers because they're vastly cheaper than 8-port 3ware cards. Perc6s on Ebay usually sell for around $200. I do not see a...

I have to do something similar once a year (at least the auction receipt part). I use Deskjet 932 printers. They're workhorses and I wish HP made inkjets as nice as those. For the reports, I'd just set up a VPN (use Hamachi if need be) to get your systems to bulk print on a legitimately fast...

Greg, I know you have a fascination with enterprise hardware, but you don't actually need it. That's what we keep trying to tell you. I understand wanting a faster computer and not wanting to buy crappy hardware, but you need to understand you keep bringing up diesel engine trucks when what you...

Greg, I will absolutely assure you that with the exception of some Microsoft Windows add-ons, everything you install is either so tiny that it doesn't matter where it's installed, or it has an option to change the install location. This has been true for at least as long as there has been...

I don't like hard keyboards because I'm almost never doing text input longer than a URL or search term. If I am, I'll go do that on a computer. I'd rather have more screen.

Yes. Vista and 7 even support symlinks. It's almost like they're proper operating systems.

Yes, I can see how changing a C to a D or an E might be asking too much.

Memory chips keep getting faster. Transistors keep getting smaller. We will continue to see improvement.

What gave you that idea?

They're dropping in price already. The speeds are only going to get faster and capacities are only going to get higher. We'll probably end up with "mainstream" MLC drives in our consumer-class products after a couple years. This is a "when", not an "if" situation.

Gmail will also do ActiveSync for Windows Mobile and for iPhone, under some conditions.

Also, nobody needs a 150GB boot drive. Windows Vista and Windows 7 install in a space between 12GB and 30GB. XP needs around 2GB by itself. Absolutely anything else you care to install can go on a secondary drive, if you'd prefer to have a fast one for your operating system.

Almost all the drives I actually use for myself are Samsung 1 or 1.5TB drives. I think I have around 40 of them, between those two sizes. However, I've installed pretty much any recent-vintage Seagate drive from 160GB up to 750GB and I still have a stack of 250GB and 500GB Hitachis that I need...

Outlook Web Access is your friend.