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Gigabyte boards have mostly been fine. The other two brands I bought heavily in that period, Biostar and MSI, seem to have plenty of issues with caps. I'm really thinking I want to see solid caps on everything at this point. Capacitors have been an issue for years.

I really like my Netshelter WX. It's in my living room. I use it as a tall coffee table.

And kind of ironic, too, given who you work for.

The fastest "mainstream" 939 CPU I'm aware of is the x2/4800. There's probably some Opteron chips that are faster but it was the tip-top of performance before AMD moved to AM2. Those systems are about three years old now, and I'm seeing capacitor failures on some of the lower-cost boards I...

I buy movies to support the people who make them, even though I'm an unrepentant pirate. I bought "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog" even though it was made available free on the internet first. There's still not all that much I want to see on Blu-Ray but for example Iron Man is absolutely...

I usually run my batteries down to about 25% charge before I plug in. If I know I'm going to be operating on AC for a while I pull the battery completely.

I have three at the moment. One is a spare and the other two are attached to PCs attached to large LCDs. I've ripped all my HDDVDs but I still buy new ones on Ebay when the mood strikes me. They're easier to deal with than BDs.

I don't care what it breaks. I'm telling people to install it because it's more secure than IE6. I do wish they had implemented Vista's sandbox mode on XP for even more security, but apparently MS is loathe to give up one of the few reasons someone might seriously look at Vista.

That's WAY more configuration than I want to bother with on a $250 computer

He'll do a damned sight better than that other group of fundie retards.

Actually it's borderline terrifying. At least one of my customers can't believe anything that's not a retail copy of windows or the OEM preload on a Dell or Lenovo is a valid copy of Windows. I can give him CoAs all day long but I get bitchy calls about the completely normal WGA updates every...

Lesson learned: Only use versions of Windows that don't have activation.

Those thingies you're talking about make DVD-VRs, which give about 95% of computer players or editing applications fits. DVD players are better but a lot of them glitch in playing back DVD-VRs as well.

I can't tell the difference between 4xFSAA and no FSAA on City of Heroes at 1080p.

If you have the resolution so high, you don't those things to begin with.

I already had four day work weeks as a condition of my employment.

Someone who does content creation for a living with professional tools MIGHT have need of an 8 CPU system. And to be fair, a middle of the road Dell Precision is also north of $5k. I could build that machine for $2500, though.

They need very expensive motherboards that go in systems that tend to not be whisper quiet. In fact, Xeon systems pretty much always wind up sounding like jet engines because of the size of motherboards and types of cases that are used with them. The only real reason to look at 3300-series...

Well, as of yesterday my paycheck for my salaried job was just reduced by 20%. My brother just lost his $80,000 a year 100% telecommuting job and wants to move in with me because apparently the idea of saving a little money is foreign to someone with a master's in Finance. The unemployment...

I concur.

Given the price v. performance of modern mid-range video cards I don't think you're going to find many unhappy customers. And for that matter, someone who buys a $100 video card might not be terribly discriminating about performance to begin with.

OK, and the MPAA has made fair use of DVDs as difficult as possible, but technically they're well within their legal rights to prevent you from using unauthorized distribution. Peerguardian probably helps somewhat to prevent certain agencies from tracking you, but I don't really know how well...

My servers are usually doing stuff, and I like to have them available when I VPN in to my apartment. I find power save modes on desktops are often buggy. My stuff stays on and I pay for it. My power bill is still lower than when I owned a house.

Your ISP is under pressure from RIAA and the MPAAA. Both organizations pay firms to monitor torrents and P2P services for egregious downloading. At any time, they're probably looking out for newly released material first and then very profitable back-catalog second. Disney is the most rabid...

I've got an X2/4800 I'd like to retire soon... I'm tying on it right now, in fact. :D But at this point I'd like to say a couple things. One is that I've been saying for a while now that there's a huge value in AMD as a platform because the onboard graphics and sound are so nice. The other is...

For Handy: Top Chair

Gee, a nonstandard Acer? Inform the media!

You install an extension. Every time you start Firefox, it checks the extensions you have installed for updates. It's really painless. IE updates with Windows Updates, which happen less often and are less visible, but the flip side of that is that the Firefox people are very, very on top of...

TechArp's GPU Comparison guide says the 4750 (no numbers on the 4770 yet) has a theoretical max of 51.2GBps while the 9600GT, which has a 900MHz internal bus, tops out at 57.6GBps. I'm not saying their numbers are perfect but that's my standard reference for graphics card stuff.

My company has had people call to ask if classes have been canceled because of swine flu. It's really, really, really that retarded.

You know, the regular-not-from-swine-flu has killed 13,000 people this year, and yet all our schools and restaurants have bravely remained open in spite of it. Honestly, I think all of this - and I mean ALL of it - is coming from the media that is tired of covering financial news that they...

Hm. I'm not entirely sure. I know I've zeroed out whole drives with dd. Generally if I'm actually installing Linux it's not a big deal. I would think that it would, since installing grub is pretty much always the last step in the install. Hm. I'll have to try that out.

Tannin, it takes me all of maybe 90 seconds including the download time to install all the Firefox extensions that I need. If I really cared I'd just package them all up in a .MSI file or use the Firefox Extension Backup addon to make a single-source install, but even that's not a big deal...

I don't know about Ubuntu's installer but both SuSE and Fedora/Centos will optionally format partitions during install.

Xrecode is a Windows program for sound file conversion and for processing .CUE + Bigfiles into individual tracks. It supports MP3, Ogg, AAC, Flac and APE, which seems to cover about everything I regularly run in to. It's free and seems free of spyware.

You might be better off with a 4770. I believe those use less power.

The one problem I have right now with ATI's hardware is the difficulty I have with the integrated audio for HDMI. I don't want to use it, and Vista/Server 2008 is really, really insistent that I do so when I want to watch even a regular DVD, to the point that it un-disables the hardware if I...

Chrome will also have a useful plug-in architecture in version 2, something that Opera and Safari sadly lack. IE8 has content blocking support and seems decent for page rendering, but the only reason I have to use Opera is if I need three simultaneous shopping carts on Newegg. Which, sadly...

Greg, you need to give up on the idea that a great deal of texture memory is an indicator of performance. You can get $50 cards with 1GB of RAM now. They're still $50 cards. In many cases I'm not even sure the GPUs that are attached to that hardware can even USE that much RAM; it's just a bigger...

My game and bench systems are the only ones I might reboot regularly. I'm more likely to replace an entire PC than reboot one. Yes, I'm bad about operating system updates, too.

After all the "You need a special PSU for the 8800GT[S/X]"-crap, I was able to run a Q6600 and a 8800GTS off the 380 Watt uATX power supply in an NSK3400. I can also attest to the fact that the PSU in an NSK3480 isn't enough to make an ATI 4870x2 go, though.

Being able to actually read the type is a big argument for an HDTV. I had a large presentation display for a while that could manage 1024x768 but these days it's hard to justify something like that when it's possible to find a 37" LCD for $500.

9.04 is brand new and it's entirely possible that it's not bug-free. Here's a suggestion: Revert to whatever version actually worked and then do an upgrade, rather than a full new install.

If they're OS flaws rather than IE flaws they do tend to get fixed quickly, sometimes even out-of-cycle. IE flaws, well, there are some things that Microsoft has known to be broken for YEARS without fixing. But I've never heard of MS saying "We have the fix now and we're going to wait six months...

Media sensationalism. We'll be all about Swine Flu for a week and then another white chick will go missing in Aruba and we'll forget all about it.

My 75GXPs lived long and useful lives. I still use 80GB drives in business machines and 40GB drives for classroom stuff sometimes. Mostly I shy away from Hitachi because they are characteristically warm in a way I do not like, but for me they have a much better track record of reliability...

Hm. Sounds like how ever Ubuntu installed, it doesn't see your hard disk. Are you maybe in AHCI or some other special BIOS mode?

At least Microsoft doesn't say things like "We're well aware of the critical security issues with our software that's installed on 80% of all personal computers, and the fix will only be made available in our next scheduled version point upgrade, to be made available six months from now, and...

Is grub-install /dev/hda not working?

This bit of code is very entertaining. Read the comment. But I'll excerpt: " // I had to apply to them for permission to apply to them to have them consider sending // me this sacred tome. This would have involved faxing them a copy of some document or...