Search results

My bookmarks toolbar is filled with folders enough to stretch a 1680 pixel wide screen. That's space I feel justified in using.

Sometimes we ask here because someone might already know and/or we don't properly have time to search.

On some of my home computers, Firefox might be restarted upwards of twice a year.

Dragon Naturally Speaking has this neat thing where it can take a voice recording and transcribe it to plain text or a Word document. Very handy in conjunction with a voice recorder. I use a Creative Labs MP3 player for that purpose.

I leave my office delibately cluttered and intermingle my personal belongings with those that belong to my employer. A couple times, someone has had the bright idea to clean the store-room that is my office and both times they wound up throwing away something important. I get bitched at for...

Nero Vision and Ulead MovieFactory will both do DVD-VR to non-retarded format conversion, if you have either of those.

WDC has historically called 6000rpm drives "5400." The x00AB drives were widely thought to be 6000rpm. I would be willing to accept 4200rpm with no detectable heat or noise if I could get a 2TB drive from an OEM I am willing to trust, but that's not the way Hitachi or Samsung operate.

I've had theoretical uATX boards not fit in the Antec 3840 before, but they were both boards that were slightly wider than normal uATX spec (XFX something-or-others). A lot of boards have to be somewhat carefully wrestled into that enclosure because the 3.5" drive bay gets in the way. I've...

Not a fan of the bookmarks toolbar, I take it?

Sysprep removes all unique information about hardware save for the hardware needed to start Windows, which amounts to the hardware needed for the Windows installer (the graphical-mode part of the install) to start. That's basically the HAL and disk controller.

My funny story for the day. I have a friend that I know through another internet forum. She kind of got thrust into a System Administrator's job and she's not entirely qualified for it, so she uses me for help quite a bit. We chat a lot and have been for about two and a half years. She has a...

Uh, it kind of sounds like you don't know entirely what you're doing with sysprep, but that's OK. The constant reboots were from a low-level hardware mismatch between your source and target machine, either a HAL mismatch or more likely a disk controller driver (or operating mode, though I doubt...

One thing you need to understand, Greg, is that not all clock cycles are created equal. You can't just say "twice as fast" and have it be so. Newer Intel chips have shorter execution pipelines and literally do less work to perform computation, which is part of the reason AMD is getting spanked...

I genuinely don't believe there's such a thing as a good generic external enclosure. I have a couple Vantec top-loading SATA enclosures that I use, and several of the bare drive units like the one ddrueding linked, but USB enclosures are pretty much eternally frustrating.

Well, with three X25-Ms in RAID0, my City of Heroes level load times are about 1/6th what they are on a 7200rpm magnetic disk. Which is pretty huge. On the other hand, for $1200 worth of hard drives, I'd damned well better get 5 second load times. My i7/920 is presently sitting at 3.6GHz and...

Well, with three X25-Ms in RAID0, my City of Heroes level load times are about 1/6th what they are on a 7200rpm magnetic disk. Which is pretty huge. On the other hand, for $1200 worth of hard drives, I'd damned well better get 5 second load times. My i7/920 is presently sitting at 3.6GHz and...

What did the Mormons do to you? Where did they touch you? Was it a bad touch? Did they make you wear their magic underwear?

Lenovo's been slow to ship for a while now. The rep I've dealt with in the past says there's an issue with their battery supplier. Buying direct from Lenovo I usually see product in between two and six weeks. Of course I can buy systems from Newegg or CDW or something, but those are invariably...

It's a chipset limitation. Netbooks are all pretty much based on some ancient iteration of the 945 chipset. And because Microsoft doesn't want these machines to be any faster or nicer than they have to be. They don't want $300 notebooks with XP running circles around $1000 ones with Vista, so...

Most of what I'm looking for is not RIAA/MPAA-represented materials. It's not a big issue for me. I'm downloading porn, classical music (mostly European labels) and comic books. When there are TV shows I'm getting there are groups I'm looking for, but it depends on what you watch and what you...

Demonoid is still around. Pirate Bay is still around. PureTNA, Empornium are as well. The short list of things to do: Turn on data encryption and/or SSH tunnel your stuff through a third party. Run Peerguardian. Don't download USA studio movies or music that was ever top 40. Don't watch or...

Yes, but given the disparity between the speed of the drive and the rest of the PC, it might not be a performance increase to do so. Everything fundamentally boils down to waiting on the drive to spin and seek. Modern OSes already do lazy writes to the hard disk.

I doubt that the drive's mechanics can deliver data fast enough for that to be worthwhile.

Depends on the machine. I know some Asus models won't see the extra RAM but I've put more RAM in a bunch of other netbooks.

Maybe a Lenovo X300? That gets you an SSD and a real CPU, and also size and weight to make Netbook owners jealous. I keep having to rant to people who don't understand the functional difference between a Netbook and a proper notebook. At this point I'm pretty good at it.

PDF 995 CutePDF OpenOffice Office 2007 has a free plugin that does it as well.

I generally buy TrippLite UPSes, because they're a Chicago company, which means I'm supporting the local guys and also because anything I order from them I get next day.

Her user profile is too goddamned big. Make a new user account. Watch it load quickly. Look for things like how many installed fonts, how many printers, how much crap is on her desktop.

I've found Vuze to be a resource hog for both RAM and CPU time, even on multicore systems. To put that in perspective, my habit is to never stop seeding nor ever clear out the list of shared torrents on either of my torrent machines. Both have probably several hundred torrents, and both do so...

I would pay obscene amounts of money for 50/10 internet service, even if it were shitty Comcast. The idea of having a 10Mbit upstream pipe gives me a happy.

I don't know enough about the Fatpipe. I've seen a hell of a lot of them in datacenters. I figure someone must.

I'm fairly certain you could buy four hours of a Linux consultant's time to get a hand-rolled router setup to do what you want.

I pay for Comcastic Business service, so when I have a seven hour outage like the one I had until about 10 minutes ago, at least I can call Comcast Business and they'll say more than "Can you reboot your modem?"

I've been sick for three days and I'm still catching up with works. Though I've got to say, contracting has been DEAD lately.

In case anyone was wondering, neither DD-WRT nor Tomato will run dual-band Linksys hardware at 5.8GHz. I mean, not AT ALL. It's 2.4GHz or nothing.

The only benchmark I really care about is City of Heroes.

Uncle Toby?

Obviously you are overclocking. What kind of RAM are you using for that setup? My new gaming system is going to be an i7 920 sitting on a Gigabyte motherobard and three X25-Ms, probably in RAID0.

I have a cameraphone photo. The pictures are correct and the slots are keyed for 5V. I'm not sure what the lesson is here, aside from the fact that Dell PCs are retarded and whomever decided that machine should be a "server" is ALSO retarded. At the end of the day they're basically stuck with...

I've got a 4870x2 coming in later this week. I'll let you know all about it when I get done building the i7 system it's going in. :D

The Auzentech hardware I'm familiar with does not do DD Live with Realtek hardware, but I too have no problem turning it on or off.

Totally sweet Wall-E case. Takes like 10 minutes to load.

... and it turns out that the LSI cards are compatible with PCI, but only 3.3V PCI, which is not something you're going to find in a Dell Optiplex. I'm giving serious consideration to just shipping my student a decent motherboard. I really am.

In the spirit of unity, I give to all of you something that we can each in our own way see as being made of both awesome and win: Hot chicks in their underwear engaged in a lightsaber duel.

I'm not willing to sacrifice the performance of my PCs for an Antivirus application, nor do I have any particular faith in Mcafee or Symantec to do anything interesting or useful for anyone but Mcafee or Symantec and their bottom line. Too goddamned much of security software is built on a...

PAE is a bit of a hack, in that it gets back to doing something not unlike the DOS-land BS of bank switching EMS memory. At some point in the future it's not going to be good enough, just as EMS wasn't. We can say we're going to move to 64-bit before then but honestly, given the direction and...

I said my 22" Dell wasn't. I got it with a coupon that made the total cost on it about $135, too.

Windows basically insists on paging sometimes, and if you don't have a pagefile you get all kinds of hilarious, cryptic error messages and random shit breaks.

I've evaluated Steadystate on PCs before, as well as Deep Freeze, before returning to image-based maintenance. My coworkers, who are at least theoretically software trainers, had difficulty with the concept of "changes go away on reboot." You can redirect My Documents to another location but...

My commit charge is 1564MB at the moment out of a total of 4956MB available. That's with 300MB of Firefox and a 512MB VMware session. Process Explorer says PaintDotNet has 97MB of private bytes, which I take to mean the combination of pagefile, system libraries and RAM claimed by the executable.