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Firefox is the #1 tool for my work and for my productivity. I don't mind if it's using a lot of RAM, given the way I use it. Same thing with VMware and Thunderbird. Thunderbird seems to take up the same 80MB RAM on all my Windows machines. I'm fine with that; there's 30,000 messages in my main...

Hint: Alt-Tab. If your PC can't manage to task switch out of the game without crashing, you need more PC.

Thank you, Mark. I believe she got an Adaptec card but if swapping to LSI can get her running I'm sure she will be thrilled to hear that.

One of the things that happens when you start working with nonprofits is you get to see some REALLY misbegotten configurations. So their "server" is a Desktop that has, I think, two 3.5" internal drive bays, a 2.4GHz P4 and a 945 chipset... but it has Windows Server 2003 R2 with 250 CALs...

There are 1xPCIe SAS cards. They're all internal only 2-port deals as far as I know. I'm surprised SOMEBODY doesn't make a functional PCI card, though. Apparently, the not-for-profit she works for is using an Optiplex GX520 with Windows Server 2003 on it.

One of my students is looking for a SAS controller with an external mini-SAS connection and either PCI or PCIe 1x interface. The system they're dealing with already has something in the PCIe 1x slot, but I'm not aware of any standard PCI SAS HBAs in the first place. Has anyone heard of such a...

In the articles section here, there's a whole bunch of things I recommend in my 2009 Malware protection guide. Most of them apply. I suppose you'll be wanting paid versions of Spybot and SpywareBlaster. They're both fairly inexpensive. Paid apps along the lines of SpySweeper and Norton Internet...

Obviously there are people who do it well, regardless, as any picture set from Domai.com, Hegre-art.com, Photodromm.com, Met-art.com et al. will prove. Candids are a different sort of art form with a different sort of skill involved, but I think the results are still more interesting that...

Guys, you are clearly photographing the wrong humans.

Sometimes I don't get foam on smaller drive orders. I try very hard not to order drives until I need a more serious number. I go through 160GB and 250GB drives quickly enough that 10 is not a problem. If necessary, I'll mix and match until I have enough drives to assure decent packaging e.g. 4...

2.1:1 is a valid widescreen format that some movies are shot in.

I can see it today. I looked a couple weeks ago and it wasn't there then.

There are a couple sweet little appliance servers with WHS on them. Shoeboxes with four or five hotswap trays. If I hadn't just spent $900 buying an APC Netshelter and a paid of large rackmount cases I'd be lusting for those.

You can? It's not available from my Action Pack or my Microsoft Partner login.

Buffalo just got over the legal action that prevented them from selling 802.11 devices in the US. I suspect someone has it out for the company as a whole.

There's some bloat in them thar apps!

It's good to have another join the 2000 posts club.

2GB RAM is hardly crippled. I have to be doing some pretty major stuff with VMware and/or running an MMO client to get anyplace close to that, even with my habitual use of of dozens or hundreds of open Firefox tabs.

Acronis offers free licenses from time to time for people who have agreed to beta test products, made volume purchases of client licenses or have purchased server licenses. I'm in all three categories. I get offered free licenses three or four times a year. On top of that, anyone who has a...

It's fairly trivial to get Acronis Home or Workstation licenses. Hell, sometimes they give them to me. But anyway, the big, big, big HUGE reason I like using Linux for fileservers is that I can add drives to SoftRAID arrays in-place. Granted I can do this on expensive hardware, but that's not...

Use Linux. The volume management for SoftRAID makes it the winner for any kind of filserving.

My recommendations for browsing porn safely and securely. My site is safe for work, some of the links at the end of the article are not. This is adapted from a document I originally wrote for my co-workers' husbands.

Generally what I'm talking about is just finding out what radio frequencies are in use nearby. If you're in an apartment building. Most of the time the manufacturer provided wireless client will tell you that, along with which signals are the strongest. The three major points of interest are...

Do you have any way to do a site survey? Netstumbler, even?

Yes. I have one sitting here in my office right now. They're acceptable. The bigger problem you're probably having in your building is probably interference. It may not matter how much you boost your AP's signal; you're just making the spectrum more crowded. In my apartment I use 5GHz 802.11n...

Here's an article for working with Avast. In particular, it goes over installation and REGISTRATION, and how to start a boot scan. I also found out that there are other skins available for it, and not all of them suck as much as the default one.

That's what it appears to come down to. There's about 50 places in the registry on this PC that seem to refer to "gamma" or "brightness." In many cases I don't know if they're official windows settings or settings for some program or others. I'm not going through all of them.

It's not ATI. If I bump the standard vga driver to 32 bit color it does the same thing.

All those things are functions of graphics driver software and can be supplanted by any number of color correction apps. In this case, there's got to be a registry setting someplace that's overriding everything I've tried to do. I'll admit that I have almost no experience with display...

I hate to admit this, but I like the DLink wireless print server a lot better. Mostly because it supports four printers but also because the setup is actually easy enough that users can handle it themselves.

I eventually found the .ICM files located under \windows\system32\spool\drivers\color and uninstalled those. The list on the problem PC was quite a bit longer than on any of the XP machines I have access to. Fixed nothing. The color profile being referenced according to the Color Control panel...

It makes my systems faster. It doesn't help me much for gaming, since I primarily play an MMO that depends on on my internet connection for loading. Most of my content is on network servers, so it's not being used for that, either. Program loads are super-fast unless I'm loading 50 or 60 tabs...

I have a notebook here that is somehow re-setting a gamma value someplace in Windows to an eye-searing level. I don't know what's causing it, I just want it to go away. I've tried changing values in the Adobe Gamma Control, set different .icc files up in the Windows Color applet Power Tool, and...

The T400 and T500 are much newer than that. I bought a T61 from Lenovo in late November of last year. I think they refreshed the lineup in January or thereabouts.

Who cares about 92MB/sec? We don't buy 15krpm drive for STR but for access time. I'm up to three X25-Ms now. I've got one in my gaming PC and one in a Thinkpad. Not sure what I'm going to do with the third one yet. Maybe RAID0 in the game machine. :D Apropos of nothing, I found this post on...

I could have sworn I saw a press release about OLED tech in upcoming Thinkpads. I read a lot of Engadget. Maybe it all ran together.

On the other hand, acknowledging that reality DOES have a liberal bias is somewhat appealing in its own way...

Don't blame me, I voted "Serenity" in that election.

I've never gotten the styrofoam for anything less than five drives. If you've gotten it for three I think that makes me jealous. Speaking of crappy packaging: I got an Atheros 5008 mini PCI card today that was in a static back and dropped in a USPS plastic bag type mailer. I am SHOCKED that...

You have to realize that the claimed speeds are usually about 1/2 practical, just from 802.11 overhead, too. If I really needed to transfer stuff to that PC over that sort of connection I'd be unspooling a long ethernet cable or dumping it all on a USB drive.

I've been doing homeplug in places that are 802.11-hostile for a while. One place where I work is using homeplug to run $75,000 Polycom teleconferencing systems in rooms that weren't wired for Ethernet in a building that is primarily steel construction (i.e. it eats radio signals). Data transfer...

The problem with using a notebook with a 1920x1200 screen is that it's going to be a large screen, and therefore both very heavy and with a short battery life. The new 17" Macbook Pros have 1080p screens. Apple says they have a seven hour battery but review web sites say it's more like 3 hours...

Acer Aspire and Gateway notebooks tend to have very bright screens, at a cost of battery life. Latitude and Thinkpad notebooks have screens that tend to be much less bright, presumably to offer longer battery life. I can't think of any notebook that reasonably offers long battery life, a...

I've watched the last episode of Battlestar Galactica five times since I got it.

I do listen to audio streams from my NPR station. I usually have one or more browsers open. I have three different browsers that I use for different purposes. I usually have a game open and my e-mail runs constantly. My phone runs about two days if I don't charge it. For all the stuff I keep...

I was actually surprise to hear that iPhones don't support Multitasking, as that's something Windows CE managed to handle 10 years ago on hardware that was approximately 1/20 the MIPS of the CPU of my current device. I took it for granted that it would be supported. And how the hell do you...

In normal day-to-day usage, CPU speed is practically irrelevant. People just don't do much work that's going to hit the CPU harder than some other component in the system. It's difficult for me to subjectively tell the difference between an E2200 and a Q6600 if all I'm doing is browsing the web...

I've been HTML-izing some handy things that can be found on the articles section of this web site. At the moment, the articles that someone might want to pass around are: How to Manually Repair a PC with Hijack This 2009 Updated Anti-Malware Procedure Information and resources for blocking...

The boot disc repair for Vista and later seems to be good at fixing messed up boot records or volume IDs, and that's about it. Vista and later absolutely HAVE to have System Restore turned on. If you turn it off, you lose all your old backups, including the snapshot from the initial install...

Most HD porn now is shot with soft focus, or in such a way that the performers are not the only things occupying the frame. FTV.com likes to use stunning outdoor sites for its HD shoots. SapphicErotica.com does dressed sets with antique furniture. Playboy has fantastic art direction for...