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My gaming rig still has a CPU that's clocked faster and I just ordered a Radeon 4870. And I'm sure I still have more disk space. :P

Ew. I'm not sure if it's the same thing, but I know that some motherboards these days use Jmicron controllers for their IDE ports, and that for some weird reason that whole setup routes through the motherboard USB controller. Basically it sounds like Jmicron-anything is something to avoid. :\

Yeah, they aren't having any of it. No changing mail clients. The guy paying the bills doesn't want them using anything different because he thinks they would be less productive working with unfamiliar software. I'd put it on Microsoft but I have a feeling that they'd just tell him to move...

Er... RyanVM patches can be integrated with its own updater or through nLite.

I am trying to make these people not have an SBS server. They're being RBL'd to hell because whatever dumbass set their server up left it as an open relay, and they're sitting on a Comcast dynamic /24 IP. Anybody with a halfway decent anti-spam configuration doesn't want herpes-over-SMTP from...

You are not helping my murderous rage at the moment.

Outlook 2003. Google Apps for domains. Four users. Their settings are all correct according to Google. I've removed the Antivirus software they were using from their PCs entirely. I've deleted and recreated their Outlook profiles. I've deleted and recreated their PSTs. Besides the E-mail...

Have you maybe looked in to making a .ZAP file?

Doesn't SQL Server prompt you to install all the dependency crap? You can in fact make .MSI files with transforms that specify different configurations, and .MSI files that support installing multiple programs, but on the whole it's very complicated for a non-expert user to do that stuff. There...

May I ask why you would put a fairly high end graphics card in a machine intended as a server? I won't even install graphics drivers in anything I use. Anyway, if the PSU is decent quality, that load is completely do-able. I've put nVidia 8800-series cards on Antec 300W-powered systems and...

I had another 750GB -AS die this morning. It was actually kind of spectacular, and judging from the burns on the drive cage there was either fire or arcing. I smelled it, and there's visible damage to the smaller of the two ICs and some of the traces. I checked my other 750GB -ASes and that...

Apparently I typed 9300. I meant the 9600. I've gotten them for $115. I pair them with Gigabyte motherboards that have a 780G chipset (uh... GA-MA78GM-S2H). Total cost is about $185 as I recall. If I didn't want the nice onboard graphics I'd probably just buy the cheapest Gigabyte board with an...

The AMD's numbers are pretty sad, but I'd still say there's value to be had in AMD-land. It's just not found in their top-end chips, which is the only thing being tested in the article. You can buy a decent AMD motherboard + one of the lower-range quad (9300) or three core Phenoms, for less than...

I usually take strips from typical brown shipping boxes. The kind that Newegg uses and is pretty much everything UPS brings me. I'm not saying it's perfect or anything, but they compress pretty well and they can stand up to having holes made in them.

I don't have anyplace to put it. And no, it's all going in a dumpster.

I am having to move my office at the moment. I'm being moved from one storeroom closet to an even smaller one. As a result I'm having to throw out a huge collection of spare parts. Today I'm tossing working Socket A, 754, 939 and 478 motherboards, Pentium 4 and various Athlon and Sempron chips...

Service is not fine. It's poor, even on the business products. I don't want a 20 minute wait time and some godawful hold music to talk to someone about replacing a $30 DVD drive. I want to press 1, 2 and tell Charlie in Atlanta my Thinkpad serial number and be off the phone in under two minutes...

If she's OK with the money, point her toward an R or a T. My impression of the SLs is that they're carrying some of the lower-end Ideapad crap into the Thinkpad line, and I'd rather avoid that. Latitudes mostly just aren't that impressive. They don't have the quality of construction and they...

Apparently the demo unit for a lot of the Windows 7 stuff at WinHEC last weekend was a 1GB netbook with a 1.0GHz Via processor. That's pretty ballsy for a Microsoft beta OS.

They are as much computer monitors to me as they are screens for watching movies and the like.

$250,000 a month?!?

Application compatibility is going to suck no matter what. That ship has sailed. As time goes on virtual machines are going to be a better solution for a lot of that, and for the rest I'm really hoping to see a move in the direction of largely platform-independent web applications. I'm looking...

I've always been under the impression that it's the controller's CPU and RAM configuration that limits the overall speed of the controller. It's pretty normal for me to be think "Why is this server so slow." and then open up that box and find a PERC card with an 80MHz CPU on it instead of, say...

Around here, farmers get a decent sized initial payout ($10k) for a 400-foot-tall windmill, plus $500 a month, plus removal of the windmill at the end of its useful life.

You can CTRL-Z and then type bg to background the task. Or you can do shutdown -r 17:30 & And start the task in the background in the first place.

I usually make drive rails out of strips of cardboard.

I have Vista on all my classroom PCs. Of course, they all have XP on them and that's what they boot to by default, but Vista is at least installed. I only know of one business that has made a coordinated effort to move to Vista. I know of four or five that skipped XP and have chosen to remain...

Fallout 3 comes out tomorrow. I remember the first one as a great action role playing game with a really unique aesthetic. I've been so disappointed by recent PC games and especially by game publishers that I'm not sure I want to buy it.

An Indian restaurant finally opened someplace close to where I live. It was alright, even if I don't really remember what I ordered (Teeka?). I heard that it was spicy, and I asked them to make it spicy. They did not make it spicy. It was fairly bland. I did not see anything on the menu that...

In Illinois in 2004, there was a scandal involving then-Governor George Ryan where he was essentially funding his campaign and lining some crony pockets by accepting bribes in exchange for valid trucking licenses. This really came to a head because a Mexican truck driver carrying one of those...

One of my favorite-ever stupid political facts: George Ryan was the SIXTH Governor of Illinois from Kankakee to be sentenced to time in prison. On the other hand, I respect the hell out of the guy for changing his stance on the death penalty. I don't remember any scandals or major allegations...

Blagojevich really is an idiot. He's caught in a permanent pissing match with the state congress, has no idea how to fund any of his new programs and can't even keep Daley happy in Chicago. Basically, he's a guy who has painted himself into a corner by not playing ball with ANYONE with any kind...

There is nothing and I do mean nothing like the murderous rage I have for Outlook. Sharepoint is a perfect product in comparison.

Apropos of nothing being said at the moment, the Obama victory rally is going to be held in Chicago's Grant Park. As much as I hate the idea of crowds or being around people, I'm actually thinking that it would be neat to go, because that really will be a historic moment in time...

I asked the person I work with who does sharepoint stuff, and she couldn't think of a way to make it work eithre. Sorry.

My bedroom display is a Samsung LN40A650. It puts my 52" Sharp display to shame, and my Sharp is only a little over a year old, I thought that a 40" display might be a bit too large to sit in front of but as it turns out I don't do all that much work (reading text) from that machine. It's kind...

Sometimes you want a chain. Familiarity and (hopefully) consistency of product are a good idea while traveling, for example. I can drink a shot glass of 100,000 Scoville hot sauce and not have it bother me, but if something kicks my personal anxiety disorder, food basically isn't going to stay...

The only problem is that one drive isn't a very large sample. In the grand scheme of things the 30 or so 750GB Seagate drives that have passed through my hands certainly isn't either, but between my poor experiences with ~10 of those 30 drives, and with 31 of the 220 80GB drives I worked on...

Since you're suggesting that you can actually get an edible meal at Applebees, I'm going to make the assumption that you ate the napkins, because there's no way you got decent food there. It's not even possible. I've gotten soda with no syrup, chicken tenders and fries that were still frozen...

Given the number of 750GB Seagate drives I've had to replace, I don't think I'll be touching that one. Between my experiences with low-end 7200.10 80GB drives and "high end" 750GB drives, I am at the point where I'm ready to classify Seagate in the same category as Western Digital.

You know, I never thought to look at Wikipedia, given the fact that I can come here and ask actual Aussies. Wikipedia: Is there anything it doesn't know? P.S. Vegemite is gross

I'd say Ruth's Kris is a high-end chain (I had a $70 meal last time I ate in one. No alcohol.). Outback is a step above a Ponderosa or a Sizzler, but I will honestly say I've had a better steak in those than I've gotten in Outback, too. It's on par with Texas Corral for a "meh" level meal...

1980's US Federal budget was approximately $700 billion, which is certainly an ironic number right about now. An inflation calculator tells me that 1980's budget in 2008 dollars would be about $1.7 trillion. The real budget for 2009 will be approximately $3 trillion. Even if we take a hacksaw...

Well, for example Americans have hot dogs. We have corn on the cob. We have a few unique cuisines: Southwest Fusion (a blend of Mexican and Asian cooking made possible by the diverse cultures of California), Cajun and southern Soul Food ("Fry everything in butter with various parts of the pig")...

Question for Aussies: Can Oz be said to have a cuisine of its own? I don't really know, but the things that come to mind about Aussie food, as an American, are that it's probably mostly derived from god-awful English cuisine (cucumber sandwiches, meat that's both over- and under-done). In the...

Once again, the simple joy of being able to re-mount /home on a different *nix variant reminds me of how retarded Windows can be.

No, but it needs to. The most annoying part is scrolling through all the drivers in the "HP" section, looking for a Officejet 5600 only to find out that the 5600 is a Officejet Pro and therefore listed after all the regular Deskjets... and also that it's in a category called "Hewlitt Packard"...

I have about $1200 in home theater equipment in my office. Just a little system. If I wasn't so lame to as to be afraid of hanging pictures and stuff, I'd probably put a couple Maxfield Parrish prints up or something, but given how the rest of my office looks (aside from the mess; I work in a...

The IMAP inbox on my home server wouldn't fit on a standard gmail account. I don't put anything in folders, either.

You can't even "upgrade" to 64-bit Vista. Basically there's no automatic path anywhere to convert to x64-anything in Windows-land. I'm having a hard time imagining what any normal desktop user would be doing that would cause them to bump in to the 3GB limit, too.