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I said acquaintance and not "perfect woman."

1080p Projectors have become surprisingly affordable. I've seen $2000 1080p projectors and sub-$1000 720p models.

Here's a nice idea: Get a big LCD. I prefer 1080p but it's easier to see 720p if you're 10 feet away. Hook it to a computer in your living room. Optionally, add a receiver. Optionally, add an HD drive of some sort. Buy a Logitech Bluetooth Keyboard for Playstation, and a USB Bluetooth adapter...

Opinion time: An acquaintance of mine is about to undertake her first ever computer build. She wants to do it on her own, which basically means asking me for help selecting parts, but her doing all the work for assembly. She does not have much money, so I am thinking I will share with her a...

1. They're running the drive constantly, which no normal user does. 2. It's from Tom's. 3. Real world experience tells me that Tom is either lying or an idiot or both, based on the fact that I own an SSD-equipped notebook and therefore have actual real world experience with them. 4. QED this is...

As a rule, anything that runs dd-WRT will run Tomato as well. Linksys has some draft-N hardware that does, but as I recall it was all over $100.

Yes. You can do the same thing with a CD-RW or a bootable USB drive if you have a machine that properly supports booting off those (both are kind of iffy; CD-RWs take longer to spin up for some reason and USB is, well, USB). Or you can just make the floppy and turn it into an ISO file.

uda posted twice after me. uda, you're on my ignore list. I can't stand you. Please direct your typing at someone else. Preferably someplace else on the internet. I'm thinking you'd fit right in with all the furry porn cretins on 4chan.

Boot off a Windows disk. Go in to the recovery console. Run the following commands chkdsk /r fixboot fixmbr bootcfg /scan No help? Try booting off an XP boot floppy or CD. Format a floppy under XP. Copy the boot files off of that PC onto your floppy disk (NTLDR, boot.ini, and NTDETECT.COM)...

I built my own and it works great for, um, $350 or so... My advice is that you find a thing that can run dd-WRT or Tomato firmware. Whatever Tomato does, it seems to stand up very well to torrenting, or better than dd-WRT, in any case. On the other side, you can do a lot more stuff with dd-WRT...

It's an MPEG4 codec. Most anything that can play modern Quicktime files can play Nero Digital, including my Linux machines.

IDE to SATA converters only cost about $10. I'm not sure they're reliable enough to run drives in RAID5, though.

Server 2008 works OK on my Thinkpad, but the couple servers I have are both mysteriously slow for interactive tasks; way WAY moreso than would be suggested by the "adjust this server for background processes" setting would indicate. I don't get the feeling that it's really running any faster...

Well, my disc arrived pre-scratched, so about all I can do is get the title to start and then not actually do anything with it. My cats like to sleep on the board.

Asus, in my experience, has only marginally better service than PC Chips. Actually, I take that back: I RMA'd some boards to PC Chips once and got them back. The Asus customer service web site disappears off the internet for days at a time and in my experience they never respond to RMA requests...

I'm sort of contemplating two 40" panels on my gaming PC. They will just fit across the desk space of my loft, though I'll have to attach them to the wall. The 27" monitor I have right now isn't really very good for watching from in bed or Wii Fit-ing.

Why would you bother with RAID0 over USB2.0? Even a pokey notebook drive shouldn't have any problem saturating 25MB/sec. I like having an SSD in my Thinkpad but most of the time it's not a life-altering difference for the sorts of things I do on that machine. I'm far more curious about desktop...

I should be so lucky. Other than Nitsirk, all the women I have ever taught are either 60-year-old steelworkers or the wives of steelworkers, or they're heavyset, uh, "urban" girls, many of whom are either pregnant or have had kids. Ew. ... and those are the only women I ever see, other than the...

The couple people I know who do any kind of digital content production both still use large Sony CRTs in preference to LCDs for their main display. Although that might have more to do with not wanting to move a 90lb. monitor than any issue related to the quality of any particular LCD.

This is a case where I have a hard limit in the form of the limit of my corporate credit card. That, and since the state is ultimately paying, we have to wait on their billing and accounting process. It'd be nice, thuogh.

It's downright hilarious. You've got a bunch of evolution deniers being a pain in the ass to an eminent biologist, and you've got the biologist owning their asses every intellectual level. As I've watched these assholes and more just like them try to convince the world that creation science or...

You should give them to Tea so that she can have a house of her own!

I was also going to suggest that if you managed to collect a small number of WD drives, you could also make a passable sort of dwelling for your sock puppet, but then there would be the inherent folly of actually collecting WD drives.

Here's the answer, and it's a deeply simple one: So you won't have to do it again. You've got some legacy program that you need to access on every machine you have? Install OS/2 or Win 3.1 or Win95 in a VM, and install the program in that. The file is portable to whatever machine you happen to...

This shall be a very dense post. It originated on Conservapedia, a wiki run by delusional knuckledraggers who are primarily interested in mental masturbation and further brainwashing of unfortunate homeschooled kids. The site itself is not a joke. The people responsible are absolutely serious...

I suggest using it to hold down papers on your desk. I've never seen a Lenovo/Thinkpad with a WD drive. I'm not too sure I've ever seen one in a business class notebook. That's the sort of thing I'd notice, too.

Tannin, why do you not simply make a Virtual machine for this software? It'd take all of 30 seconds to install Win3.1 or for that matter OS/2 (well, OK, maybe FIVE minutes for OS/2) under VMware.

nVidia, being among the foulest technology companies in the world, would see fit to rinse its collective mouth only the foulest substance imaginable.

I believe I read last week that Australia has overtaken the US as the most obese nation. I'd dig up a link but I am busy eating a McNugget. Anyway, I got my Wii Fit today. My first one disappeared from a FedEx shipping depot, so this is the replacement. I may post something about it after I try...

Fixed that for you.

The kids are as young as 17 and as old as 20. They're AB Honor roll students who meet a maximum income level and have been accepted to a four year college. As old as 20? Yes. A lot of the girls are first or second-time parents (most of the boys are, too, but it's not as much of an issue for...

You can get a decent BD-ROM drive for $120, Santilli.

Yes, because the wastes of Free Will and Oxygen that are Republicans have done SO MUCH in the name of freedom, privacy and security in the last 8 years.

AMD's 780G platform, however, offers real, modern, integrated GPU that does support such playback assistance, and it's priced fairly reasonably. You could certainly build a modest new machine around such a motherboard for around $250 (motherboard, CPU, Power Supply, RAM), compared to the $100...

Honest answer: if you have a physiology or chemical sensitivity that isn't represented by the options available at your local drug store. I would like to need a condom some day. D:

It was a sunny afternoon in March when she stopped by Woot’s creative offices. She said she was there to sell us ink cartridges for the office printer—but as it would happen, she also ushered our two wide-eyed interns into manhood. She called herself Elexa. What a vision! She was thin, but...

As a car guy, it might make more sense if we relate this to cars. Toyota makes a Camry, which is a perfectly nice, reasonable car that I would hazard to guess is an ideal car for your typical urban/suburban 3-person family. Toyota also makes an Avalon, which has all the same functions a Camry...

I'm within $.23 of my maximum budget on each PC, if that tells you anything.

That's still not a $25 card, either. :P

I'd rather not give them printers at all. $50 more money spent on hardware (actually, more like $70 if they'd let me use Vista Basic rather than Premium) would make those machines DRASTICALLY better instead of being the slugs that they are. In two years that money won't matter, but I really do...

I believe you need dual-link DVI support for 2500x1600. Those are not found on lower-priced cards. Standard DVI does top out at 1920x1200. So yes, Lunar is correct that a cheapie isn't going to be the best option.

More thoughts on some hardware I've gotten to play with recently. Shuttle K45 barebones: They're $100 shoebox machines based around an i945 motherboard. No slot for an optical drive and no Ice-Q cooling. Guess what? They're great. I've built about a dozen of them. Stick something in a...

Apparently, one can fold on nVidia GPUs now.

I'm doing my "Teaching Kids how to build computers" classes again this summer. As in years past, this means buying low-end parts by the score. Here's the system: Celeron 430 1.8GHz CPU Intel branded 945-based uATX motherboard (with no PCIe slots, something I didn't notice until after I bought...

You are clearly suffering from some kind of deficiency of imagination. All a five year warranty on a WD drive means is that you'll have an opportunity to double the cost of the hard disk in shipping charges from UPS/Fedex.

From an HD-watching standpoing, you'll be better off with a more up to date graphics card. Fairly modest cards from ATI (x2400s and up, basically) and from nVidia (8400s and up) have at least some support for offloading HD-video decoding onto the GPU. This is a good thing.

There is *no* price premium for the T-series, when compared to units in the same weight and performance class as similar models from Dell, HP or Toshiba. In fact, Ts usually come out cheaper if your buying anything but the baseline model from each product line.

Acronis is looking for beta testers for its Exchange backup server product. They indicate that people accepted in their beta testing program will receive a totally sweet copy of Echo Workstation for free. I don't know how many of you have test setup where you have both Server and Exchange...

Er... why have POP3 turned on, even?

There are 11 I still need to do. Magpie. It was written by Ben Goodger, project manager for Firefox. He abandoned it when FF2.0 came out, but someone else continued development. Unfortunately, the new guy doesn't have permission to update addons.mozilla.org, so he just leaves comments on the...