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I deploy a couple hundred computers a year with Samsung hard disks. With, say, 1200 drives in service over the last six years, I've had to RMA nine of them.

In my experience, Tecras don't have appreciably better build quality than Satellites, and Satellites are horrid.

Video encoding is where I feel it, and running VMs.

Read this guy's tech advice column. See if you can find the part that's really, really, scarily wrong.

Or not bother to install the update...

Article about why popular radio in the US sucks so damned much.

Someone I built a PC for a few months back was telling me she had similar issues - she couldn't get to expedia.com or llbean.com when she was using a local DSL service, though on Comcast or Verizon she was fine. DNS issue? Nope. Her's resolved the same way. Spyware? She didn't have any...

There are many tens of thousands of law offices that are still using WordPerfect 6 or even 5. Wordperfect and PDF are the only acceptable formats for electronic court submission in Indiana, and from experience most lawyers think of PCs as typewriters with TVs on them ("What do you need another...

The cooling system on the bigger 8800s is very nice, until the point when it breaks.

Toshiba notebooks hasn't made a good notebook since, oh, probably the mid 90s.

Vista is still affected by rootkits. Even Vista64 - which cannot be made to run unsigned drivers AFAIK - has had proof-of-concept rootkits installed.

Hope most of your 2008s suck less than my 2007 did.

One interesting thing you guys might not know is that all in all antivirus software is becoming less effective. A lot of malware is now wrapped up in rootkits or using non-virus (no replication) infection methods.

I'd look at a Lenovo X61. They weigh about 1.5kg and have 12" screens. They *do not* have internal DVD burners. The last ones I deployed, I gave out with 8GB thumb drives, which cost quite a bit less than the Ultrabase that those things need to have their "internal" DVD drive. A T61 (I own two...

I had the day off and slept a lot. I don't like not having work to do.

It's the same. I'll need to test the board to be sure it's OK, but it should be.

I do not have a KT266. I have a Gigabyte KT333 which should be a drop in replacement.

Yes but there's a time aspect to that as well.

I'll look.

No idea. I know I sure don't like iTunes.

Moreover, I think the main issue we'd all like to see addressed is reliability, and that's very difficult to do.

I don't know. iTunes is pretty bad if you're someone who has only ever used Windows. A lot of the UI stuff doesn't work the same way.

One of my clients gave me a 2GB iPod nano. He couldn't figure out how to work it. I don't know what I'm going to do with it yet.

Can you get a Procurve ANYTHING for under $500?

At the moment, I have a 52" 1080p LCD TV with a Microsoft external HDDVD hooked up to the PC that is handling most video. I'm planning to replace the external drive with an internal BluRay/HDDVD unit in the near future. The PC I'm using it with is an Athlon x2/5200 "low wattage" model on a very...

Watch the movie. And then you can watch Buffy and Angel, by the same guy. Also watch the specials on the DVD. You really get a sense of how close the members of the cast got, and how much they believe in the show. And then watch Battlestar Galactica, which has nothing to do with anything made...

Actually, what I am is a person who prefers a keyboard and mouse for input. I thought the Wiimote would be cool and different, but basically nothing uses it in any comprehensible fashion, except the Wii sports titles (and Wii play, but those are pretty dull). I really don't like most console...

Will, I cannot even tell you the number of times I have had to explain that the Windows Security Center alerts actually mean something. Home users, business users, it doesn't matter. Basically, no matter what those alerts say, as long as they see the icon for their antivirus software, they think...

I can't find anything on the Wii that I like except for Boxing. I've rented probably 30 titles (at $5 a pop) looking for something. Most console games still have terrible controls and basically nothing else really uses the motion sensor for any good effect.

There's really no reason to leave Windows 2000. It does everything XP does, after all. XP basically has a newer driver base and, um, wait... no... Yeah. That's it. A newer driver base. Otherwise it's functionally identical. Some people might think XP is prettier, but those people are mostly...

That's pretty much a general criticism of enthusiast publications in general, Mark. ExtremeTech, MaximumPC, CPU, AnandTech, Tom's Hardware... Pretty much all of them make that mistake. When any publication talks about $1000 computers or for that matter $100 power supplies as "low end", I know...

Proper RAID arrays - as opposed to Promise/Highpoint software abortion thingies - are a proven technology, and moreover, a proper RAID is something that could go a long way in alleviating your storage woes, Lunar. As for the legality of "illegitimate data", it's my opinion that I've paid enough...

I save some project type work until the end of the year, when I have time off to deal with things. I upgraded backup systems, did Vista and Office upgrade counseling ("no") and installed internet monitoring software. I have a client that's seriously looking at Linux as a desktop platform instead...

Microsoft warns users not to edit files that have been backed up with MS Home Server. OK, so the compelling technology in Home Server is that it can be used as a central point for backups. And users shouldn't use it for that. Makes it kind of pointless, doesn't it?

I've managed to do quite a bit of working. It's all contracting stuff, so I am at least getting a payday out of it.

I am working. I was working. I will be working.

TrueImage usually works at 60 -75GB/hour, going from an internal drive to USB2, though backups are usually faster than restores. 31 hours seems slow, even for a full 1TB.

It's a matter of balance, of course. But everything I have is stored in multiple layers of redundancy, and I strongly prefer things that way than take the chance that I might lose some amount of my data.

Those drives are pretty much brand new, and Samsung's storage division isn't exactly known for being on top of the latest technology. It wouldn't surprise me at all if their software is just buggy when dealing with their biggest drives.

I'm a big fan of lots of smaller arrays. It's easier to find enough space to move things around if one of the arrays goes (or starts to go) south. That single array won't look so smart the first time you have a controller failure...

Right box, wrong board inside. Although, it's really freakin' hard to tell the difference. They all look the same except the DGwhatever boards don't have parallel ports. When you're building so many computers at a time, you don't immediately notice little things like that. :) For what it's...

"Increasing simplification of bodily structure " would be acceptable. However, the use in question here is definition #3: decreasing in rate as the base increases, which I think we can agree in fact and in practice to be a bad thing.

There was no point in Superbad that I felt was not worth watching. It was painful at times, but painful in a way that I could 100% identify with. Most of the people I know who did not like Superbad are people I suspect didn't have major teenage awkwardness issues.

My father once had an employee who worked at the Nuclear Plant at Clinton, Illinois. He was caught trying to remove nuclear waste and it was eventually revealed that he was in the process of constructing a small reactor in his basement. I am very much pro-nuclear power. Modern reactor designs...

Any sales tax is regressive. I'm not suggesting that tax codes shouldn't be reformed. I am suggesting that taxation based on sales as the sole method of funding government programs is going to result in a shifting of burdens away from the people who can best afford to pay taxes. Even 10% of...

For no particular reason, here's the numbers for the classroom PCs I built in December. Number of PCs built: 60 All parts save the case came from Newegg.com. Antec NSK3380 case Intel 946GZis motherboard Intel Core 2 Duo E4500 2.2GHz Crucial 2GB DDR2/667 DIMM NEC Optiarc 18x SATA DVD Burner...

You obviously have no idea how many people will install everything in the box. One of the biggest problems I have in teaching computer building and home networking classes is to get people to ignore the install CDs as much as humanly possible.

I suspect ddrueding has the right of it. The same thing pops on Slashdot a few times a year, and you find out that the guys doing the study were including optional software (Apache, Firefox, whatever) in their metrics while just including what MS said they could include for the Windows part.

The 3380 has a standard PSU.

Any tax based on sales rather than income is regressive - placing an unfair burden on those who make less money. The only people who will actually pay less under the proposed fairtax than the current system are those who either make less than $15,000 (mostly they aren't paying taxes already) or...