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Is one of those actually better than the other?

Putting aside my opinion of WD for a moment, who the hell is going to bother with a drive that might have 3% extra capacity after some kind of nebulous upgrade process?

The RAM is a couple 2GB DIMMs I had from upgrading a laptop to 8 or 16GB in the past and the 802.11/BT card was fished out of a dead laptop. The mSATA card was an otherwise too small for anything useful 80GB model, though I'll admit most people don't have spare mSATA cards sitting around. I can...

This was on Imgur, which means it was probably also on reddit, but some of y'all probably haven't seen it yet.

It's probably a 5-platter design. That's kind of Hitachi's thing.

10TB drive announced from WD/HGST.

I may have mentioned this, but if you own a Windows or Android tablet, the XBMC/Plex remote apps available for them are super, super sexy. My mom can't work a TV either, but does pretty well once she's in Plex. I still think the FireTV is pretty nice. The Chromecast is way, way better than it...

Apple invented smart watches, NFC payment systems and phones larger than 4.5" today. Clearly, the world will never be the same.

The worst mistake I ever made was adding the word "dint" to my Swype autocorrect.

There are people uploading raw .ISOs of blu rays to the usual places. I usually Netflix special effects spectacle movies that I don't buy just so that I can convert them myself, but even with a Netflix distribution center just 50 miles from my apartment, they don't mail them faster than I can...

Spywareblaster basically prevents some bothersome toolbar and ActiveX control installations, and stops some cookies from being written. It's like a cherry on top of Spybot's immunizations, but the program is tiny and has zero impact on system resources, so I still install and use it. Spybot...

I agreed to go computer shopping with a few ladies I know of the "working their way through college"-variety this afternoon. We kind of had a pre-meeting about who wants what and some interesting themes came up: * No one was remotely interested in a 17" laptop. Even without my prompting. * No...

Be glad you don't deal with much Classical music, where the "authoritative" sources might list an album's artist by the composer, soloist, conductor or ensemble; albums are frequently untitled and will almost never have anything in the Composer or album artist fields; non-English characters in...

Handy, do you find the wrist rest on your MBP uncomfortable? My generic advice for people who want Macs is to look long and hard at the Mac Mini or Air or to consider some sort of mobile device instead. Most of the time, people who want OSX machines are doing so because "It just works"...

Maybe the audio tool stuff should be in the Toolbox section? Here's a random and pretty interesting look at what it takes to manage the porta-johns for the Burning Man festival.

A desktop. From my laptop. Which is safe for work. I contemplated uploading my main desktop at home complete with plausible-deniability pixel blurring.

I need to do more editing but here's a link to the current file that's sitting on my Google Drive. I'll throw it back on my web site after I get it in better shape. Feedback appreciated.

I'm not a fan. The screens are nice and OSX in and of itself is fine as a marvelously consistent *nix. I like OS X just fine. Spotlight is fantastic and I wish search on Windows worked half so well. But I don't like the touchpad, keyboard or uncomfortable metal finish of the Macbook Pro. I think...

Some of the Metro-ified XBMC remotes for Windows 8 are pretty drool-worthy as well. For the all one of other SF members who will admit to having a WinRT device. ;)

The least reliable drives for me have been 2TB eco drives, but 2TB in general seems to have been a weird spot in terms of reliability. The 3TB Barracudas aren't stellar by any stretch of the imagination, but I bought a LOT of 2TB drives to use for backup systems and I think I've replaced...

Regarding the hosts file: Windows 8 and 8.1 ignore the contents of the hosts file if Windows Defender is running. I have a script that grabs the MVPS.org hosts file and puts it where it goes, but I've observed that Windows Defender will re-enable itself occasionally after Windows Updates. I...

I have a 3770k on my main desktop. I've had it for a couple years now. I haven't kept the same main desktop for more than a year since I was sedrosken's age. I have a perfect excuse to buy a ridiculous new setup next month and I'm still trying to decide if I actually want to bother. If there's...

I actually update that document periodically, though the last few revisions have lived on my Google Drive instead of the web. FWIW, both Firefox and Chrome read PDF files without any additional software now. This is fine for probably 95% of web users. The NTFS permission or GPO settings that...

Here's my list of proactive steps: 1. Adblock Plus in every browser. Also the Easylist TPL in IE and the High Security level for the Internet Zone (this will make IE annoying to use so it won't get used). Make sure Easylist, Fanboy's Annoyance Removal, Malware Domains, Social Blocking and Spam...

I don't need OSX, except to have a machine running it someplace so that I maintain familiarity with it.

We've had picture heavy threads before and SF has been fine. Most of my desktops are utterly not safe for work and not for the impressionable eyes of youngsters such as yourself. :D I had to spend 40 minutes today explaining to someone why he has to use a password to access his web mail. He...

I spent about half a day mucking around with my NUC to make it properly work as a Hackintosh. I was thinking that the combination of Launchpad + XBMC would be a pretty decent alternative to the Server 2012R2 (read that as Windows 8, for all intents and purposes) install it has on it now. ...

Allcast is pretty spiffy. Basically, you gain the ability to screencast your Android to anything that can act as a DLNA receiver. It's not free, but it does specifically work with the Xbox86, PS3, Roku and FireTV.

Dude. Evernote. Or OneNote. Whatever. Get that crap synchronized with Gdrive or Skydrive or something. Your notes are more important than an OS install or a single device, man. There's no reason in 2014 to tie any of that to a single software install or piece of hardware.

You know as well as I do that ain't happening. My goal here is to look for extra, helpful steps to include in a process that I can document and pass along to others so that I don't have to clean up every machine someone tells me has a problem. Right now, I have two versions of such a document...

It's a trade off between capacity, durability and portability. The disk drive will be cheap, but it's also likely to break and you may have issues powering it, depending what you're plugging it in to. I used to carry and use three or four 2.5" drives in external enclosures, but since I have 64...

The Sidebar was removed from Vista and 7 because it was found to have horrific security problems.

The most typical thumb drive failure for me seems to start with a "This drive needs to be formatted" message followed by a failure to format. That's also a fairly common indicator that an SSD has crapped out.

It's back to school time, which for me means getting to look at or hear about the malware that's been on high school and college students' computers since May, the last time they actually looked at a device other than their phone. I have a standard procedure that works pretty well (install...

Mine definitely get loved to death. I suspect I get 12 - 18 months out of the high capacity drives I carry around for system images and data transfers. I have a small pile of dead soldiers I need to send back to Sandisk or Lexar right now.

Every time I look in to it, Dell seems to be the only affordable/appealing option as far as name brands go, with the HP, Apple and Viewsonic products all being in the "Oh wait, you're serious. Let me laugh harder." range of pricing. I have a weirdo Korean off-brand 27" monitor I got from Fry's...

Looks like Toshiba offers Recovery Media for sale here.

I'm thinking sedrosken would have a hard time coming up with a ~20GB flash drive or the like to back up on to.

You can just hit pause. The space bar. I do that all the time.

Most modern laptops have their product key stickers inside the battery compartment. Also, since legality probably isn't a concern for you, it's relatively easy to get a KMS Activator to use with a copy of Windows Enterprise editions. I'm not a huge fan of using UEFI either. I can't seem to...

Known as one of the best restaurants on Earth, the $295 per person Chef's Tasting Menu at The French Laundry, as reviewed by a four year old. as told in many, many photos.

A few companies are now talking about extremely inexpensive x86 machines with small SSDs and low-res screens that will run full-blown Windows 8 in the ~$200-$250 range. They'll be limited to 2GB RAM, which basically makes them Netbooks redux, but they're probably closer to what a lot of people...

I've been using Waterfox lately. I loaded up 80 pages of tumblrs full of animated .gifs and crap and got RAM utilization up over 3.5GB for the waterfox process and I've left them there while I do my normal browsing. I'd say that it's working fine, though I suspect that if I loaded several tabs...

Since you now have your cool little HP box up and running, have you tried it out for video content yet? Or is it dedicated just to audio at this point? I'm curious to know whether it behaves well enough for high bit-rate video playback. Not to advocate something totally, completely that is...

Do third graders get the metric system? I think you should at least try to communicate this in metric since it lends itself better to scale.

This Universal USB installer is pretty handy. Yes, it'll turn a random Linux .ISO into a bootable thumb drive. But I also noticed that it will do a lot of techie tools and rescue CDs without a whole lot of work. Also, here's a Lifehacker tutorial on making a Live Windows install on a thumb...

This is so much better it's not even funny. Thank you Doug.

I get something like 65/20 when I speedtest to the nearest site but only 40/12 when I test to my Colo in South Bend. The important thing is that I'm getting service that's fast enough that I don't have to worry about how fast my service is. I have one customer that's stuck on a 192k DSL line. I...

There are "lite" versions of XP. One that I've used in a couple specific circumstances would load on an original Pentium and only required 40MB RAM. Of course, it wouldn't take updates and had a lot of functions stripped out, but in most other respects it was functional. I believe it was called...

Nope. Chrome has a Reload button to the left of the address bar. IE is the one that put Reload off to the right where it doesn't belong.