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  1. Mercutio

    To iPhone or Not ?

    Also: Gmail calendars just work on Android. You have to have a paid Google Apps for Domains account before calendar magic happens on iThings. On the other hand, I spent what I think is an unreasonable amount of time screwing around with WinAmp on a desktop and my phone to make it handle music...
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    Evil Empire

    Apple has never wanted to be Microsoft. Microsoft wanted to be IBM. And in a way, they are. But Apple has never really given serious run at competing in general purpose business computing. Instead, they created a system with some practical business use (early support for networking and...
  3. Mercutio

    Media Player Appliances

    The Popcorn Hour player does have the ability to play damned near anything, but the interface is slow to the point of aggravation and using the remote to type in share names and passwords could not be more miserable. I must admit that I haven't done much but play videos with it, but I didn't see...
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    Dead AMD 3200+, Dead ram, and possibly Power supply

    There are too many enormous Microsoft customers still using XP for them to slip up on that. But for cases where the same Windows installation has existed in-place for six or seven years, no it wouldn't shock me if there were issues even on a pretty vanilla setup.
  5. Mercutio

    Disk Controllers with 3TB support

    Yes but I could buy three M1505s for what that LSI card costs.
  6. Mercutio

    Supermicro deal on Ebay

    I really won't know until I actually receive it. I have a couple slow quad core Xeons to put in it but I'm not sure about RAM.
  7. Mercutio

    ViDock and/or DIY eGPU

    That really wouldn't surprise me. Even the super high end cards are only using all that RAM for multi-sampling textures that are getting used over and over. It's not like they actually need to deliver 16Gpbs of output.
  8. Mercutio

    Disk Controllers with 3TB support

    The H700 and H800 will do 3TB now and supposedly the H200 will with a firmware update that isn't out yet.
  9. Mercutio

    Disk Controllers with 3TB support

    My personal winner was the IBM ServerRAID M1015. They're $75 on Ebay, support SAS expanders and 3TB disks, SAS and SATA drives, use a pair of SFF internal connectors and they have hardware support for RAID 0, 1 and 10. That beats the hell out of $400 for a Dell H700.
  10. Mercutio

    Something Random

    They're still getting the kinks worked out due to limited support from publishers, but there are at least two systems for e-book lending available to your community library right now.
  11. Mercutio

    run dll as an app error

    Some people just don't listen to reason.
  12. Mercutio

    Dead AMD 3200+, Dead ram, and possibly Power supply

    To be honest, I think you got sold a line of bullshit with regard to AMD CPUs and dead memory controllers. Seriously. When CPUs fail, they pretty much fail totally, and even that is extremely rare. I RMA perhaps one processor every two years. If there were a rash of defective AMD chips it would...
  13. Mercutio

    ViDock and/or DIY eGPU

    I'm cautiously interested in such a thing, if only to give a home the retired gaming cards I can never seem to sell. Perhaps these things will be a nail in the coffin for "gaming notebooks."
  14. Mercutio

    Dead AMD 3200+, Dead ram, and possibly Power supply

    You also spent somewhere between $150 and $350. For purposes of comparison, I can build a complete budget build machine for $215. You can't go by how much stuff cost when it was new. Things depreciate. A 1986 Mercedes 560 was probably $40k when it was new but it's not worth a damned thing now...
  15. Mercutio

    Dead AMD 3200+, Dead ram, and possibly Power supply

    All the Auzentech sound cards are fully supported on newer versions of Windows. And time is right: You would have been far better off tossing the old hardware and getting low-end new stuff than dicking around with what you have. Saying that you'd rather spend money on another expensive machine...
  16. Mercutio

    Speaker suggestions

    Genius SW-G2.1 are a 2.1 + control module set of computer speakers that cost $50 or so. I got a couple sets for use in my classrooms and I really can't believe how nice they sound. They look retarded but they sound better than a lot of computer speaker sets that cost three times as much.
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    Something Random

    How would you rate a turtle as a house guest?
  18. Mercutio

    Mouse 4 notebook

    Trackballs work best with the pointer speed setting turned all the way up. I can give the ball a spin and go from corner to corner on a screen pretty easily.
  19. Mercutio

    Dell PERC 6i failed?

    They're supposed to work that way. I'll admit I haven't tested that configuration because I traditionally use softRAID.
  20. Mercutio

    Dell PERC 6i failed?

    They're cheap, plentiful and they play nice with SATA disks and SAS expanders, which I've heard that some RAID cards do not. You can also build an array across multiple cards if you've got 'em. They're a sure bet for a working configuration. It was cheaper for me to get six 8-port Perc5s than...
  21. Mercutio

    run dll as an app error

    I'd just like to say that I install ACDSee v 3.1 on every Windows computer I own. It is my naked lady viewer of choice. The version I use is 11 years old. My vote is "put ACDSee back."
  22. Mercutio

    iPhone syndrome

    Apple is a lifestyle brand. People who buy Apple stuff buy Apple stuff. It does not occur to Apple people that they could buy things that do not have an Apple logo on them if an Apple logo is available. iTunes is still an abortion and so is AT&T's service, at least where I live. I have no...
  23. Mercutio

    Media Player Appliances

    Netflix and maybe XBMC in what is very possibly its lamest form.
  24. Mercutio

    question Mobile Phones

    Doesn't the AMOLED screen just wreck batteries? Battery life is definitely a weak point on high performance Android devices. That's something to consider as well.
  25. Mercutio

    Supermicro deal on Ebay

    I bought one. Even if I toss the motherboard, the chassis and PSU are worth it to me.
  26. Mercutio

    4TB drive from Seagate

    Maybe they'll show up as 1.75TB when I connect them to my x58 motherboards instead of 750GB.
  27. Mercutio

    Media Player Appliances

    I'm now the owner of a Boxee box, a Seagate Freeagent Theater, a Popcorn Hour C200, and a Roku something-or-other. I built myself a Vortexbox, I have WHS machine and I've got an Xbox360 and a Wii as well. Out of the stuff mentioned in this thread, the only major thing I didn't buy was a Dune...
  28. Mercutio

    4TB drive from Seagate

    Sounds like a good way to burn in a CPU as well.
  29. Mercutio

    Disk Controllers with 3TB support

    Win7/Server 2008 need AHCI mode turned on to enable some of the built-in SSD optimizations.
  30. Mercutio

    Disk Controllers with 3TB support

    I really don't care. It's about all about density anyway. Unfortunately, I can't really bring myself to turn of AHCI mode on my i7s. That would suck for their SSDs.
  31. Mercutio

    Disk Controllers with 3TB support

    Looking at 1155, 1366 and AM3 stuff, it looks like motherboards top out at 12 SATA ports, not all of which can be assumed compatible with the drives. A new motherboard is cheaper than an 8-port RAID card.
  32. Mercutio

    4TB drive from Seagate

    Spinrite, but I don't know if it will operate with huge drives. You could also script something simple with dd on a *nix machine. dd if=/dev/yes of=/mnt/hdd Would fill a drive up with repeating ones eventually.
  33. Mercutio

    Viore HD 1080p 60HZ lc40vf80 for 389 at costco?

    Amazon offers free return shipping on TVs for the first 30 days. That's more than enough time for defects to become apparent.
  34. Mercutio

    Disk Controllers with 3TB support

    I'm not sure. It seems like the market is crying out for some inexpensive options with 8 ports and > 2TB support but they just aren't there. Not all SAS cards support expanders and not all SAS cards play nice with > 2TB drives, and what's left starts at about $450. That's just painful.
  35. Mercutio

    4TB drive from Seagate

    I hate Seagate almost as much as WD at this point and that's saying something. As much as I would love to pull 32 drives out of service and replace them with a mere eight, it's not going to happen if Seagate is my only option.
  36. Mercutio

    Viore HD 1080p 60HZ lc40vf80 for 389 at costco?

    I bought a 40" 1080P Toshiba LCD from Amazon for $399 today. That Viore doesn't sound like such a good deal now, does it?
  37. Mercutio

    Anyone using Blue Ray?

    Honestly, I think the best thing to do for basic backup is just to stick another internal drive into a desktop and to anoint that drive as "the drive that holds backups." I say internal because the simple fact is that external drive power supplies are so crappy and accidents are so frequent in...
  38. Mercutio

    Disk Controllers with 3TB support

    That could very well be why they show up as 750GB on the machines I have. Nonetheless, I'm not that far from needing a bunch of compatible ports, so it's good to get this out there.
  39. Mercutio

    nsquared seamless computing

    Some of that looks to me like someone was asked to find something to do with X random Microsoft computing initiative. I did watch the whole thing. It's also interesting that they didn't demo "render an object in 3D from the tablet computer's camera when they went through the trouble of showing...
  40. Mercutio

    Different case from Lian li

    I like the drive tray. It needs more of them, though. Or maybe I just need to break down and trade all my computer chassis for Norco monstrosities.
  41. Mercutio

    Disk Controllers with 3TB support

    I've managed to obtain a half dozen Hitachi 3TB drives. I have exactly two machines where I can fully use a 3TB drive, and even at that it appears that I only have a total of four usable ports. So I need a nice disk controller with large drive support, and perhaps someone else will find this...
  42. Mercutio

    Outlook + Gmail

    Relating to your difficulties time, as I believe I mentioned before, the Outlook mail uploader from Google barfed on complex folder structures (i.e. more than one level of nested folder) when I used it. I wound up verifying everything and moving what wasn't there by hand using simple IMAP copies.
  43. Mercutio

    question Backing up compressed files

    To be honest, practically every modern file format is compressed to some greater or lesser degree. Even things like Word documents and CAD drawings are inflated and deflated as they're opened.
  44. Mercutio

    Meet the $229 dual core 15.6" Laptop

    It's an Acer product. That should be the end of discussion.
  45. Mercutio

    Mac book Air, anyone used one?

    They're very slow and expensive by current standards.
  46. Mercutio

    Timing of building a new system

    As I think I've mentioned before, I run drives with north of a dozen hard drives on 500W PSUs. The only thing I do is stagger spin-up.
  47. Mercutio

    Mouse 4 notebook

    OK, yeah, technically the one I really like is the Trackman Marble Wheel.
  48. Mercutio

    Mouse 4 notebook

    Thumb goes on trackball. Fingers go on buttons. I can use any input device put in front of me. I've been using trackballs for 15 years or so. I dimly recall a four hour period where I struggled a little bit to get used to my first one.
  49. Mercutio

    Mouse 4 notebook

    I will as usual put in a vote for a Logitech Trackman Marble+. The only thing I ever move is my thumb.
  50. Mercutio

    Something Random

    I'm 5'9" and 197. I can put on 34" pants but I don't think I'd wear them in public.
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