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I'm a fan out Auzentech cards for the Dolby Digital encoding, which I find quite enjoyable for symphonic music, but absent that there really isn't much point. EAX got borked with the transition to Vista and I haven't seen a game with a Creative logo on it in years. Yes, I probably will buy...

Taxes are not a punishment. They represent the costs for the public services one uses. You don't think a high income earner makes more use of public services than a low earner?

Should be, yeah.

Did you run it as an Admin? I frequently forget that, too.

Technically the whole /16 of 192.168 is open to private assignment so I wouldn't think it would be an issue.

System Restore in Vista and 7 works better than XP's version. And some people think TrueImage is buggy. I suspect those people are using the gimicky "Try it Out" feature or using the program incorrectly. TrueImage 2010 has a very different UI from previous versions. It kind of pisses me off...

I can understand that OCZ might not get tons of RMA requests for commodity RAM, but 80-odd days for a $700 drive? Granted that I wasn't calling to complain, but given that RMAs to Crucial and Intel are sent back overnight or second day shipping, it's a little hard to swallow.

Are you just talking about supernetting to a larger LAN, ddrueding? I'm not sure how Windows behaves in the context of stapling a couple /24s into a /23, though I suppose most of the historical arguments against letting an ethernet network get that big are invalidated by ubiquitous switching.

I tried a passively cooled Gigabyte 5670 in my main HTPC and decided that it was getting way too hot when I was watching HD content. I switched down to a 5450, which doesn't get as warm. I suspect it might work better in a different enclosure than an Antec NSK2400, but that's where I was...

The difference is, of course, clicking on an icon vs. having to tell someone to type a bunch of commands at the scary black screen.

And so, not quite three months after I shipped the drive back, I got a replacement Vertex EX 60GB drive from OCZ. That's some fine servicin' there, OCZ.

Yes

Yep. Which really makes me wonder how effect spyware removal is on those systems, but c'est la vie.

Maybe the other guys are just faster at getting products into the retail channel, or Intel is practicing strict adherence to a roadmap in defiance of engineering or manufacturing realities?

From time to time I have benefited from things that have fallen off the back of a truck. It's been a good, long while, but it has happened. Anyway, if somebody wants to go halfies on a case of 3TB drives, I'll get in on that.

Me too. Hitachi drives are usually great for RAID applications and that would solve the hell out of my disk space problem.

I don't think I've ever (EVER!) fixed an XP machine from System Restore, but I have a whole CD wallet full of different permutations of XP for doing repair installs.

Speaking of huge fines, did you hear the one about the Finnish CEO getting a $200000 speeding ticket?

You could just slipstream IE8 into an XP disc, you know.

Ate bad Chinese food. On the down side: Three days with multiple hours spent on toilet. On the up side: Lost just over five pounds.

Hitachi is kind enough to provide both connectors. I appreciate that they do that.

I'd be a bit annoyed if I need service help on a Wednesday. I wonder if his career as a photographer has taken off or if the economy there is just as crappy as it is here. Either way, sounds like he can go stomping around the kangaroos and koalas and poisonous everythings as much as he likes.

Register a domain. $10 a year. Make that domain a single-user Google Apps premier domain ($50/user/year). Install Google Sync on each system. You'll sync everything that Outlook can sync. Hosted Exchange is usually about $10/user/month, so the Gmail thing is a pretty damned good deal.

I have VPN access anyplace I have a decent internet connection. I don't always have a decent internet connection though.

Yes. The developer stopped working on the free 1.x version years ago. It's a very good thing to keep on your thumb drive.

Yes. Mine has 30GB of free space. Granted, a lot of that is music that I just want to carry around but there's 118GB of system images and another 40GB of virtual machines. It adds up.

I like Avast better. It has a smaller resource footprint and a boot time scan options.

Yes, there's more going on with what it does. It does stuff with LSP providers, too.

Harsh, Coug.

Many of the monitors in my office are several years old. No DVI. Oddly, because they aren't crappy TN panels and because they ARE native 1024x768, which is very comfortable for my students to read, I'm willing to overlook their faults. I have one or two adapters in my laptop bag but frankly...

What's happened is that something has inserted itself in the chain of the IP Protocol Stack, and that thing was then removed, which breaks the chain. ICMP happens before the broken thing, and it works, but web stuff doesn't and therefore gets borked. There are instructions for doing the same...

wiinsockxpfix. Google it.

My current low-end card pet peeve: Two DVI connectors and no DVI to VGA adapter in the box. Jerks.

I've been holding up well with that stuff for years.

So Asus has rediscovered drive overlay software?

I looked into it and decided it was more of a hassle than I wanted to deal with.

I don't know what Top Gear is. I did just get 14 seasons of Good Eats. I've never seen it either but the name sounds promising. My dad's been on a food show kick, so I got all of "Diners, Drive-ins and Dives" and "Man vs. Food" for him. Man vs. Food is mega-awesome and I want to be that guy...

The biggest problem I've seen on low-end graphics hardware is poor HD video playback. Something like a GMA945 can drive a screen at 1920x1200, but invariably that turns a system into mush if you try to play a 720p Youtube video. Also, every once in a while you get a "long refresh" where you can...

I'm perfectly happy to wait for DVDs and/or torrents. Everything is better without commercials and all the crap that TV networks splash over the screen during broadcasts.

It would depend on the end user who gets that system. For myself I'd buy the 300 + Seasonic for sure. The 300 is put on sale pretty regularly. I've gotten them as cheap as $35 or so. I've found that Amazon and Provantage are both good places to look for Antec cases. Amazon is best of all for...

I suspect that the generic target for all of that boils down to acceptable performance in WoW, which has low poly-count models and textures that scale to look decent at pretty much any resolution. On an Intel IGP, you play at 800x600 and on AMD's you can probably manage 1280x1024 or 1280x768 or...

Which, I note, doesn't even support HDMI.

The Radeon 4250 is a common IGP with a fill rate of 2240MPixels/sec and 8.53GB/sec or 11.2 GB/sec memory bandwidth. The 5240 offers a fill rate of 5400MPixels/sec and 6.4GB/sec or 12.8GB/sec memory bandwidth. I'd say there's not much difference from one to the other. For comparison, Intel's...

Walking Dead's season is only six episodes long. Dammit.

They make hand held video cameras, webcams, PMPs and they still make sound cards. Auzentech licenses some-or-other IP from them so they can claim full X-Fi compatibility with their high end sound cards, too.

I can certainly understand the desire for a certain threshold of quiet, but after a certain point there's not much to be done. The difference between a 120mm fan spinning at 800rpm and no fan at all is low enough that I can barely tell, and that's on a computer that's right next to my head...

I noticed that the PSU in the PC next my bed no longer has an operating fan. It's a simple 500W Antec Earthwatts. That machine is an i7 with seven 1TB drives and my old 8800GTX. I'm pretty sure that PSU is out of warranty, so now I'm curious to see how long it will operate without that fan running.

The key part of Buck's statement is "feel like an IGP." AMD's low-end discrete cards are more or less the same hardware they build in to their chipsets and nvidia's aren't any better. On the other hand, I'm not sure that I care. A Radeon 4350 or Geforce 9400 is respectable enough for business...

I don't think I'd waste a Windows 7 license on a system that old, Adcadet. You're talking about tying the software to a motherboard with uncertain reliability going forward. That board is four or five years old. It's not going to live forever.

The good news is that Creative Labs has been relegated to obscurity and will soon be sold to serve as a brand name for some-or-other line of personal music players.